EMMA GOLDMAN

A D O C U M E N TA R Y H I S T O R Y O F
THE AMERICAN YEARS

Candace Falk, editor

Barry Pateman, associate editor
Jessica M. Moran, assistant editor
Susan Wengraf, illustrations editor
Robert Cohen, consulting editor

1. Made for America, 1890–1901

2. Making Speech Free, 1902 –1909
A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN YEARS

VOLUME ONE

Made for America, 1890 – 1901

CANDACE FALK • EDITOR

BARRY PATEMAN • ASSOCIATE EDITOR

JESSICA M. MORAN • ASSISTANT EDITOR

SUSAN WENGRAF • ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

ROBERT COHEN • CONSULTING EDITOR

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S
Berkeley Los Angeles London
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book
provided by the General Endowment of the University of California Press Associates,
and by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

frontispiece
The young Emma Goldman just after her arrival in the United States from Russia
in 1885. Fermin Rocker remembers his father, the eminent German anarchist
activist and historian Rudolf Rocker, commenting wryly that his friend and
comrade Emma Goldman was “made in America.” (Emma Goldman Papers)

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2003 by The Emma Goldman Papers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Emma Goldman : a documentary history of the American years / Candace

Falk, editor ; Barry Pateman, associate editor ; Jessica M. Moran, assistant
editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-08670 – 8 (v. 1 : alk. paper).
1. Goldman, Emma, 1869 –1940. 2. Anarchists—United States—
Biography. 3. Anarchism—United States—History—Sources.
4. Freedom of speech—United States—History—Sources. I. Title:
Documentary history of the American years. II. Goldman, Emma,
1869 –1940. III. Falk, Candace, 1947– IV. Pateman, Barry, 1952 –
V. Moran, Jessica M., 1977–
hx843.7.g65 e427 2003
335⬘.83⬘092 — dc21
[b] 2002028943

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

ansi/niso z39.48 –1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 䊊
⬁
 We dedicate our work to all
who champion liberty and strive for
social and economic justice.
This page intentionally left blank
 SPONSORS

The Emma Goldman Papers thanks all of our

supporters, including these sustaining sponsors Carolyn Patty Blum
for the volumes, for helping to keep history alive Mariam Chamberlain
through their generous contributions. Patrick Coughlin
Barbara Dobkin, Ma’yan, The Jewish Women’s
National Historical Publications and Records Project
Commission E. L. and Helen Doctorow
Marilyn French
University of California, Berkeley, Office of
The Funding Exchange
the Vice Chancellor for Research
Peter Glassgold and Susan Thibodeau
Lois Blum Feinblatt, Irving and Lois Blum the late Alice Hamburg (Agape Foundation)
Foundation Louis and Sadie Harlan
Cora Weiss, Samuel Rubin Foundation Nancy Hewitt and Stephen Lawson
Ronald Hill
Judith Taylor, The Murray and Grace Nissman
Ronald Hogeland
Foundation
Bill Jersey and Shirley Kessler, Catticus
Stephen M. Silberstein Corporation
National Endowment for the Humanities Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow
Hannah Kranzberg
Furthermore: A Project of the J. M. Kaplan Maya Miller
Fund Joan K. Peters and Peter Passell
the late Art and Libera Bortolotti Robert Segal and Nancy Bissel Segal
Michelle Shocked and Bart Bull
Ben and Ida Capes family:
Judith Smith and family
David Capes, Judith Capes,
Shirley Van Bourg
Bonnie Capes Tabatznik, Susan Chasson,
and Albert Chasson

Mecca Reitman Carpenter The list of donors to the Emma Goldman

Papers Project as well as donations in remem-
the late Marcus and the late Harryette Cohn
brance of and in honor of others continues
Eric Alan Isaacson and Susan Kay Weaver with Emma’s List, beginning on p. 591.
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

List of Documents xi

List of Illustrations xv

Foreword xvii

Forging Her Place:

An Introduction 1

Editorial Practices 85

List of Abbreviations 91

DOCUMENTS, 1890 – 1901 93

Chronology 489

Directories
Individuals 516

Periodicals 563

Organizations 570

Selected Bibliography 581

Emma’s List 591

Acknowledgments 597

Index 615
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 THE DOCUMENTS

1890
October 25 Article in the Baltimore Critic: “An Eloquent Woman” / 95

1892
May 3 Article in the New York World: “Anarchists in Charge” / 96
July 25 Article in the New York World: “Berkman’s Career Here” / 100
July 28 Interview in the New York World: “Anarchy’s Den” / 111
July 30 To Der Anarchist (in German) / 116
July 30 To Der Anarchist / 119
August 13 Appeal in Der Anarchist (in German) / 122
August 13 Appeal in Der Anarchist: “Attention!” / 123
August 20 From Alexander Berkman (in German) / 124
August 20 From Alexander Berkman / 125
October From Alexander Berkman (in German) / 127
October From Alexander Berkman / 129
October 8 To Max Metzkow / 130
October 19 From Alexander Berkman / 132
November 18 From Alexander Berkman / 134
November 30 From Alexander Berkman / 136

1893
March 4 From Alexander Berkman / 138
June 27 To Max Metzkow / 140
August 22 Article in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung (in German) / 141
August 22 Article in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung: “Badly Advised” / 144
August 25 Police affidavit / 148
September 13 Essay in Die Brandfackel (in German) / 149
September 13 Essay in Die Brandfackel: “The Right of Free Speech in America” / 151
September 17 Interview in the New York World: “Nellie Bly Again” / 155
October 4 Excerpt from trial transcript: “The People vs. Emma Goldman” / 161
October 17 Article in the New York World: “The Law’s Limit” / 177

xi
 November Essay in Die Brandfackel (in German) / 183
November Essay in Die Brandfackel: “American Justice” / 186

1894
May 25 To Claus Timmermann (in German) / 190
May 25 To Claus Timmermann / 192
August 18 Article in the New York World: “My Year in Stripes” / 194
August 20 Article in the New York World: “Hailed Emma Goldman” / 203
October Essay in Die Brandfackel (in German) / 209
October Essay in Die Brandfackel: “Anarchist Laws” / 211

1895
February Article in the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health: “Character in
Unconventional People” / 214
July 21 To the Firebrand / 217
August 2 To the New York World: “Emma Goldman’s Attitude” / 219
September 25 Official circular of the German government / 220
October Article in Liberty: “Emma Goldman in London” / 221
October 18 Essay in the Torch of Anarchy: “The Condition of the Workers
of America” / 228

1896
March 23 To Augustin Hamon / 233
April 28 To Augustin Hamon / 234
May 24 To the Firebrand: “Eastern and European Propaganda” / 236
July 23 To Augustin Hamon / 239
August 5 To the Firebrand: “The Berkman Fund Again” / 240
November 22 Article in the Pittsburg Leader: “A Woman Anarchist” / 243
November 27 Article in the Pittsburg Post: “Goldman’s Cry Against Society” / 247
December 2 To Max Metzkow / 251
December 4 From Alexander Berkman / 254
December 17 To Augustin Hamon / 257
December 17 To Max Metzkow / 258
December 30 To Max Metzkow / 260

1897
March 25 To Max Metzkow / 262
April 13 To Augustin Hamon / 263
June 25 To Augustin Hamon, with enclosure / 265
July 18 Essay in the Firebrand: “Marriage” / 269
August 17 Article in the New York World: “Anarchy in Spain and in New York” / 274
August 20 To Augustin Hamon / 280
September 4 Article in the Providence Evening Bulletin: “Anarchy” / 282

xii THE DOCUMENTS

September 13 Article in the Boston Daily Globe: “Advised Strenuous Measures” / 285
September 30 Article in the Chicago Tribune: “Emma Goldman Has Her Say” / 288
October 24 Interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine: “What Is There
in Anarchy for Woman?” / 289
December 15 Series in Sturmvogel, letters I and III (in German) / 293
December 15 Series in Sturmvogel: “Letters from a Tour” / 300
December 19 Article in Le Père Peinard: “American Post-Bag” / 318

1898
February 13 Transcript of lecture in Free Society: “The New Woman” / 322
February 23 Interview in the Pittsburg Leader: “What Emma Says” / 324
February 25 Article in the Pittsburg Post: “What Emma Goldman Thinks
of Patriotism” / 327
March 15 To Solidarity / 329
April 27 Interview in the San Francisco Call: “Emma Goldman, Anarchist” / 331
July 10 To Free Society: “‘Ideas and Men’” / 334
July 15 To Solidarity: “A Short Account of My Late Tour” / 337
July 25 To the Detroit Sentinel / 340
July 31 To Free Society: “Gives Her Side” / 344
September 18 To the New York World: “New York Anarchist Leaders Denounce the Murder
of Austria’s Empress” / 346

1899
January Exchange of letters in Liberty: “An Undelivered Speech” / 349
March 5 Transcript of lecture in Free Society: “Authority vs. Liberty” / 353
March 14 Interview in the Detroit Evening News: “An Interrupted Interview” / 357
July 15 Article in the Oakland Enquirer: “An Anarchist Propagandist” / 362
September 24 Interview in the Pittsburg Leader: “The Red Queen Is Here” / 366
September 27 To Augustin Hamon / 370
October 18 To Max Metzkow / 373

1900
January 4 To Max Nettlau / 374
January 24 To Max Nettlau (in German) / 377
January 24 To Max Nettlau / 379
February 19 To Max Nettlau (in German) / 381
February 19 To Max Nettlau / 382
February 20 Transcript of address in Freedom: “The Effect of War on the Workers” / 384
March 12 Communiqué from Royal Prussian Police to French Interior Ministry / 389
April 8 Transcript of address in Free Society: “The Propaganda and
the Congress” / 392
April 22 To Free Society: “Observations and Suggestions” / 395
April 29 To Free Society: “Some More Observations” / 400

THE DOCUMENTS xiii

 May 15 To Max Nettlau (in German) / 404
May 15 To Max Nettlau / 406
May 22 French intelligence report / 408
June 31 To Max Nettlau (in German) / 410
June 31 To Max Nettlau / 412
July 15 To Max Nettlau / 414
September 25 To Free Society: “The Paris Congress” / 416
December 12 Article in the New York Times: “Rented by Emma Goldman” / 422

1901
January 6 Interview in the New York Sun: “Talk with Emma Goldman” / 423
February 8 To Marie Goldsmith / 432
February 17 To Free Society: “An Open Letter” / 434
ca. March 24 From Peter Kropotkin / 438
March 26 Extradition order from the French government / 439
April 11 Interview in the Philadelphia North American: “A Character Study of Emma
Goldman” / 440
April 12 Article in the Philadelphia North American: “Tyranny of Police Publicly
Denounced” / 446
May 5 Article in the Pittsburg Post: “Body Cremated, Goldman Spoke” / 449
May 6 Article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers” / 452
June 2 Essay in Free Society: “Gaetano Bresci” / 455
July 10 From Alexander Berkman / 457
July 25 From Alexander Berkman / 458
September 8 Article in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Assassin’s Trail of Crime from Chicago
to the Pacific Coast” / 460
September 11 Interview in the New York World: “Story of the Arrest of Anarchist
Queen” / 464
October 6 Essay in Free Society: “The Tragedy at Buffalo” / 471
November 11 To Lucifer, the Lightbearer: “Emma Goldman Defines Her Position” / 479
November 24 To Max Nettlau / 481
December 20 From Alexander Berkman / 484

xiv THE DOCUMENTS

 I L L U S T R AT I O N S

frontispiece Emma Goldman, 1885 / iii

1. Johann Most, 1890 / 97
2. Alexander Berkman, 1890 / 101
3. Handwritten note from Alexander Berkman to Henry Clay Frick, 23 July 1892 / 104
4. Sketch of Berkman’s attack on Frick in New York World, 1892 / 104
5. Police photo of Alexander Berkman, 1892 / 105
6. Drawing of Emma Goldman in New York World, 1892 / 112
7. Masthead of Der Anarchist, 1893 / 117
8. Carl Nold, ca. 1890s / 139
9. Cover of Die Brandfackel, 1893 / 152
10. Nellie Bly, 1890 / 156
11. Cover sheet of trial transcript, 1893 / 163
12. Police photo of Emma Goldman, 1893 / 164
13. Philadelphia police arrest record slip for Emma Goldman, 1893 / 165
14. Advertisement in Die Brandfackel, 1893 / 187
15. Voltairine de Cleyre, 1891 / 195
16. Cover of de Cleyre’s 1894 pamphlet In Defense of Emma Goldmann / 196
17. Sketches of anarchists in New York World, 1894 / 204
18. Cover of Liberty, 1895 / 222
19. Louise Michel, ca. 1890s / 226
20. Cover of The Rebel, 1895 / 229
21. John Turner, ca. 1900 / 237
22. Masthead of The Firebrand, 1897 / 238
23. Handwritten page of 2 December 1896 letter from Emma Goldman to Max Metzkow / 252
24. Headline from Pittsburg Post story on Emma Goldman, 1896 / 258
25. Sketches of Emma Goldman and her audience in Boston Daily Globe, 1897 / 286
26. Front page of St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview of Emma Goldman, 24 October 1897 / 290
27. Masthead of Sturmvogel, 1897 / 301
28. Cover of Le Père Peinard almanac, 1897 / 319
29. Masthead of Free Society, 1902 / 323
30. Masthead of Liberty, 1899 / 350
31. Benjamin Tucker, ca. 1887 / 351

xv
 32. Handbill for London mass meeting commemorating Haymarket anarchists, 1899 / 358
33. Handbill for Emma Goldman’s series of lectures at Athenaeum Hall, London, 1899 / 363
34. Advertisement in Arbeter Fraint for Emma Goldman lecture in Yiddish, 1899 / 367
35. Program for London mass meeting benefiting Italian anarchists, 1899 / 371
36. Max Nettlau, ca. 1890s / 375
37. Program for London farewell concert honoring Emma Goldman, 1900 / 390
38. Peter Kropotkin, ca. 1890s / 396
39. Photo of Emma Goldman with drawing in Chicago Tribune, 1901 / 461
40. Front page of San Francisco Call, 1901 / 465
41. Police photo of Emma Goldman, 1901 / 473
42. Police report of Emma Goldman’s arrest, 1901 / 474
43. Front page of New York World, 1901 / 480

xvi ILLUSTRATIONS
 FOREWORD

Lunching in Paris with Emma Goldman, Theodore Dreiser pleaded with her, “You must
write the story of your life, E.G.; it is the richest of any woman’s of our century.” It had
not been the first time a friend had suggested that she chronicle her life. With the assis-
tance of her comrades, she heeded the advice, collected the necessary funds, and began
to write her remarkable autobiography, Living My Life. Goldman wanted very much to
share her life, thoughts, and struggles with the people she had sought to influence and
change, and she hoped the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, would charge a minimal sum
for the book. “I am anxious to reach the mass of the American reading public,” she wrote
a friend, “not so much because of the royalties, but because I have always worked for
the mass.”
Emma Goldman succeeded in a variety of ways in reaching “the mass,” both a read-
ing and listening audience. Living My Life went through several editions, her life has
been portrayed on film and in song as well as on stage, and numerous biographies have
been written. None of these, however, is as critical as the publication of the four vol-
umes of selected letters, speeches, government documents, and commentaries from the
Emma Goldman Papers Project, making that vast and invaluable resource available to
scholars, students, and a reading public throughout the world.
This is a truly remarkable achievement, the culmination of several decades of col-
laborative work, including an international search for documents, the identification of
correspondents, and the preparation of biographical, historical, and bibliographical
guides. To appreciate the magnitude of this task is to know that Goldman’s papers were
as scattered as her scores of correspondents, in private collections and archives here and
abroad, even in places like the Department of Justice, whose agents had seized a portion
of her papers before ordering her deportation. Only the commitment of many friends
and comrades over many decades, and the untiring efforts of librarians, scholars, and
archivists, have made these volumes possible.
In closing her autobiography, Emma Goldman reflected over her tumultuous years on
this earth: “My life—I had lived in its heights and its depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic
joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop. I had lived
my life. Would I had the gift to paint the life I had lived!” It will now be left to scores of

xvii
 scholars, students, artists, and dramatists to use this extensive collection to enrich their
accounts of an extraordinary career. This is more, however, than material for future bi-
ographers; it is an indispensable collection for studying the history of American social
movements. That is clear from the moment one scans the list of Goldman correspon-
dents and finds the names of some of the leading cultural and political figures of her
time, alongside the names of less known but no less important men and women who
shared—and did not share—her commitments.
Emma Goldman came out of a unique and expressive subculture that flourished in
America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The participants included
some of the nation’s most creative and iconoclastic artists, writers, and intellectuals, most
of them libertarians, some of them revolutionaries. What drew them together was their
rejection of the inequities of capitalism and the absurdities of bourgeois culture and pol-
itics. That led them to embrace such causes as the labor movement, sexual and repro-
ductive freedom, feminism, atheism, anarchism, and socialism. They represented every-
thing that was irreverent and blasphemous in American culture. In their lives and in
their work, they dedicated themselves to the vision of a free society of liberated individ-
uals. They were too undisciplined, too free-spirited to adapt to any system or bureaucratic
structure that rested on the suppression of free thought, whether in Woodrow Wilson’s
United States or in Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Russia. “All I want is freedom,” Emma Gold-
man declared, “perfect, unrestricted liberty for myself and others.”
The economic depression of the 1890s introduced Americans to scenes that contra-
dicted the dominant success creed—unemployment, poverty, labor violence, urban ghet-
tos, and, in 1894, an army of the unemployed marching on the nation’s capital. In that
spirit, Emma Goldman engaged herself in these struggles, employing her oratorical
powers to stir audiences and awaken them to the perils of capitalism and the violence
of poverty. According to newspaper accounts of her address in 1893 to a crowd of unem-
ployed workers in New York City’s Union Square, Goldman implored them, “Demon-
strate before the palaces of the rich, demand work. If they do not give you work, demand
bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right.” That statement was
Goldman at her oratorical best, and it did not go unnoticed. For her exhortation she was
arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. It would be only one of
many arrests, whether for lecturing on anarchism, circulating birth control information,
advocating workers’ and women’s rights, or opposing war and the military draft.
The life of Emma Goldman is a forcible reminder that the right to free expression in
America has always been precarious. Intellectual inquiry and dissent have been per-
ceived— often for good reason—as subversive activities, and they have, in fact, been
known to topple institutions and discredit beliefs of long standing. To be identified
as public enemies, to be hounded as disturbers of the peace, was the price Goldman and
her comrades paid for their intellectual curiosity, expression, and agitation. During her
lifetime, Emma Goldman was denounced for godlessness, debauchery, free thinking,
subversion, and for exposing people within the sound of her voice to radical and uncon-

xviii FOREWORD
ventional ideas. Her life provides a unique perspective on the varieties of anarchist and
feminist thought, radical and socialist movements in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries and the causes championed, the position of women in American society
(and within radical organizations), and the political repression that followed the outbreak
of World War I and the imprisonment and political exile of dissenters. In 1919, Goldman
was deported to Soviet Russia, where she found something less than a revolutionary
utopia. Her stay in Moscow provides an intimate glimpse of both the promise of the Rus-
sian Revolution to American radicals and their subsequent disillusionment with its be-
trayal. Her exile continued in Germany, France, Britain, and Canada, bringing her finally
into the Spanish Civil War and still another chapter in the turbulent history of radicalism
in the twentieth century.
Since the birth of the United States, Americans have struggled to define the meaning
of freedom. That has often been a difficult and perilous struggle. For Emma Goldman,
freedom required individuals to shake off the “shackles and restraints of government.”
The price of freedom, she came to recognize, was eternal vigilance, a wariness of those
who in the name of protecting freedom would diminish freedom, and resistance to rules,
codes, regulations, and censorship (no matter how well intended) that would mock free
expression by restricting or penalizing it. Free speech meant not only the right to dissent
but more importantly the active exercise of that right in the face of attempts to suppress
it. And, perhaps most important of all, it insisted on the right of others to speak out on
behalf of what the majority believed to be wrong, freedom for the most offensive and dis-
turbing speech. That was the true test of freedom of speech. “Free speech,” Goldman de-
clared, “means either the unlimited right of expression, or nothing at all. The moment
any man or set of men can limit speech, it is no longer free.”
What Emma Goldman said provoked controversy, both within and outside the radi-
cal movement, and not all radicals were enamored with her political positions. Margaret
Anderson, a radical editor and literary modernist, appreciated Goldman’s sheer presence
more than her ideological commitments: “Emma Goldman’s genius is not so much that
she is a great thinker as that she is a great woman.” But whatever one might think
of Emma Goldman’s political views, actions, blind spots, and vision, few individuals in
American society so exemplify the tradition of dissent and nonconformity. Few brought
more passion, intensity, exuberance, perseverance, and self-sacrifice to the causes she es-
poused. Even when she failed to convert people to her positions, she compelled many of
them to reexamine their assumptions and to question the accepted wisdom and elected
leadership.
For much of her life in America, Emma Goldman defined the limits of political dis-
sent. True loyalty to a nation, she believed, often demanded disloyalty to its pretenses and
policies and a willingness to unmask its leaders. To Goldman, liberty was more than an
ideology, it was a passion, to be lived and breathed each day. “Liberty was always her
theme,” said Harry Weinberger, her lawyer and close friend: “liberty was always her
dream; liberty was always her goal . . . liberty was more important than life itself.” And,

FOREWORD xix
 as he went on to suggest, free expression has always led a precarious existence. “She
spoke out in this country against war and conscription, and went to jail. She spoke out
for political prisoners, and was deported. She spoke out in Russia against the despotism
of Communism, and again became a fugitive on the face of the earth. She spoke out
against Nazism and the combination of Nazism and Communism and there was hardly
a place where she could live.”
It must be said, however, that Goldman did not speak out with equal fervor about the
most repressive and violent denial of human rights in her lifetime. She identified with
the struggles of oppressed workers, and the New Declaration of Independence she is-
sued in 1909 proclaimed that “all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are
born with the equal right to share at the table of life.” But in a time of racist terror and
severe racial subjugation (political, social, and economic), far more severe than any of
the violations of civil liberties she so courageously deplored and fought, Emma Goldman
avoided the South and mostly ignored the struggle for black rights and racial equality, a
struggle that involved not only black Americans but a coterie of progressive white allies.
Perhaps she was trying to appease the racism pervading the labor and socialist move-
ments. More likely, she was unconscious of this contradiction in her life’s commitment
to “the wretched of the earth.” Whatever her personal feelings about these matters, they
would occupy little space in her writings or speeches, and hence are mostly absent from
these volumes.
The Emma Goldman Papers Project at the University of California at Berkeley, in se-
lecting, editing, and annotating the documents for this valuable series under the direc-
tion of Candace Falk, has brought into our historical consciousness a most extraordinary
woman, whose passion, spiritual qualities, and commitments illuminate a certain time
in our history, even as the lesson she taught remains timeless: that social and economic
inequities are neither unintentional nor inevitable but reflect the assumptions, beliefs,
and policies of certain people who command enormous power over lives. Her life forces
us to think more deeply and more reflectively about those individuals in our history—
from the abolitionists of the 1830s to the labor organizers of the 1890s and 1930s to the
civil rights activists of the 1960s—who, individually and collectively, tried to flesh out and
give meaning to abstract notions of liberty, independence, and freedom, and for whom a
personal commitment to social justice became a moral imperative. No better epitaph
might be written for Emma Goldman than the one composed in 1917 by A. S. Embree,
an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World imprisoned in Tombstone, Arizona:
“The end in view is well worth striving for, but in the struggle itself lies the happiness of
the fighter.”
leon litwack,
morrison professor
of american history,
berkeley, california

xx FOREWORD
 F O R G I N G H E R P L A C E : An Introduction

History is the evocation of an authentic past, built through innuendo and inference—a
pursuit both palpable and elusive. A small detail illuminates history’s subtleties, per-
forms its alchemy, as a photographic image holds time luxuriously still— creating a sa-
cred space for reflection and the illusion of comprehending the intricacies of a world
long past. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years is comprised of
selected documents—rare glimpes of a valiant life dedicated to the creation of a radically
new social order: “freedom, the right to self expression, everybody’s right to beautiful ra-
diant things.” 1
As in a photographic album, where the spaces between the images—the unrecorded
intervals— create an imagined narrative, portraying a single life in constant interplay
with others, so do the documents in this selected edition, chronological but not linear,
form a montage of the unfolding of Goldman’s public life. Personal correspondence,
newspaper reportage, government surveillance reports trailing her in Europe, court tran-
scripts showcasing the drama of her arguments before judges and jurors, lecture notes
and manuscripts, and previously unpublished documents reflecting the international
reach of the anarchist movement all tell a story not only about Goldman, but about a time
and place when the price of freedom was inordinately high.
In every age, there are individuals who assume the role of public guardians of free-
dom. Emma Goldman, complex and often paradoxical, merits a place among such tran-
scendent spirits. Her words live on as a reminder—and as a warning.

FRAMING THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

The format for the presentation of historical material in this multi-volume documentary
history of Emma Goldman is consistent with her core role as a champion of independent
thought. Each document is anchored by annotations that explicate the historical context,
deepen and invite interpretation, and illuminate a vast and relatively unknown world.
Searching for sources on the complex political history of anarchism took years of collab-
orative and global detective work. Unearthing significant papers and unraveling the un-

1. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1931), p. 56; abbreviated as LML hereafter.

1
 derlying stories of the people and events have required—and inspired—the scholarly
devotion, intellectual balance, and careful preservation of authenticity upon which these
volumes rest. While the selected documents cannot capture the whole of Goldman’s life
nor describe all the people and events surrounding her, this multi-volume edition does
serve as a road map to the past and a route into a rich and not yet fully explored terrain
of history— especially of the history of anarchism.
Even though in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries anarchism’s chal-
lenge was feared and shunned by historians, who purged this marked political history
from U.S. tomes, because there was a strong written and oral tradition among anar-
chists, the continuity of their culture and lore was assured. Served by a collective mem-
ory, the survival instinct of anarchists was anchored in the heroics of their movement.
Pamphlets and newspapers expressing a variety of ideas were the anarchists’ epicenter—
they read, republished, and honored political tracts from their past. Anarchists retold the
inspiring stories of their courageous predecessors, building on their own history to cre-
ate a more glorious vision of the future for all. With tremendous fanfare, they celebrated
anniversaries—honoring the defeat and loss of life in the uprising of the Paris Commune
of 1871,2 and the death and hallowed last words of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887.
They modeled themselves, their lives, their cooperative efforts, and their political strate-
gies in relation to those who preceded them. Ritual remembrances allowed for the renewal
of a vow not to forget those whose sacrifices and challenges might otherwise have been
obliterated by the conservators of traditional history. What anarchism might signify in the
United States at the beginning of the twentieth century was in flux and took shape through
varied forms of collective meditation on the relationship between political theory and prac-
tice. The young Emma Goldman would play a significant role in the anarchists’—and the
nation’s— ongoing discussion about the concept of, and possibilities for, freedom.
It is in the spirit of the tradition of remembrance and respect that we present this doc-
umentary history of Emma Goldman’s American years, along with a chronology of her
life and the anarchist movement as well as biographical appendices of prominent indi-
viduals, periodicals, and organizations. Pieced together, these texts fix a moment in time,
add clarity and nuance to Goldman’s work, to the surrounding culture, and to the ideas
and activities of the anarchists. Offering a critical engagement with the past, the array of
original sources presented in these volumes promote accuracy and fairness. The docu-
ments display the anarchist movement at its best and its worst—in its reach for egali-
tarian cooperation and in the depth of its sectarian controversies, in its articulation of a
“beautiful ideal” and in its engagement with the prevailing undercurrent of political vio-
lence in a violent era. Each volume in this documentary edition provides the back-
grounding data from which those who yearn for social equality and freedom will find
much to admire about Goldman—and also a fount of new material from which to raise
important, and possibly disconcerting, questions about her life and times.

2. See Letter to Max Metzkow, 25 March 1897, esp. note 2, for elaboration on the remarkable spectacles
and performances staged to honor the Paris Commune.

2 INTRODUCTION
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN PERSPECTIVE
The historical documents in this selected edition, especially those in vol. 1, Made for
America, 1890–1901, that chronicle the initial decade of Emma Goldman’s political life,
may surprise those whose image of Goldman has been colored by the softening filter of
her autobiography, Living My Life (1931). A lighthearted portrait of Goldman as a cultural
rebel, the woman who dances in the revolution has been evoked on t-shirts and etched
into the public consciousness for more than thirty years since the reprint of her auto-
biography in 1970.3 Although not completely inaccurate, this image ignores the darker
shadows of her political militancy.
In her autobiography, Goldman couches her militant political engagement in a nov-
elistic and stylized optimism and obscures her intermittent despair. She tilts her para-
doxical and all-encompassing political stance, one that mirrored the poles of her own per-
sonality, to emphasize her seemingly boundless empathy, while still brandishing her
piercingly sharp-tongued severity. Casually embedded in the recounting of her life and
passionate loves in the autobiography is a casting of herself as a modern-day counter-
part to Judith, the biblical heroine of bloody justice who cut off the head of Holofernes
to avenge the wrongs of her people.
Goldman used her autobiography as an opportunity to reveal and finally unburden
herself of years of secrets about her clandestine involvement with her closest friend and
comrade—Alexander Berkman—in his attempt to assassinate the steel magnate who
had ordered the use of violence to quell a strike. She conceptualized her autobiography
as adding her voice to Berkman’s prison memoirs, foregrounding Berkman as “the pivot
around which my story was written,” and asserted that “my connection with Berkman’s
act and our relationship is the leitmotif of my 40 years of life.” 4 Goldman in her mem-
oir revealed her belief that her shadowy engagement with the violent edge of the revolu-
tionary anarchist movement was in complete harmony with her less fearsome role as a
luminary of women’s freedom and free expression, thus distinguishing herself from her
mainstream and liberal contemporaries, who struggled to reconcile the cloak-and-dagger
impression of her political work. Shrewdly, however, as she composed her dazzling au-
tobiography and epic entry into the historical record, she chose not to brandish these out-
wardly contradictory traits.
In one of the most remarkable memoirs of the twentieth century, and among the very
few written so eloquently about a woman’s experience by an American immigrant steeped
in the political realm, Goldman documents the passionate intensity of a life lived in the
service of an ideal and creates a narrative coherence through her portrayal of the tireless
pursuit of a singular vision. A major literary accomplishment, the autobiography was
intended to sweep the reader into history, rather than to expose and explicate its precise
detail.

3. Living My Life (reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Pagination of 1970 edition replicates
1931 edition.
4. EG to Arthur Leonard Ross, 13 January 1929, EGP, reel 20.

INTRODUCTION 3
 Goldman was profoundly aware of the difference between the act of reporting history
as it happens and of writing from hindsight and remembrance. She recounted her re-
fusal, when asked while still young to write the story of her life: “I have barely begun to
live.” 5 Only in her twenties, Goldman was too busy witnessing and participating in her
era to step back and to record the amazing events; she explained that “When one is stand-
ing right in the middle of the battlefield surrounded by enemy fire . . . one can not judge
things objectively” (see Letter to Max Nettlau, 24 November 1901).
But by 1927, she had the “leisure” of exile and almost four years to write her autobi-
ography. Deported from the United States during the Red Scare of 1919 after opposing
conscription during the First World War, she had made an attempt to serve the revolu-
tion in Russia but fled to Europe for refuge from disappointment, settling briefly in
France, the place where she would ponder and write about her life. At the age of 58, she
was a battle-scarred warrior, far away from the intensity of political activism of her youth
and from the United States, the country where she felt most at home. She was possessed
with a longing to return and a determination not to be forgotten and anxious to record
her life and times. Her American friends even hoped that her book would attract a popu-
lar readership that might sway the U. S. government to allow her reentry.
Outwardly shunning the fantasy that the book would facilitate her return, she drew
the broad canvas of her life without excluding elements that still might seem threaten-
ing to the government authorities that had expelled her only a decade before. Not sur-
prisingly, however, as an exiled anarchist, she underplays the extent of her clandestine
entanglements. The silent omissions from her narrative create a more uniformly posi-
tive rhetorical effect, protect aging, militant comrades from the censure of public expo-
sure and prosecution, and perhaps shield her from the embarrassment and dangers of
full personal and political exposure. Instead, she chose to foreground her inner drama
and to embed the specifics of her varied political activity with the forces of history around
her, “in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and in fervent hope.” 6
Remarkably exacting in its presentation of the character of Goldman’s emotional life,
the autobiography fills in the story of Goldman’s family, childhood,7 and personal devel-
opment, her sense of adventure, and her love and appreciation for those in, and close to,
the anarchist movement around her, and also delineates her major life shifts. Yet, Living
My Life, like most memoirs, while a treasure trove of information, ideas, and emotion,
still never offers the reader the full story of her personal life, nor could it have presented
a completely accurate historical record. Writing mostly from memory rather than writ-
ten records, and prey to lapses, Goldman understandably conflated past events. Espe-
cially in light of repeated government confiscations of her personal papers, she rarely
could confirm dates and places. She gathered only relatively few of her letters from

5. LML, p. v.
6. LML, p. 993.
7. For more on Goldman’s recollections of her harsh early life, especially in Russia and Germany, see
LML, esp. pp. 58 – 60 and 66 – 69.

4 INTRODUCTION
friends who had saved and cherished them over the years. She complained throughout
the writing process that she had no access to articles from early periodicals to refresh her
memory. Among the more poignant and benign examples of her conflations of history
was her account of coming to the United States in 1885 with her sister Helena, “eyes
filled with tears” as they “stood pressed to each other, enraptured by the sight of . . . the
Statue of Liberty suddenly emerging from the mist . . . the symbol of hope, of freedom,
of opportunity! She held her torch high to light the way to the free country, the asylum
for the oppressed of all lands.” 8 In fact, she imagined herself approaching the statue,
which was still in process, not yet fully assembled nor on its pedestal.
Although the autobiography remains a compelling narrative of Goldman’s personal
and political evolution, it now has an apt complement in this documentary edition of
Goldman’s papers. Selected essays and travel letters, personal correspondence, inter-
views, newspaper accounts of her speeches, and government surveillance reports ex-
tended beyond a narrow interest in Emma Goldman the individual. These volumes dis-
play her impressive engagement with the complexity and depth of the fin de siècle world
she inhabited and the broad spectrum of people, events, and ideas brought together by
her expansive and inclusive philosophy of anarchism.

A NOTE TO OUR READERS

Documents from Goldman’s early life, now pieced together for the first time in this debut
volume, create a dramatic representation of little-known aspects of her personality,
thoughts, and activities. Mentored by the most powerful and talented anarchist speakers
and many of the most challenging radical thinkers of her time, Goldman incorporated
their voices and created a unique harmony of ideas and sentiments, at once identifiable
with a particular time and place in history, and profoundly universal. Marked by a poli-
tics born of youth, the lure of freedom remained her vital center.
These early documents also reveal Goldman’s prescient and unusual belief that it was
not only possible, but in fact preferable, to frame the seemingly contradictory forces of
destruction and construction, of chaos and harmony, within one’s self and one’s vision.
We offer our work as a primary source for assessing the work of the young Emma Gold-
man in all her complexity, a woman who had the courage to look straight into the fires of
despair and violence raging around her—and as an illuminating exposé of her quest to
“contain multitudes.” 9

THE YOUNG EMMA GOLDMAN STEPS ONTO THE POLITICAL STAGE

Made for America, 1890–1901, vol. 1 of this documentary history of Emma Goldman’s
American years, opens with a brief newspaper report of an 1890 lecture by “an eloquent

8. LML, p. 11.
9. A paraphrasing of “(Do I contradict myself ? . . . I am large, I contain multitudes)” from Walt Whit-
man’s “Song of Myself,” number 51, Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s free and open spirit was admired by
anarchists and his poetry praised for its celebration of life in all its contradictions.

INTRODUCTION 5
 woman.” It was uncommon in the 1890s to see a woman on the lecture circuit, especially
one in her early twenties. Goldman later would attribute her success as a lecturer in part
to being a woman, claiming that the novelty of a female speaker always guaranteed an
inquisitive audience. After more than a decade on the road, she mused that in the end,
however, the real challenge was “to hold them. . . . not talk to them as a woman, but as a
comrade.” She often remarked that her desire was not to “topple men off their pedestal
in order to take it” but rather “to share it” (see “Talk with Emma Goldman,” Interview in
the New York Sun, 6 January 1901). One newspaper reporter of the time observed: “No
care of the prettiness of manner or speech can stay her. Her voice may break, her knowl-
edge of English may fail her: but she is more effective than art could possibly make her,
more eloquent than the completest elegance of speech could give. She snarls, she sneers,
she thunders at her audience, and she is as indifferent to their rage as to their approval”
(see “A Character Study of Emma Goldman,” Interview in the Philadelphia North Amer-
ican, 11 April 1901). In 1890, when Goldman stepped onto the political stage at the age
of twenty-one, eager to hold and inform her audience, the seeds of her uncompromising
vision, emotional intelligence, and razor-sharp analyses of an array of political and cul-
tural issues had already taken root.
She had immigrated to a country of rebels, a destination of choice for those who fled
oppression. Born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1869, she left Russia and her father’s stern pa-
triarchal hold when she was sixteen, settling in Rochester, New York, at the end of De-
cember 1885 with a married sister. After three years, she fled a brief, and for her, dis-
tasteful marriage.10
Under the strict scrutiny of German Jewish bosses, she had worked in an austere gar-
ment factory with other Eastern European Jewish girls. Cringing at the squalid working
conditions of her adopted home and the injustice that seemed reminiscent of a world she
thought she had left behind, she dreamt first of the liberating force of love, and then, of
revolution.

INSPIRED BY THE HAYMARKET ANARCHISTS

Goldman came of age in an era permeated by labor agitation and violence. She marked
her political transformation, her “spiritual birth,” 11 to the chilling moment when she
became aware of the horror and significance of the death of the Haymarket anarchists.
Newspapers across the world reported about the violent events at a 4 May 1886 rally
in Chicago called to protest the killing of four striking McCormick Harvester plant work-
ers; over a hundred policemen marched up to stop the demonstration when a bomb ex-
ploded at Haymarket Square. Casualties, most from police bullets not bomb fragments,
totaled close to seventy, including seven dead policemen. Although the identity of the
bomb thrower was never established, official blame fell upon the anarchists of Chi-

10. For a detailed account of Goldman’s early marriage and young adulthood in Rochester, see LML,
pp. 15–25.
11. LML, pp. 7–10.

6 INTRODUCTION
cago.12 A traumatized public, hungry for revenge, and anxious to tame a burgeoning la-
bor movement, looked to the courts to quell the insurgency.
According to the accused anarchist Albert Parsons, the Illinois state attorney indicted
him and his comrades “because they were leaders . . . no more guilty than the thousands
who follow them.” In the closing argument at the Haymarket trial, he made no attempt
to veil his intent: “Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them;
hang them and you will save our institutions, our society.” 13 Many radicals of Goldman’s
generation 14 traced their political awakening to that solemn day—11 November 1887—
when Parsons and his fellow Chicago anarchists George Engel, Adolph Fischer, and Au-
gust Spies were executed. On the day of his execution, Spies argued that history would
absolve the Haymarket anarchists and predicted that a day would come when the silence
of their deaths would reverberate as a revolutionary call to action that could never be sup-
pressed. His eloquent prediction deeply moved the seventeen-year-old Emma Goldman,
who was haunted by the image of the four who were hung. Louis Lingg, who had in-
gested dynamite rather than allow the State to execute him, “stood out as the sublime
hero of the eight [and] became the beacon of our lives.” 15
Her despair turned to inspiration after she heard the German socialist Johanna Greie
Cramer speak during the trial on the fate of the accused Haymarket anarchists.16 Con-
vinced of their innocence, Goldman resolved to avenge their deaths. Within two years,
she extricated herself from a life of unhappy domesticity and factory work and dedicated
herself to the vision of justice she believed the Haymarket anarchists represented.

THE EXCITEMENT OF NEW YORK CITY

In August 1889, at the age of twenty, Goldman left Rochester with “a great ideal, a burn-
ing faith” and arrived alone in New York City.17 Leaving behind the disappointments and
provincialism of her first immigrant years, she opened herself to the thrill of a world un-
confined by the strictures of traditional social norms, determined to find a means of eco-
nomic support that served rather than hindered her ideals and a family of choice and
openness. Having entered the movement with the perspective of youth, Goldman would
remain acutely attuned to the expression of freedom and autonomy. The preeminent New
World metropolis represented hope and possibility, even in adversity. New York City’s im-
migrant community on the Lower East Side was a vibrant polyglot culture, with a café or

12. For more information on the Haymarket case, see Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984) and David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket
Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1986).
13. For Albert Parson’s paraphrasing of State Attorney Julius Grinnell’s statement to the jury, see Rob-
ert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America—From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge:
Schenkman Publishing, 1978), p. 40 n. 84.
14. Among those in Goldman’s circle inspired by the Haymarket anarchists were Alexander Berkman,
Voltairine de Cleyre, and “Big Bill” Haywood.
15. LML, p. 42.
16. For Goldman’s account of the event, see LML, pp. 7–10.
17. LML, p. 10.

INTRODUCTION 7
 saloon for almost every political persuasion and for every immigrant’s country or town
of origin.18 Goldman felt especially at home among German- and Yiddish-speaking an-
archists and appreciated those who both shared her roots and had cast off confining Rus-
sian Jewish religious orthodoxy. She immersed herself in heated political discussions,
mostly in her German mother tongue. These gathering places offered a colorful respite
from long hours working in sweatshops and living in squalid tenement housing; the sa-
loons provided a refuge for forgetting the horror of sickness and poverty that permeated
daily life and a locus for empowerment born of camaraderie. Mainstream journalists, in-
trigued by Goldman’s exotic life, waxed poetic about some of Goldman’s German associ-
ates, who, accustomed to bursting into song and especially uninhibited after hours of
talking and drinking beer, enlivened the atmosphere of the cafés and saloons she had be-
gun to frequent. Impromptu political discussions, engaged in by many who had recently
been imprisoned in Europe, stretched into the wee hours of the morning. These safe ha-
vens provided an open forum for debate and for lashing out against economic and social
exploitation and served as a hotbed for organizing public demonstrations intended to ig-
nite the righteous indignation of others.

REVELING IN A SWIRL OF IDEAS

Anarchist politics and culture, with a central focus on the concept and practice of free-
dom, was a seamless match for the young Goldman’s temperament and desires. The
most open of all political philosophies, anarchism sparked her imagination. She found
the anarchist movement both politically and intellectually engaging, and gradually cre-
ated a blend of ideas of her own.
Goldman believed that everything that challenged the mind and encouraged individ-
ual freedom would advance the movement. A voracious reader, she integrated a host of
radical ideas with the themes of classic works of literature and political theory to form her
vision of anarchism. She strove less for originality than for synthesis and, in so doing,
wove her own distinct pattern of thinking. This quality of incorporating and transform-
ing the work of others into her own may have contributed to doubts among traditional
political theorists about the merits of her intellectual contribution. She believed in the
interconnections between the old and the new, between past and present ideas. In her
anarchist lexicon, pretensions of even the possibility of complete originality conjured up
images of self-inflation—and a short-sighted dismissal of the evolution of the social, po-
litical, and historical context of individual thought. Creativity, like everything else she val-
ued, was a patchwork. Goldman’s personal development as a complex political thinker was
grounded in her openness to a rich variety of ideas, within and beyond anarchist theory.

A PATCHWORK OF ANARCHIST THEORY

Goldman began by familiarizing herself with anarchist literature and sifted through the
movement’s internal debates on competing premises for economic and political change.

18. For a vivid account of Lower East Side life, see Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New
York: Macmillan, 1934).

8 INTRODUCTION
She admired and honored great thinkers, picking and choosing from their works, chang-
ing her emphasis over the years. From the works of Michael Bakunin she took the spirit
of revolt, a strong atheist streak, and ideas of anarchist collectivism with its focus on dis-
tributing resources according to the individual effort rather than need. In this early pe-
riod, however, she was persuaded to distance herself from Bakunin’s economic theories
in favor of Peter Kropotkin’s vision of anarchist communism with its emphasis on the
right of individuals to the resources necessary to meet their basic needs—giving what one
could but taking only what one needed from the shared accumulation of wealth.19 Kro-
potkin’s ideas were popularized by, among others, Joseph Peukert in his newspaper, Die
Autonomie. She incorporated ideas on insurrectionism from Errico Malatesta, and from
Johann Most, among others, the recognition that attentats—individual acts of political vi-
olence—were an inevitable response to the State’s use of violence to maintain its power.
Goldman’s first interest in syndicalism and its espousal of the power of the general strike
as a tactic for the emancipation of the working class was piqued when she was in Paris and
met French anarcho-syndicalists associated with the barred 1900 anarchist congress.20
Goldman’s faith in the inexorable progression of history toward freedom was reinforced
by her reading and discussion of Kropotkin 21 and theories adopted from Karl Marx, both
of whom believed that people would inevitably act on their natural desire for freedom.
She was drawn to anarchist individualists in the United States who emphasized social
relationships and lifestyle and who focused first on individual liberty— especially the ac-
tivities of Moses Harmon and the Lucifer group, whose early work for free speech she
particularly admired. Members of the Lucifer publishing group had defied obscenity laws
enacted under the 1873 and 1876 Comstock Acts and willingly gone to jail for challeng-
ing the marriage code and for daring to discuss in print its blunting sexual and emotional
impact—free-speech activities that were broadly defined, along with radical literature, as
“obscene.” 22
Friedrich Engels’s book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State was
widely read among anarchists, and no doubt contributed to Goldman’s belief that mar-
riage was at root an economic arrangement and the primary foundation for the concept
and practice of private property—an idea upon which she would elaborate in lectures on
the subject throughout her life. Goldman incorporated many of these ideas into her con-
ception of anarchist communism in America, the political philosophy she found most

19. See Kropotkin’s arguments in “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles,” in George Wood-
cock, ed., Peter Kropotkin: Fugitive Writings (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993) and also Kropotkin’s
The Conquest of Bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For Bakunin’s ideas, see
Sam Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980).
20. For introductions to syndicalism, see Rudolph Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press,
1989) and Linder and Wayne Thrope, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism (Aldershot: Scholar Press,
1990).
21. Peter Kropotkin, “The Spirit of Revolt” among other works by Kropotkin.
22. For more on Moses Harmon and the periodical Lucifer, see Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love
in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977) and Martin Henry Blatt, Free
Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

INTRODUCTION 9
 compelling. Not yet fully formulated, its tenets were being worked out in the journals
Firebrand and Free Society, which she read from cover to cover.

INDIVIDUALIST TRADITION
Goldman astutely drew on the most liberal doctrines of the founding fathers of her
adopted country, especially Thomas Jefferson’s and Thomas Paine’s belief in individual
freedom and in the tyranny of too much government. She incorporated the fervor for
civil disobedience from Henry David Thoreau and the celebration of the unharnessed
spirit from Walt Whitman. She found kindred militant rebels in Wendell Phillips and
John Brown. Her homage to this radical tradition was an important signal of Goldman’s
Americanization and of her remarkable ability to combine old and new world thinkers
into her hybrid notion of anarchism.
She was introduced to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche in Vienna in 1895 and espe-
cially appreciated his theories about the centrality of individual will outside of conven-
tional morality. Goldman had read the German philosopher Max Stirner before 1892,
when she claimed to be motivated by self-interest; broadly defined in the Stirnerite sense,
an egoist’s self-interest was the realization of the full freedom of the individual to follow
his or her own sensibilities.23 She also recognized that strategic use of the label “egoist”
sometimes served as an ideological disguise to protect others from implication in col-
lective acts of political violence.
While Goldman identified with elements of individualist anarchism, she simultane-
ously distinguished herself from it. Benjamin Tucker, editor of the philosophical maga-
zine Liberty: Not the Daughter, But the Mother of Order (a subtitle borrowed from Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon), was the most prominent American individual anarchist.24 Beginning
in 1886, Liberty featured articles debating the issue of whether egoism or natural rights
was the basis for individualist theory. While the sovereignty of the individual was always
paramount to the creation of a voluntary society, anarchist communists and anarchist col-
lectivists differed from individualist anarchists in their insistence on economic coopera-
tion, mutualism, and the rejection of private property. Some individualists, influenced by
reading and discussions of Max Stirner’s work, took the idea to its logical extreme, reject-
ing even the notion of natural rights, or the will of any group, and accepted only individual
desire as the criterion for action. Many American adherents of this strain had been in-
fluenced by early translated segments of Max Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own. The

23. For more on Max Stirner, see his The Ego and Its Own (London: Rebel Press, 1993) and James J. Mar-
tin, Men Against the State (DeKalb, Ill.: Adrian Allen Associates, 1953). Also see Letter from Alexan-
der Berkman, 20 August 1892, esp. note 2, and Letter to Free Society, 17 February 1901, esp. note 4,
for a fuller account of the use of the term “egoist.”
24. For more on Benjamin Tucker and the periodical Liberty, see Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1988); James J. Martin, Men Against the State (Colorado Springs:
Ralph Myles, 1970); Michael Coughlin and M. Sullivan, eds., Benjamin Tucker and the Champions of
Liberty: A Centenary Anthology (St. Paul, by the editors, 1986); and Martin Blatt, Free Love and Anar-
chism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

10 INTRODUCTION
variety of political expression sanctioned by individualist anarchists in Europe, many of
whom were Stirnerites, included direct action and propaganda by the deed, guided by free
will and accountable only to one’s self. American individualists discussed the issue, even
imagined a confederation of individualists, but rarely identified with political violence.
Among the elements of American individualist ideology to which Goldman was attracted,
sexual radicalism and free love were paramount. She agreed with and promoted their
view against any form of either intervention or sanction by the State of the social and sex-
ual relationships between women and men but differed on the issue of private property.
Also drawn to the modernists of her time, Goldman digested their ideas into her an-
archist body politic—and thus her life and work became an intellectual template for the
most forward and far-reaching possibilities of the era.

SEXUALITY AND GENDER: THE IDEAS OF SIGMUND FREUD

Goldman’s signature integration of gender interests into her political vision developed
gradually. Her early models of political thought and action were primarily European male
anarchists and American individualist anarchists, who were steeped in the theory of ve-
hement rejection and distrust of the State. Although her message during the early 1890s
was equally militant, Goldman infused that message with an interest in sexuality that
would later expand both the scope of her concerns and the composition of her audience.
She was more psychologically oriented than her anarchist communist comrades—
many of whom were economic or political determinists, marked by the influence of Karl
Marx, Michael Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. For her the scales were even—inner and
outer freedoms were necessary elements for meaningful social and political transfor-
mation, and no formulaic change in social conditions was a guarantee against subjuga-
tion to one’s inner tyrants. She pondered these issues, not only in relation to her own
childhood (remembering her harsh and sometimes violent father, whose abuse she wit-
nessed and endured), but also with respect to the psychology of political violence.
Goldman was especially taken with the ideas of Sigmund Freud,25 whose lectures she
attended in Vienna in 1895, and later at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
in 1909 (the city in which she had had an ice-cream parlor years before). Freud’s work
confirmed her belief in the formative influences of childhood and her instinctual sense
that sexuality was a critical social force, inextricable from the political advocacy of free ex-
pression. This early period of Goldman’s intellectual and emotional development co-
incided with the period of Freud’s career when he had begun to connect hysteria with a
theory about women’s frustrated, repressed sexuality, and to expose the prevalence of in-
cest. Goldman was riveted by Freud’s discussion of topics others considered taboo. She
used his psychoanalytic theories to broaden her own thinking, especially about the forces

25. LML, p. 173. See also Freud’s “Aetiology of Hysteria,” published in 1896 after being presented to the
Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology earlier the same year; trans. James Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Pyschological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, pp. 189 –221 (London:
Hogarth Press, 1962).

INTRODUCTION 11
 that stunt women’s emotional development and how secrecy can mask the horrible un-
derside of family life. These ideas added texture and depth to her discussion of free love.
Goldman also appropriated Freud’s focus on sexuality as a driving force but trans-
formed it to suit her own belief in the power of love and sexual desire as crucial cohesive
elements of social harmony. Her autobiography is a testimony to Freud’s influence (and
as well to Frank Harris’s, who lived in Nice, close to her writer’s cottage in Saint-Tropez,
and who had published a four-volume memoir laced with his sexual experiences).26
Goldman framed her self-portrait to include vivid descriptions of her sexual encounters
(ranging from the horror and shame of being raped in her teenage years to the ecstasy
and romances of her adult life).
Exposed to cutting-edge ideas about the fundamental importance of sexuality and
committed to the anarchist tradition of free love, Goldman combined two streams
of contemporary theory to buttress her own sensual nature and unconventional life
choices. The young Emma Goldman reveled in the sensuality of engagement. She raised
her many concurrent love affairs to a matter of political principle. She fixed her lifetime
self-image in this erotic phase as a sexual free spirit and began to link the concept of
“love” to her anarchist vision—believing that the desire for harmonious relations be-
tween the sexes was universal, and that it was the most potent of all metaphors for social
and political unity.

BRIDGING SEPARATED TERRAINS

Goldman’s ideas about love and sexuality placed her at the center of a perennial debate
among anarchists about the relative political importance of such personal issues. In the
United States but especially in Europe, the anarchists’ agenda was generally one of all-
inclusive engagement with labor issues, confrontations with state power, and theorizing
about anarchist communism, collectivism, individualism, and syndicalism.
At a meeting in 1897 in Chicago called to support the jailed Firebrand editors (who
dared to publish, among other things, Walt Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for Me”), Lucy
Parsons, wife of Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons, scoffed at their emphasis on sex-
uality and maintained that the risks involved in discussing free love were wasteful to the
anarchist movement and distasteful when other more serious and pressing problems de-
manded attention.27 Lucy Parsons’s ideas resonated with a large, mostly male constitu-
ency, who tipped their hats to the importance of sexual freedom in the transformative vi-
sion of anarchism but wished it away from their lofty place of pure political discourse.28
Then at the secret session of the banned Paris congress of 1900, some of the French
delegates objected to Goldman’s reading of Missouri anarchist Kate Austin’s paper “The

26. The four volumes of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves were first published by the author in Paris,
1922 –1927.
27. For a fuller account of the meeting, see “Letters from a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December
1897, esp. note 34.
28. The Pittsburgh Manifesto of 1883 includes the appeal for “equal rights without distinction of sex or
race.”

12 INTRODUCTION
Question of the Sexes: A Report on the History of the Free Love Movement in the
U.S.”—insisting that it would only serve to increase misconceptions of anarchism.
In their theories, anarchists were ahead of their time. They believed in equal rights
for all, without distinction of sex or race. There was considerable support for “free lov-
ers,” and of the men and women who, like the Lucifer Group, lived out, and were some-
times arrested for, their anarchist ideals of personal freedom.29 Yet, even within their own
ranks, there were always anarchists who either shared the biases of the mainstream cul-
ture in deeming sexuality a predominately personal matter, or for whom even the most
compelling issues of private life remained secondary both to their concerns about the
public good and for the safety of their comrades.
Often the storm center of controversy on other issues, Goldman assumed the role of
bridging these separate terrains.

ROOTED IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION

To Goldman, anarchist ideals had an inspirational quality reminiscent of those of the
Russian revolutionaries whose presence had swirled around her in St. Petersburg in her
teenage years just before she came to the United States.30 She linked anarchism to the
soulful novels she read as a girl. She was especially drawn to the provocative and often
suppressed fictionalized story of a political commune, N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to
Be Done? which she had read when she was fifteen. Chernyshevsky’s 1863 work had in-
spired a generation of radical intelligentsia in Russia to political action.31 Goldman
adapted its model of a Russian radical cooperative, its worldview about the centrality of
free women who worked together with men in the service of the people and abided by a
strict code of ethics within the context of violence, its idea that individual contentment
can never be disconnected from the contentment of others, and its belief in the nonex-
clusivity of intimacy and love. She integrated these tenets of Chernyshevsky with the
more directly political writings of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, among others, into the
theory and practice of anarchism as she imagined it would evolve in the United States.
Though dominated by a German contingent of exiles, adherents to anarchism who had
immigrated to America knew no geographical boundaries. As immigrants, they brought
with them the experience and excitement of the practice of anarchism from England,

29. See “The Right of Free Speech in America,” Essay in Die Brandfackel, 13 September 1893, note 1, and
“Marriage,” Essay in the Firebrand, 18 July 1897, note 1, for details on the free-marriage trials and
the Comstock laws.
30. For more on the Russian revolutionary tradition, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York:
Universal Library, 1966).
31. V. I. Lenin titled his famous essay “What is to be done?” (1902)—in which he argues for a coherent
and tightly controlled democratic centralist party of revolutionaries to carry out the social revolution
—after Chernyshevsky’s novel, having read it just after his brother was executed and recognizing its
power to influence and inspire the lives of emergent revolutionaries. Sobranie materialov, p. 182;
cited in Chernyshevsky’s sixteen-volume collection, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 706. From Irina
Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1988).

INTRODUCTION 13
 Italy, France, Spain, and Russia. In Goldman’s youth, Jews, driven by persecution, spread
across the globe but were united by a common tradition and a religious text that was read
and debated, week after week, year after year; the transition to anarchism, bound by ideas
rather than the state, was almost seamless for many secular political Jews. By no means
monolithic in their beliefs, anarchists in America and those in Europe argued passion-
ately with each other about the fine points of theory and practice—whether their em-
phasis should be on production or consumption, whether noble ends justify repugnant
means, and when and how to react to the issues of the day. Not the least of these current
issues was when, and whether, the use of political violence was philosophically or strate-
gically appropriate.

PROPAGANDA BY THE DEED

Goldman was influenced by European anarchists, socialists, and militant workers who
were part of a tradition of agitation, both planned and spontaneous, and who employed
tactics ranging from strikes and sabotage to political assassination.32 These tactics made
sense especially in places like Germany, which had become a stronghold of socialism
but, with the enactment of repressive laws, had barred propaganda efforts and imposed
lengthy jail sentences for labor agitation. In Russia too, a revolution was brewing; Tsar
Alexander II had been assassinated, radicals were subject to exile, and Jews to pogroms.
It was even speculated that the failed attempt taken against him in 1866 mimicked Rahk-
metov’s similar attempt in Chernyshevsky’s popular novel.33 The small group of Russian
radicals known as Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), who were predominantly from the
gentry elite and who succeeded in killing Alexander II in 1881, had employed terrorist
tactics with a large measure of success and considerable tacit approval from an inter-
national community for whom despotism had come to be equated with tsarism.34 The
air was thick with discussions of political violence. Anarchist congresses in London in
1881 (attended by many prominent thinkers and activists in exile) and in Pittsburgh in
1883, overwhelmingly favored “propaganda by the deed”—attentats—the use of violence
against violence. In spite of the intense political repression and waves of reaction spurred
by such acts, there was optimism among anarchists about the possibility for revolution-
ary change. Les Temps Nouveaux (New Times), a French anarchist communist paper,
published a somber international attentat balance sheet in its 24–30 September 1898 is-
sue, tallying the relatively small number of leaders lost—four heads of State killed and
twelve wounded—in comparison to what it estimated as three million acts of violence
committed against the people, including wars. Most often, the conservative and reac-

32. For further discussion of propaganda by the deed, see Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary
Anarchism 1872 –1886 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
33. Cited in Iu. Steklov, M. N. G Chernyshevskii: Ego zhizn’ i deiatel’ nost’, 1828 –1889, 2nd ed., 2 vols.
(Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), p. 132; see Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, p. 30.
34. For a brief definition and history of nihilism, see note 1, “Berkman’s Career Here,” Article in the New
York World, 25 July 1892.

14 INTRODUCTION
tionary individual use of the same tactics were omitted from anarchist discussions of the
heroics of political violence. A formidable cluster of immigrant radicals, especially those
who had recently arrived from Germany and Russia and shared this frame of mind,
while longing for the promise of freedom in their new country, also presumed that se-
lective use of force might be an effective and necessary means for fundamental change
—and, if necessary, retaliation.
In its early use, the phrase “propaganda by the deed” was intended simply to distin-
guish between theorizing about revolutionary change and taking “direct action” to ad-
vance those ideas. Bakunin’s 1870 “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” en-
couraged anarchists to “spread our principles not with words but with deeds, for this is
the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.” This
call to action was not immediately interpreted as an incentive for violence, nor to incite
the symbolic targeting of those individuals perceived as collaborators in, or perpetrators
of, the brutal injustice around them. Spanish and Italian anarchists took Bakunin’s
words as a call for small-scale uprisings and spontaneous strikes— collective seizures of
power intended to set an example, and a pattern for others to follow.
Not until the 1878 attempts on the life of the German emperor Wilhelm I on two
separate occasions by the socialists Max Hodel and Carl Eduard Nobiling, did anarchists
begin to equate “propaganda by the deed” with individual or small-group attentats (or
assassinations). The March 1881 assassination of the Russian tsar Alexander II by the
radical Russian group Narodnaya Volya—intended as a bold call for revolutionary
change—really did influence the direction of history thereafter, and anarchists adopted
propaganda by the deed as their strategy of choice. Reflecting this shift, the July 1881 Lon-
don International Social Revolutionary Congress attended by, among others, Peter
Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Louise Michel, adopted a resolution endorsing “propa-
ganda by deed” and urging the study of “chemistry” in preparation for the use of explo-
sives. Thus the phrase became synonymous with individual and group acts of targeted
assassination as well as of general terror, not only for anarchists but for the public at
large. The same policy was adopted among anarchists in the United States, with the
Pittsburgh Manifesto of 1883 widening the parameters of the phrase by calling for “de-
struction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolution-
ary and international action!” Of the eight Haymarket anarchists, especially the anarchist
communists Louis Lingg, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer supported armed insur-
rection and individual acts of propaganda by the deed. The anarchist periodicals Gold-
man would have read in her formative political years between 1889 and 1892, Die Auto-
nomie and Freiheit, were permeated with violent rhetoric. They not only supported the
use of violence and praised those who carried it out, but Johann Most, the editor of Frei-
heit, who was one of Goldman’s earliest mentors, even authored the 1885 Revolutionary
War Science as a working manual for the attentater.
In 1894, residual doubts about the efficacy of the tactic of propaganda by the deed be-
gan to surface among anarchists, and was best articulated by Kropotkin’s assessment in
La Révolte: “a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few ki-

INTRODUCTION 15
 los of explosives.” His words tacitly encouraged the need for education, and reinforced
the complexity and extended timeframe needed to create popular support for truly revo-
lutionary changes. Although Kropotkin never repudiated the attentat as a right of re-
venge and even praised the heroism of such acts, his emphasis had shifted from a whole-
hearted belief in the success of such tactics, to an appreciation of the act’s symbolic
intent, focusing instead on addressing public misconceptions about anarchism, and orga-
nizing loosely structured federations—leagues, trade unions, schools, discussion groups
—that would work on many levels to create the basis for a grand transformation. The an-
archist communist strand within the movement in the United States attempted to hold
the tension between destruction and construction, without abandoning either pole.
Goldman’s position on the issue of propaganda by the deed bore the important influ-
ences of Kropotkin and of the anarchist communists in the United States and Europe.
By 1901, when the issue touched her life most immediately—with the assassination at-
tempt on the President of the United States by an anarchist who had attended a Gold-
man lecture that glorified the heroism of those who engaged in targeted acts of violence
—her essay, “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” reflected her shift away from the belief that such
an act could spark a workers’ revolt; she had acted on this belief nine years earlier when,
in 1892, she and Alexander Berkman conspired to kill Carnegie Steel Company manager
Henry Clay Frick after Pinkerton gunmen shot and killed striking workers, and she
never abandoned her assertion of the right of the individual to “act” against organized
violence of the state. No longer focused on the effectiveness of such tactics, Goldman
shifted her manner of addressing the issue of political violence to educating the public
about the forces that drive an assassin to his act, hoping to elicit sympathy for the vul-
nerable psychological state and heightened sensitivity of those who choose to risk them-
selves as martyrs in an act of revenge intended as a harrowing cry against the injustice
and cruelty surrounding them.

BROTHERS WAR
Shortly after the execution of the Haymarket anarchists, the American anarchist move-
ment consisted primarily of Jewish anarchists. Pionire der Frayhayt (Pioneers of Liberty),
a rank-and-file Jewish workers group, came together to defend the Haymarket anarchists
on 9 October 1886, the day of their sentencing. The group was soon joined by anarchist
writers and organizers—Saul Yanovsky, Hillel Solotaroff, David Edelstadt, and Roman
Lewis, among others—and concentrated in the eastern cities of the United States, coa-
lesced in 1890 around the publication Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor). The
paper galvanized the Yiddish anarchist community and articulated its strong links to the
militant International Working People’s Association.
The IWPA’s 1883 Pittsburgh Manifesto had been authored primarily by Johann Most
and reflected his contempt for palliatives of reform; instead, he called for the destruction
of privilege based on social class and for the establishment of a free society based on the
cooperative organization of production, a formulation identified as economic collectiv-

16 INTRODUCTION
ism by Michael Bakunin. Most’s German-language paper Freiheit had a run of thirty years
(from 1879 to 1910) and a tremendous following among both German and Jewish anar-
chists, who were drawn to its violent political rhetoric in this period of history when vio-
lence against labor was rampant, and many anarchists and socialists imagined that rev-
olution was imminent.
Like other political movements engaged in formulating a general vision of the future,
differences emerged, not only in theory but also in personality and preference. Rallying
around Joseph Peukert and his paper, Die Autonomie (published from 1889 to 1895), Ger-
man anarchist communists distinguished themselves from anarchist collectivists (who
used ability as a criterion in the distribution of goods and services) by their enunciation
of the criterion of distribution according to need. Threatened and angry, Johann Most,
who was accustomed to dominating the movement, became embroiled in a heated clash
of egos, in part under the guise of a political debate about conflicting philosophical po-
sitions on anarchism. Sweeping the European German anarchist community during the
1880s, this vicious split, in which Most and Peukert each accused each other of treach-
ery, became known as the Bruderkrieg (the “Brothers War”) and continued to reverber-
ate throughout the movement in the 1890s.35 Also festering in anarchists’ collective
memory was the fate of the militant anarchist hero Johann Neve, who was arrested in
Belgium in 1887 after smuggling dynamite across the border to be used by the German
movement. Rumor had it that Peukert had either deliberately or inadvertently identified
Neve to a police agent, a betrayal believed to have resulted in Neve’s death in prison. The
high drama around Neve, who was seen as a man of great integrity and a martyr for the
cause, transcended factionalism and occupied the storm center of European anarchism.
Goldman and Berkman identified with elements of both theoretical standpoints and
maintained alliances with many followers of both Most and Peukert. By 1890 Goldman
and Berkman favored Peukert’s position over Most’s; later she asserted in Living My Life
that Die Autonomie “seemed to express anarchism in a clearer and more convincing
manner” and that his tenets “were much closer to what anarchism had come to mean . . .
than those of Freiheit.” 36 Berkman even recommended to a conference of Jewish anar-
chists in New York City in 1890 that they embark on a full investigation of the spy
charges against Peukert before assuming his guilt.
Immigrant radicals, still in thrall to political developments in Europe, tended to emu-
late the splits and tensions between the various factions of the issues between the anar-
chist and socialist movements abroad, allowing them to overshadow their own emergent
identity as an indigenous movement. Although the philosophical template for Gold-
man’s political ideas had been set, events and personalities in the anarchist movement

35. For further discussion on the Brothers War, see Heiner Becker, “Johann Neve,” The Raven 1
(May 1987) and Andrew Carlson, Anarchism in Germany (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972).
Also see note 3, “Berkman’s Career Here,” Article in the New York World, 25 July 1892, for details of
this most divisive feud in anarchist history.
36. LML, p. 74.

INTRODUCTION 17
 were ever changing. Given the intrigue within the ranks, Goldman’s transcendent ability
to incorporate new ideas kept her remarkably modern and continuously identified as an
open and forward thinker.

MUTUAL AT TRACTION
When the young, bright, attractive Emma Goldman entered the New York anarchist po-
litical arena, militant European men dominated it. Burning with a desire to serve hu-
manity, to be active in the cause of freedom, she welcomed mentors and comrades, and
the stimulation of their new ideas. Mutual attraction marked this moment in her young
life. The reciprocal sizzle of sexuality and politics was a fitting tonic for her spirit and of-
ten expressed itself in intimate crossing of ethnic and national boundaries, though still
within a mostly non-English-speaking immigrant world. The clandestine dangers, wo-
ven so tightly into the fabric of anarchist culture, intensified her excitement and under-
scored the importance of building trust among comrades whose secrets had far-reaching
consequences. Captivating intimate relationships emerged from and fed her enthusiasm
for her new political engagement. Foremost among her early mentors and lovers were
Alexander Berkman and Johann Most.
Alexander Berkman, known by the Russian diminutive Sasha, was an immigrant
close to Goldman’s own age, and first caught her eye at Sachs’s café on Suffolk Street, the
unofficial headquarters of young Yiddish-speaking anarchists in New York City’s Lower
East Side neighborhood. Eastern European Jews, especially from Russia, had fled anti-
Semitism and the pervasive oppressiveness of tsarist rule in the 1880s. To cushion the
harsh anonymity of their arrival, new immigrants clustered into small enclaves bound
together by a common language and culture. The mutual attraction between Emma and
Sasha was intensified by their shared revolutionary and Russian heritage. Their love and
friendship would become the emotional center of both their lives.
Berkman modeled himself after his uncle, the Russian revolutionary Mark Andreye-
vich Natanson, Sasha’s personal ideal of a “noble and great man.” 37 Sasha immigrated to
the United States in 1888 and joined the militant New York City organization Pionire der
Frayhayt (Pioneers of Liberty) the same year; the group launched the country’s first Yid-
dish-language anarchist paper, Varhayt (Truth), the predecessor of Freie Arbeiter Stimme
(Free Voice of Labor). The Varhayt editorial collective combined rank-and-file labor mili-
tants with highly educated writers and lecturers. Berkman was also an active member of
the anarchist periodical Freiheit (Freedom), whose driving force was Johann Most.
Graced with tremendous oratorical talent, Most was respected for the many prison
sentences he had endured in the service of the cause, and for his willingness to voice in-

37. Natanson was a founder of the Chaikovsky Circle of Russian revolutionaries and of the group Zemya
i Volya (Land and Liberty) and later, of its militant faction Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), the radi-
cal group that practiced the use of terror. See “Talk with Emma Goldman,” Interview in the New York
Sun, 6 January 1901, note 10, for more on the impact and legacy of the Narodnaya Volya group.

18 INTRODUCTION
cendiary ideas in a manner more dramatic and convincing than any speaker Goldman
had ever heard. His prolific vitriolic writings, especially Die Gottespest (The God Pesti-
lence; 1888) and The Beast of Property (1890), were staples of the movement as well as his
powerful defenses of the political rationale for die Propaganda der That—“propaganda by
the deed.” Revolutionary War Science (1885), Most’s weapons manual, which Berkman
used, was especially provocative.
Many years her senior, Most took Goldman under his wing. He recognized her po-
tential as both political protégé and lover. Goldman was honored to have attracted the at-
tention and friendship of a man who was such a force in the movement. She was a quick
study, and it was not long before Most sent her on the road, in 1890, to Rochester, Buf-
falo, Cleveland, and Baltimore to deliver her first public lectures on the contradictions in-
herent in the movement for an eight-hour workday. Goldman seized the opportunity to
challenge the overriding system of power and exploitation, echoing many of the senti-
ments of the groundbreaking 1883 Pittsburgh Manifesto, a document drafted by Most,
among others, that had reflected the views of many of the Chicago Haymarket anar-
chists. The manifesto established the parameters of anarchist discourse—“the destruc-
tion of existing class rule by all means” and “the establishment of a free society based
upon cooperative organization of production” and “equal rights for all without distinc-
tion of sex or race.”
Goldman found the experience of lecturing intoxicating— especially when she de-
parted from Most’s ideas and followed her own inspiration. The crowds welcomed this
bold newcomer who spoke on such topical issues as “The Right to Be Lazy” (a title she
borrowed from the book by Paul Lafargue),38 hurling insults at a system of privilege that
left so many people either impoverished or literally worked to death. Goldman delivered
her message at first only in her German mother tongue, a language easily understood by
both Yiddish and German audiences, and especially appealing to newly arrived immi-
grants. Many among them, who had participated in militant groups abroad, were intent
on continuing their fight for social and economic justice in a country that held more
grandiose promise than it actually delivered. Goldman railed against factory owners who
felt threatened by organized labor and against the political system that made immigrants
targets, vulnerable to exploitation and indiscriminate violent attack should they dare to
strike for greater economic rights.

L ABOR VIOLENCE
In this extremely volatile time, it was actually quite difficult to assess, even metaphori-
cally, who threw the first stone. Statistics show that in the United States between 1881
and 1905, there were 37,000 strikes, independent of those called for by a central union.
Between 1877 and 1903, 500 such confrontations escalated into interventions by state

38. Paul Lafargue, Das Recht ouf Faulheit (Zurich: Verlag der Volksbuchhandlung, 1887).

INTRODUCTION 19
 and federal troops on behalf of the owners against the strikers, with untold numbers of
fatalities.39 Records were poorly kept and inaccurate because many of those killed were
“foreign” workers, not yet “citizens” of the United States, whose deaths were not con-
sidered worthy of official tally. 40 New immigrants, who could work but generally could
not vote, had little hope for any official recourse to counter the extreme exploitation to
which they were subjected, although a significant few forged links to New York City’s
Tammany Hall political machine. Often the disenchanted among them gravitated how-
ever toward direct-action tactics—strikes and sabotage. The fact that the State did not ad-
equately represent the interests of the oppressed rendered the anarchist perspective all
the more enticing to this militant sector of exploited workers.
Whether the union movement could have sustained the militancy of its beginnings is
unclear. The extraordinary use of armed force to squelch militant union tactics and to
halt even the discussion of reorganization of the workplace allowed for only the most re-
formist unions to thrive. Thus, it is not surprising that in this battle to gain influence and
respectability in the United States, the bombs and assassinations associated with the vi-
olent edge of the anarchist spectrum became a source of tension for the moderate sector
of the labor movement.
When Goldman entered the political arena, between 1890 and 1900, there were sig-
nificantly more incidents of labor unrest than during the previous decade— over 16,000
strikes and lockouts with over four million employees engaged in the attempt to rede-
fine the conditions of their work.41 Although most anarchists viewed the eight-hour
movement as an inadequate palliative to an inherently unjust economic system, the la-
bor movement was a natural point of entry for someone eager to make a difference in the
lives of working people. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the price of strik-
ing for higher wages and sometimes for reduced hours (with victory won only half of the
time) was all too often one’s life.

ANARCHISM BRIEFLY DEFINED

Goldman voiced the political intent of the anarchists and would later extend their prin-
ciple of freedom to the pressing social and cultural issues of her time: “We seek the es-
tablishment of Anarchy, or, in other words, a freedom from government of any kind; a
community of interests based upon common production of equal and necessary charac-
ter; we seek a perfect liberty for each individual to enjoy the grand and glorious products
of nature; we seek for each an equal liberty to cultivate the talents and abilities as well the

39. See “Advised Strenuous Measures,” Article in the Boston Daily Globe, 13 September 1897, notes 1, 2,
for details on the Hazleton massacre; see “Letter from a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December
1897, note 29, for details on the United Mine Workers’ strike; and see “The Effect of War on the
Workers,” Transcript of Address in Freedom, 20 February 1900, note 6, for details on the Coeur
d’Alene strike.
40. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 90 –91.
41. Thomas Sewell Adams and Helen L. Sumner, eds., Labor Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1907),
p. xx; data from the Sixteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Labor.

20 INTRODUCTION
attainments of the highest knowledge” (see “The Law’s Limit,” Article in the New York
World, 17 October 1893).

SPREADING THE WORD

As a traveling lecturer, Goldman served the important role of spreading horrific infor-
mation about, and the perspective of those who fell victim to, labor violence— events of-
ten suppressed from mainstream newspapers. The barring of radical journals from the
mails under a broadly interpreted law against “obscenity” meant that Goldman’s lectures
might be the only source of sympathetic information about labor troubles.
Over time, Goldman became especially adept at rallying solidarity and raising funds
for labor organizing across the nation. In these early years, she solicited funds for the
striking women garment workers and for the languishing anarchist newspapers Free So-
ciety and the Firebrand, among other worthy causes.
Her speaking career was launched among the immigrant left—a community that
remained her loyal audience and refuge, as her public gradually widened to include
English-speaking Americans. When she stepped onto the political stage at age twenty-
one, she embarked on what was to become a continuous lecture trail. Her tours served
the multiple purpose of providing a forum for her political message and an incentive for
her youthful exploration of the expansive cultural and geographic terrain of the United
States, molding her unique pattern of Americanization—and contributing to her grow-
ing ability to reach, understand, and learn from the varieties of culture and history of her
vast adopted country. Such forays into the country’s interior were rare for immigrant
working girls clustered in New York City, and fed Goldman’s yearning to break away from
conventional expectations.

LIVING COMMUNALLY
When Goldman returned to New York City from her first month-long lecture tour, she
was inspired to extend her political vision to her daily living arrangements. An informal
commune began to take shape, organized in part by readers and supporters of Most’s
newspaper Freiheit. She had dreamed of finding a cooperative based on free association
in work, in love, in political vision—to match the one depicted in her beloved novel,
Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Closely approximating her desires, her household
consisted of Sasha and his cousin Modest Stein, known as Fedya, along with her young
friends Anna and Helene Minkin. Goldman imagined herself to be Vera Pavlovna (whose
many lovers lived together or frequented the same quarters without hiding their affec-
tions, fully within each other’s gaze). She linked Fedya to the novel’s portrayal of Vera’s
brother, and Berkman to Rahkmetov (a role he too ascribed to himself ), Chernyshevsky’s
pure revolutionary. The group lived together first in New York City and later in New Ha-
ven, Connecticut, where they loosely organized themselves around an attempt to estab-
lish a women’s sewing cooperative. Jealousies cropped up as the group’s personal entan-
glements thickened. Johann Most would later become intimately involved with Helene
Minkin, and Sasha with her sister, Anna Minkin. The tension of their informal summer

INTRODUCTION 21
 commune in New Haven eventually became unbearable, prompting their return to New
York City. Emma, Sasha, and Fedya—by this time, a loose ménage à trois—broke away
from the larger collective living group.
Still attached to the idea of creating a life outside of the city, Emma left the drudgery
of piecework sewing behind and migrated to the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, in
the spring of 1892. There she joined Fedya, who had arranged a job for her with his em-
ployer—a busy photographer who was sympathetic to their cause. In this underdocu-
mented period of Goldman’s life, only scantily reported in her autobiography, one may
surmise that there was much to hide—both personal and political. She did write about
her next move, to nearby Worcester, where with Sasha and Fedya she started and faced
the failure of their own photography studio. Then, stirred by accounts of the tsar’s latest
atrocities, they came upon the all-American idea of opening an ice-cream parlor to fund
their return to Russia. But even double scoops could not secure a steady flow of cash, off-
season in a hot-weather business, thus dashing their hopes of joining the international
supporters of the brewing revolution in their mother country.

AT TENTAT — AND THE DELUGE

At the same time, industrial violence racked the United States, with the governors of five
states calling for the National Guard to quell labor unrest—against miners in East Ten-
nessee and in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, against switchmen in Buffalo, and to counter gen-
eral strikes in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Homestead, Pennsylvania.42
On 6 July 1892, Goldman burst into the small room in back of the flat she shared with
Sasha and Fedya frantically waving a half-open newspaper. Berkman described her agi-
tation as “the cry of a wounded animal . . . the bitterness of helpless agony.” Barely able
to speak she blurted out—“Homestead. Strikers shot. Pinkertons have killed women and
children.” 43
The Pinkerton gunmen, ostensibly there to protect strikebreakers, shot at striking
workers at the Homestead steel mill in Pennsylvania. An ambiguous order from indus-
trial magnate Henry Clay Frick ended in a bloody conflict between striking workers, de-
tectives, strikebreakers, and armed guards. Even before Homestead, Emma, Sasha, and
Fedya felt compelled to respond to the plight of workers in their adopted home and
sealed their commitment to die for the cause of anarchism.44 Together they plotted to re-
taliate against Frick, the manager at the Carnegie steel company’s mill.
For justice to triumph over adversity, Goldman and her circle presumed that such ex-
traordinary forces of repression necessitated counterviolence. Sasha would carry out
their plan. Emma attempted to prostitute herself to get money for the gun. Fedya worked

42. See “Berkman’s Career Here,” Article in the New York World, 25 July 1892, note 13, for a detailed ac-
count of the events at Homestead.
43. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Associa-
tion, 1912), p. 1.
44. LML, p. 62.

22 INTRODUCTION
out the logistics and vowed to follow through on the act, should anything go wrong. They
helped write and distribute a workers’ manifesto, anticipating that their attentat would
spur the workers to rise up in righteous indignation. The night he arrived in Pittsburgh,
Sasha signed into a hotel under the name of his literary revolutionary archetype, “Rakh-
metov.” But the tactics of their Russian counterparts failed them in America. Sasha in-
jured Frick but failed to kill him. An associate of Frick’s helped restrain rather than de-
fend Sasha, who was later attacked by a carpenter who tried to hit him with a hammer as
he faced arrest. Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Fedya, who went
to Pittsburgh after the arrest to finish where Sasha had left off, was foiled by an informer.
Impetuously and with a sense of outrage, the twenty-three-year-old Goldman, the
twenty-two-year-old Berkman, and a small group of their friends had planned the retal-
iatory attentat against Frick, holding him responsible for the indiscriminate deaths of the
strikers. Berkman would spend the next fourteen years in prison. Only when he was be-
hind bars did he gradually begin to comprehend the insularity of his act and why the very
workers he intended to defend had not come to his defense, although he had no regrets
about alienating the ever-growing moderate contingent of the labor movement. Sasha’s
most severe punishment, however, was the hurtful condemnation of the prominent an-
archist Johann Most—the most vociferous challenger of Berkman’s political judgment.45
Anarchists by no means gave unilateral support to acts of political violence and argued
bitterly among themselves on the issue. Yet, whether ends justify means was less an is-
sue for the anarchists than whether oppressors would retreat in fear or workers would
rise in victory after having destroyed the old order to create the new.46
Although too-sparse evidence protected Goldman from the punishing hand of the law,
she could not escape the censure of a suspicious public. Her private acknowledgment of
shared guilt and her sustained belief in the symbolic significance of Berkman’s act fueled
a legal and political campaign on his behalf that punctuated every aspect of her life until
his release in 1906.
Equally important was Goldman’s personal support from afar; she acted as Berkman’s
emotional anchor as he cycled in and out of the abyss of depression— especially in prison.
Haunted by the dire consequences of their joint actions, Goldman’s identity would be for-
ever entwined with his, her freedom tainted by his confinement, her development as a
thinker and as a woman never far from his imagined gaze.
Paradoxically, a relatively short prison sentence of her own provided Goldman a
respite from survivor’s guilt. Goldman was arrested and, in October 1893, convicted of
incitement to riot for uttering sentiments that might encourage the poor to demand,

45. See Letter to Der Anarchist, 30 July 1892, note 1, which provides the first English translation of
Most’s position paper against Berkman’s act.
46. See Letter from Alexander Berkman, 19 October 1892, note 3, for an exposition published in Prison
Blossoms of the reasoning behind Berkman’s attempt to kill Frick; see also Letter to Augustin
Hamon, 25 June 1897, note 7, for a statement of organized labor’s distaste and disapproval of Berk-
man’s attack on Frick.

INTRODUCTION 23
 then take, bread “as their sacred right.” During the first year of Berkman’s imprison-
ment, Goldman had been free to follow her own inclinations and interests. In her own
ten months behind bars, lonely encounters with society’s imprisoned outcasts would be-
come their poignant commonality.

AN ANCHOR IN THE STORM

Even the horrors of a prison cell could not squelch Goldman’s hunger for engagement
with political and intellectual life, nor hamper her development as a young woman who
reveled in both the turbulence and excitement of her times. Anarchists affirmed freedom
of the individual, espoused free love, fought against possessiveness, welcomed variety.
Goldman’s intimate life was never eclipsed by Berkman’s incarceration. Even while they
were together, before his imprisonment, Sasha had been involved with their roommate
Anna Minkin and Emma with his cousin Fedya. At a December 1892 meeting organized
to support the commutation of Berkman’s prison sentence, Goldman found herself at-
tracted to Ed Brady, an erudite Austrian anarchist, seventeen years her senior, recently re-
leased after serving eight of a twelve-year sentence to hard labor in Vienna for distribut-
ing anarchist literature.
Although no extant letters between them have been located, Goldman wrote about
Brady extensively in her autobiography, and her comrade Harry Kelly eulogized him in
1903 in the London monthly Freedom, as “one of the kindest hearts that ever beat . . . the
movement has lost a tower of strength in his death.” Goldman lived with Brady from
1893, then after her release from Blackwell’s Island prison in 1894, to early 1899, cast-
ing him off because of his intermittent possessiveness, both of her activities and of her
other involvements. She resumed their friendship in 1901 when she needed his compan-
ionship. Brady proved to be among the most influential of her lover-mentors, fostering
her political and cultural education as well as her sexual maturation. Among the many
gifts their relationship bequeathed to her was an introduction to, and lifelong love of, lit-
erature. Goldman found him “the most scholarly person I had ever met” and praised
him as “a born teacher [whose] patience was boundless”; he was also a masterful cook.47
Her six years with Brady, from ages twenty-four to thirty, provided the steadfast, though
stormy, environment for her young womanhood.48
Brady’s office supply business, which she helped promote during the spare moments
she snatched away during her lecture tours, often provided a material cushion for their
political work. In spite of his personal longing for convenient domesticity, their shared
political vision— especially Brady’s commitment to the efforts to free Berkman and to act
as Goldman’s comfort and support when she too was in jail or on the road lecturing—
provided a critical and sustaining frame for the early period of her political engagement.
The young Emma Goldman’s decade-long initiation into political activism was one of

47. LML, pp. 115–116, 118.

48. See LML, p. 151. Other intimacies and flirtations cushioned this time of Goldman’s life. Their sto-
ries are interwoven in her autobiography, veiled with suggestive inferences to love and true passion.

24 INTRODUCTION
complete immersion—sometimes harsh, sometimes dazzling, a dramatic rite of pas-
sage into an uncertain world. She responded with all her energy and passion to a call to
battle in a terrain of seemingly infinite possibility.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND NARRATIVE GUIDE TO THE DOCUMENTS

A noisy 1892 labor demonstration sets the action for the first volume, Made for America,
1890–1901. The loud cacophony of immigrants shouting in German, Yiddish, Russian,
and English greet Emma Goldman, already reputed for her eloquence, as she mounts a
cart to shout her message, only to have her platform hitched to a horse by an opposing
faction. Socialists, determined not to let anarchists speak that day, pull her out of earshot.
Almost comically, the newspaper account mocks Goldman for continuing her tirade in
vain, fading into the distance.
The sharp focus on Goldman does, in fact, recede as the front-page coverage of Al-
exander Berkman’s failed assassination attempt on Carnegie steel plant manager Henry
Clay Frick unfolds. Unfortunately, a police seizure and purging of personal papers that
chronicled the years preceding Berkman’s act also interrupts the documentary trail of
Goldman’s debut into a life of political engagement. Thus, the first volume of the selected
edition of Goldman’s papers has a later-than-desired point of entry.

AF TERMATH OF THE AT T E NTAT

While the mainstream press cranks out details of Berkman’s attentat, an internal feud
breaks out among anarchists in what became the U.S. movement’s most sensational and
hotly debated political stories of the era. Did Berkman’s act weaken the movement and
leave it more vulnerable to suppression? Did the intent of Berkman’s act succeed in de-
livering a blow to the system of wage slavery even though it was a tactical failure? Was it
a pivotal case in point of the complex distinction between the concept and reality of the
anarchist tactic of “propaganda by the deed”? Was Berkman out of step with American
labor and the hold of American economic and political forces? Or was Berkman a hero,
a martyr for the cause of labor—the “Brutus of the 19th century” (see “Emma Goldman
in London,” Article in Liberty, October 1895), a man who had the courage to depose a
tyrant and willingly risked his life to avenge the deaths of striking workers? Was he the
victim of slanderous attack by Johann Most, a man whose dominance as a strategist for
the international anarchist movement had been eclipsed temporarily by Berkman’s indi-
vidual act of violence? Did personal animosity or political difference obscure the subtlety
of Most’s critique—his praise of Berkman and simultaneous condemnation of his act?
Intermingled with reports and opinion pieces in the German anarchist press is Most’s
position statement, “Attentats-Reflexionen,” a portion of which is published here for the
first time in English translation (see note 1, Letter to Der Anarchist, 30 July 1892). Gold-
man, though later known for her compassion, makes Most, her former lover, the target
of her unmitigated fury. She attacks Most’s arguments as the pathetic ravings of a jeal-
ous old man, a “miserable coward, a liar, a dissimulator, and above all a weakling.” She

INTRODUCTION 25
 counsels against cultivating “such demagogues, who through us and our pennies be-
come ‘great men’” and warns that because of such personages, “the movement will be
hampered and the ruling class will triumph” (see Letter to Der Anarchist, 30 July 1892).
Goldman’s relentless campaign to win support for Berkman—her determined at-
tempts to shorten his prison sentence, ease his load, and educate the public about what
she contended was the heroic dimension of his act— dominates her life during this early
period. Her distinctive voice and her potential contribution to the theoretical debates rag-
ing around her were muted by her concrete engagement with Berkman’s plight. Letters
from Berkman, often sent sub rosa to avoid prison censors, were cherished items from
which Berkman later wrote Prison Memoir of an Anarchist and testaments to the sustain-
ing power of their friendship as well as chronicles of their struggle to melt the cold iron
bars of his cell with their love. He wrote of her “affectionate letters” to him as “the only
break in the terrible sameness. . . . With closed eyes I sense its weight, like the warm
pressure of your own dear hand, the touch reaching softly to my heart, till I feel myself
lifted across the chasm into your presence. The bars fade, the walls disappear” (see Let-
ter from Alexander Berkman, 18 November 1892). Berkman, who identified with politi-
cal martyrs and with the heroes and heroines of Russian novels, wondered “What will
become of me, I don’t know. I hardly care. We are revolutionists, dear: whatever sacrifices
the Cause demands, though the individual perish, humanity will profit in the end. In
that consciousness we must find our solace” (see Letter from Alexander Berkman, 18 No-
vember 1892). The dark side of such confident declarations was his inner “terror,” the
reckoning with the possibility that it might be all for naught—“reality seized me and I
was swept by a paroxysm of anguish” (see Letter from Alexander Berkman, 30 Novem-
ber 1892).
Goldman tried (as did the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre), often to no avail, to coun-
teract Berkman’s bouts of depression—a condition born of both circumstance and tem-
perament. Just when he seemed to be sinking beyond rescue, the companionship of his
co-conspirators and fellow prisoners, Carl Nold and Henry Bauer, assuaged his pain.
Nold and Bauer, German activists in Pittsburgh’s eight-hour workday movement, had
been sentenced to five years in the same prison as Berkman for distributing an incendi-
ary manifesto to the Carnegie steel plant workers at Homestead. Together, this trio cre-
ated a secret magazine, Prison Blossoms— excerpts of which have been translated from
German and published in English in this volume for the first time. The three anarchists
differentiated themselves from other inmates by describing themselves as those who
“suffer for an ideal” and coined the term “political prisoner” (see Letter from Alexander
Berkman, 4 March 1893). Years later, in 1918, Goldman and Berkman would launch the
League for Amnesty for Political Prisoners, a contentious campaign to persuade prison
officials to deliver mail to them addressed as “political prisoners” even though the gov-
ernment claimed that there were no political prisoners in the United States.
Goldman built on the broad appeal of this concept as a strategy for strengthening
support for Berkman in Pittsburgh, the site of his trial and the seat of government
officials with the power to grant a pardon or shorten his sentence. Berkman’s eloquent

26 INTRODUCTION
and heartrending letters chronicling the experiences of his first incarceration and the
couple’s attempts to see each other punctuate the narrative of the first volume of this doc-
umentary history. Berkman writes to Goldman as his “Immutable,” “Sister Sonya,” his
“beloved sailor Girl,” and “Musick” and she to him as her Russian “Tolsogub,” her man
with sensual thick lips. His prison letters are remarkable documents—poignant exam-
ples of the contrast between censored and uncensored, messages coded and encoded,
modulations of tone calibrated to a multiplicity of potential readers—and are a tribute to
the continuity of intimacy in the face of the enforced separation of prison. Berkman’s let-
ters to her indicate that in hers to him (which sadly were lost or confiscated by prison au-
thorities), Goldman had repeatedly sent assurances that his isolation would not drag on
and tried to distract him with tales of her engagement in the events on the outside, es-
pecially in correspondence that eluded the pen of prison censors. Yet, “the injustice of
the law” and the prison system which “breeds rottenness” (as her own experience would
prove) cast an ominous shadow on this daunting period of Goldman’s life (see “My Year
in Stripes,” Article in the New York World, 18 August 1894).

GL ARING POVERTY: ARRESTED FOR URGING THE POOR TO DEMAND BREAD

Goldman’s letters to others during this early period provide glimpses of her daily routine,
working twelve hours a day at a sewing machine as the country sank into the depression
of 1893. Massive unemployment and a bankrupt U.S treasury made the possibility of the
government’s collapse not so distant a threat. She noted that funds for anarchist propa-
ganda were drying up; for example, Der Anarchist (which had moved from St. Louis to
New York) closed its presses (see Letter to Max Metzkow, 27 June 1893).
Glaring poverty, the sight of the throngs of unemployed, and the ostentatious few who
held the bulk of the nation’s wealth catalyzed Goldman to gradually begin speaking out
against injustice—to take the risk of standing again on the speaker’s platform and re-
claiming her nascent political voice, shedding the fears of public censure raised by her
association with Berkman. The mood of the country was changing, and the forces of
labor activism strengthened in this time of desperation. The dedication on 25 June 1893
of a monument erected on the gravesite of the anarchists of the Haymarket affair drew a
crowd of 8,000 — even attracting many foreign delegates attending the world fair in Chi-
cago. The decision, on the day after the commemoration, by Illinois governor John Peter
Altgeld to unconditionally pardon the remaining Haymarket anarchists and to condemn
their legal proceedings as a case of judicial murder, signaled a crack in the system and
broke the hold of what otherwise had seemed like a monolithic enemy.
Labor took this as a message of hope, but conservators of order feared that the gov-
ernment was becoming too lenient. Massive demonstrations by the unemployed were
raucous gatherings of men and women predominantly under the age of twenty-five and
primed to take to the streets and demand work and food. In August 1893 in New York
City, in this charged atmosphere, Goldman addressed a crowd of over 5,000 and urged
them to demonstrate before the palaces of the rich and demand bread, directing them to
take it, as their “sacred right,” if it was denied.

INTRODUCTION 27
 Each newspaper account of her speech reflected the bias of the beholder.49 The re-
porters of the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, describing the crowd as “professional agitators,
fanatics, utopians and demagogues,” misleadingly presented the portion of Goldman’s
talk in which she linked anarchism to the American liberal tradition as if it were a tran-
scription: “‘This is the land of Thos. Jefferson, John Brown, Abe Lincoln,’ shouted the
loudmouth in bad English, ‘and in it hundreds of thousands are crying out for bread. If
those men could witness this meeting, they would blush in shame. The rich live splen-
didly and in their pleasures and their women have everything that the heart desires, but
the wage slaves are worse off than the colored people in the time of slavery. These bad
times are not due to the silver crisis, they have other roots. You demand bread, and if you
cannot acquire it through peaceful means, you will get it by force. Unite and take it by
force, if you cannot get it peacefully’” (see “Badly Advised,” Article in New-Yorker Staats-
Zeitung, 22 August 1893). Her words, and those of the others who spoke that day, were
considered grounds for arrest. Police stopped her in Philadelphia as she was about to
address a rally of the unemployed, extradited her, and forced her to face her accusers in
New York. The characteristically extreme language of nineteenth-century law displayed
in the police affidavit offers a glimpse into the government’s demonized projections:
“one Emma Goldman being an evil disposed and pernicious person and of turbulent dis-
position, together with divers other evil disposed and pernicious persons to the number
of fifty and upwards, unlawfully, wickedly and maliciously intending and contriving to
disturb the public peace, and to excite the citizens of this State to hatred and contempt
of its government and laws, and to raise and make riots, routs and unlawful assem-
blies within this State . . . with force and arms . . . did threaten to take steal and carry away
the goods, chattels and personal property of the good citizens of the State of New York,
and did make other wicked, malicious unlawful threats” (see Police Affidavit, 25 Au-
gust 1893).
She responded in German, in the New York City–based anarchist communist news-
paper Die Brandfackel, with vituperative invectives to match the pitch of her accusers. An-
gry at “the fact that the ruling class in America has been committing the most despicable
acts and most shameless assaults upon the working people using the so-called liberal in-
stitutions of a republic as a cover,” she warned that she would find “other ways and
means to open the eyes of the people and speak to them so that the hearts of the capital-
ist Caesars of America will tremble; I will yet rip the mask of lies from the faces of this
cowardly band” (see “The Right of Free Speech in America,” Essay in Die Brandfackel,
13 September 1893). Outraged at being arrested for attempting to organize the unem-
ployed in a time of extraordinary hunger, Goldman compared the wretched state of free
expression in the United States to the despotism of Russia—a theme that would echo
throughout her life in her many commentaries on the subject. In fact, all of Goldman’s
early pleas for free speech were tied to a virulent critique not only of police repression,

49. See “Badly Advised,” Article in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 22 August 1893, note 7, for a slightly
different account of the New York World’s Goldman’s speech delivered in German.

28 INTRODUCTION
but of capitalism itself. She believed that challenging ideas were kept away from the
laboring masses, ignorant of their plight. Only later did Goldman intermittently de-
emphasize this in order to solidify free speech as a right in the interest of the middle
class—as well as for the poor.

NEWSPAPER’S RISING STAR EXPOUNDS ON GOLDMAN’S VIEWS

The dark side of government harassment was countered by the bright prospect of trans-
forming negative attention into an opportunity to communicate ideas to the general pub-
lic. Interest in her trial grew in tandem with remarkable publicity. Goldman had become
a celebrity, a fate sealed by the publication of Nellie Bly’s exclusive front-page interview
in the New York World. Goldman’s published remarks roused a growing movement of
women drawn to but often not completely satisfied with suffrage solutions; later news-
paper coverage indicates that Goldman eventually attracted the lively edge of the liberal
reform mainstream who flirted with radicalism and bohemianism and often were dis-
couraged by the many compromises inherent in their own programs for gradual change.
Among the many facets of Bly’s article was a psycho-political explanation of the roots of
Goldman’s identity as a revolutionist, going back to her childhood in Russia. Goldman
told the journalist that self-interest rather than altruism was her motivating force: “I am
an Anarchist because I am an egotist. . . . I never hurt a man in my life, and I don’t think
I could . . . what others suffer makes me suffer.” Addressing the issue of greed and big
business— often commenting on what she called “commercial theft,” Goldman made
the astute assessment that stock exchange boards were merely a format for “respectable”
commercial gambling.
She also answered the questions most frequently asked of anarchists—where they
stood on issues of God (“I believe in nature, nothing else”); work (“No one is lazy. They
grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence. . . . [If ] every man would do
the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so [he] could not be unhappy
and discouraged”); crime (“We do not grant there is anything to steal, for everything
should be free”); marriage, love, and childrearing (“Let there be nothing but voluntary af-
fection and there ceases to exist the prostitute wife and the prostitute street woman. . . .
Mothers who would rather do something else than care for their children could put them
in the schools, where they would be cared for by women who preferred taking care of
children to any other work”); and violence (“I don’t believe that through murder we shall
gain, but by war, labor against capital, masses against classes, which will not come in
twenty or twenty-five years . . . until then I am satisfied to agitate to teach, and I only ask
justice and freedom of speech”).
Impressed by Goldman’s articulate, searing responses (and her linking of wage slav-
ery to domestic slavery), Bly altered her portrayal from the initial description of Goldman
as just a young “little bit of a girl” to the closing description as a “modern Joan of Arc”
whose imprisonment would undoubtedly be less for Goldman’s “offense” than for her
beliefs in anarchism. Bly also softened the usual image of Goldman with such details as
a woman who loves her bath, likes her dresses “plain and quiet,” but above all loves

INTRODUCTION 29
 books and surrounds herself with them (see “Nellie Bly Again,” Interview in the New
York World, 17 September 1893).

EARLY BAT TLES ON THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF FREE SPEECH

The lengthy transcript of Goldman’s 1893 trial for unlawful assembly and incitement to
riot, with its focus on the intent and exact wording, in English and in German, of Gold-
man’s speech at the demonstration of the unemployed, is a remarkable document—
among the most telling cultural and political remnant in the collection. Framed by urban
industrialization, it is a window through which to view class tensions in the United States.
The transcript conveys the tone of the era— of labor and politics, of the creative mix of
mostly non-English-speaking immigrant cultures, of the omnipresent undercurrents of
violence at labor demonstrations where both angry revolutionaries and club-wielding po-
lice exchanged blows. In the urban milieu of New York City, Goldman could simultane-
ously address a huge crowd and still try to hide her revolutionary words from the skulking
presence of government stenographers by speaking in her native German tongue. The
varied statements of the witnesses demonstrate the phenomena of conflicting percep-
tions of those who attended the same event, whether on the side of the police or of the
anarchists. Each person’s testimony is a cultural artifact of its own. In telling his story, the
first detective made sure to emphasize the negative impact of Goldman’s speech—urg-
ing the hungry to demand bread—as witnessed by the excitement of the crowd: “hats were
waved in the air” (“People vs. Emma Goldman,” Excerpt from Trial Transcript, 4 Octo-
ber 1893). Even the repetitions in the proceedings, with defendants each giving their own
version of the same Goldman speech as well as their perceptions of the responses of the
crowd, and the cross-examinations of each witness, form the basis of an interesting med-
itation on history, memory, and perception—and on what constitutes truth in the con-
text of unjust law. The perceived threat of an anarchist using the metaphor of the hungry
demanding bread to represent the idea of taking action against depravity was reminis-
cent of the French anarchist Louise Michel’s incendiary speech of 1883, and of the book,
The Conquest of Bread, by Peter Kropotkin, that had just been published in 1892.
Goldman’s testimony, and those of her close associates Ed Brady and Claus Timmer-
mann (Timmermann received a six-month sentence stemming from the same event),
deepens the picture, not only of the event, but also of her life—as does the hectoring
voice of her prosecutor. Goldman testified “in her own behalf, that she lived in this coun-
try eight years. She had delivered many public speeches in this country. She was in the
habit of preparing her speeches and committing them to memory. She had written out
the German speech that she delivered on the night of the 21st of August, 1893, and she
had memorized it. She had made notes of the English speech that she delivered on
that night, before she went to the meeting. There was not very much difference between
the English speech and the German speech. She had been requested by several of the
unemployed to speak at that meeting. She saw Detective Jacobs at the meeting. She
had heard the testimony of Detective Jacobs, on the stand; she denied everything that he

30 INTRODUCTION
said, it was not true” (“People vs. Emma Goldman,” Excerpt from Trial Transcript, 4 Oc-
tober 1893).
The feverish pitch on both sides of the political spectrum mirrored the mood of out-
rage and defensiveness in a country permeated by disparities of wealth during the 1893
depression and the false premonition among some contemporary anarchists that an-
other revolution, of the same historic proportions that swept France and America in the
late eighteenth century, was imminent. Goldman astutely surmised that until that day
(which she earnestly estimated would come to pass by 1915), she would focus the atten-
tion of her public work on education—for which free speech was critical. In her con-
cluding testimony, speaking in her own defense, Goldman championed freedom—and
free speech—as a basic human desire. “The striving for freedom is not the creature of
my brain, nor that of any other being; it lies rooted in the people, and the contentions of
the past, the struggles between the people and their oppressors, show but too plainly that
the people are desirous of being freed from their burdens.” Her testimony was as much
directed to journalists whose reports might sway the public as it was to the jurors already
prejudiced against her. She pleaded that “The press misrepresented anarchists, by trying
to represent them as murderers, thieves and robbers, and as if they were only desirous
of taking all the money of the capitalists and putting it in their own pockets” (see “People
vs. Emma Goldman,” Excerpt from Trial Transcript, 4 October 1893). Goldman believed
that she spoke for working people who were ignorant of the causes of their plight but
whose applause marked their approval of her ideas (see “The Law’s Limit,” Article in the
New York World, 17 October 1893).
As he pronounced the guilty verdict, the judge underscored his pride in American in-
stitutions, acknowledged Goldman as “a woman beyond the average in intelligence,” and
expressed his relief that “only a few, compared with the great number of our citizens . . .
believe in your doctrines.” In a speech Goldman had prepared but did not deliver in
court, Goldman reflected bitterly on her eight years of fighting for justice in America and
on her guilty sentencing for making “the ruling masses uncomfortable” for showing the
workingman “the real reason of their misfortune”; she spoke out against the “state of
‘order’ ” achieved by “the Winchester rifle and Gatling gun” pointed at laborers who dare
to devise a “means to remedy their need.” In a parting invective hurled at the court, she
ended her prepared statement by echoing the words spoken by Louis Lingg upon his
sentencing at the conclusion of the Haymarket trial: “I tell you, the day of reckoning
is not far—a time when no concessions will be granted to the tyrants and despots. . . .
You have convicted me, you may pass sentence of imprisonment upon me, but I tell you
that I hate your laws [and] your ‘order,’ for I know but one ‘order’—it is the highest po-
tency of order—Anarchy” (see “The Law’s Limit,” Article in the New York World, 17 Oc-
tober 1893).
In this early period, before the groundswell of political pressure forced the govern-
ment to provide federal protection of the right of free speech, the definition of the right
was pliant and arbitrary. In this volatile atmosphere, it was no surprise that Goldman was

INTRODUCTION 31
 found guilty. Unraveling the legal doctrine behind Goldman’s verdict—the myriad
definitions of unlawful assembly, of liberty and license, of what constitutes inciting a riot
—is a fascinating point of entry into the dramatic battles fought, before and after Gold-
man’s case, in courtrooms and in the streets. The right to organize labor was the most hotly
contested setting for the fight for free expression; threatened capitalists and industrialists
both resisted, relying on the heavy hand of government authority to enforce their own in-
terests instead of protecting workers’ rights. A plethora of free speech fights rippled from
the contested ground of labor unrest—and uncontrolled masses of the unemployed had
already begun to riot. Goldman, among others, stood in the battlefield between labor and
capital, both as provocateur and as an upholder of the inalienable right of free expression.
The struggle to secure that right extended to the fight for sexual freedom, resulting in a
successful alliance between liberals and radicals. It did not, however, attract the masses
to the anarchist cause. Ultimately these battles succeeded in laying the foundation for
meaningful guarantees across a wide political continuum for the right of free speech (see
vols. 2 and 3), temporarily rescinded when the nation entered the First World War.
A controversy also swirled around the issue of printed speech. Just after her trial, the
New York World’s coverage subverted local government censors by publishing the speech
Goldman had intended to deliver at the end of her trial. Though newspapers played an
important role in advancing the right to written speech when the spoken word was in
danger of suppression, reporters often made a point of distinguishing their own politi-
cal sympathies from the content of the anarchist speeches they helped disseminate by
tagging on an undercutting comment. In her barred speech, Goldman made sure not to
limit her commentary to the importance of free expression; she also mounted a direct at-
tack on private property, the State, and the Church. The reporter noted that not long ago
such invectives resulted in the martyrdom of the Haymarket anarchists, or burning at
the stake, “the reward of numberless men [and women] of advanced thought,” and
mused, with some surprise, that the desire for freedom should still prevail. A mixed mes-
sage emanated from the scandal-mongering press analogous to the judge’s explicit re-
spect for Goldman’s intelligence even as he punished her for challenging the institutions
that signify stability. For example, after extensive coverage of Goldman’s trial, one jour-
nalist ended his article with the quote of the attorney who had withdrawn from her case:
“She is like all fanatics . . . a little bit gone” (see “The Law’s Limit,” Article in the New York
World, 17 October 1893).

INTERPRETER OF SOCIAL MAL ADIES

A counterbalance to the documents chronicling Goldman as mainstream media star,
interpreter of social maladies, and the voice of conscience in America is provided by
the unmediated texts of her communication with other anarchists. Her public persona
differed as she moved from one political universe to another. Especially before 1893,
Goldman’s written language of choice was German and her most eager following were
German- and Yiddish-speaking comrades. The German-language documents in Made
for America reveal that even as Goldman adapted to the United States, she remained

32 INTRODUCTION
deeply identified with Europe and expressed herself more vociferously to the formidable
immigrant non-English-speaking subculture of which she was a part. For the anarchist
press, where she usually wrote in German, she was far more militant. There she could
focus on political violence with a seasoned audience who appreciated the fine points of
debate on bombings in Europe or strikes in the United States. She could comment about
the American legal system with more vehemence. She underplayed issues of party poli-
tics, which were of concern to liberals and to the general radical left, while continuing to
stress the importance of the liberal doctrine of free speech to anarchists. The many Ger-
man-language articles ferreted out of short-lived anarchist journals, retrieved and trans-
lated for this edition, complement impressions of Goldman’s oratorical power gleaned
only from her English lectures and writings and constitute a distinct and significant frag-
ment of the story of her public life.

PRISON MISSIVES
Among the most revealing Goldman letters written during her ten months in prison are
those smuggled out away from the gaze of prison guards—sometimes torn and later re-
assembled or secreted out under the jackets of sympathetic prison staff or visitors to
other inmates. Many of Goldman’s letters were written for and published in anarchist
periodicals—allowing her to remain a presence in the movement even while she was in-
carcerated. In these communiqués, she pointedly described the system of “class justice”
to which she had fallen victim. She mocked her judge as a “hyena standing in the service
of the capitalist class” and noted that he had more power to sentence people arbitrarily
than would have been permissible in Russia or in Europe, places known for their intol-
erance of political dissent (see “American Justice,” Essay in Die Brandfackel, November
1893). German anarchists, especially, followed Goldman’s case closely and interpreted
her prison sentence as an ominous signal that American legislatures had begun to
mimic the draconian anti-anarchist laws of Europe.
Like many prisoners, Goldman used the time to educate herself—not only about
prison conditions, but also to read political and literary masterpieces, solidify her social
critique, and become more fluent in written and spoken English—gradually shedding
the tell-tale trilling roll of her “r’s”—and hoping to shed the greenness of the unschooled
immigrant. Her friends brought her books to read; Justus Schwab sent through Ed Brady
Voltaire’s Candide and works by the American writers Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the English philosophers
Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. Even the prison library and its flirtatious librar-
ian offered classics by women whose gender was disguised by pen names—George Eliot,
George Sand, and Ouida.
Goldman was determined to extend the reach of anarchist ideas across America.
Upon her emergence from New York City’s Blackwell’s Island prison in 1894 and mind-
ful of the many anarchist comrades behind bars across the globe, she was intent on us-
ing the public attention directed at her release as an opportunity to educate the Ameri-
can public about the harshness of prison life. She hoped that by spreading stories of

INTRODUCTION 33
 prison atrocities, coupled with her old refrain on the absurdity of the current state of the
law on issues of free speech, she could add a new element to what seemed like an end-
less struggle against an escalating tide of repression. She also vowed to redouble her ef-
forts on Berkman’s behalf. In the compelling first-person narrative she sold to the New
York World, Goldman told the story of her arrest and her life in prison—women’s treat-
ment, the inmates, the warden, the food, the work, and the chastening experience of
the injustice of the law as it reinforced her faith in anarchism. She lamented that during
her time in prison “I met no convicts that were at all well to do. All were poor, miserable,
broken-down remnants of humanity. Reared in the streets of New York, surrounded from
earliest infancy by the vilest associations, none of them is educated. All are aged long be-
fore their time by privations and poverty.” She described the “female wing” with its “large
mess hall, with sixty-seven cells, a large room for the chapel and a ward for the sick. The
cells are short and narrow, dark and damp. A piece of canvas stretched across two irons
represents the bed, two blankets, a straw pillow and a pail completed the outfit. . . . Sup-
per consisted of a pan of greasy black liquid called ‘coffee’ . . . made by pouring boiling
water over burnt bread. The ‘ladies’ of the ‘hotel’ seemed very hungry; they ate their
portions in silence . . . not due to improvement, but to the rules, which forbid talking at
meals. This was one of the hardest rules for new female boarders to obey.” Describing
the humiliation inherent in the system, she vowed to “defy prison and prosecution.” At
the same time, she acknowledged that as a high-profile inmate, Goldman was given
relatively lenient treatment; she was released from backbreaking work as a seamstress,
trained as a nurse, and never experienced the worst of it—although she reported that
“what I had witnessed in that hospital made my blood run cold and filled me with in-
dignation and horror” (see “My Year in Stripes,” Article in the New York World, 18 August
1894). Compounding the physical constraints and vileness of her time, she remarked on
the sadistic psychological torment inflicted on the prisoners. Her long, descriptive letter,
published exclusively by the New York World, helped to exorcise some of the haunting
feelings she so needed to shake in order to successfully reenter the world outside her
prison cell and was also an immediate vehicle with which to spark public outrage at what
she believed was an otherwise hidden institutional hell. Goldman used the newspaper’s
payment as a nest egg with which to set up an apartment with her lover Ed Brady. Dis-
seminating information about her time in prison also served as a corrective to the main-
stream newspaper’s dismissive articles about the “little anarchist” published at the be-
ginning of her imprisonment.

TALKING THE TALK, DRESSING FOR THE WALK

Goldman’s descriptive account, published the day after her release from prison, hooked
the public on daily news of her whereabouts and paved the way for in-depth reporting of
public celebration of her release. In a New York World article entitled “Hailed Emma
Goldman,” her New York City well-wishers were characterized as a “polyglot assem-
blage.” The newspaper reported that Goldman, in fine rhetorical form, proclaimed to a

34 INTRODUCTION
cheering crowd whose “din and racket was worse than that on the baseball field when the
home nine wins out on a tied score in the last inning”: “I have come back to you after
having served ten months in prison for talking. If the representatives of your Govern-
ment intend to prosecute women for talking, they will have to begin with their mothers,
wives, sisters and sweethearts, for they will never stop women from talking” (see “Hailed
Emma Goldman,” Article in the New York World, 20 August 1894).
The press, reflecting their readers’ curiosity and fear as well as a heightened interest
in protest and strikers in a year when federal troops broke up the Pullman railway car
strike, now was more fascinated with Goldman than ever. Newspapers were filled with
blatant sensationalism, replete with vicious mockery and shameless prejudice against
radicals, immigrants, and people of color, and permeated with graphic gender bias. Gold-
man—a woman in the spotlight, an anarchist, a Jew, and a political activist who was both
eloquently appealing and terrifyingly challenging to the public—was favored more and
more by journalists of all stripes as a lively subject for big-spread feature articles.
Obsessed with the details of her outward appearance, the press tried to make sense
of, and find links between, Goldman’s exotic personality and her provocative ideas. The
newspapers produced artful line drawings, every bit as expressive as their written de-
scriptions of Goldman and, in a parallel manner, presented caricatures of her physical
traits ranging from grotesque to alluring. Always measured against the conventional
scale of femininity, Goldman was even the subject of the phrenological interest of the
time, with its underlying ethnic and class bias. Observations about her appearance often
opened with the comment that Goldman only “professes to be a Russian Jewess,” and
preceded to illustrate how her particular physiognomy was characteristic of those who
have an “ineradicable instinct to hold an opinion” (see “Character in Unconventional
People,” Article in Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, February 1895). The ex-
pression of surprise at her “good looks”—with reference to her light brown hair and
blue-gray eyes—was as unwelcome as the invocation of negative stereotypes projected
onto voluptuous Jewish women. Goldman embraced a more cosmopolitan identity but
could not control the narrow public perception of her ethnicity.
The combined effect of endless ethnic insults and the public’s constant judgments
about her looks left her feeling vulnerable and tapped into her particular mix of insecu-
rity and vanity. The Stockton, California, Daily Record, for example, noted in a 22 July
1899 article (which called her the “Queen of Anarchy”) that Goldman’s “appearance
would indicate that in her the seeds of anarchism had been generously nurtured and de-
veloped.” She met the harassment of the press’s jaundiced gaze with the protective shield
of stylish clothing, which she considered completely consistent with her politics, an out-
ward signifier of creativity and daring. Journalists fetishized Goldman’s sense of fashion
with long descriptions such as “The modest blue serge Eton suit, with a blue muslin
shirtwaist and scarf, had no suggestion of bloomers, and the light brown hair, not banged
but falling loosely over the forehead and gathered in a little knot behind, was very pretty
and girlish” (see “Nellie Bly Again,” Article in the New York World, 17 September 1893)—

INTRODUCTION 35
 professing surprise that Goldman shared concerns common to other women. News-
paper articles sometimes documented her wardrobe more thoroughly than the content
of her lectures. The 8 September 1897 Providence, Rhode Island, Evening Bulletin, for ex-
ample, noted with some irony that “she’s looking trim and neat in a blue dress and jaunty
alpine hat as she sat in the cell” without an equal embellishment of the political issues
that landed her in jail. Later, her cultivated manner of dress allowed her to “pass” among
her middle-class supporters, but not without raising suspicion among the more working-
class members of her audience—many of whom dressed well, but never with such
extravagance.

EMBRACING THE WORKING CL ASS IN ALL ITS COMPLEXITY

Goldman was an ardent champion of the working class, never wavering in her loyalty
and identification, especially with the plight of immigrant labor, even as she expanded
her reach to English-speaking audiences, many of whom were from the middle class and
some of whom came to hear her more out of curiosity than of conscious necessity. Yet,
as an anarchist, she had a complex relationship to organized labor. A firm supporter of
the right to a living wage and, later, to a shorter workday, she diverged from many union
activists in her basic distrust of capitalism, and of all leaders, whether labor or manage-
ment, and disdained their quest for government reform and tacit acceptance of capital-
ism: she believed that neither the wage system, nor hierarchical management, nor the
corrupting influences of power could ever be reformed.
Instead, as an anarchist with syndicalist leanings, Goldman advocated a more coop-
erative vision of the organization of labor, supporting the more extreme tactic of the gen-
eral strike to end wage slavery and bring about a new social and economic order. More-
over, as she developed in her role as a ubiquitous gadfly, she often spoke at union halls
to open forums of members receptive to a good debate. While some trade unions ad-
mired her courage and bold critique of the system, and included among their members
those whose politics were completely aligned with hers, others deemed the anarchists
unrealistic and too extreme, with union officials especially sensitive to the anarchist re-
jection of any hint of the necessity for a hierarchical structure of power. Although many
labor officials differed with the anarchists on the issue of political violence, their support
or repudiation was complex and surprisingly did not always coincide with a proscribed
radical or conservative political trajectory. Some labor organizations preferred to distance
themselves from the all-encompassing anarchist critique of capitalism, fearing that a
connection with anarchism might diminish what little negotiating power the unions
managed to win. In 1895, the New York World reported that the unexpected presence of a
single anarchist in the room of a meeting of striking tailors stirred up significant dis-
comfort. Goldman disavowed the paper’s misleading reports about her engagement in
the forthcoming strike and used her letter to send a message to the union tailors: “My
sympathy is fully with the strikers, and I sincerely hope they will succeed in their efforts
to better their condition, but they will do well not to put too much faith in their leaders

36 INTRODUCTION
or they will fail, as others have” (see “Emma Goldman’s Attitude,” Letter to the New York
World, 2 August 1895).
Goldman’s aversion to bosses—whether union or management—also extended to a
wariness of the undifferentiated power of the masses. Goldman trusted only the free as-
sociation of individuals in an environment that supported critical thinking, as she was
later to write in her lectures on the drawbacks of majority rule, her critique of liberal de-
mocracy. Although she was disparaging of the inherent paradoxes of the union strategy
of the American Federation of Labor—its language of economic determinism and glori-
fication of the working class, while still advocating an elitism of skilled craft unionism
and the cultivation of leadership, which she abhorred—her heart was with their struggle,
and she recognized the significance of their growing strength and allied herself with the
alleviation of poverty and the improvement of the quality of daily life for all working
people. She found points of resonance primarily among immigrant trade unionists— es-
pecially Jewish and Italian workers. Goldman was a welcome speaker at meetings of the
United Mine Workers, especially at its Italian anarchist branch in Springfield, Illinois.
Between 1891 and 1901, among the many unions she spoke before was the American La-
bor Union in Newark, New Jersey; the Glass Blowers’ Union in Monaca, Pennsylvania;
the Brewers’ and Malters’ Union, the Painters and Decorators Union, and the Scandi-
navian Painters Union in Chicago, Illinois; and the United Labor League in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. In spite of ideological differences and sporadic tensions, she marched in
the 1891 May Day parade with the Working Women’s Society of the United Hebrew Trade
Organization, a radical confederation in which Morris Hillquit was an organizer, that
had close ties to the Socialist Labor Party. She was grateful for their later loyal support of
Berkman. The thriving American Federation of Labor, a moderate union of predomi-
nantly skilled workers, however, kept their distance from Goldman and the anarchists,
who in turn were especially reproachful of the AFL president, Samuel Gompers, charac-
terizing him as the epitome of conciliatory leadership. The Central Labor Unions, local
councils made up of several trade unions, were varied in their radicalism; those with a
considerable anarchist membership opened their doors to Goldman, especially in Boston,
Massachusetts, and in Detroit, Michigan. The most prominent anarchist labor group was
the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA)—a federation of groups that was
especially strong from 1883 to 1892. The IWMA served as a base for organizing and in-
tegrating the sometimes conflicting tendencies of the two movements—trade-unionism
and anarchism—as well as providing a destination and ready audience for Goldman’s
many lecture tours.
The international labor movement was potentially the most powerful base of public
support for Alexander Berkman’s release. A new generation of workers, untainted by the
controversy of the past among anarchists and union organizers about Berkman’s tactics,
gladly joined the campaign to mount public pressure for the reduction of his sentence—
and cast him as the avenger of violence against striking workers. Many unions re-
sponded generously, including those whose gradualist tactics were unambiguously non-

INTRODUCTION 37
 violent, by offering money and influence to help Berkman’s cause. Employing a strategy
common to the movement, Goldman almost single handedly escalated the pressure to
free Berkman by internationalizing the protest— extending her plea in person to labor
groups across the Atlantic. In the summer of 1895, she set sail for Europe.

KINDRED SPIRITS AMONG EUROPEAN ANARCHISTS

Upon her arrival in London, Goldman was met with heavy surveillance. In an era when
propaganda by the deed was an international phenomenon especially widespread in Eu-
rope, police spies from various countries cooperated in the hope of foiling potential ag-
gressors. A would-be assassin often gathered ammunition in one country, attacked an
identified tyrant in another country, and then fled for safety to a third country. The gov-
ernment made no distinction between Goldman and others they considered to be overtly
violent interlopers. An official circular from the German government announced the in-
tention of a Russian “about 26 –28 years old” with “a mastery of the German language”
to travel from New York to London, then possibly to Germany, cautioning against this
“exceedingly dangerous person,” and requesting notification of her arrival (see Official
Circular of the German Government, 25 September 1895). Which nation she happened
to visit mattered little to the surveillance agents in the United States, Germany, France,
and Russia, who trailed her. All found her guilty by her associations with those consid-
ered the most important and dangerous anarchists of her time.
Apart from the constant shadowing, her arrival in London was full of respect and ex-
citement, interesting meetings, and lots of intense discussion. She cast herself as an
emissary of the working class in an address to a public meeting at South Place Institute
(see “Emma Goldman in London,” Article in Liberty, October 1895). Goldman reported
on and analyzed the condition of workers in the United States and underscored the lim-
its imposed by American cultural values, or lack thereof, as well as the country’s unem-
ployment statistics and history of racial and ethnic oppression. In part because she still
identified strongly as a European, she exhibited keen insight into the issues of interna-
tional concern. She spoke eloquently on labor to British audiences, who were impressed
with her knowledge about their own struggles. Goldman articulated a vision of a work-
ing class unified across national boundaries, presaging European syndicalism just
around the corner.
To solicit support from the international anarchist movement for Berkman’s release,
the young Goldman introduced herself to its movers and shakers—to prominent intel-
lectuals, theorists, and activists. Among the luminaries she met were Peter Kropotkin,
Errico Malatesta, James Tochatti, Augustin Hamon, and Louise Michel. Russian revolu-
tionary exiles gathered to meet her in the apartment of Marie Goldsmith, a Russian an-
archist and scientist living in Paris. In her autobiography she recounted that she even
managed to fit in a nursing course on midwifery and children’s diseases in the exciting
cosmopolitan city of Vienna, where she attended Wagner’s operas and Freud’s lectures
and read voraciously— especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom she dubbed in
1915 “the intellectual storm center of Europe.” She quickly familiarized herself with Eu-

38 INTRODUCTION
ropean propaganda work and took it upon herself to report back to the American anar-
chist press about what she had learned (see “Eastern and European Propaganda,” Letter
to the Firebrand, 24 May 1896). Informally, she had begun to assume the role of an an-
archist emissary. She and her American comrade Harry Kelly, who was sometimes based
in London and traveled back and forth to the United States, invited European anarchists
to visit the United States and encouraged an informal pan-national exchange.
Among the most important Europeans who would later visit her in America were the
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and his close associate, the English anarchist John
Turner. Kropotkin’s visits in 1897 and in 1901 opened new doors. His novel inclusion of
ethical arguments added an important dimension to the existing economic and social
theories of anarchism. Quickly adopted in the United States, Kropotkin’s ideas also
refined Goldman’s sense of anarchism as a moral force. Interest in his lectures and cu-
riosity about this geographer and Russian-prince-turned-anarchist, especially on college
campuses in 1901, brought new money to the anarchist movement that would become
the foundation of support for several groups and periodicals. Turner’s 1896 tour too
proved mutually beneficial; he was an eloquent spokesperson for the necessity of linking
organized labor to anarchism and for the importance of a militant workers’ movement.
Following through on her offer to arrange Turner’s lecture tour, Goldman forged new
links to English-speaking American groups and began to perfect the art of managing a
successful political speaking tour, with its important advance work, all skills that would
serve her own long lecturing career well.
Goldman, honored to share the platform with Turner at his final New York talk, was
startled but not vanquished when her nemesis Johann Most jumped out of the audience
and tried to stop her from speaking. This surprise retaliation—for the incident years be-
fore when Goldman had mounted the stage to strike Most with a toy horsewhip while he
articulated his disapproval of Berkman’s act—was a dramatic display of Most’s intention
to continue to challenge Goldman’s portrayal of Berkman as the avenger of labor; it was
also a reminder that respect for the free expression of opposing ideas was often difficult,
even among anarchists. Of the many problems Goldman faced in organizing Turner’s
U.S. tour, in retrospect, by far the most profound centered on the issue of free speech.
The frequent difficulty in getting access to speaking venues foreshadowed the over-
whelming obstacles Turner would face upon his return in 1903 in the wake of a harsh
series of anti-anarchist laws; the close ties Goldman developed with him during these
early years set the stage for the legal challenge of the 1904 Turner case (see vol. 2).
The survival of the anarchist press was especially important following the anarchist
expulsion by the socialists from the London congress of the socialist Second International
in July 1896; it was a critical time for consolidating the movement’s strength.50 With the
sharp break, strategic differences especially on issues of political action and electoral re-

50. See Letter to Augustin Hamon, 28 April 1896, note 2, for details on expulsion of anarchists from
the Second International; also see “Observations and Suggestions,” Letter to Free Society, 22 April
1900, note 12, for a history of the many previous congresses and political splits.

INTRODUCTION 39
 form reinforced the divisions between anarchists and socialists. It was incumbent upon
Goldman and other anarchists to develop a distinct synthesis of their own. She rode the
tide of active participation and cooperation in the development of theories of anarchism
—in print through journals and books, and in discussions at meetings, lectures, and in-
ternational congresses—and joined the attempt to foster the solidarity necessary for the
anarchist movement to thrive.

CAUGHT IN THE CROSS FIRE OF THE ANARCHIST PRESS

Goldman supported an array of anarchist journals, not only by contributing occasional
articles and reports of her speaking tours, as well as of tours made by others, but also as
a distributor and solicitor of funds. She hoped to increase the journals’ circulation when-
ever possible, thereby expanding their loyal but relatively small readership and extend-
ing their ever-endangered shelf-life. She relied on the printed word to spread the news
about Berkman’s case and was grateful for the willingness of the international anarchist
press to keep news about him current. Her interests were not confined solely to Berk-
man’s defense fund. Goldman continued to take part in debates about the theory and
practice of anarchism. Because she believed that unity strengthened and internal frag-
mentation weakened the movement, she welcomed every occasion to keep lines of com-
munication open—a position she found easier to support in theory than in practice.
No emissary of the anarchist movement could avoid criticism from their comrades.
Sparring seemed like the necessary evil of political activism; government and press de-
tractors often seemed more tolerable than dissension within the movement. Lively de-
bates among anarchists were an integral part of the movement’s celebration of the free
will and free expression of each individual. Perhaps because Goldman was willing to go
the extra mile for her comrades, and believed that her honor and sense of ethics were
above reproach, Goldman experienced any attack or criticism of her work very person-
ally. Although she welcomed debate about her ideas, she was livid when Firebrand im-
pugned her character by publishing a letter accusing her of misappropriating Berkman
defense fund money for her personal use—she would face similar accusations through-
out her political life. She wrote to the paper: “According to my understanding of Anar-
chist principles, those who have never subscribed a cent, never cared for Berkmann’s re-
lease, have no right to ask any accounts of whomsoever, and to poke noses into other
people’s affairs” (see “The Berkman Fund Again,” Letter to the Firebrand, 5 August
1896). A series of communications shot back and forth in which Goldman firmly ex-
pressed her belief that the editors should have defended her. The editors argued that
since they routinely published appeals for funds, they also had an obligation to publish
objections, never intending anything “personal”— claiming that they merely intended to
put into practice their belief in the unlimited right to free expression. Frustrated by what
seemed to Goldman as the Firebrand editors’ intransigence under the guise of airing dif-
fering opinions (and unaware of her own contradictions on the matter), as well as her
failed attempt to galvanize her supporters to write to the paper about the absurdity of

40 INTRODUCTION
such a claim, Goldman vowed that should she ever have her own journal, she would
never stoop to personal attacks against other anarchists in print—a promise to which
she could not completely adhere. Believing it to be counterproductive and vulgar, she
closed her 5 August 1896 letter to the Firebrand with the prediction that if they contin-
ued in this manner “they will only put nails to their own coffin.”
Yet, many anarchists dismissed Goldman’s personal concerns because they too disap-
proved of censorship of any kind; they defended the publication of such missives as a
matter of free expression, even when personal squabbles were exposed. Goldman only a
few years before had sunk to similar depths in her attack on Most as Berkman’s betrayer
(although she still believed his transgression more profound than the petty misdeeds as-
cribed to her); now intolerant of such calumny, she believed that the dignity of the anar-
chist vision was diminished, and its champions, for whom integrity needed to be a core
value, were personally insulted by bitter fighting within the anarchist ranks. Accepting
criticism was never Goldman’s strong point; it proved to be an unavoidable sore point
that plagued her to the end.

STIRRING THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE

In spite of this temporary setback in the pages of Firebrand, by 1896 Goldman had be-
gun to hit her stride on the speaker’s platform. Her 21 November 1896 lecture in Pitts-
burgh delivered in German to 250 “free to starve” laboring people, was proof of her grow-
ing confidence, her intellectual and political range, and her biting eloquence. In her role
as public intellectual, she strove to educate and inspire. Her speeches dazzled audiences
with the artistry with which she integrated ideas and events— creating a coherent picture
on a political canvas of otherwise disparate elements.
The Pittsburg Leader reported on two wide-ranging lectures in which Goldman ad-
dressed the differences between anarchists and socialists, exposed the dynamic of class
as it permeated prison walls, compared the persecution of the Jews in Russia and the
United States, and critiqued electoral politics; her talk included topical jabs at President
McKinley, remarking that “McKinley is also a good man, but his past record as governor
is against him.” She then went on to compare the threatened state of civil liberties in the
United States with the tyranny of tsarist Russia. She incorporated references to Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and linked their ideals to those
who, like the Haymarket anarchists, “dared to advocate the rights of humanity.” She
noted that November was the month of commemoration for the death of the Haymarket
anarchists and how the memory of the horror of their hangings seemed unbearably
close. Goldman echoed the sentiment of August Spies as he addressed the jury, as she
analogized their deaths to other forward thinkers who faced a similar fate: “Jesus was
crucified, Huss was burned, Bruno was killed” (see “Goldman’s Cry Against Society,” Ar-
ticle in the Pittsburg Post, 27 November 1896). She taunted her audience, reminding
them that it was less than a decade since the Haymarket hangings, and that they were
only one generation away from the memory of civil war, threatening the possibility of

INTRODUCTION 41
 slipping back thirty or forty years to the restoration of slavery. In this same speech in
which she embraced many of the attributes of American liberal democracy, she exposed
its chilling underside—its lynching, hangings, and almost medieval prison conditions
(also referred to later in “The Effect of War on the Workers,” Transcript of Address in
Freedom, 20 February 1900).
In her second speech of the week, she spoke more militantly and even directly advo-
cated the bomb thrower’s “holy” act, which she believed was calculated to redress the
crimes that plagued the people. Immigrant anarchists began turning to her by 1893, even
before Most’s death in 1906, as their spokesperson of choice. Their active participation
in Berkman’s defense was proof that Most’s critique had not squelched her efforts.

THEORIZING THROUGH THE BARS

Goldman made every effort to keep Berkman informed about the groundswell of inter-
est in his case, trying to lift his spirits, to offer him hope. Berkman lived vicariously
through Goldman’s experiences; his letters to her offer his regular comments on events
on the outside. Her life, no matter how free, was never free from the haunting, harrow-
ing images of his life in prison. Her joys and sorrows were his, and even the smallest mo-
ments of contentment cutting through his pervasive misery were also hers. He experi-
enced the days of communication with her as “momentous [bringing] a glow into the
prisoner’s heart to feel that he is remembered, actively, with that intimate interest . . . your
letters are so vital, so palpitating with the throb of our common cause” (see Letter from
Alexander Berkman, 4 December 1896).
Prison censors intermittently denied Berkman the right to stay engaged with anar-
chist news by barring the delivery of anarchist papers like Solidarity, one among a grow-
ing number of English-language newspapers that played a critical role in reinforcing the
growing anarchist communist tendency in the movement in the United States. As Gold-
man and Berkman refined their ideas about the theories and practices of anarchism, they
also dreamed of creating a publication of their own.

WHAT IS THERE IN ANARCHY FOR WOMAN?

In 1897, Goldman published an essay on marriage in Firebrand. The essay reflected the
ideas of the champions of sexual freedom, Ezra and Angela Heywood, editors of The
Word, and Moses Harmon, editor of Lucifer, the Lightbearer. Both Harmon and the Hey-
woods had been persecuted and imprisoned under the 1873 and 1876 Comstock laws for
advocating free love and contraception. Goldman’s essay advocated sexual freedom, but
as a purist she went on to label freethinkers and liberals, radicals and socialists, as hyp-
ocrites for ascribing to conventional practices in the realm of marriage and the family, no
matter how radical their political ideas. She transposed the ideas of Bakunin’s God and
the State by noting the analogy of how common it was to dispel religion without relin-

42 INTRODUCTION
quishing the authority of God and government, to the common practice of marriage, an
institution difficult to shake, even for anarchists, who rejected sexual dominance and
strove for equality in intimate as well as political life.
Goldman also analyzed love as an experience tempered by class and integrated a dis-
cussion of prostitution into her analysis of the more exalted myths about marriage, by
identifying marriage as economic prostitution. In her attempt “to break the chains of
mental and physical slavery,” she echoed ideas from Friedrich Engels’s Marriage, the
Family, and the State when she noted that marriage relations “are the foundation of pri-
vate property” and give “the man the right and power over his wife, not only over her
body, but also over her actions.” Declining to address “the few exceptional cases of mar-
riage which are based on love, esteem and respect . . . [as] exceptions that only verify the
rule,” she boldly asserted that “conditions cannot be changed until this infernal system
is abolished. . . . I demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to
live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand free-
dom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”
Goldman concluded her essay with the declaration that “Marriage, the curse of so many
centuries, the cause of jealousy, suicide and crime, must be abolished if we wish the
young generation to grow to healthy, strong and free men and women” (see “Marriage,”
Essay in the Firebrand, 18 July 1897).
This essay, which drew on debates among anarchists in Liberty, was delivered also
as a rousing lecture and became the kernel of many more over the years that similarly
stressed the importance of consistency between public and private life. Goldman linked
forward-thinking ideas brewing in radical political circles with those of the burgeoning
women’s movement, reminding all to beware of hypocrisy— especially as it was infused
in personal relationships. Her first travel report, published in installments in the German
anarchist communist paper Sturmvogel (Storm Bird, the title of Maksim Gorky’s poem to
the storm petrel—whose presence signified impending turbulence) in December 1897,
detailed the persistence of local officials’ attempts to suppress her talks on this taboo sub-
ject. Free love, she decreed, was freedom against slavery in the realm of the affections.
Goldman’s lecture on the “new woman” has a distinctly modern sensibility. It was not
only a celebration of what the new woman could and should be, with the promise of
a life of freedom, but it was also a declaration of her conviction that such freedom could
never be accomplished without the “new man.” She counseled that the new woman
movement “demands an equal advancement by the modern man” (see “The New
Woman,” Transcript of Lecture in Free Society, 13 February 1898).
She disdained the moralism of the women in the temperance movement and asserted
that you couldn’t make men abstain from drink by smashing saloons. She couldn’t stand
the self-righteousness of the suffragists, who believed that a woman in power would be
superior to men and not subject to the same forces of greed and concession that go hand
in hand with party politics. Countering what she considered to be the hypocrisy of pro-

INTRODUCTION 43
 tective legislation and the glorification of motherhood, as well as the misguided emula-
tion of the male, Goldman insisted that women without equality were destined to be
slaves to society (see “What Is There in Anarchy for Woman?” Interview in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 24 October 1897, and “The New Woman,” Transcript of
Lecture in Free Society, 13 February 1898). Such inequality was intensified within the in-
stitution of marriage. Few among even the most progressive circles escaped Goldman’s
searing critique. She challenged both the separatist and the essentialist vision— dis-
claiming the special status and condition of women—and proclaimed that true freedom
for woman could only come through the mutual friendship of man.
On 24 October 1897, the Sunday magazine of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch interviewed
Goldman for a front-page article entitled “What Is There in Anarchy for Woman?” This
issue attracted readers across the political spectrum. Leading the story was her answer,
that anarchy held out “More to woman than to anyone else— everything which she has
not—freedom and equality.” In an example of the gender-polarizing bias of the public
gaze, Goldman was described in the same article as “in every sense a womanly looking
woman, with masculine mind and courage.” The twenty-eight-year-old Goldman, at the
prime age for raising a family, was given free range to critique the current state of mar-
riage and the family. She described the married woman as “the servant, the mistress, and
the slave” of her husband and children, a person who not only loses her individuality but
even her name. She urged women to take their place in the business world beside men,
to insist on equal wages, and to demand communal care of children. Goldman articu-
lated the importance of freedom and equality in relationships and the over-arching con-
cept of love as a force for creating harmony in the world and at home. Although she
lacked sophistication when addressing the care of children, unaware of the importance
of consistency and continuity of childcare (in part because she had never raised a child),
she astutely focused her attention on spreading responsibility away from the beleaguered
parents to the community at large. These ideas were consistent with the many commu-
nal experiments with new variations on parenting and childcare taking place in small
enclaves across the nation. She also asserted that no marriage court could control affec-
tions. And, in what must have been a response to the reporter’s question on whether an-
archy could get rid of heartaches, she capriciously remarked, “the human race will always
have heartaches as long as the heart beats in the breast”—a sentiment echoed by Errico
Malatesta in 1900.51
Goldman joked about the public’s perceptions of the hidden dangers in her message,
about being blamed randomly for bombs, and about the number of policemen who
stalked her lectures, claiming to have counted up to fifty in the hall just the week before.
This “priestess of anarchy” knew how to charm and inspire her readers as well as her live
audiences, not to mention many of the journalists who began to feature Goldman more

51. Errico Malatesta, the anarchist theorist, in his essay “The Jealousy.”

44 INTRODUCTION
regularly in the columns of their newspapers as an emergent star, on a par with main-
stream celebrities of the era.

FAR-FLUNG TRAVELS OF A WANDERING JEW

The “hard news” about Goldman’s early tours across the country and the details of her
political commentary were reported most fully in the anarchist press. Goldman’s first ex-
tensive travel diary was published in the aptly and poetically named German-language
periodical Sturmvogel. It was published in five installments from December 1897 to Feb-
ruary 1898, stretching the customary emotional range of the paper’s field reports (see
“Letters from a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897). Her travel letters were
not only full of detail about attempts by the police to suppress her talks, her many arrests
along the way, entertaining commentary on her quips with boisterous audiences full of
local color, but also replete with poignant descriptions of her feelings as a woman alone
on the road traveling without the protection of a mate or money. Included were insider
information on the various anarchists who eased her way, vignettes about Samuel Gom-
pers, the Social Democracy of America (just formed in July 1897 with a significant num-
ber of anarchists in tow), and Eugene Debs’s urging the labor conference in St. Louis to
refrain from their attempt to unseat Gompers. She commented on the complacency of
some coal miners, about moral zealots and pervasive Comstockery, the similarity be-
tween the plight of the farmer and the industrial worker. She added her insights into the
tensions among German anarchists and expressed her desire for a more unified move-
ment that would not only attract younger activists but also mirror modern sensibilities
and popular concerns.
In her series of travel letters in Sturmvogel, Goldman reflects on her belief in the di-
rect link between deeds and emotions, her struggle with the burden of the responsibil-
ity of communicating what she had witnessed as she toured the country, and her recog-
nition of the inadequacy of words to express the world of emotions or experience.
Goldman’s travel writings are fascinating artifacts of a woman on the road, a “wandering
Jew” with a restless, unsettled spirit, who enjoyed intermingling with new faces, habits,
and was exhilarated by the raw experience of her own strengths and weaknesses, unfet-
tered by the monotony of ordinary everyday life.
Goldman’s experiences on tour serve to document the prejudices against women trav-
eling alone. Turned away from all the local inns, she once took refuge with a respectable
family, but their violent domestic squabbling impelled her to run out into the rain in the
middle of the night in search of a hotel willing to house “hussies” (see letter no. 2, “Let-
ters from a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897). Vivid descriptions of her ex-
perience of frequenting bars and being accosted by the gaze of sexual predators, who as-
sumed she was there for only one reason, fueled her critique—but also played a role in
creating her lifelong self-image as a woman who attracted the erotic desire of men. Her
writings from the road convey a sense of playfulness, as well as outrage, at the sexual pol-
itics triggered by the spectacle of her presence.

INTRODUCTION 45
 There are many cadences to Goldman’s voice in this volume. Evidence of Goldman’s
capacity to be both insider and outsider permeates the documents. Goldman can be ob-
served as an outsider to the dominant culture, writing in her native German for an al-
ready militant immigrant audience— caustic and sarcastic, hurling invectives. This au-
dience, also the readership for many foreign-language anarchist periodicals, was often a
mix of Germans and Jews, drawn to the vituperative style of her German and the lyrical
literary influences of her Russian roots. Some were more patient than others about her
minimal facility with Yiddish, a language she considered somewhat vulgar and less elo-
quent than her native German, in spite of the great Yiddish literary figures who later
caught her attention, especially Sholem Asch, David Pinski, and Jacob Gordin.
Especially among new immigrants, vacillation between loyalty to and ambivalence
about their country and culture of origin was common. Goldman hoped to leave behind
the elements of her past she identified with narrowness and conventionality. She gravi-
tated toward German high culture with its masterpieces of literature and philosophy, as
well as toward American idealism with its seeming freedom from timebound tradition,
and she remained a shining star in Yiddish radical circles, the group with a familial feel
that eased her way into public life in the United States. Rejecting Jewish religious ortho-
doxy, she nonetheless embraced the messianic fervor of her roots, the desire to correct the
world, and the devotion to learning and to questioning authority engrained in the talmu-
dic tradition of weekly scholarly and philosophical commentary and interpretation of Old
Testament text and Jewish law. Most of all, she adapted the contemporary Jewish sense
of the power of a people bound together by a shared vision without reliance on the for-
mal, unifying structure of a nation state as completely consistent with her definition of an-
archism. Goldman adapted a Jewish cultural norm as she extended her hammock of sup-
port beyond her biological family ties and lived out the commonly held belief that a strong
community was integral to the survival of her people; she welcomed the opportunity to
meet new comrades as she created circles of lasting friendship everywhere she went.
Her tours often were hosted by Jewish and German anarchists who busily performed
the advance work for her lectures. Without a trace of ethnic exclusivity, they opened their
homes to her and shared the kinship of a common culture and a commitment to free-
dom for all. Her travel writings can be read for their record of immigrant anarchist per-
ceptions of the American interior—and as Goldman’s way of providing an introduction
to those who otherwise might not have the opportunity or the means to travel through
the vast mysterious expanses of their chosen country.
Reporters covering her tours offered their readers colorful descriptions of town
squares with “packing box” lecturers in every corner, and told of how Goldman attracted
audiences away from gospel wagons and once, in Providence, Rhode Island in 1897, even
from ventriloquists (see “Anarchy,” Article in the Providence Evening Bulletin, 4 Septem-
ber 1897). Her own descriptions of the sparkling energy and surprising militancy of
small farm-town anarchists like Kate Austin were combined with vivid evocations of the
ominous tension of the cities, where in one confrontation with the police, she labeled a

46 INTRODUCTION
particularly behemoth representative of law and order as a “lard-dripping monster” (see
letter no. 2, “Letters from a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897).
In an era when newspapers exhibited a blatant bias against the left, traveling lectur-
ers like Goldman often served a critical role of spreading the word about the radical per-
spective. She spoke about issues the mainstream papers ignored, including such atroci-
ties against labor as the Hazleton massacre where Slavic coal miners were shot from
behind during a peaceful march. She portrayed the devaluation of immigrant workers
and the vulnerability of strikers to violence. Skilled at illuminating international events
that had an impact on the United States, she analyzed the war with Spain, various atten-
tats against European rulers, and the arbitrary harshness of the Dreyfus case in France,
which she believed to be reminiscent of the heavy hand of the law in the trial of the Hay-
market anarchists.
Goldman, who had an extraordinary talent for creating a sense of familiarity and con-
nection with her listeners, revealed in her travel diary her technique for personalizing an
audience. She would scan the crowd for “one real, honorable and great person [like] hid-
den gems, who live and suffer anonymously yet give out so much light that they make
a person forget for a moment the vale of tears around us” (see letter no. 1, “Letters from
a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897). Her ability to speak so intimately to a
large group called forth her disarming emotional intelligence and definitely eased the
public’s reception to the political bite of her message. And yet, almost in equal propor-
tion to her success as a lecturer, Goldman experienced a profound sense of the short-
comings of relying on the spoken word to alleviate the suffering of those who faced ex-
treme violence, who risked their lives for freedom.

IMPATIENT WITH GRADUALISM

Goldman was often as impatient with herself as she was with liberal, even socialist,
strategists of reform. She cried out “like a wounded animal” in complaint about her
métier for being all too gradual to tackle the enormous social, economic, and political
problems at hand. She documented the mixed experience of attempting to address labor
and reform groups at a conference during a major United Mine Workers’ strike. By the
time of this conference, the strike was nearly over, and Samuel Gompers, the president
of the American Federation of Labor, had discouraged workers from attending. In Eu-
gene Debs’s presence, Goldman was prevented from speaking by the socialists.52 When
Debs, the president of the American Railway Union and chief organizer of Social De-
mocracy of America, who had promised her the floor, did not come to her defense, she
accused him of cowardice—remembering that he had confided to her in private that he
identified with anarchism and had called himself her “comrade.” 53 Disappointed, Gold-
man wrote disparagingly about Debs, positing that his political position as the leader of

52. T. P. Quinn, “Reflections of E. V. Debs,” Free Society, 3 July 1898, pp. 6 –7.
53. LML, p. 220.

INTRODUCTION 47
 Social Democracy in America evolved through tactical compromise, claiming that he
“collapses like a fly in the slightest gust of wind” (see letter no. 4, “Letters from a Tour,”
Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897). At this point in his career Debs was enthusiastic about
strategies for the socialist colonization of targeted areas across the country, but he quickly
bent to an electoral strategy and chose to bow out of many critical conflicts within his
own party. Only much later, in 1918, in the contested era of agitation against conscription
law when they were both in jail, was Goldman and Debs’s profound respect for each
other solidified.
Even those closer to Goldman’s ideology were subject to her public censure. Since
1894, when she had turned to lecturing in English to a wider audience, she realized how
profoundly isolated immigrant anarchists were from the American cultural landscape.
Goldman began her work as a forger of links between these disparate worlds and ear-
nestly believed that she could help to alleviate the vulnerabilities of her “foreign” com-
rades. She even found herself genuinely attracted to the openness of the American
dream. She lambasted German anarchists for their dogmatism, their “club” fanaticism,
for withdrawing into “choral societies” and lodges of raucous drinking, for railing against
and alienating the youth from the German left. Their flamboyant insularity fueled her
belief that for anarchist ideas to spread in America, immigrant anarchists had to make
the effort to speak and organize in English, to extend their reach beyond the radical
circles bound to their country of origin.
She applauded the efforts of the anarchist communist journal Firebrand, whose pub-
lication she announced at the Paris congress as marking the growth of that tendency in
the United States, and praised the journals Free Society and Solidarity as critical tools for
the Americanization of anarchism. Gradual assimilation among immigrant anarchists,
who were now more proficient in English, coupled with the demise of Sturmvogel (in
1899), Die Brandfackel (in 1895), and Der Anarchist (also in 1895), which left Most’s Frei-
heit as the only U.S.-produced, German-language anarchist publication still in circula-
tion, reinforced the need for a pivotal figure like Goldman to bridge the old world with
the new.
In an economy of scarcity, when it was difficult to keep a publication funded and dis-
tributed, Goldman’s physical presence, her face-to-face contact with a variety of audi-
ences, and her remarkable energy and persistence created personal and political al-
liances that transcended the limitation of the printed word. Eventually she would cover
the map of the United States, speaking in every town, especially budding urban metrop-
olises, where an anarchist or labor group was willing and interested in hosting her. A re-
port in Solidarity on 15 July 1898 estimated that from February to June of 1898, she vis-
ited 18 cities in 16 weeks. She kept up this pace over the next 22 months, holding over
66 meetings.54 Her admirers across the country formed the fabric of support that eased

54. See Chronology for listing of cities EG visited between January 1898 and October 1899, when she
returned to New York to prepare for her departure for London in early November.

48 INTRODUCTION
her way, providing the local housing, food, and the organizational detail that were crucial
to the success of her meetings.
Goldman experienced each encounter as a confrontation with the new, a welcome
challenge, and the confirmation of a new openness to anarchist ideas across the nation.
She was proud to perform this labor of love gratis—she would take money for expenses,
even a hotel room, but vowed never to take money to propagate her vision; she later sur-
mised that “the work of a true propagandist cannot be paid. . . . I claim that one can only
give the best of one’s self when actuated by love to the thing one gives, out of one’s inner-
most desire to be useful, to oppose that which one considers wrong, and such a product
of one’s thoughts, nerves, blood, and the whole make-up, is above any remuneration”
(see “Some More Observations,” Letter to Free Society, 29 April 1900).
She had wedged her way into an almost exclusively male (and mostly paid) lecture cir-
cuit, crossing language barriers and extending beyond the immigrant community; she
took pleasure from her role as an informal anarchist ambassador and was showered with
accolades for her oratorical talents even from many who did not share her political per-
spectives. But, while playing to the audience and enjoying their adoration, Goldman was
never naïve enough to rest on her laurels. She would later share with a reporter her omi-
nously prophetic intuition: “I looked at the crowd that followed hurrahing for me the
other night, and I said in my mind to them, ‘You cheer for me, you follow me, but you’d
hang me if your mood changed’” (see “A Character Study of Emma Goldman,” Interview
in Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901). She recognized that while many were
lured to her talks by their interest in, or support of, her political perspective, others were
drawn primarily to the entertaining spectacle of an orator who was in vogue. Although
anarchism had always been the domain of a small minority, Goldman ascertained that
receptivity to anarchist ideas was as much a product of the times as it was of her own
efforts.
A pointed example of her vulnerability to the shifts in the political climate came with
Spain’s declaration of war on the United States in April 1898, which revived the nation’s
patriotic front and threatened to set back its relatively new air of openness. Over the next
twenty years, her consistent left critique of war as a quest for spoils by capitalists com-
pounded with her boldness on the issue of militarism when the United States entered
the First World War ultimately set the stage for Goldman’s deportation. Her classic an-
archist analysis on the subject was first laid before the public during the U.S. conflict
with Spain and its colonies. War and adversity provided an intrepid political propagan-
dist like Goldman with fertile ground for raising provocative and potentially unpopular
ideas about the faces of the enemy: “Truth is a dangerous weapon in the hands of work-
ing men and women. Your enemy is not in Spain, but in Washington; not in Madrid, but
here in San Francisco, in New York, in Chicago. I believe in holding up a looking glass
before you, so that you can see and know yourselves. When you are educated, when you
realize your power, you’ll need no bombs, and no dynamite or militia will hold you” (see
“Emma Goldman, Anarchist,” Interview in the San Francisco Call, 27 April 1898).

INTRODUCTION 49
 REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF THE MIDDLE CL ASS
Although Goldman remained loyal to the downtrodden and exploited, especially in her
early years as a political activist, she would set herself apart from the traditional left in
the United States by her willingness to depart from a dogmatic beholdenness to all
things working class, even risking the appearance of seeming positively bourgeois in her
quest for personal refinement.
Her feeling of entitlement to creature comforts, ascribing the code of deprivation
to the churches, raised some eyebrows among purists in the radical anarchist ranks. In
her autobiography she would celebrate her espousal of “everybody’s right to beautiful,
radiant things.” 55 Goldman selectively incorporated an aesthetic sensibility as a life-
enhancing quality best cultivated by all. She scoffed at the ascetic left’s ambivalent con-
flation of the love of beauty with ruling-class indulgence. Drawn to the many accou-
trements of leisure and privilege, Goldman appreciated refinement wherever she found
it. Given this affinity, it was no surprise that eventually she would choose to introduce an-
archist ideas to the middle class, and middle-class culture to the working masses.
She offered her ideas to the middle class, couching them in the language of the edu-
cated, and addressed concerns based less on money than on one’s internal experience of
deprivation. The ease of her reach across class lines came in part out of deference to the
rise of Russian revolutionaries among the elite—the class from which she believed rad-
icals in America would also emerge—and in part because of a desire, common among
immigrants, to retrieve the respectability they had taken for granted in their country of ori-
gin. She assessed and compared her audiences—the diversity of their class, gender, and
ethnic makeup, and the spectrum of their political beliefs. She was aware of the many
impoverished coal miners, whose daily struggle to survive was harsh enough to prove
that economic conditions alone do not foment revolutions. Goldman proclaimed that “it
is useless to appeal to the overfed, but still of less use to appeal to the underfed. To be
successful, we must reach the class whose brains have not yet been destroyed by starva-
tion” (see “A Short Account of My Late Tour,” Letter to Solidarity, 15 July 1898). She urged
her comrades to disregard those who enter the movement purely to better material con-
ditions as “a menace to the cause”—reminding them of the importance of moral, intel-
lectual, and spiritual development that “no amount of turning social conditions topsy
turvy will better” (see “Talk with Emma Goldman,” Interview in the New York Sun, 6 Jan-
uary 1901). Her ideas about the positive role of modest material comfort in support of
one’s serving a social cause set her apart from some economic determinists and purely
philosophical anarchists, and from communists who appealed almost exclusively to the
working class. She, like Bakunin, saw the revolutionary potential of intellectuals and dis-
affected students—all those who didn’t fit easily into the conventional social fabric. Gold-
man drew many people graced with the advantage of education and money to her lec-
tures who otherwise might have been dismissed by some anarchists as too bourgeois to
be open to radical ideas.

55. LML, p. 56.

50 INTRODUCTION
 Believing in the revolutionary potential of those who had been born to privilege was
not a new idea for someone who had come of age in Russia, inspired by the nihilists
and by the circle of gentry who joined together to kill Alexander II. Goldman’s heroine,
Sophia Perovskaya, who was integral to the plot against the tsar, was the daughter of
the governor-general of St. Petersburg. The nihilists created a culture that strove for
the unity of the intelligentsia and the laborer in the factory and field against the tyranny
of tsarist oppression. Their pivotal literary heroes and heroines (who appear in Cher-
nyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?) included doctors and others from an educated elite,
who join together to begin a cooperative sewing shop, thus shifting their proclivity from
the professional content to the form of work and privileging instead the value of com-
munal production. Yet even as they devote themselves to the contentment of others,
Chernyshevsky’s characters also believe in the fulfillment of life’s pleasures, especially
the political and personal value of free love—the catalyst for much of the controversy
around his book.
It was common for revolutionaries to cast off their association with their privileged
beginnings in the service of the underclass. Peter Kropotkin was perhaps the most em-
blematic of this tradition, as one who had abandoned his princely title in the service of
the people. Goldman admired Kropotkin’s revolutionary spirit but also his refinement,
and described him as “the heir of a brilliant career, with but one ideal, one purpose in
life—the liberation of the human race from serfdom, from all physical as well as spiri-
tual serfdom.” 56 Goldman extracted from Kropotkin’s writings a devotion to ethical as
well as economic liberation that fortified her attraction to anarchism, and she placed a
nobility of the spirit as among the highest value for anarchists.
Goldman matched her appreciation for nobility of the spirit with her fear and distaste
for “vulgarity” (her catch-all expression for the coarse and unrefined)—a term she never
associated with “obscenity” (the government’s catch-all expression for the condemnation
of free love and sexual deviance), which made her challenging ideas, especially about sex-
uality, more palpable to the middle class. Goldman reveled in the joys of sexual pleasure,
in the personal courage of its expression in a world bound by oppressive convention—
especially for women. Her experience as a woman shaped her perceptions and allowed
her to articulate an aspect of freedom otherwise on the distant borders of acceptability
not only to the general public but among the doctrinaire male anarchists as well, whose
political attunement was more completely focused on the plight of the working and un-
employed poor.
The San Francisco Call commented on Goldman’s success— especially in the arena of
reform relating to free speech and women’s freedom. They marveled at the rapidity with
which an immigrant woman not yet thirty years old, “five feet of feminine anarchy,” had
made an impact on the vast and varied political culture of her adopted country, while has-
tening to note that in past centuries such outspokenness might have resulted in being

56. EG’s tribute to Peter Kropotkin on his seventieth birthday was published in Mother Earth (Decem-
ber 1912); the essay appears in vol. 3.

INTRODUCTION 51
 “boiled in oil” or “beheaded” (see “Emma Goldman, Anarchist,” Interview in the San
Francisco Call, 27 April 1898).
Freethinkers, who generally challenged God but not the State, and who, up until then,
with few exceptions, also thought of anarchists as a dangerous fringe to be treated “like
lunatics” 57 for their extreme anti-statism, began to offer Goldman venues for her lec-
tures. Even conservative clubs and unions vied for her bookings— drawn to her mag-
netic personality and to the overlaps between her anarchist critique and the reform is-
sues of the day. The San Francisco Call’s 27 April 1898 interview highlighted what they
considered Goldman’s more sensational observations, especially on the issue of racism
when she raised the question “who does the lynching in the South, white or black?”—
going a step beyond the liberal press that condemned the horrific brutality of the method
of punishment but often stopped short of imagining the innocence of the victims of the
lynching mob. Although anarchists clearly espoused racial equality, Goldman herself
was guilty of adopting a political style that mirrored the custom of separate racial spheres
of her time. Yet, in spite of this common failing, even among radicals, the barbarism of
race hatred firmly set in the texture of turn-of-the-century life in the United States fueled
Goldman and her circle’s fury against a system that would tolerate such transparent
injustice.
Fortunate to have the ear of the nation, with all the heightened press attention to her
ideas, she still scoffed at any attempt to place her on a pedestal. Goldman rebuffed ques-
tions that expected her to foretell the particulars of the future, asserting that it was not
her place to design a blueprint for an anarchist society: “I may be a fool [but] I am not a
prophet.”

CAUTIONING AGAINST THE SEDUCTION OF LIBERAL REFORM

In the seedtime of one of the most fervent eras of progressivism in the history of the
United States, the moral purity of the anarchists, while serving as an admirable and in-
dispensable antidote to what Goldman considered the duplicity and compromise inher-
ent in the electoral process, left them isolated from the majority of Americans, who
staked their hopes on progressive reform. Acting as a gadfly of conscience, Goldman was
quick to note how business favors won votes, how much more the rich had to gain than
the working poor from the system as it was, and how power intoxicated and corrupted
the nation’s leaders. Preaching strongly that “unless we bring our acts in conformity with
our ideas, we will never progress, never change conditions” (see “‘Ideas and Men,’” Let-
ter to Free Society, 10 July 1898), Goldman continued with an assertion that no anarchist
could be a “rascal”—a term she considered synonymous with “politician.” And yet every-
where, including in her own ranks, she found examples of hypocrisy. The inclination to
play both ends of the political continuum, the temptation to engage in electoral politics
to which even anarchists were vulnerable, was, by Goldman’s standards, a heinous crime,
and justified the dropping of her resolve against stooping to personal attacks.

57. Robert Ingersoll publicly labeled Goldman “insane” (see Letter to Solidarity, 15 March 1898).

52 INTRODUCTION
 Though he denied the accusation, there raged a heated debate about the participation
in the political party process by the co-founder of the anarchist papers Freedom and Fire-
brand, Henry Addis. The discussion reverberated through the anarchist press for six
months and remained part of an ongoing debate about anarchist morality under capital-
ism. It raised thorny strategic issues that further splintered the movement. In an era of
“reform,” the lines between the various strains of the left were often blurred by good in-
tentions, by the shared desire for a more equitable and just world—and sometimes by
political opportunism. Surprising political alliances held the potential for alleviating op-
pressive conditions but tainted the over-arching anarchist position that “political action
is a folly . . . it corrupts the people and will never set them free.”
Goldman added complexity to the ongoing argument about anarchist engagement in
party politics by noting that in January 1897 anarchist Saverio Merlino’s declaration in Il
Messaggero, Rome’s bourgeois daily, urged electoral support of socialist and republican
candidates both as a means to combat the threat to liberty represented by Italy’s reac-
tionary government and as a necessary step in deposing the reactionary regime of Prime
Minister Francesco Crispi.58 While Goldman never claimed to support Merlino’s tactics,
she distinguished his “good” strategic reasoning from the monetary gain Addis osten-
sibly received for participating in electoral politics, which, in her view, lacked any sem-
blance of principle. Ironically, Addis claimed to have used the money from his one-time
work for a politician to pay the costs of booking Goldman’s speaking venue, a fact which
made the debate ever more complicated—and from which Goldman recoiled.
When Goldman addressed the issue of participation in party politics to her many Jew-
ish audiences, she likened the anarchist who advises others to vote to the Jew who em-
ploys a Christian to perform tasks that religious convention forbids on the Sabbath,
sanctified as a day of rest; she argued that both are implicated in the act. This metaphor
from her own culture became a common signifier of hypocrisy in her lectures and writ-
ings, although she made sure to excuse those in thrall to the “prejudice and superstition”
which “knows no logic,” differentiating them from anarchists who she claimed ought
to know better than to mix worlds (see “‘Ideas and Men,’” in Free Society, 10 July 1898).
The Church too, and the distinction some Catholic priests made between deeds and
words, between the innocence of thinking malicious thoughts and the guilt when acting
upon them, was easy game for analogies for Goldman’s notion of well-intentioned du-
plicity in electoral politics. During this period, Goldman began to develop her thinking
on religion and hypocrisy for what would in 1913 be expanded into a formal essay entitled
“The Failure of Christianity.” 59 She directed many of her comments to her earlier lecture
hosts at Liberal Clubs, havens for discussion of freethought, whose organizing premise
was distinctly anti-religious. In a fascinating aside, Goldman refers to Christ as a re-

58. See “‘Ideas and Men,’ ” Letter to Free Society, 10 July 1898, notes 1, 4, and 5, for contextual detail on
Merlino’s involvement in the election in Italy.
59. Her essay, plus a second one on the topic of hypocrisy, were published together as a pamphlet en-
titled Victims of Morality and the Failure of Christianity, Two Lectures (New York: Mother Earth Pub-
lishing Association, 1913).

INTRODUCTION 53
 former with advanced ideas based on sentiment and not reason; this comment won the
praise of the prominent liberal letter writer F. B. Livesey, although she later clarified her
preference for modern reformers whose philosophy is based on both sentiment and rea-
son, and leaves “no room for gods, devils or their emissaries” (See Letter to the Detroit
Sentinel, 25 July 1898). Thus, the notion of intelligent consistency took precedence in
Goldman’s lexicon of respect, confirming the influence on her understanding of anar-
chism as a product of the Enlightenment, with its belief in progress born of reason.
This pursuit of the rational was not synonymous with an endorsement of the system
of compulsory education. From Goldman’s perspective, schools were the training
ground for the docility necessary to become a cog in the wheel of industrial capitalism.
Furthermore, public education’s general program and standards left too little time to ac-
commodate “the individual abilities and inclinations of . . . pupils.” She insisted that the
concept of compulsion and learning were antithetical, and that the goal should be the
nurturance of “thinking and reasoning young men and women,” not the creation of “au-
tomatic machines” (see Letter to the Detroit Sentinel, 25 July 1898). These ideas formed
the kernels of her later work for the Modern School movement and of her emergent cri-
tique of conventional notions of higher education, a popular critical trend in the United
States and in Europe.
In the 1890s, militant anarchists dominated New York City’s urban radical landscape
but could never gain a mass footing across the nation. As the Socialist party gradually
gained momentum, tapping into the desire for a more moderate electoral approach to so-
cial change, the anarchists’ rejection of gradual reform as well as their acceptance of the
inevitability of violence relegated them to the fringes of the radical movement. The tac-
tics of militancy and violence that had been central to much early labor union activism
were steadily displaced. Although Goldman and many anarchists often used the term
“socialist” interchangeably with “anarchist,” she was especially disparaging about the
emergent Socialist party in the United States. Goldman castigated its leadership for ex-
cluding her in fear that she might dissuade its members from taking the electoral route
or spur challenges to their labor negotiation policies. She often repeated her disappoint-
ment at Debs’s failure to stand up to the socialists on her behalf at an early stage of his
political career as emblematic of the compromise his position entailed as the emerging
leader of Social Democracy of America, even for a man of vision and integrity.60 Such per-
sonal schisms, which only time and shared political hardship could dispel, and the many
internal battles within the left, influenced the evolution of radicalism in the United
States.
The value Goldman placed on critical thinking extended to the political organizations
of her time, which, like many socialist-dominated union groups, often shunned any as-

60. See “A Short Account of My Late Tour,” Article in Solidarity, 15 July 1898, note 2, for a history of the
formation of the Social Democracy of America; also see “Gives Her Side,” Letter to Free Society,
31 July 1898, note 1, for the detail on Debs’s reneging on a promise.

54 INTRODUCTION
sociation with anarchist ideas and allowed only for discussion of their own political per-
spective. Goldman, who had come to anarchism from a European context (before the
1896 expulsion of anarchists from the International), at a time when the boundaries be-
tween anarchists and socialists had been more permeable, ironically, witnessed its most
intense period of differentiation and fragmentation. In the 1890s, a debate between an
anarchist and a socialist was often as entertaining as it was edifying. Outsiders, for whom
the identities of the two groups merged, were incredulous to witness the level of ire and
insult each hurled upon the other.
As Goldman became a more seasoned lecturer, she refined her amazing ability to
judge character and to quickly size up the personality of the cities and towns along her
route. The observations interspersed in her political travel reports make marvelous ad-
ditions to the study of local history in America. She calibrated her talks accordingly. The
discovery of pockets of openness infused her with the hope that the essence of anarchist
ideas could act as a tonic against narrowness within and outside the movement. In 1898,
her source of optimism came from the West Coast, where audiences seemed much less
dogmatically sectarian and “not so much in the grip of politicians, bigots and hypocrites
as the East. Sunday laws, moral laws, laws prohibiting speech in the open air, etc., are
little known in the far West, and I hardly think ever will be. This alone makes life pleas-
anter on the Pacific than here, where every [policeman in a] bluecoat exercises the power
of a Czar” (see “ A Short Account of My Later Tour,” Essay in Solidarity, 15 July 1898).

A WAVE OF ASSASSINATIONS, A SEA OF POLITICAL REPRESSION

By the fall of 1898, acts of political violence by anarchists returned with a vengeance. The
world was abuzz with news of assassinations—which in the last several years included
the shooting of the Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo by the young
compositor Michele Angiolillo, the killing of the French president Marie François-Sadi
Carnot by Sante Caserio, and the murder of the Austrian empress Elizabeth by Luigi
Luccheni. Goldman was in the hot seat once again, called to unravel the complex philo-
sophical strands that tied anarchism to individual acts of terror. Her support of such acts
was predicated on the concept of retaliation. She repudiated the attack on the Austrian
empress, a woman she considered “harmless, unhappy and not unkind” who had never
been directly responsible for any atrocities and was the victim of a misdirected young
man, himself “a product of present economic, political and social injustices” “who . . .
did not know father or mother.” Somewhat callously, Goldman refused to accept any pre-
sumption that such acts committed by “social outcasts” could mar the grandeur of the
philosophy of anarchism any more than “the moon can dim its splendor at the barking
of a dog” (see “New York Anarchist Leaders Denounce the Murder of Austria’s Empress,”
Letter to New York World, 18 September 1898). Like a mantra, she repeated her position,
always asserting that political repression breeds its own violent antagonists. In a 25 July
1898 letter to the Detroit Sentinel, she warned that the chilling effect of Comstockery (the
suppression from the mails of anarchist literature under Post Office official Anthony

INTRODUCTION 55
 Comstock’s definition of “obscenity”) on free speech and a free press, by diminishing a
common belief in the use of the pen as “anarchy’s best weapon,” might create the des-
peration that breeds acts of violence. Yes, anarchism stood for “peace, safety and liberty,
and does not recognize the right of one to rule, injure or coerce the others,” but she also
believed that in an era of violent injustice, counterviolence was inevitable. She articulated
her belief, which she shared with Kropotkin, that revolutionary violence was part of the
natural process of change: “We might as well fight against cyclones, earthquakes, torna-
does, lightning and other phenomena, as to fight against individual acts of violence. They
have been and will be as long as we retain the causes which produce them; and I look
upon such occurrences as warnings of the coming danger to the tyrants of the world”
(see Letter to the Detroit Sentinel, 25 July 1898).
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Goldman found an opportunity for reach-
ing a wider audience primed to think about history. Goldman’s letter to the Detroit Sen-
tinel includes this warning about the future: “every anarchist is also a student of history,
and as such he or she must recognize that the ruling classes have never granted privi-
leges to the oppressed until forced to do so by the latter . . . the struggling masses of the
present century can expect nothing from their masters, and if they want to change their
conditions and bring about a state of society in which no one shall enjoy the toil of his
fellow man they will only succeed through social revolution, never through peaceful
methods” (see Letter to the Detroit Sentinel, 25 July 1898). Goldman’s assumption that
positive change for the working people would be predicated on bloodshed underesti-
mated both the co-optive power of modern capitalism in the United States, the force of
organized labor, and the persistant circumvention of repressive law.

EFFORTS TO FREE BERKMAN

Goldman learned to navigate the legal system to find a ruling that might lessen Berk-
man’s prison sentence, but she refused to supplicate on his behalf. Documents issued by
the Berkman Defense Association illustrate the persistence of the group’s attempts to
move “heaven and earth” to have him pardoned, even devising a way to contact Andrew
Carnegie himself through Benjamin Tucker, the editor of Liberty. The Berkman com-
mittee refused Tucker’s draft letter of repentant supplication, recoiling at his characteri-
zation of Berkman’s attentat as “a foolish act of barbarism,” rejecting his twists of phrase,
most notably “they come here to-day in an attitude of sincere repentance, no longer as
reformers, but as reformed, and asking for liberty as a reward of their reformation.” This
insiders’ exchange documents the fault lines and fissures that ran through American an-
archism, the premium on saving political face, maintaining loyalty to the significance of
an act of violence in spite of its dire consequences, and on the value of personal integrity
within the movement, even as it attempted to “work the system” it opposed, on Berk-
man’s behalf (see “An Undelivered Speech,” Exchange of Letters in Liberty, January
1899). This strategy proved to be the last effort to free Berkman legally—the next action

56 INTRODUCTION
of the defense committee would be the gathering of clandestine support for his breakout
attempt from prison.

A VOICE FOR ANARCHISM

By the end of the 1890s, Goldman was probably the most proficient spokesperson in the
United States to the general public for the core values of the vast and misunderstood
spectrum of anarchist ideas, as well as a fount of intellectual engagement with her own
comrades. Among Goldman’s most popular lectures was “Authority vs. Liberty,” in
which she anticipated and answered common questions as well as defined pivotal ter-
minology about anarchism. Ironically, after delivering three other lectures on anarchism
in Barre, Vermont, in January 1899, she was barred from giving her fourth talk, on the
topic of suppression of liberty by authority. Circumventing the ban by utilizing the right
to free written speech, a transcript of her talk was circulated in Barre, and Abe Isaak took
the liberty to publish the full text of her lecture in his 5 March 1899 issue of Free Society.
In the lecture, Goldman declared: “Everything good and noble, grand and beautiful, wise
and useful, has been done by the spirit of liberty, from the love of freedom, in spite of
and in the teeth of government and authority. When man will have recovered from the
effects of authority, when he will understand that freedom is the most precious thing,
when he will be free to live, to work, to act, to develop, to enter into social relations with
whom he is in sympathy, then warfare, conquests, robbery, theft, corruption, poverty and
all the ornaments of the State, all the burden of authority will be looked upon as relics of
barbarism.” She defined the concept of authority with complexity and not entirely nega-
tively, affirming the positive authority of ideas in science, art, and literature that com-
mand respect—an idea that already had been posed by Bakunin in God and the State.
What she objected to was authority in its manifestation as forceful suppressor of her
speeches: “behind your chief of police are the clubs and pistols of your policemen; and it
is this brutal force that makes authority a curse to humanity.” She blamed the govern-
ment for instilling hatred for anarchism and anarchists, for spreading the impression
that anarchism was antithetical to the best interests of the people. With Berkman in
mind, she predicted that one day her audience would realize that it was the anarchists
“who at the risk of their own lives and comforts try to free you from the clutches of your
masters” and that the anarchists’ philosophy was “based on that stern, undisputable
logic that liberty is just as necessary for man as air, light and food” (see “Authority vs.
Liberty,” Transcript of Lecture in Free Society, 5 March 1899).
Goldman ultimately believed that anarchism embodied the highest form of personal
and political evolution. To a reporter from the Detroit Evening News, Goldman even made
a characteristically provocative link between class privilege and educational attunement
to affinity for anarchist ideas. She defined an anarchist as “a person of higher indepen-
dence—not the commonly mistaken enemy of law and order.” She posited that “the
higher the education of a class, the more anarchists it contains. Doctors, lawyers, pro-

INTRODUCTION 57
 fessors, newspapermen, many of these are anarchists, but they dare not, perhaps, declare
themselves. Even the freest man is tied to his surroundings. We are dependent upon one
another, therefore we must make concessions. Yes, personally, I believe we should all
have the courage of our convictions, but I would not condemn as cowards those who do
not have that courage” (see “An Interrupted Interview,” Interview in the Detroit Evening
News, 14 March 1899).
The press, especially liberal journalists who may have secretly identified with ele-
ments of Goldman’s political philosophy, either romanticized the exotic aspects of the life
of the bohemian left or sometimes indulged in tongue-in-cheek disparaging descrip-
tions. A Detroit Evening News interview characterized Goldman as “a strange little
woman who was born out of the social conditions of the period” and described her sur-
roundings in novelistic detail: “in a rear room of the Hotel Randolph late last night [a]
few choice spirits had gathered to celebrate the visit of their guest of honor—their doc-
trinal saint—Emma Goldman. The incense of cigarettes were burned before her shrine.
Long-necked, dark bottles gave forth pale Rhine wine, and white-aproned waiters carried
in flagons of foaming beer. These people were Bohemians in all the sense conveys. Their
simple, unrestrained enjoyment shamed the artificial apings of their American cousins.
They lived in the land of Lotus, where carping care is left on the border, and all within is
sunshine and happiness.” A chorus of German anarchists interrupted Goldman’s inter-
view intermittently, singing verses such as “Where there are happy songs, settle down
calmly / Wicked people have no songs” (see “An Interrupted Interview,” Interview in the
Detroit Evening News, 14 March 1899), thus demonstrating once more that anarchists
lured new recruits not only for their high ideals but also for the fun and sense of aban-
don that was so much a part of the culture of freedom.
The 15 July 1899 edition of the Oakland Enquirer heralded the arrival of Emma Gold-
man as “a real live anarchist . . . who might be taken for a college student or an exponent
of suffrage. She is of medium height, with hair tending toward the Titian, with strong
features and wears eyeglasses. She speaks with a considerable vehemence and a foreign
German accent.” According to the article, the topic of her speech—“Aim of Human-
ity”—was typical of her large, all-encompassing themes.
The newspaper account described Goldman’s speech as countering religious ideas of
fate and destiny with human will. She explored definitions of individual contentment
and posited that most people strive “to reach the highest amount of happiness or sat-
isfaction . . . with the least expense of time and energy is the common end of human
life.” She noted, with some irony, that the country’s forefathers associated religious free-
dom with happiness and asserted that “the church practically controls the education, the
morals and the ethics of the country, and while persons who may differ from accepted
beliefs are not subjected to the rack and thumbscrew they are often subjected to os-
tracism.” She complained repeatedly about how restrictive news coverage made it diffi-
cult to educate oneself about world social and economic conditions. The newspapers,
permeated with sensational news, rarely reported “the proceedings of labor meetings or

58 INTRODUCTION
[the] speeches of those who are trying to better the conditions of the working classes.
They are simply jumping jacks in the hands of capitalists who own them.” Convinced
that “there can be no real equality without equality of opportunity,” she pointed an accu-
satory finger at the class system of education in the United States with universities serv-
ing as “show places of the sons of aristocrats” instead of being “filled with the sons of the
working class” and contrasted this inequality to the situation in Germany, where from
1848 to 1880, university students were the leaders of radical thought. She concluded her
talk about the meaning of life, urging her audience to “give what we have of ability and
talent to educate and to help others. It is only through this that we will realize the true
aim of life.” By positing human interdependence at the core of her belief system (a con-
cept similar to Kropotkin’s “mutual aid”),61 Goldman’s talk almost took on the veneer of
a religious sermon— except, of course, for her avowed belief that submission to God and
to the State and its laws was antithetical to true freedom and human happiness (see “An
Anarchist Propagandist,” Article in the Oakland Inquirer, 15 July 1899).

CHANGING COURSE IN EUROPE

In 1899, taking her own advice to heart, Goldman went one step further and began to ex-
plore the idea of becoming a doctor as a more effective means than nursing to contribute
to the health and well-being of the people. Wealthy admirers, who believed in her poten-
tial over—and perhaps in spite of—her politics, offered to foot the bill.62 Advanced
schooling in medicine was more readily available to women in Europe than in the United
States. Goldman, who had just turned thirty, felt more confident and more firmly set in
her identity than when she had studied nursing and midwifery in Vienna in 1895. She
was also eager to play a role in the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working
People scheduled to take place in September 1900, in conjunction with the Exposition
Universelle, the world fair, both being held in Paris that year.63 The prospect of lecturing
in England, Scotland, and France for a year before undertaking medical studies in
Switzerland was equally appealing.
Perhaps the most salient subtext of her trip, especially after the recent decision to stop
pursuing Berkman’s pardon, was the secret escape plan to tunnel him out of his prison.
Well under way, the plan was funded under the guise of support for legal action and
advertised in Freie Arbeiter Stimme (by Saul Yanovsky) and in other papers as a new ap-
peal for Berkman; it held the promise of freedom far from the clutches of the American
prison system and of a grand reunion in Europe for the two long-separated comrades. It
is likely that their anticipated dramatic meeting was the center around which the other

61. Ideas for Peter Kropotkin’s essay “Mutual Aid” (1902) evolved from a series of articles published in-
termittently in The Nineteenth Century between September 1890 and June 1896 —some of which
he may have discussed with Goldman during her 1895 London visit.
62. See “The Red Queen Is Here,” Interview in the Pittsburg Leader, 24 September 1899, note 2, on EG
sponsors Herman Miller and Carl Stone.
63. See ibid., note 3, for a brief history of anarchist congresses from 1881 to 1900.

INTRODUCTION 59
 elements of her trip were planned—with schooling, meetings, lectures merely a cover
for her decision to leave the United States. All participants were careful not to leave a pa-
per trail, lest their plan be discovered and their efforts thwarted. Later, however, both
Goldman (in Living My Life) and Berkman (in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist) revealed
much of the detail of these illegal attempts to free him from prison, albeit with false
names for the participants in the plan.
Included in the first volume are letters written by Goldman in German to Max Metz-
kow, her anarchist friend and contact in Pittsburgh, which contain the most explicit ref-
erences to this escape plan, along with Berkman’s letters carefully coded to communicate
covertly past his prison censors. Just a month before Goldman was about to set sail, it
was rumored that a prison skirmish erupted, and a shot was fired, possibly wounding
Berkman and precipitating his further confinement in a solitary cell. In fact, in Decem-
ber 1899, the prison brawl had been spurred by a fellow inmate’s fatal attack on Berk-
man’s pet bird. Relieved that it was not her comrade who was hurt, she interpreted the
incident as just a temporary setback, and went on to complete her Midwest tour, antici-
pating their rendezvous in Europe, as planned.
Goldman joked about giving America a rest, having in the last eight months “deliv-
ered 210 lectures on economic, sociological, ethical and sexual subjects” (see Letter to
Augustin Hamon, 27 September 1899). During her last tour through the country in
1899, the Pittsburg Leader reported that Goldman was said to have baptized babies in
beer, a rumor she denied: “for in the first place we do not believe in baptism at all.” Ac-
tually, the coincidence of nineteen recent births to anarchist families in Spring Valley, Illi-
nois, was only a pretext for calling a meeting of mothers and children. An offhand com-
ment about how she might prefer beer or wine to the water in which Christian children
were baptized led to the misunderstanding, one that Goldman, who was already known
as the “high priestess of anarchy” (a titular honor that sometimes included requests for
officiating not only over commemorative celebrations, but over funerals as well), found
comical. Goldman likened the reaction of the town’s mayor upon spotting her carrying a
red flag at a town procession to a bull impelled to charge.
Spring Valley, Illinois, was a center of Italian anarchism and the home base of Gui-
seppi Ciancabilla, editor of L’Aurora. Threatened by this anarchist stronghold, the town’s
mayor made a desperate attempt to rescind the permission he had afforded the sacrile-
gious Goldman. According to a Pittsburgh newspaper, which professed amusement at
alarmist stories about Goldman’s visits to small towns on the outskirts of their city, it was
time for this “Anarchist of international notoriety [who was dressed] in a neat fitting black
suit with tailor-made jacket and a small toque” to head toward more cosmopolitan terri-
tory (see “The Red Queen Is Here,” Interview in the Pittsburg Leader, 24 September 1899).
By February 1900, Goldman was dazzling British audiences with her lecture entitled
“The Effect of War on the Workers,” in which she addressed issues posed by the recent
Boer War in the context of English history. Her speech was phenomenally brave, given
the popular support for the war in England, with British workers among the most patri-
otic. Cleverly quoting the English political philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s piercing articu-

60 INTRODUCTION
lation of the pathos of war and militarism, she told a cautionary tale of the American ex-
perience during the Spanish-American War and the violent repercussions the war set in
motion against striking miners, including lynching of African Americans in the Ameri-
can South. In her talk, intended to redress the wrongs of the war on the working class
and its accompanying racial atrocities, Goldman counseled the British workers not to do
the bidding of others. She warned, “all class and racial hatred is but the result of your ig-
norance, and . . . while you willfully choose this ignorance you become the easy tools of
your Governors, who are too cowardly to go out and fight themselves” (see “The Effect
of War on Workers,” Transcript of Address in Freedom, 20 February 1900). Paradoxically,
but like many of her contemporaries, Goldman lacked a deeper understanding of race in
her idealization of the foes of British imperialism—a sentiment among radicals fueled
by the deaths of over 28,000 Boer civilians in British concentration camps 64 that ignored
the racism of the Boers, which would eventually lead to institutional segregation in the
form of apartheid. She championed the Boers over the British, ignoring the South Afri-
can blacks caught between two imperial powers of European heritage. Recollections in
her autobiography almost thirty years later of her lecture to English workingmen (a de-
cidedly different account from comments she had written at the actual time of her visit)
touted her celebration of the English as “a people whose history is surcharged with the
spirit of rebellion and whose genius in every field is a shining star upon the firmament
of the world”—harkening to “the immortal works of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shel-
ley, and Keats, to mention only the greatest in the galaxy of poets and dreamers of your
country . . . the most precious heritage of a truly cultivated people.” 65
Goldman strove to be respectful of the culture and class of the audience she ad-
dressed; always a quick study, she directed her talk to the current problems facing the
British worker, especially in light of the Boer War, and illustrated her ideas with examples
from their own history and from her experience in the United States.66 Through this syn-
thesis, she said, she hoped to bring them a step forward in the battle against ignorance,
passivity, and injustice, which crossed all national bounds. Later, in the 22 April 1900 is-
sue of Free Society, the subtext of her reference to “ignorance” became clear. She sur-
mised that free speech in England was a hollow shell because “this sacred right is not
suppressed by the government, like in our ‘blessed land,’ but by the people themselves.
By the ‘people’ I do not only mean the ignorant, whisky-saturated, patriotism-maddened
workers, but also the mental wage slaves: clerks, bookkeepers, cashiers, typewriters,
commercial travelers, and other flunkies to money and titles. . . . In England, where pa-
triotism in the present war is based upon nothing but commercialism, the brutality of
the people is simply beyond any comprehension and rather discouraging” (see “Obser-
vations and Suggestions,” Letter to Free Society, 22 April 1900). Suppression by the

64. Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. xxi–xxii.
65. LML, p. 256.
66. In her autobiography, Goldman recounts a very different lecture delivered at this time than the con-
temporary accounts suggest, creating a different emphasis many years later (LML, pp. 255–257).

INTRODUCTION 61
 people themselves seemed much harsher to Goldman than a hall lined with policemen
dressed in blue uniforms and brandishing clubs.
To offset her frequent encounters with audiences lacking insight into social and po-
litical forces of oppression, Goldman engaged in strategic and philosophical discussions
with anarchist peers. In the spring of 1900, Goldman traveled from London to Paris with
Hippolyte Havel, a Czech anarchist communist, journalist, and editor she had met in
London—an intriguing but moody comrade, “a veritable encyclopedia” of the move-
ment, exactly her age, who with notable synchronicity actually had been in jail in Vienna
in 1893, at the same time she was in jail in New York City. They intended to participate
in the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People—known colloquially
as the “Paris congress”—scheduled to take place in September.
Goldman’s European trip was not only an opportunity to confirm her place in the in-
ternational movement but also a chance to reestablish and make new friendships. She
enjoyed the camaraderie of anarchist historian Max Nettlau and continued to learn from
and integrate the ideas of the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin. Within her first months
in London, based at the home of her old friend Harry Kelly, she was lecturing with anar-
chists Louise Michel, Peter Kropotkin, Varlaam Cherkesov, Tom Mann, and Tarrida del
Marmol on behalf of victims of Italian political repression; and she attended a Russian
New Year’s party along with other Russian revolutionary exiles. She went on tour in Scot-
land, met Tom Bell, the militant Scottish anarchist, and gravitated back to London as a
center for anarchist activity and friends. Paris, the site of the planned international an-
archist conference and of the world fair, promised to be a perfect convening point for
many of her friends, including “Artists musicians, journalists & other bohamians” (see
Letter to Augustin Hamon, 27 September 1899).
Her experience in Paris seemed like a crazy quilt of the old and the new—a familiar
European culture reminiscent of her past, a shared sense of the weightiness of political
concern; even the food and the coffee were more to her liking. And yet, she had become
accustomed to the casual style of the Americans, the more fluid identity among immi-
grants as they put down roots in a country that was home for many cultures, and the rel-
ative openness to strong women—like herself. In spite of the overall ecstasy of her trip
to Paris, one can imagine how she bristled, especially in Europe, when the constructs of
her chosen cosmopolitan identity were toppled by subtle asides and seemingly inescap-
able ethnic stereotyping—and was particularly alarmed at the rumor that her friend
Augustin Hamon, the French anarchist and editor of L’Humanite nouvelle then working
at the New University in Brussels, was “infected by the disease of Anti-Semitism” 67—a
prejudice most anarchists consciously attempted to eradicate. She delivered a few lec-
tures but never truly hit her stride in Paris, nor was she completely successful in cross-
ing the barriers of cultural and gender bias.
The experience of displacement is not uncommon to those who, like Goldman,
choose to pursue their studies outside their country of origin, or to tourists of any age or

67. EG to Augustin Hamon (13 November 1899), EGP, reel 1.

62 INTRODUCTION
gender. This feeling of dislocation was accentuated by the fluctuating enthusiasm of the
handful of anarchists hosting her along the way. The unpredictability of her experience
was tempered also by the varying levels of professional competence of those who did the
advance work for her few formal talks—a problem she would encounter again and again
over her next twenty years as an itinerant lecturer. After her warm welcome in London,
she was stunned by her treatment in Paris, by what she considered her comrades’ lack of
sensitivity, hospitality, and solidarity. Gradually, more positive encounters eclipsed her
rocky beginnings, and looking back years later, she wrote: “The inspiring atmosphere of
our movement in Paris and my own delightful experiences in the city made me wish to
prolong my stay.” 68 It was during these trips back to Europe that Goldman began to re-
alize that she had become more an American than a European and felt a calling to act as
a liaison. She was propelled by the open pluralism of the American identity and its in-
clusiveness that allowed her to never have to choose to leave her culture of origin com-
pletely behind. Established European theorists viewed the young Goldman, a rising star
of the anarchist movement, as an immigrant harbinger of the freshness of America, an
intriguing national hybrid, and the object of intellectual curiosity and of sexual desire.
Goldman’s interest often extended beyond her anarchist circles as she gravitated to-
ward the cutting edge of the culture. In Paris, she was drawn to the excitement of the new,
to the greater convergence of politics and art, and to a distinctly modern sensibility. Af-
ter visiting the Palais des Beaux Arts but steering clear of the old masterpieces, she
summed up the poles of her aversion and attraction in a letter to the historian Max Nett-
lau: “I have little interest in things of the past. I want life, the real, and not what once was”
(see Letter to Max Nettlau, 31 June 1900).
In fact, Goldman was so entranced with the bohemian lifestyle that medical school
began to take a back seat to the stimulation around her. She predicted that the pastoral
environment of Berne, Switzerland, would depress her, and although her fluency in Ger-
man allowed for a full understanding of the lectures, she worried that most formal pro-
grams for physicians included Latin, a requirement far too demanding for her desired
combination of political and cultural activity. Having set the bar perhaps too high, she
dropped her plan of studying medicine when she realized she lacked the qualifications
for the rigorous program. Goldman eventually lost the financial support of the men
funding her trip, who rescinded her living expenses once she decided not to attend med-
ical school. She salvaged her plans with a practical compromise and learned the new
Viennese electric techniques of scalp and facial massage. She was thrown back on Ed
Brady, among others, to fund her stay, and she resumed her familiar reliance on com-
rades to host her speaking tours. She plunged into a less conventionally studious life of
learning in Europe, more carefree but no less intense.
Goldman’s primary preoccupation during this time, however, continued to be with
Alexander Berkman and whether his escape plan would succeed. She hoped to meet him
in Munich. From there, they hoped to travel together to London to Max Nettlau’s house

68. LML, p. 280.

INTRODUCTION 63
 in mid-July 1900, then continue on to celebrate his resurrection as a free man in Paris
at the anarchist congress in September. Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, led by a German an-
archist (whose code-name was “Tony”),69 Eric B. Morton (a Norwegian-born anarchist
code-named “Ibsen”) along with an assistant (code-named “Yankee”) were busy digging
the tunnel; as they dug, Chicago anarchist Vella Kinsella sang and played the piano in a
house situated above the action, to drown out the noise of the shovels. But, on 26 July
1900 prison officials discovered the tunnel; not knowing for whom it was dug, they im-
mediately ordered Berkman and others into solitary confinement. Morton quickly fled to
France to join Goldman and to avoid being tracked by prison authorities in the United
States. Crestfallen, and with all hopes for Berkman’s escape dashed and no rendezvous
imminent, Goldman drowned her sorrows by throwing herself even more intensely into
the preparations for the Paris congress.
The surveillance arm of the police in each country Goldman visited was put on offi-
cial alert based upon the reputation that preceded her. Often in close contact, should they
need to cooperate in their attempts to keep track of her whereabouts, they responded to
the pervasive fear that their country’s rulers would be the next in line for assassination.
The collection of primary sources in these volumes includes many interesting govern-
ment surveillance documents, offering an inside view of governments in their demeanor
as threatened and punishing pursuers of dissenters. A communiqué from the German
Royal Prussian Police to the French Interior Ministry illustrates a potentially comic in-
competence. Fearing that there may have been a “dangerous purpose” for Goldman’s trip
to Paris, the German police sent a warning that Goldman and a companion intended to
leave London, though, at the time of the report, their spies seemed to have lost Goldman’s
trail, leaving the Germans begging to be kept “informed of their actions and move-
ments, should you manage to find them” (see Communiqué from Royal Prussian Police
to French Interior Ministry, 12 March 1900). A French surveillance document reported
on anarchist meetings Goldman addressed; it also asserted that she “has relations with
the named Havel,” intimating that they may have been lovers as well as political com-
rades. The French police chief observed that Goldman was “very intelligent” and “dan-
gerous as far as theoretical propaganda is concerned” (see French Intelligence Report,
22 May 1900). On his recommendation, the French government would issue an expul-
sion order—more than four months after Goldman had left the country (see Extradition
Order from the French Government, 26 March 1901).
In Paris, the closely watched Goldman addressed the organizational committee for the
upcoming anarchist congress on the state of the American movement, and attended a se-
ries of related meetings building up to the September meeting, including the women’s
congress in June. She planned to make a brief appearance at an early August meeting of
the International Conference of Neo-Malthusians, a group that interested her for its ad-
vocacy of the political and evolutionary importance of birth control to maintain the abun-

69. According to the anarchist scholar Paul Avrich, in consultation with the Emma Goldman Papers.

64 INTRODUCTION
dance of resources necessary to sustain life, rather than the regrettable belief of some in
the race and class survival of the fittest.
Her talk on the state of the American movement to her European comrades, reprinted
in the 8 April 1900 issue of Free Society, is a marvelous documentary summary of her as-
sessment of its progress. She emphasized the plethora of journals, the success of her re-
cent lectures (reaching almost 60,000 people in an eight-month span), and the expan-
sion of the audience to “American people, not the foreigners,” as further proof of the
importance to international anarchism of tending to this new and fertile terrain. While
relatively few among her audiences ever joined the anarchist ranks, Goldman boasted
that “the American trades unions, social and literary clubs, ethical and philosophical so-
cieties, no longer look upon us as bomb-throwers, wild beasts, drunkards, or uncombed
and unwashed tramps, (this idea having been manufactured by our enemies, and . . . the
daily press), but meet us friendly, invite our lecturers and listen with interest to the ex-
position of the philosophy of Anarchist-Communism” (see “The Propaganda and the
Congress,” Transcript of Address in Free Society, 8 April 1900).
Regrettably most American anarchists did not have the means to send more dele-
gates, a situation that generated some dissension in the movement on issues of repre-
sentation and fairness, especially from the anarchists who clustered around Freiheit, who
raised questions about the whole endeavor. Kropotkin countered the disparagement with
a call to all anarchists, urging that they participate, if only by essay, if they could not at-
tend. Representatives from the various tendencies in the movement vied to speak at the
congress, and Goldman added her recommendations to the list. She suggested Vol-
tairine de Cleyre, a woman of integrity known as an anarchist “without a tag,” and her
dear friend Harry Kelly, temporarily based in Europe. Everywhere money was being
raised for representatives to attend the anarchist congress, and the excitement mounted.
The Paris congress was intended to be a strategic reunion to build bridges of support,
engage in serious self-criticism, plan for the future, and refute those who proclaimed
that “Anarchy is dead.” A major show of force was sure to be noticed, in part because the
eyes of the world were focused on the world fair then going on in Paris. Goldman posited
that if anarchism could be established as a major movement, perhaps more would join
the ranks, especially those in the middle class who lacked the courage to be identified as
anarchists. She expected the importance of the congress to be on a par with the First In-
ternational in 1872, when the mutualists (anarchists who supported Proudhon’s ideas
about mutual barter exchanges) gathered around Bakunin, split off from Marx, and met
at Saint-Imier to establish their own organization, the Anti-Authoritarian International.
She hoped the 1900 congress also could erase the memory of the Second International
in London in 1896, where the anarchists were expelled—an event that permanently
added the “narrowness, discipline and intolerance of parliamentarian Socialists” to the
anarchists’ list of manifestations of “invasion and despotism” to be battled (see “Obser-
vations and Suggestions,” Letter to Free Society, 22 April 1900). An earlier meeting of an-
archists planned for Paris in 1898 was faced with threats of suppression by French au-
thorities and, of necessity, had been convened in secret. In spite of this ominous history,

INTRODUCTION 65
 the anarchists thought that this time, especially with the international draw of the Paris
Exposition Universelle on display, they could hold their meetings in the light of day.
However, the likelihood of holding the congress was threatened by a new wave of re-
pression that rippled throughout the world. On 29 July 1900, anarchist Gaetano Bresci
assassinated King Umberto of Italy. In the final hours before the anarchist congress was
scheduled to begin on 19 September, the French council of ministers barred all social and
political gatherings associated with the meetings and then forcefully squelched the slated
participants’ efforts to launch a massive protest on the evening of 18 September. To pro-
hibit all anarchist activity, they invoked the 1894 lois scélérates ruling, which had been is-
sued in response to an earlier rash of political violence. Accustomed to sudden acts of
suppression, the anarchists quickly scaled down and secretly convened a few meetings.
Protest posters, hung throughout the city, berated the government’s disallowing of pub-
lic speeches and anarchist gatherings. In spite of the suppression during this time, the
French anarchists actually gained ground and reinforced their ties to the labor movement,
sympathetic to their plight. But, looking back later, Goldman came to think that the fact
that the anarchist congress was called at all had been naïve. She concluded that its plan-
ning represented a “child-like belief that some governments are better than others; that
if our gatherings are suppressed in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia, they surely must
be permitted in France . . . in Paris, the city of revolution, the history of which has been
written with the blood of its people, the sons and daughters of which have stood on the
barricades, days, nights, weeks, fighting and dying for Liberty . . . the only city that is
ruled by a ‘radical’ government and Socialistic minister” (see “The Paris Congress,” Let-
ter to Free Society, 25 September 1900).
The clandestine proceedings, the intended presentations, reports, and manifestos,
the record of debates and discussions, all were printed as a supplement to Les Temps Nou-
veaux and distributed internationally. Out of the meetings, a Bureau of International
Correspondence was organized. The committee would share information about the eco-
nomic, political, and ethical state of the movement in each country, to build solidarity
and cooperation and a network of support for traveling anarchists, and most immedi-
ately, issue and circulate among labor unions a protest against the suppression of the
Paris meeting of the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People.
In her desire to be closer to Berkman, Goldman planned to leave Europe shortly after
the September meetings. She did attend the Neo-Malthusian congress from August 4 to
6 as planned, just days before the pre-meeting sessions of the anarchist congress. The
proceedings reported in the journal of the Malthusian League mentioned, “Goldman in-
formed the conference on the illegal status of birth control dissemination in the United
States.” 70 Moving from one meeting to another, Goldman began stocking up on birth
control literature and contraceptives for her trip back to the United States.
Though they lost track of her whereabouts, the French police reported Goldman’s de-

70. The Malthusian (September 1900), p. 68.

66 INTRODUCTION
parture in November from Paris to Boulogne in the company of Hippolyte Havel and
Eric B. Morton (though the police knew Morton only by the alias John Leroy, a name he
adopted to avoid arrest after the discovery of the escape tunnel). Goldman’s time abroad
ended early in December as her ship entered New York harbor. Her identity was more
than ever entwined with America. Having left her adopted country for almost a year, she
began to recognize and accept the intensity with which it had become her home.

BRIDGING THE CONTINENTS: THE LECTURER RETURNS

Even from Paris, Goldman had kept one foot in each world, and remained in constant
contact with propaganda work in the United States. She had counseled her American
comrades to resist the temptation to rely on European anarchist lecturers, and instead to
look to the many talented speakers already in their own midst. And although Ameri-
can anarchists had benefited from the previous tour of the eloquent English anarchist,
John Turner, she reminded them that the laboring people of his own country also sorely
needed him.
As she began to turn her attention more fully back to the speaker’s trail in the United
States, she wrote about her mixed feelings about political lecturing—the contradictions,
the balancing act of financial support, reliance on one’s comrades for hospitality and rail-
way fares, her insistence on the purity of intent. Given that Goldman eventually devoted
most of her life to lecturing, these early ruminations are particularly important touch-
stones, the ethical moorings from which her life’s work evolved. In a reflective mode, she
wrote to Free Society in April 1900: “I for one would never consent to make a business of
lecturing. It seems to me that the work of a true propagandist cannot be paid; that the very
thought of being paid for what one says, must rob one of the enthusiasm and devotion for
our cause. I claim that one can only give the best of one’s self when actuated by love to
the thing one gives, out of one’s innermost desire to be useful, to oppose that which one
considers wrong, . . . I am aware that a propagandist cannot live on ideals, yet if the com-
rades would only extend more . . . hospitality and solidarity . . . one could easily tour from
five to six months in the year, . . . more than any one ought to do, if he really is desirous
to serve the cause” (see “Some More Observations,” Letter to Free Society, 29 April 1900).
Goldman also abhorred the notion of an anarchist lecturer becoming a wage slave to
her comrades and was determined that it was a role that could be better supported by
other means. She sometimes scraped by with income gleaned from publishing opinion
pieces in mainstream papers. When she was in Paris, disappointed by a Parisian news-
paper’s policy of excluding articles written by foreigners, Goldman tutored French stu-
dents in English, briefly attempted a business as a tour guide, and occasionally catered
dinners for her friends. Given her dire circumstances there, she was appalled by what
she considered to be the insensitivity of anarchists who were so accustomed to material
comfort that they could not even recognize need when they saw it, and became convinced
that the Church or farmers were more generous than her own comrades (see Letter to
Max Nettlau, 15 May 1900).
She had envied her friend Max Nettlau, whose inheritance allowed him to follow his

INTRODUCTION 67
 political inclinations without financial worry. She marveled at his ability to travel and col-
lect material for his biography of Michael Bakunin, whom she considered among the few
worthy people “who have led such a rich life and have contributed so unendingly to the
general good in such a unique, individual manner.” She coveted Nettlau’s luxury of time,
but doubted whether she herself would have had the endurance necessary to research and
write a biography, a task she considered mammoth—“that requires a level of persever-
ance and tenacity of which I unfortunately cannot boast.” Considering herself “too much
of a gypsy to carry out anything that requires patience,” Goldman also envied the per-
manence of the written word, believing that Nettlau had “certainly accomplished a great
deal” through his literary works toward social and political transformation, in many ways
more effectively than her “fourteen years of agitating.” Written when she had been in Eu-
rope without much of an audience and little of her own writing in process, Goldman de-
scribed herself to Nettlau as “completely miserable”—wondering about her chosen work,
ruminating on the depressing thought that perhaps “not one person has become an An-
archist or revolutionary through lectures” (see Letter to Max Nettlau, 31 June 1900).
By 1900, Goldman had developed a distinctive style of lecturing—a quick humorous
quip about the police, or current politics, or even about the person who introduced her,
followed by a sweeping talk linked to contemporary issues that displayed her signature
political and cultural critique of hypocrisy. Her intention was always to reach a varied au-
dience through reason and emotion, always ending her talks with a rousing articulation
of a vision of hope for a better world within reach. Goldman transcended her immigrant
identity; even with traces of a strong Russian accent, her erudition obscured her lack of
formal education, and enabled her to continue to widen her circles, and her influence. En-
ergetic and easily able to create a rapport with her listeners, she became a performance
artist in the service of the cause of anarchism—attracting many to the spectacle of her
inimitable form of political theater. Her lecture style was more colorful, her repertoire of
subjects broader, and her radius of travel in the United States wider than most others in
her circles. After her formal lecture, during the question period, her biting wit often left
the audience in stitches. She joined the ranks of several prominent women anarchist lec-
turers, but stood as the lone immigrant in the group. In the 1890s, those who knew her
best were immigrants who appreciated her early lecture style that matched the intensity
of their labor struggles. By 1900, she had expanded her range of topics, and matched the
pitch of her lectures to the variety of audiences she was grateful to address.
The resumption of her public lectures in the United States had an ominous begin-
ning. As Goldman entered a hall in New York City its proprietor threatened “to turn out
the lights should the meeting develop into one of Anarchistic tendencies.” In response
to his harsh proclamation, Goldman callously praised the assassin of King Umberto of
Italy for taking a stand against the tyranny of a despot and recklessly declared that, given
the current mood of the masses, she would hate to be “in the shoes of a monarch or of
President McKinley” (see “Rented by Emma Goldman,” Article in the New York Times,
12 December 1900). Within the next year, the American president would be dead and the

68 INTRODUCTION
newspapers would allege that his assassin, after attending her lecture in Cleveland on
5 May 1901, had been inspired by Emma Goldman to commit his fatal act.
Paradoxically, during the nine months before the McKinley assassination, Goldman
had reestablished herself in America more effectively than before. A broader audience,
curious about her experiences in and perceptions of Europe, attended her lectures and
avariciously read newspaper reports of Goldman’s ideas and whereabouts. The phenom-
enon of public demand for her opinions in turn increased the scope and force of her con-
victions. As she reacquainted herself with the state of the movement in America, her new
lecture series reflected an awareness of the increased strength of labor. She was im-
pressed with the groundswell of radicalism demonstrated by the recent and relatively
large outpouring of votes for the Socialist Party presidential ticket of Eugene Debs and
Job Harriman, and treated their popularity as a political advance, without dropping her
general critique of party politics. She lectured throughout the Northeast and Midwest,
challenging labor to go one step beyond trade unionism; her topics included “Anarchism
and Trade Unionism,” “What Will Lessen Vice,” “Cooperation a Factor in the Industrial
Struggle,” “Modern Phases of Anarchism,” and “On the Failure of the Free Unions.”
She even helped arrange Kropotkin’s 1901 tour, his second in the United States. Fol-
lowing through on the program set forth by the Paris congress to strengthen and en-
courage cooperation across national boundaries, Goldman and Kropotkin cemented
their friendship even further. The overwhelming reception to his visit, with colleges vy-
ing for bookings, was an indication of his continued draw. He had come first in 1897 as
a delegate to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, addressing the Na-
tional Geographic Society as an eminent scientist and geographer, as well as a prominent
anarchist. His appeal increased by 1901, with his impressive range of interests and pro-
fessional credentials adding credibility and “respectability” to anarchism (in spite of
Kropotkin’s support for the principle and practice of propaganda of the deed, of attentats).
In this window of openness to provocative political ideas, Goldman was front-page news,
a gadfly for ideas and opinions, and a personality who sparked the public’s imagination,
interest, respect, and sometimes, justified fear that her verbal prowess could topple what
little stability existed in the social order around her.
A long interview in the 6 January 1901 New York Sun probed for biographical insight
about Goldman’s intellectual and political development and showcased her prediction
that, in the new century, women would lead the way. Saturated with novelistic detail, the
account described Goldman as a fascinating woman with “the mouth of a worker and the
eyes of an enthusiast” and with the unmemorable face of “girl students of Russia. Intel-
ligent, desperately earnest, lighted from within by an ideal and a purpose, yet calm as a
mask, save for the eyes”—[she is] “a forceful woman with brains and experience, under
the influence of a great enthusiasm.” The article documented Goldman’s recollections of
Russia, where “one breathes in revolutionary thought with the air, without being at all
definitely interested in anarchy one learns its principles.” Nostalgically, she described the
social and intellectual freedom of Russian women, their camaraderie with “thinking

INTRODUCTION 69
 men,” underscoring her belief that the “feminine mind needs rubbing against mascu-
line mind” in a relationship of serious study and mutual respect. Because they think, she
concluded, women and men become anarchists.
Her own path had been more circuitous. Born to relative privilege, she recounted that
she “hadn’t come in actual contact with the want and suffering of the world until [she]
joined the wage earners.” As she recalled the story of her political transformation in New
York City and her involvement with striking laborers, Goldman articulated clearly why
she did not consider herself a political leader: “A leader must be a diplomat . . . make con-
cessions to his party, for the sake of holding his power . . . give way to his followers in or-
der to be sure they will sustain him. I can’t do that. I am an Anarchist because I love in-
dividual freedom, and I will not surrender that freedom. A leader must sooner or later
be the victim of the masses he thinks he controls.” Although she described her initial at-
traction to anarchism as an emotional response to human suffering, she emphasized the
importance, once again, of the rational foundation for political belief, her pledge to study
and think, to “make passion bow to wisdom,” to avoid the tendency to be “carried away
from the truth by sentiment” (see “Talk with Emma Goldman,” Interview in the New
York Sun, 6 January 1901).

HALF-TRUTHS
As always, she was forced to prove that all anarchists don’t “carry bombs in our coat pock-
ets” and to assert that individual acts of violence were provoked responses born of op-
pressive social and economic conditions. She underscored her respect for the person
“willing to lay down his life for the cause of humanity” as a “noble” act, even if it was
“mistaken.” The New York Sun nevertheless reported that Goldman was unpopular with
the large sector of militant anarchists for “her disbelief in bloody streets as a pathway to
the millennium.”
Some anarchists took issue with the particulars of this interview, in part because they
depended upon her to articulate for the public a consistent position on violence as a vi-
able tactic. Goldman too was painfully aware that her position was more complex than
reported and was often misunderstood by the mainstream press. To counteract the pre-
ponderance of misinformation, she relied on the anarchist papers to print her objections,
clarifications, and a more nuanced, carefully crafted expression of her position. In the an-
archist press, she could record the changes in her emphasis, not only about violence but
also about workers, and correct the misinformation created by rumors circulating about
her in the movement. In fact, Goldman’s attitude about the efficacy of violence was in-
consistent. Her firm support of the attentater, however, ultimately cast a shadow over her
public veneration. In response to the critique of the New York Sun interview, she adopted
a principled refusal to judge an act by its result. By asserting that above all she believed
in the lessons gleaned by the act’s intent and in an “innate sense of justice and a rebel-
lious spirit” (see “An Open Letter,” Letter to Free Society, 17 February 1901), Goldman
contradicted an earlier pronouncement that violent acts were only as effective as the

70 INTRODUCTION
change in thinking they provoked. Yet to understand what may have appeared as vacilla-
tion, Goldman’s answers to the usual questions asked of anarchists by the mainstream
press required the studied ability to read between the lines. Goldman sometimes uttered
half-truths to unsuspecting journalists in order to redirect the discussion of violence.
The dark residue of the association of anarchism with political violence marked Gold-
man’s life—forcing her to grapple, in varying degrees of clarity, with issues that she
found profoundly troubling. She was willing to withstand the controversy within the
movement, the mixed emotions elicited by newspaper reporters privileging one person’s
position above all others, because she believed in the importance of extrapolating the so-
cial significance of such difficult problems for a wider audience. Goldman took her suc-
cess to be a signifier of renewed openness to anarchist ideas. Given her mission, the in-
evitable inaccuracies and distortions in the New York Sun article seemed a small price
to pay.

PRIVILEGED WOMEN AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Predictably her interviews almost always turned to the topic of women. She used these
occasions to encourage more participation both within and outside the anarchist move-
ment—applauding the efforts of the Kansas farm–based activism of Kate Austin and the
urban focus of Voltairine de Cleyre in Philadelphia. In spite of her biting criticism of the
ignorance and frivolous preoccupation of most American women, Goldman presaged
the importance of the American woman to the cause of freedom, predicting that “The
movement will come from the middle class, but it will spread.” She compared the Amer-
ican woman favorably to her French, German, and English counterparts. “It is a matter
of course for the American woman to be free . . . [she has] liberty—home, public, social,
educational, religious. She is bound to forward our cause.” Counseling her sisters not to
“rave against man and exalt woman” as the suffragist did, but to meet them “on logical
ground,” she asserted that “the question of sex has no place in a great movement toward
truth” (see “Talk with Emma Goldman,” Interview in the New York Sun, 6 January 1901).
Nonetheless, outrage against gender injustice was integral to Goldman’s vision and strat-
egy for change; this sensibility and sensitivity to the importance of women’s freedom
laced through all her political work—whether or not she ranked such issues as the most
vital to her cause.
Goldman began to work through her controversial interest in and appeal to the middle
class. Still caustic in her condemnation of the insensitivity and indulgence of class priv-
ilege and “respectability,” with its coerced conformity, she also was frustrated with the
movement’s singular focus on the working class, the ways in which labor unions as-
suaged workers’ suffering but dulled their impetus to fight for a larger vision of the trans-
formation of the relationship of work and production. She complained that the worker
“boasts of his right to choose his master, not knowing that he thereby forfeits his right to
be his own master.” Freedom, she believed, was like “a delicate plant [that requires]
proper care and attention, or it fades away.” She longed for the advent of “the intelligent

INTRODUCTION 71
 worker of the world [who] stands up for his rights, and works with those whose aim in
life is the establishment of equal liberty in all phases of life.”
In 1901, she continued her ruminations about the ways in which social and economic
class background intersected with anarchist propaganda. She enjoyed discussing such is-
sues with “Prince” Kropotkin, who by his very being confirmed her ideas about extend-
ing the anarchists’ message to the privileged. Berkman’s initial resistance to these ideas
frustrated her. Her frequent disagreements with him on the issue convinced her that his
confinement with the desolate poor in prison obscured his ability to assess a shift in the
political potential of different strata. Goldman continued to circulate her lecture cards to
the rich and the poor, spoke to as many audiences as would have her, while she herself
worked, sometimes twelve hours a day, saving up to support her tour. On the perennial
lookout for noble spirits, for those who strove for consistency in thought and action,
Goldman found more and more comrades in every stratum as the years went on—many
of whom she considered anarchists even if they were themselves unaware of the fitting
label for their beliefs.

A HARBINGER OF CHANGE
Among the more dramatic events signifying Goldman’s renewed popularity in the United
States was her bold free-speech fight in Philadelphia, the home of anarchist Voltairine de
Cleyre. Goldman vowed to defy the mayor’s prohibition of her talks, and was fortunate to
have been interviewed by an admiring writer, Miriam Michelson, for the 11 April 1901 is-
sue of the Philadelphia North American as a signifier of a broader trend in the nation.
Goldman seized the opportunity to compare the suppression of free speech in Philadel-
phia to despotism in Russia: “The methods of Russia are of the tenth century; the intel-
lectual development of America is of the twentieth. They don’t go very well, do they?”
Her retort to Michelson’s doubts about the imminence or practicality of anarchism
was disarming, and represented a significant change in her perception of the timing
and inevitability of revolution: “It is my nature to be what I am. . . . As long as I live I must
be a crusader. What I think, what I feel, I must speak. Not for a hundred, not for five hun-
dred years, perhaps, will the principles of anarchy triumph. But what has that to do with
it? ‘Is it right?’ not ‘Is it hopeless?’ is the touchstone of courage and principle.” Entranced
with this “stout . . . broad hipped . . . sturdy-looking, quick-moving, intense woman,”
Michelson gave Goldman full range to express her beliefs—from her accusation that
the shady mayor suppressed her speeches only to appear more moral than he was, that
the infringement on the right of free speech was inevitably dangerous to the free press,
that she was opposed to prisons on the contention that “no human being, however de-
graded, is irredeemable,” a principle she would apply even to corrupt mayors and police
lieutenants.
Goldman reiterated her hopes for the middle class: “It is the middle class and the pro-
fessional people that are being educated to whom theories of life like mine appeal.” But
she did not view winning them over, or any class, as essential. “Just so long as there re-

72 INTRODUCTION
main in the world men and women ready to die for principle, there will be hope for man-
kind. It is from the minority that the strength to uplift the world has always come”—a
kernel of the lecture on minorities and majorities she would deliver in later years.
Michelson’s assumptions were challenged by her awe at Goldman and raised ques-
tions for her about gender and identity. She marveled at Goldman’s lack of conventional
female constraint: “There is no ‘no thoroughfare’ for her mind. She dares to follow
wherever conviction leads.” Yet the reporter seemed surprised at Goldman’s evident love
of the “feminine . . . flowers and pretty things,” some too expensive for her means, in-
cluding stylish clothing and “pretty things in the shop windows.” Michelson found it
refreshing to hear her complaints about her physical portrayal in the press, which Gold-
man attributed not to vanity but to revulsion for vulgarity. Applauding this new sensi-
bility, Michelson expressed her own strong opinion that Goldman should be allowed to
speak so that all might “learn something [about] the difference between tenth and twen-
tieth century methods of governing” (see “A Character Study of Emma Goldman, “ In-
terview in the Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901).
Goldman did succeed in speaking many times that month in Philadelphia, repeating
her ominous refrain (“free speech does not exist in America unless it suits the govern-
ment”) once to over two thousand people, once dramatically on the steps of the City Hall,
and a few times surreptitiously tagged onto another event or union meeting. When she
appeared under the auspices of the Single Tax Society of Philadelphia, the hall was filled
to capacity and “her every utterance was greeted with unanimous applause” (see
“Tyranny of Police Publicly Denounced,” Article in the Philadelphia North American,
12 April 1901). Building momentum, she looped her way to the Midwest—to Pittsburgh,
Cleveland, Chicago, and back through Buffalo, then on to Rochester, reuniting with her
family in July before her intended return to New York City.

AN ASSASSIN IN HER MIDST

In the audience of one of Goldman’s lectures in Cleveland in early May 1901, a meeting
monitored by two uniformed police and one undercover agent, was Leon Czolgosz, the
future assassin of President McKinley. Whether it was really Goldman’s talk, “The Mod-
ern Phase of Anarchy,” at the Liberty Association of the Franklin Liberal Club that led
Czolgosz to his act is a matter of historical conjecture. Although all public figures are
subject to a modicum of projection from their beholders, this particular Goldman talk
was definitely incendiary and emotionally rousing—and did glorify the attentater as a
martyr for a higher cause.
Several months later, when Goldman saw Czolgosz’s picture in the paper following
the assassination, she recognized him as the young man who had approached her dur-
ing intermission at this Cleveland lecture, asking for suggestions from her for some-
thing to read. From a list of anarchist writings available and advertised then in Free Soci-
ety, it is likely that she had recommended Kropotkin’s Appeal to the Young. Thinking back,
she remembered that in her lecture she had scowled at the police, hurled invectives at

INTRODUCTION 73
 the detectives in the hall as “the meanest and most despicable creature in the universe,”
crying out against “the galling yoke of government, ecclesiasticism and the bonds of cus-
tom and prejudice.” She had asserted that “anarchism [had] nothing to do with future
governments or economic arrangements” and spoke approvingly of the motives in all the
recent acts of violence carried out by men “unable to stand idly by and see the wrongs
that were being endured by their fellow mortals” (see “Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers,”
Article in Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 May 1901).
Shortly after the Cleveland talk, Gaetano Bresci, the assassin of King Umberto of Italy,
allegedly was murdered in prison. Goldman wrote a dramatic eulogy for the 2 June 1901
issue of Free Society. Her piece was circulated widely and probably read by Czolgosz, who
had visited the Chicago office of the magazine in July on the same day Goldman departed
for Buffalo and Rochester. In the office, Czolgosz evidently spouted references to vio-
lence and raised fears among the editorial group that he might be a provocateur. Gold-
man remembered seeing him among the group that accompanied her to the Chicago
train station to bid her farewell, but dared not reveal it to the press or the police. Her
article read: “Each age has had its John Browns, its Perovskayas, its Parsons, Spies, An-
giolillos, and its Brescis, who were misunderstood, persecuted, mobbed, tortured, and
killed, by those who could not reach the sublime heights attained by these men. Yet they
have not lived in vain, for it is to them that we owe all that is good and noble, grand and
useful in the world . . . and the world will have to learn that while one Bresci is killed,
hundreds are born ready to lay down their lives to free mankind from tyranny, power, ig-
norance, and poverty” (see “Gaetano Bresci,” Essay in Free Society, 2 June 1901).
Such poetics about the martyrs of “the deed”—which certainly could inspire future
acts—were no doubt fueled by Goldman’s profound attachment to Alexander Berkman.
At the time, Berkman was just emerging from a long period of solitary confinement, hav-
ing been barred temporarily from letter writing, prohibited from any visitation, emo-
tionally brutalized by his prison experience, and on the verge of suicide. Goldman was
stricken with grief as she read his letters that recounted the raw experience of the hor-
rors of prison life. Every generalized public reference she made to the daring resolve of
those who committed individual acts of violence also served as an incantation to Berk-
man and his courage as he endured the harsh consequences of his act.
Between 19 and 24 August 1901, Goldman at long last was granted visitation rights
as Berkman’s “sister,” for the first time in nine years. The mood of the country suddenly
seemed more open. A new law would hold the possibility of commuting his sentence.
She had some money to travel, released from her long nights as a nurse with supple-
mentary income from promoting Ed Brady’s stationery and office supply business. Gold-
man’s “restless spirit” seemed contained for an instant.
In Buffalo, on 6 September 1901, Leon Czolgosz, who had been stalking President
McKinley during his visit to the Pan American Exposition, shot and fatally wounded him.
After Czolgosz’s arrest, the newspapers across the world reported the claim that “Emma
Goldman’s Words Drove Him to Murder” (see “Assassin’s Trail of Crime from Chicago

74 INTRODUCTION
to the Pacific Coast,” Article in San Francisco Chronicle, 8 September 1901)—a headline
distortion of his confession, in which he stated that the last person he heard speaking
was Emma Goldman but that she did not tell him to kill the president. It is unclear
whether or not the San Francisco Hearst newspaper—hungry to counter its previous
harsh coverage of McKinley—fabricated the seemingly verbatim interview with Czol-
gosz, but it succeeded in setting off waves of incrimination against Goldman. He was re-
ported to have said that “Her doctrine that all rulers should be exterminated was what set
me to thinking so that my head nearly split with the pain. Miss Goldman’s words went
right through me, and when I left the lecture I had made up my mind that I would have
to do something heroic for the cause I loved.” When he ended the story of his obsession
and pursuit, he restated his motive, with no regrets: “I am an anarchist. I am a disciple
of Emma Goldman. Her words set me on fire.”
In an era when free speech was still very much a contested terrain, the fear of violence
following the McKinley assassination precipitously tipped the balance away from the an-
archists, whose utterances, once again, became synonymous with terrorism. The confla-
tion of incendiary words and violent action intensified. It had been only fourteen years
since the execution of the Haymarket anarchists in Chicago, and Goldman, now demo-
nized, feared for her life. Suddenly the eyes of the world were searching for her. The na-
tion was in shock, the public’s fascination with her turned to disdain. She was terrified
at the level of hatred hurled at her. The 8 September 1901 Chicago Tribune caricatured
Goldman as a devil surrounded in flames, a “wrinkled, ugly, Russian woman, who owns
no god, has no religion, would kill all rulers, overthrow all laws, and who inspired McKin-
ley’s assassination” (see illustration on p. 461).
Goldman was lecturing in St. Louis when she read about the assassination of the pres-
ident. Her first response was to lie low and stay out of sight. Then, upon reading about
the arrest of her Free Society comrades in Chicago, she bravely and voluntarily rushed to
be near them—in the city that only fourteen years earlier had seen the Haymarket an-
archists hanged. She even arranged an exclusive interview with a Chicago newspaper at
a fee high enough to provide her friends with the necessary bail for their release. As she
waited in a friend’s apartment, posing as a Swedish maid, the police barged in and found
her. Insisting that it was just a matter of time before she would have given herself up,
Goldman grabbed her sailor hat, her toiletries, and a book, and followed the detectives
onto a streetcar to the police headquarters, glad that she had something to read along
the way.
After her arrest and interrogation she begged them to allow her to send a telegram to
her sister—a quick way to assure her that Goldman was safe and to urge her to “comfort
mother.” She told the police that she had found out about her alleged involvement in the
assassination through the newspaper—like most other people. She explained her pres-
ence in Chicago as a desire to be close to her friends from Free Society now under arrest,
and recounted how she had taken the train from St. Louis.
Cleverly, she had avoided detectives, spending several days around town, even shop-

INTRODUCTION 75
 ping at Marshall Field’s department store. But alone in a cell, even if it was “the best room
in the annex,” her playfulness was gone and she burst into tears at the thought of a fac-
ing a ten-year prison sentence and $5,000 fine for an act in which she perceived herself
as having had no part, carried out by a person she barely knew (see “Story of the Arrest
of Anarchist Queen,” Interview in the New York World, 11 September 1901).
Goldman was relieved when no legal grounds could be found to prosecute her for the
McKinley assassination, and was convinced that her luck may have been attributable to
“official rivalry and jealousy, and [her] absence from New York [at the time of the assas-
sination], to which [she owed her] release” (see Letter from Alexander Berkman, 20 De-
cember 1901). Czolgosz’s actual statement to the police on the night of the assassination
absolved Goldman and confirmed that, although she was the last one he had heard talk
against the government, “She didn’t tell me to do it.” 71 He exhibited a canny resistance
to leading questions, and consistently denied any direct involvement with her; he pur-
ported to have seen her only once as part of a large crowd at her Cleveland lecture and
covered up the fact that he had accompanied her, along with members of the militant
Free Society group, to the railway station in Chicago. But, even in the absence of any for-
mal establishment of guilt by association or official punishment, her life would forever
be entwined with Czolgosz’s act; the outside world, which may not have known her name
before, would now associate Goldman with acts of terror.
In the weeks before Czolgosz’s electrocution, Goldman, true to her pattern of affirm-
ing the valor of the intent of a person who engages in individual acts of violence in the
name of freedom, came to his support. The movement was divided, though it is also pos-
sible that a modicum of posturing in their public protests may have served also to shield
other anarchists from any suspected engagement in the act. Still, some considered Czol-
gosz “a lunatic,” 72 McKinley an inappropriate target, and the act a catalyst for a terrible
wave of repression. Even Berkman voiced his opposition against it. He believed that
his own attentat against Frick, who was the actual perpetrator of bloodshed against labor,
was more effective than the targeting of McKinley, a relatively benign symbol of national
wealth and power. Ironically, he argued that the McKinley assassination was an act sure
to be misunderstood by the masses (a position similar to Most’s critique of Berkman’s act
only nine years before). Goldman held fast, identifying Czolgosz as an outsider, psychi-
cally susceptible to the suffering of the world surrounding him—perhaps not even an
anarchist, but “ a soul in pain [who] could find no abode in this cruel world . . . lacking
in caution . . . but daring just the same . . . I cannot help but bow in reverenced silence
before the power of such a soul, that has broken the narrow walls of its prison, and has
taken a daring leap into the unknown.”
As to violence, Goldman predicted that it would “die a natural death when man will

71. People vs. Leon F. Czolgosz, 6 September 1901, in Courthouse Archives, Erie County, Buffalo, N.Y.
72. In Letter from an Unknown Correspondent to Lucifer, vol. 5, no. 41 (31 October 1901), p. 2, with
Goldman’s reply in Lucifer, vol. 5, no. 43 (21 November 1901).

76 INTRODUCTION
learn to understand that each unit has its place in the universe, and while being closely
linked together, it must remain free to grow and expand.” As to the dissension among
the anarchists (which in her pain and panic loomed larger than life even though many
anarchists, including Kate Austin, Harry Kelly, Voltairine de Cleyre, and those who clus-
tered around L’Aurora, actually agreed with her), she counseled them to value both the
inner and outer human condition: “Anarchy is the philosophy [which includes] every
branch of human knowledge pertaining to life. . . . Anarchists ought to be students
of psychology and honestly endeavor to explain certain phenomena, not only from a
politico-economic but also from a psychological standpoint” (see “The Tragedy at Buf-
falo,” Essay in Free Society, 6 October 1901, and “Emma Goldman Defines Her Position,”
Letter to Lucifer, the Lightbearer, 11 November 1901).
She found herself defending the subtleties of her position to the readers of Lucifer; the
journal reported her as saying to the press that “as an Anarchist, she was opposed to vio-
lence. She deplored the assassination of McKinley, and said that if the people want to do
away with assassins they must do away with the conditions which produce murderers.” 73
Goldman corrected their impressions, asserting that she had not the occasion to “deplore
or applaud the assassination.” Shortly after Czolgosz’s execution, Goldman, unnerved and
grieving, tried to correct the misrepresentation of her statement to her comrades in a let-
ter to Lucifer written on the day of the solemn commemoration of the fourteenth anni-
versary of the death of the Haymarket anarchists; she romanticized Czolgosz as “a man
with the beautiful soul of a child and the energy of a giant.” In the letter, she may have
merged her own feelings of isolation in the face of rampant demonization by the main-
stream press and genuine fears for her own life, with her projection of Czolgosz’s “pitiful
loneliness”— embittered by the fact that a few anarchists actually joined conservatives in
questioning his sanity. Yet, even as she underscored the need to comprehend the com-
plex psychological makeup of an attentater, she allowed for only simple one-dimensional
positive perceptions: the portrayal of a sensitive soul colliding with a cruel world.
Goldman probably did have a more textured understanding of psychological deviancy
than her political comrades, not only because of her fascination with Sigmund Freud,
but also through her work as a nurse. Her letter to Max Nettlau, for example, was writ-
ten during a brief lull in her fourteen-hour workday as a nurse, while “taking care of a
neurotic, so you can imagine that I am in frightfully great demand” (see Letter to Max
Nettlau, 24 November 1901). And yet, the distinguishing characteristic that always ele-
vated any person in Goldman’s eyes, no matter how troubled internally, was a commit-
ment to the cause of freedom. Thus, she could tolerate with great patience, and even rev-
erence, the “strange behavior” of Berkman in prison upon emerging from solitary
confinement. He had apologized to Goldman for his silence during their late summer
prison visit and for his obsessive playing with “the shiny little trinket that was dangling

73. Referring to a meeting at the Manhattan Liberal Club of 8 October 1901, Lucifer (October 1901).

INTRODUCTION 77
 from your watch chain” as if it represented “all of my dreams of freedom, the whole world
of the living” (see Letter from Alexander Berkman, 20 December 1901). She honored
Berkman and Czolgosz as sensitive souls and martyrs for the cause of justice, disre-
garding the negative effects of the trauma that Czolgosz may have inflicted on a country
reeling from the shock of his actions.
And yet privately Goldman recounted in her autobiography that “the most terrible
thing I had yet experienced” 74 was the psychological impact of Berkman’s denunciation
of Czolgosz’s act, remembering that he doubted “whether it was educational, because the
social necessity for its performance was not manifest . . . therefore the value of the act
was to a great extent nullified.” He had contrasted it to similar acts in a despotic regime
like Russia where its intent would be understood immediately. Berkman counseled Gold-
man: “The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, be-
cause it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the
subtle source of democratic tyranny, and as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.”
Continuing on this vein, Berkman’s own sense of superiority stuck like bones in Gold-
man’s throat: “In modern capitalism, exploitation rather than oppression is the real en-
emy of the people. Oppression is but its handmaid. Hence the battle is to be waged in
the economic rather than the political field. It is therefore that I regard my own act as far
more significant and educational than Leon’s. It was directed against a tangible, real op-
pressor, visualized as such by the people” (see Letter from Alexander Berkman, 20 De-
cember 1901, and Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 412 –17).
While Goldman grasped the elements of truth in Berkman’s argument, she was still
grieving over the horror of the recent electrocution of Czolgosz and the public’s gawking,
vengeful fascination with the gory mechanics of his execution, and also feeling under fire
from all sides herself; she had mustered her courage in the face of her false implication
in Czolgosz’s act and voiced support for his intent. Given these circumstances, she found
the timing of Berkman’s remarks especially callous— especially since Berkman had es-
caped Czolgosz’s fate by sheer circumstance rather than by design. Goldman was tangled
in a dangerous and complex web and caught by strong contradictory emotions that
elicited a deep well of loneliness during what proved to be, and was remembered in her
autobiography as, one of the most difficult phases of her life. It seemed positively shock-
ing for her to face the storms of reaction around her without the tacit and unqualified
support of her closest comrade. Reluctantly she drew upon her own reserves, and by ne-
cessity differentiated herself and her evolving political identity further from Berkman—
a painful but ultimately important step in Goldman’s political and personal development.
Perhaps the cataclysmic impact of the McKinley assassination on her own life was the
basis for the hyperbole in her 6 October 1901 article in Free Society “The Tragedy at Buf-
falo.” It opens with an exhortation: “Never before in the history of governments has the

74. EG to AB, 23 November 1928, IISH and EGP, reel 20.

78 INTRODUCTION
sound of a pistol shot so startled, terrorized, and horrified the self-satisfied, indifferent,
contented, and indolent public, as has the one fired by Leon Czolgosz when he struck
down William McKinley, president of the money kings and trust magnates of this coun-
try.” While acknowledging that “this modern Caesar was [not] the first to die at the hands
of a Brutus,” Goldman completely ignored the history of the United States before her ar-
rival. She neglected to mention the shock waves set in motion by the relatively recent as-
sassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 in the post–Civil War era when an
embattled nation struggled to maintain some semblance of unity. Nor did she acknowl-
edge the confusion set in motion by the seemingly random assassination of President
James Garfield in 1881, who like President William McKinley, on the surface, appeared
to be a rather benign symbol of the consolidation of industrial capitalism.
Surprisingly, the tally of deposed leaders in the United States in the period just pre-
ceding Goldman’s emigration was higher than it had been in Europe and Russia where
the aura of assassinations appeared to be omnipresent. The assassination of the presi-
dent destabilized the apparent confidence that was building at a time when the United
States was in transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy; when alliances
between capitalists and government were strengthening; when labor militancy escalated
the demand for an equitable share in the value of their work; when women began to work
outside of the home and to challenge usual categories of domestic power; and when
freed slaves struggled to find a place in a culture in which they had been disempowered
and disenfranchised.
In the wake of the McKinley assassination, a desire for revenge unified the frag-
mented and wounded nation. More than ever, anarchism was equated with terrorism in
the collective mind of the mainstream public; the hunt for the logic behind what might
otherwise may have seemed like a random act of violence was on, with newspapers busy
telegraphing warning sirens across the world, searching hungrily for the blueprint of
conspiracy. Everyone in Goldman’s circle was suspect. Loose affiliations across the
borders between liberalism and radicalism receded. Although some anarchists were
amazingly vocal in their support of Czolgosz, many anarchists laid low. They cautiously
reached out to one another, as they too feared random acts of violence— especially from
an angry vigilante mob. Many labor unions, including those with a record of militancy,
publicly condemned the act, distancing themselves from the anarchists, in the quest to
keep what little progress they had won for workers intact. In this heated environment, it
took tremendous courage to claim even the slightest identification with anarchism.
Acutely aware of the need to shift this correlation, Goldman rose to the challenge.
Still recognized by the fuming press as a prophet of anarchism, Goldman persisted
in her unwavering mission to impart a more complex awareness to the public of the is-
sues, and by necessity, took the long view. Goldman focused on the need for education
about anarchism and urged her comrades to distribute the proceedings from the anar-
chist congress to the broadest possible constituency. She even briefly entertained the idea

INTRODUCTION 79
 of publishing a book about her life’s work up to this point, or an anthology of essays on
anarchism. In an environment of suppression by intimidation in the shadow of newly
drafted but not yet enacted anti-anarchist laws, Goldman also dared to open a Social Sci-
ence Club in New York City for a series of lectures intended to counter the rampant mis-
information about anarchism and to keep the lines of communication among her com-
rades open. She claimed that most people “who on other occasions have had a good word
for us, have drawn back in a cowardly fashion, and what of our own people? . . . I am
telling you if we need one-half century to bring clarity to our own ranks, how much
longer to lift the cloud which hangs over the spirit of the masses” (see Letter to Max Nett-
lau, 24 November 1901).
A variant on the heavy hand of repression Goldman had witnessed in Europe began
to build in the United States. Goldman was all too aware of the fact that the Haymarket
anarchists had been hung only fourteen years before on flimsier evidence than that
which had been hurled at her after Czolgosz’s arrest. Within days of the McKinley assas-
sination, the National Association of Merchants and Travelers adopted resolutions call-
ing upon the U.S. government to bar anarchists from entering the country. An anti-an-
archist immigration law was proposed. The police commissioner in New York ordered a
careful census of all anarchists in the city to “make conditions disagreeable for those
named.” A general wave of reaction rippled through the nation, and mention of even
the word “anarchist” was grounds for suspicion. Anarchist presses were ransacked. In
Spring Valley, Illinois, the militant Italian anarchist paper L’Aurora was shut down and
its editors run out of town. In New York City, the musical comedy The New Yorkers, which
contained three anarchist characters, had to be rewritten to eliminate them from the
show. An angry crowd attacked the offices of the Yiddish anarchist paper Freie Arbeiter
Stimme. Johann Most was arrested for publishing in the German-language anarchist pa-
per Freiheit a reprint of an article on political violence, written several years earlier and
included merely as a space-filler, to his misfortune, just days before the assassination. At
the Western Penitentiary in Allegheny City in Pennsylvania, Berkman, tainted by the as-
sumption of guilt by association, was sent back into solitary confinement.
Under the pseudonym E. G. Smith, Goldman pieced together a life of partial hiding.
She remained deeply involved with her political comrades, continuing to participate in
meetings, but with a slightly lower profile. Her attempt to build support for anarchism
among liberal free-speech advocates and middle-class women was temporarily sus-
pended; the climate of the nation had been too shaken by the death of its president to tol-
erate or herald anarchist speech. The anti-anarchist mood of the country made caution
advisable until the furor over the McKinley assassination had passed. The veil of physi-
cal safety customarily afforded to women had fallen in proportion to the public’s desire
for revenge. In her autobiography, Goldman recounted being beaten by a policeman as
she was being transferred from one jail to another, who “landed his fist upon my jaw,
knocking out a tooth, and covering my face with blood. Then he pulled me up, shoved
me into the seat and yelled, ‘Another word from you, you damned anarchist and I’ll break

80 INTRODUCTION
every bone in your body!’” 75 Such frightening experiences were unavoidable in the path
she had chosen. In 1901, during what was perhaps the most terrifying period of her life,
Goldman countered her profound despair with hope and accepted her fate without re-
sentment or sentimentality. She weathered the storms of political transformation with
remarkable resilience—a quality she would need to call upon in the turbulence ahead.

LOOKING BACK
When they were in their early twenties, Goldman and her comrades Alexander Berkman
and Modest Stein sealed their ménage à trois with a youthful “pact to dedicate their lives
to the cause in some supreme deed, to die together if necessary, or to continue to live and
work for the ideal for which one of us might have to give his life.” 76 Goldman and Berk-
man especially were bound in body and soul by their public complicity in the attempt to
avenge the deaths of striking workers—and lived out the elation and sacrifice implied
by the drama of their gesture. Made for America, 1890–1901, documents their story as it
began to unfold—when Goldman entered the political stage and Berkman was behind
bars— each a constant presence in the others’ life. Their voices are the bookends that
unite this volume.
In an age in which speech itself was a heavily contested right, Goldman challenged
social and economic norms and, in so doing, articulated rarely voiced but commonly
held yearnings. The first volume of this documentary history tracks the beginnings of
Emma Goldman’s political emergence as an immigrant radical, whose battle with Amer-
ica elicited the country’s best and worst—its most visionary edge and its most repressive
arsenal. Goldman, a Russian Jewish immigrant, had forged a place in the vast and var-
ied political terrain of the United States. She embodied the paradox of her times: her
“beautiful ideal” of anarchism—an attitude of life, a theory, and a practice of complete
freedom—seemed to fit the open spirit of the American dream. Yet her belief in the in-
evitability of political violence—the destruction of the system of injustice that would al-
low for the construction of a new social order—left her vulnerable to the forces of reac-
tion and placed her firmly in the margins of the culture.
Goldman, who asserted that she never courted violence, also questioned the appeal of
the purely pacifist position. She labeled pacifism as a signifier of privilege and oblivious-
ness to the brutality of government and corporate safeguards of political power— espe-
cially against the demands of labor. Yet the issue of political violence was equally prob-
lematical for anarchists—victimized by the public’s misapprehension of the intent of the
few among them who engaged in such acts and torn apart by their own awareness of the
deadening repression that often followed their attempts at retaliation against injustice.
For her compassion for the perpetrators, Goldman would be marginalized and for-
ever entwined with their fate. She, like the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin, never

75. LML, p. 307.

76. LML, p. 62.

INTRODUCTION 81
 wavered in her empathy for those “sensitive souls” who commit political violence— even
when she considered their acts tactically unwise. Nor did she express regret when these
events set in motion waves of severe reaction and repression, remarking that they often
did more to bring anarchism into public attention than any book or pamphlet. Paradox-
ically, Goldman rarely commiserated with the common person who experienced ripples
of terror and revulsion in the wake of such acts—those whose fears allowed for no tol-
erance for the distinction among anarchists between targeted attentats and generalized
acts of terror. In response to public rancor and the pervasive resistance to pursuing a
compassionate investigation of the conditions that propelled political violence, she re-
mained indignant to the end.
Her primary commitment to anarchism and her lifelong association with Alexander
Berkman, who was by far the more militant of the two and the one who carried out “the
act” and directly supported others similarly engaged—kept the shadowy edges of vio-
lence close by. Her relationship to Berkman and his act predisposed her to avoid con-
demning other anarchists who resorted to violence, no matter how far her method of
political practice had shifted from theirs. Although she had colluded in planning the at-
tentat on Frick, even confessing to it in her memoir, Goldman’s most powerful weapon
was not physical violence but the spoken and written word. Her own writings and the
published reports of her lectures bear witness to the uncanny power of her eloquence to
leave her audience—across class, cultural, and, in some cases, even political, divides—
spellbound. Her words inspired others to action—and flamed their desire to transform
the world. Her persuasive oratorical powers, however, were less feared because of the as-
sociation of anarchism with violence than because of the public’s even greater dread of
the anarchist challenge to social and cultural norms, especially on the issue of sexual-
ity—the most powerful metaphor for freedom in all aspects of life. Goldman enlivened
the battle for the right to free expression; her persistent resolve sparked a gathering force
to win what she considered “the greatest and only safety in a sane society.” 77
Goldman engaged with every facet of the movement, with every fiber of her being. For
a young woman in her twenties, she had a remarkably forceful vision—both for herself
and for the world she hoped to transform. The selected documents in Made for America
reveal Goldman’s early empathy for the impoverished masses and the beginnings of
her desire to engage the privileged in the long battle to change a world in which the gaps
between the rich and poor were staggering. They reveal as well the acuity of her cultural
critique, her quest for consistency, and the high value she placed on personal integrity—
all elements of the largesse for which she would be celebrated later on. The documents
also display the palpably unavoidable pettiness and sectarianism within the anarchist
movement, the personal jealousies, and often misguided grandiosity. This documentary
history of Goldman’s American years also allows the reader to explore the reasons for the

77. “Statement to the Inspector of Immigration,” New York Times, 28 October 1919.

82 INTRODUCTION
anarchists’ use of violence in reaction to what was perceived by Goldman and her circle
as the appallingly brutal government and industrial repression and exploitation of the
laboring masses.
The strength of her character dwarfed her frailties— of intermittent self-righteous-
ness, aggrandizement of her cause over all others, biting sectarianism against other, less
purist factions of the radical movement. Her characteristic conflations of personal loy-
alty with political principle, and her surreptitious internal battle between the sometimes
diametrical pulls of emotion and reason, account, in part, for the apparent inconsisten-
cies in her political arguments. Friendship and emotional intimacy were critical factors
for developing the trust and cooperation necessary for building a movement and a social
structure consistent with anarchist ideals. Her ideas on the subject of violence, by ne-
cessity veiled, are ultimately difficult to unravel, and are permeated with duplicity in the
name of protecting the guilty. Paradoxically, what detractors might consider to be Gold-
man’s delusions of grandeur, actually served her well. Her heightened sense of respon-
sibility and self-confidence, among other aspects of her psychological makeup, allowed
her, even at an early age, to believe that she had the power to take on the world; and, she
did. As she emerged from the polyglot of her immigrant culture into the vast and rocky
political landscape of the United States, she matured into a courageous, romantic, em-
pathic, eloquent, and integrative thinker. Above all, Goldman strove to be a person of
principle and consistency. She faced her own demons and those around her, and evolved
into one of the most extraordinary figures of her time—in a world that was harsh and,
in many ways, still remains mysterious and impenetrable.
The first volume closes in 1901 when the two anarchists and comrades reflect upon
the ways in which they had changed in the years since Berkman’s attentat. Independently,
both Goldman and Berkman had developed a new compassion for their adversaries,
suddenly recognizing their shared humanity. In a particularly open and honest letter
(smuggled out to avert the gaze of the prison censors), Berkman articulated the essence
of both his and her deepening transformation (see Letter from Alexander Berkman,
20 December 1901): “I was especially moved by your remark that you would faithfully
nurse the wounded man, if he required your services, but that the poor boy, condemned
and deserted by all, needed and deserved your sympathy and aid more than the presi-
dent. More strikingly than your letters, that remark discovered to me the great change
wrought in us by the ripening years. Yes, in us, in both, for my heart echoed your beau-
tiful sentiment. How impossible such a thought would have been to us in the days of a
decade ago! We should have considered it treason to the spirit of revolution; it would have
outraged all our traditions even to admit the humanity of an official representative of cap-
italism. Is it not very significant that we two—you living in the very heart of Anarchist
thought and activity, and I in the atmosphere of absolute suppression and solitude—
should have arrived at the same evolutionary point after a decade of divergent paths?”
Berkman countered Goldman’s attribution for this change as the “ennobling and
broadening influence of sorrow” by reminding her that others who endured the horror

INTRODUCTION 83
 to which they had been subjected might have grown more embittered. He reflected on
the softening of the heart as part of the progression of their maturation: “The love of the
people, the hatred of oppression of our younger days, vital as these sentiments were with
us, were mental rather than emotional. . . . Only aspirations that spontaneously leap from
the depth of our soul persist in the face of antagonistic forces. At 30 one is not so reck-
less, not so fanatical and one-sided as at 20. With maturity we become more universal;
but life is a Shylock that cannot be cheated of his due. For every lesson it teaches us, we
have a wound or a scar to show. We grow broader; but too often the heart contracts as the
mind expands, and the fires are burning down while we are learning. At such moments
my mind would revert to the days when the momentarily expected approach of the So-
cial Revolution absorbed our exclusive interest. . . . Humanity was divided into two war-
ring camps: the noble People, the producers, who yearned for the light of the new gospel,
and the hated oppressors, the exploiters, who craftily strove to obscure the rising day that
was to give back to man his heritage. . . . The splendid naivety of the days that resented
as a personal reflection the least misgiving of the future; the enthusiasm that discounted
the power of inherent prejudice and predilection! . . . But maturity has clarified the way,
and the stupendous task of human regeneration will be accomplished only by the
purified vision of hearts that grow not cold” (see Letter from Alexander Berkman, 20 De-
cember 1901).
Whether compassion, in fact, could be a force of healing in their troubled world is a
question whose answer was yet to unfold.
candace falk, june 2002
chamakome ranch, cazadero
& the emma goldman papers,

university of california, berkeley

84 INTRODUCTION
 EDITORIAL PRACTICES

SELECTION
The documents in this volume are selected from the comprehensive microfilm edition
of the Emma Goldman Papers, published 1991–1993. In addition, this volume contains
documents discovered after, and in some cases as a result of, the publication of the mi-
crofilm collection. In selecting documents for this volume, which covers the earliest part
of EG’s career, the editors have tried to select the most representative (and in some cases
the only) documents to illustrate EG’s life and career between 1890 and 1901. Because
so little of EG’s correspondence from this period has survived, the reader will notice
a large percentage of the documents have been drawn from EG’s published writings in
the anarchist press, as well as from accounts of EG in mainstream newspapers. Close to
80 percent of the extant correspondence from the early years of her career has been se-
lected for this volume, some of it written in German and translated here for the first
time. We include a number of letters from Alexander Berkman to EG, although unfor-
tunately no correspondence from EG to Berkman from this period has survived.
Documents fall into three general categories: personal correspondence, published
writings (including newspaper accounts of EG’s lectures as well as interviews with her),
and government reports.
The majority of the documents in vol. 1 are drawn from the radical and popular press.
The published documents are selected to reflect EG’s activity within the anarchist com-
munity and include her early articles on anarchism, free speech, marriage, and violence,
as well as correspondence and travelogues, all published in the anarchist press. The doc-
uments selected illustrate her entrance into and evolution within the political anarchist
movement in the United States and Europe. Also included are a number of reporters’ ac-
counts of her lectures and early interviews with her, selected as representative of main-
stream media interest in EG as well as offering another perspective on EG’s political
ideas and actions. The New York City dailies, and especially the sensation-seeking New
York World, made a point of covering the lives and culture of the recent immigrants on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The government documents illustrate the fragile and adversarial relationship EG
had with state agencies and officials both in America and Europe. While the number of

85
 government documents will increase in later years as EG’s notoriety and her perceived
influence increases, it is apparent that, from 1895, EG was recognized as a central figure
in a movement that threatened the stability of the state, and hence was regarded as a per-
son warranting surveillance. The government documents reveal the interplay between
revolutionary activity and the opposing structures of state power.

FOREIGN-L ANGUAGE DOCUMENTS

English was not Goldman’s first language. As a seventeen-year-old immigrant, her pri-
mary languages were German and Russian though she possessed some command of
Yiddish. Later she would also gain some competence in French and Italian. Her English
spelling and syntax, especially in these early American years, was sometimes faulty and
idiosyncratic. We have left it as it is. In the interest of documentary purity, we have pro-
vided, where space allowed, the original German text, followed by English translation, of
pertinent correspondence as well as several of Goldman’s philosophical essays and her
travel reports from lecture tours.

ARRANGEMENT
The documents are arranged chronologically, according to date of authorship or publi-
cation of text. Documents dated only by month and year are placed at the beginning of the
month. Documents dated only by year are placed at the beginning of the year. Where pos-
sible, a place of authorship is also provided and added to the date line at the beginning
of a document. For documents of the same date, EG’s correspondence is placed first.

TEX T
Documents are presented in their entirety, except for several newspaper articles that
cover a broad range of topics; in such cases, we have excerpted only the section focusing
specifically on EG. Also, EG’s 1893 trial transcript has been excerpted for reasons of
length and to keep undue repetition to a minimum. A summary of any text that has been
excised is provided at the end of the truncated document. These documents may also be
consulted in their entirety in the microfilm edition.

FORMAT
Some features of all the documents have been standardized for this volume. All doc-
uments include a title line identifying them as correspondence, essays, articles, in-
terviews, or government documents. Styles of dates and place names have also been
standardized; the date and place line immediately follows the document title. For corre-
spondence, salutation and signature lines have been placed consistently. In the body of
the documents, paragraphs have been indented consistently, and empty lines between
paragraphs have been closed up. Immediately following the text of the document is a lo-
cation line describing the origin or physical location of the document as well as the repos-
itory, archive, or institution where the original document may be found. The location line

86 EDITORIAL PRACTICES
may be expanded as a short paragraph identifying and describing any textual irregulari-
ties not reproduced in the document, information about any excised portions of text, al-
ternate versions, publication history of the document, or accompanying matter such as
photographs or illustrations.

TRANSCRIPTIONS
EG was largely an autodidact and an inveterately bad speller. Her correspondence most
dramatically reflects her rapid progress both intellectually and linguistically in the first
decade and a half of her career. With Goldman’s correspondence we have rendered the
transcriptions of the originals in a very literal form. All misspellings and grammatical
errors are preserved. Words and characters struck out in the original, indicating an
abandoned thought or construction, are transcribed when legible with a strike-out bar
through them.
Spacing between words has been made regular. A single space is used between sen-
tences. Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected by the editors. Often EG
would demarcate the end of a sentence with a large space but no period, followed by a
capital letter to mark the beginning of the next sentence. Periods have been silently added
by the editors to standardize the text and increase readability. Apostrophes have been
silently inserted in place of the thin spaces that EG often used to denote contractions or
possessive constructions.
Two informal shorthand markings in particular have not been preserved: EG’s place-
ment of a bar over the letter “u” to distinguish it from an “n” and over a consonant to in-
dicate that it should be doubled. Both practices were common in German script at the
end of the nineteenth century and appear mainly in EG’s letters written in German,
though she occasionally carried them over into her letters in English as well. Instead, the
bar over a “u” has been ignored, while barred consonants have been rendered as double
consonants. (In one instance a footnote signals the alteration in the transcription, where
the barred consonant occurred in EG’s signature and her intention might be of interest
to the reader.)
Interlineations and superscripts are brought down to the line. Long dashes at the end
of a line or paragraph are rendered with a dash of standard length. Hyphens at the end
of a line in an original document are not preserved unless they are normally part of
the word.
In printed texts a less literal transcription policy is used than for EG’s own manuscript
texts. Obvious typos are silently corrected, as are misspellings. Older or otherwise legit-
imate alternate spellings are preserved, such as the older spelling of “Pittsburg” in a
number of cases. This same practice applies to third-party government documents. Edi-
torial insertions are rendered in italics and enclosed in square brackets, for example [re-
minds]. Conjectured words are also set in italics, followed by a question mark, for ex-
ample [comrade?]; and illegible text is indicated by [illegible].
Readability, the convenience of the researcher, and a desire to prevent unnecessary

EDITORIAL PRACTICES 87
 confusion have informed the transcription policy. Certain elements in EG’s correspon-
dence that are less likely to be of interest to the student or historian have therefore been
standardized.

ANNOTATION
Footnotes provide brief elucidation of specific persons, radical newspapers and organi-
zations, and events mentioned or alluded to in the body of a document. Annotation is
provided at the first substantive mention of the person, event, or periodical. Fuller con-
textual information is provided in the appendixes: the Chronology as well as in the three
alphabetical directories of personal biographies, periodicals, and organizations. In addi-
tion to clarifying names, dates, and events and providing minimal cross-references to
documents mentioned or cited in a given text, the footnotes alert the reader to vagaries
in the original document not reproduced in this edition. Footnotes also briefly identify
important themes and ideas that informed the intellectual and philosophical develop-
ment of EG.
Annotation also provides missing voices in a particular discussion or debate, or refers
the reader to other sources in the microfilm edition or elsewhere that are directly related
to a particular document. This has been done as thoroughly and consistently as possible,
but the reader must be aware that the amount of material relevant in certain cases, even
with respect to material contained in the microfilm edition, remains too vast to account
for absolutely.

CHRONOLOGY
The Chronology provides both a broad overview of important events during the period
from 1869 to 1901 as well as a day-by-day record of EG’s activities and movements (in as
much detail as is possible to document from the historical record). The Chronology also
traces EG’s introduction to platform speaking, identifying where possible the date, loca-
tion, and topic of her lectures.

DIRECTORIES
In addition to the annotations and the Chronology, the three directories help to contex-
tualize the radical history of the period—the labor strikes, political events, social move-
ments, and organizations and political figures, whether well known or obscure—that
were integral to EG’s world. Each volume is intended to stand alone, although the reader
should be aware that the directories are time-bound primarily by the years covered in the
volume, and thus may not cover the entire history of a person’s life or an organization’s
trajectory.

INDIVIDUALS
The personal biographies in the Directory of Individuals add further detail to the short
identifying footnotes accompanying the documents. Each directory entry gives the indi-

88 EDITORIAL PRACTICES
vidual’s dates, nationality, and a short history of his or her political and social activities
especially during the period of this volume. Where applicable, the entry also identifies
the person’s oeuvre, including periodicals contributed to as well as books and pamphlets
published.

PERIODICALS
The Directory of Periodicals identifies the important radical, anarchist, and socialist
newspapers and magazines that were part of the political world in which EG operated.
All periodicals in which EG’s writings were published, as well as other contemporary pe-
riodicals that informed the political world in which EG lived, are listed. Each entry
identifies publication dates and locations as well as editors and principal contributors.
The periodical’s political orientation is identified and, where possible, EG’s participation
in the life of the periodical or the view the periodical took toward EG’s political career is
described.

ORGANIZATIONS
The Directory of Organizations adds further documentation to the complex political
world of which EG was a part. Entries identify important organizations mentioned or al-
luded to in the documents, giving contextual history to the period that helped to define
the anarchist and radical movement in America.

EDITORIAL PRACTICES 89
This page intentionally left blank
 A B B R E V I AT I O N S

DOCUMENT DESCRIPTIONS
FORM
A autograph
P printed
T typed

TYP E
D document (trial transcript, printed leaflet, etc.)
L letter
Pc postal card
W wire or telegram

SEAL
f fragment
I initialed
S signed
Sr signed with signature representation
U unsigned

EXAMPLES OF DOCUMENT DESCRIPTIONS

ALS autograph letter signed
ALSf fragment of a signed autograph letter
API autograph postcard initialed
PLSr printed letter with signature representation
TDS typed document signed
TDSr typed document with signature representation
TLI typed letter initialed
TLS typed letter signed
TLSr typed letter with signature representation
TLU typed letter unsigned
TWSr typed wire with signature representation

91
 REPOSITORIES, ARCHIVES, AND INSTITUTIONS
CLU University of California, Los Angeles Institutional Location: Department of
Special Collections, Research Library
CSmH Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
CtY-B Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
CtY-S Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
DLC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
DNA National Archives, Washington, D.C.
GA RF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Fed-
eration; formerly TsGAOR, the Central State Archive of the October Revolution),
Moscow
IEN Northwestern University Library, Special Collections Department
IISH International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
IU-U University of Illinois, Chicago, Library
MBU-ab Boston University Libraries, Special Collections. Institutional Location: Anna
Baron Papers
MBU-EGP Boston University Libraries, Special Collections. Institutional Location: Emma
Goldman Papers
MCR Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
MH-H Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
MHi Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
MiU Labadie Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University
of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
MnHi Minnesota Historical Society
NN Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations
NNC Butler Library, Columbia University, New York
NNMA New York City Municipal Archives
NNU New York University, New York
NSyU Syracuse University

OTHER ABBRE VIATIONS

PERSONS
AB Alexander Berkman
EG Emma Goldman

PUBLICATIONS
EGP Candace Falk et al., eds., The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition.
Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1991–1993; reference is by reel number.
LML Emma Goldman, Living My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931; reprint, New
York: Dover Publications, 1970.

92 ABBRE VIATIONS
DOCUMENTS, 1890 –1901
This page intentionally left blank
 Ar ticle in the B A LT I M O R E C R I T I C
Baltimore, 25 October 1890

An Eloquent Woman Talks to the

Foreigners in German of Their Condition
and How to Remedy It.

Miss Emma Goldman, of New York, delivered two addresses to workingmen in this city
on Sunday last. The first one was at Industrial Hall, where she spoke to the International
Workingmen in the afternoon, and at night spoke before the Workingmen’s Educational
Society at Canmakers’ Hall.
Miss Goldman is a young woman of perhaps twenty three years of age, and is a fine
speaker. She was born in Germany, but at an early age left her native country to go with
her parents to Russia, where she began to notice the oppression of the poor, and, like
many others, she immediately set to work to study out some means to alleviate their con-
dition. At the Canmakers’ Hall meeting she said, among other things, that when she
came to this country and saw the magnificent buildings, and then saw the wretched
squalor of the tenement houses, she wondered and cried “Oh! How did it come to pass
that such grand and Magnificent things can exist so close to such wretched misery.” And
she was of the opinion that conditions in this country were almost as bad as in Europe.
She said that wages were comparatively less in this country than in Russia, since in
the latter country everything is so much cheaper. Another thing was that in Russia they
knew that there exists a tyrant, but in America all were supposed to be free; yet men are
hanged for free speech,1 while others were sent to Blackwell’s Island.2 Yet there are
people to teach you how to throw off the yoke. The same general conditions exist in all
countries, and the authorities and those whom we are accustomed to look for advice ap-
pear to be in league against us. Michael Cohn 3 and William Harvey also made addresses.

Baltimore Critic, 25 October 1890.

1. A reference to the execution of four anarchists in November 1887 for their alleged part in the Hay-
market riot the previous year.
2. Most likely a reference to the prominent anarchist Johann Most, who was fighting a year’s prison sen-
tence to Blackwell’s Island for a speech he gave 12 November 1887, the day after the execution of the
Haymarket anarchists. He eventually served the sentence, from June 1891 to April 1892, for incite-
ment to riot.
3. Anarchist Michael Cohn was a physician and also a financial supporter of EG throughout her life.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1890 95

 Ar ticle in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 3 May 1892

Anarchists in Charge.

Herr Most’s Friends Captured the Union Square Meeting.

They Hooted Secretary Lloyd and He Left in Disgust.

Half the Speakers Declined to Address the Meeting—A Rabid Female Agitator
Delivered a Fiery Appeal Until She Was Carted Away— The Demonstration
Was an Inglorious Fizzle—Police on the Scene.

Probably the angriest people in the city this morning are the members of the Central La-
bor Union, for their May-Day celebration last night in Union Square, on which they had
based such great expectations, was captured by the Anarchists, and it looked at one time
as if the whole thing would end in a riot.
As the plaza began to fill up at 8 o’clock it was noticed that the biggest crowd was con-
gregating around the truck on the east side of the square from which Anarchist John
Most had announced he would speak.1
B. Witkowski was the Chairman, and when the signal to start was given he came for-
ward and had just said “Workingmen,” when cries of “Most! Most! We want John Most!”
began to ring through the air.
“Mr. Most is not here,” Witkowski replied. “You can’t hear him, and I hope you will
keep quiet.” This only incensed Most’s friends, and they shouted louder than ever.
George K. Lloyd, Secretary of the Central Labor Union, came forward.2 He has a
strong voice and thought he would be able to manage them, but he only added fuel to the
flame. “John Most is not here,” he screamed, “and if he was he would not speak, for, let
me tell you, we’re not Anarchists.” 3 Then they started yelling and hissing.
“It’s no use trying to speak,” said Lloyd. “I’ll leave you in disgust,” and with that he

1. The announcement of Johann Most’s intention to speak at the rally appeared in Freiheit, as well as in
handbills distributed by Jewish anarchists. In various papers on the Sunday preceding the demon-
stration, the Central Labor Union (CLU), organizers of the event, in an effort to spurn any connection
to the anarchists, formally announced their intention to deny Most permission to speak. See Freiheit,
30 April 1892, p. 1; Arbeiter-Zeitung, 6 May 1892, p. 2; Der Anarchist, 7 May 1892, p. 4.
2. George K. Lloyd served as the recording secretary to the New York City Central Labor Union during
1891–1892.
3. Conflict in the crowd’s reaction may have been indicative of the political divisions within the organi-
zation. Some other CLU locals were more open to anarchist membership. For instance, Charles Mow-

96 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

jumped from the wagon. There was an instant rush towards
him by Most’s friends, and trouble seemed imminent.
Inspector McAvoy and Capt. McLaughlin had 100 police-
men drawn up in line behind the cottage,4 and when the row
started the Captain took along a dozen men and made for the
truck. He got there just as Lloyd escaped, but he looked as if
he would like to charge the crowd.
“All right, Captain,” shouted Witkowski, “we’ll quiet
them.”
They sent to the cottage for Henry Weismann, editor of
the Bakers’ Journal, and who is supposed to be a friend of
Most.5 When he commenced to speak they all cheered. His
speech was very mild, and he strongly urged them to look to
the trades unions for their emancipation and to let politics
alone.
After that the Anarchists had it all their own way. A Johann Most, internationally renowned German an-
Mrs. Goldmann, a disciple of Most, clambered on the truck archist and early mentor to Emma Goldman. (Labadie
and started off on a harangue in German. She is a little Collection, University of Michigan)
woman, with spectacles and a squeaky voice, which sounded
as if some one were crying in distress. How to get rid of the
crowd puzzled the Central Labor Union officials, until some
suggested hitching the horse to the wagon. The idea was
acted on, and just as the female agitator gave one tremendous wail the horse was
whipped up and started off, but this did not discourage the speaker, for she kept up her
screaming until she was out of hearing distance from the crowd. Then she dropped from
the tail end into the street.6

bray and Harry Kelly were both influential in the Boston Central Labor Union, which sponsored John
Turner’s lecture in that city on 4 May 1896, after Turner attended a regular session meeting of the
CLU on 3 May 1896. See also Letter to Max Metzkow, 2 December 1896, below, for examples of CLU
support for Alexander Berkman.
4. The cottage, a wooden chalet in front of which ran a colonnade, was located on the north side of the
square. Speakers used its porch as a rostrum from which to address crowds gathered on the wide
plaza facing it.
5. Henry Weismann (1863–1935), a prominent German anarchist and trade unionist, was editor of Bak-
ers’ Journal.
6. EG’s address was reported sympathetically and in great detail the following day in the Yiddish-lan-
guage anarchist periodical Freie Arbeiter Stimme. A critical account appeared in the 6 May 1892 New
York Arbeiter-Zeitung, a Yiddish Socialist Labor Party weekly: “while the glasses of the ‘well-known’
Mrs. Goldman blazed and her voice squealed, the horse got the propaganda of the whip and the an-
archist speaker made progress far away with horse power in Hotzeplotz. They were left with long
noses. Mrs. Emma Goldman nevertheless courageously continued her shrieking, as long as her voice
could still be heard. And then she even more courageously jumped down from the wagon onto our
poor earth which must bear the burden of so many fools.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 97

 Meanwhile the people on the piazza of the cottage had not been having an easy time,
for when three of the speakers, A. Jablonowski,7 Charles F. Wilson 8 and Charles Soth-
eran,9 were called on to speak, they flatly refused unless Henry Weismann, J. H. Edel-
mann, W. C. Owen and R. Lewis, who were also announced as speakers, were sent away.10
Chairman Lapine was in a terrible way. He implored them not to create any confusion
but to speak for the good of the cause, but they wouldn’t appear on the same platform
with those four. Jablonowski and his friends are members of the Central Labor Union
and the Socialist Labor party. Henry Weismann is the man who split the Central Labor
Federation and formed the New York Federation of Labor because of the presence of the
Socialists.11
The other three were members of the Socialist Labor party and afterwards separated
from them and formed the Socialist League.12 This was the cause of all the jealousy.

7. Possibly Ludwig Jablinowski (b. 1856), a cigar maker and member of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP)
and the New York City CLU, for which he served as financial secretary from 1884 to 1886. Active in
Henry George’s mayoral campaign in 1886, Jablinowski was a founder in 1889 of the New York Cen-
tral Labor Federation (CLF), an organization opposed to the CLU. Jablinowski lectured on labor is-
sues in the New York area around 1892 and in San Francisco in 1893. He was a reporter, and later
editor, for the SLP’s propaganda organ, the People, and a reporter for the New Yorker Volkszeitung.
Jablinowski was part of the SLP faction that opposed the newly formed and anarchist-influenced So-
cialist League, which split from the SLP in 1892.
8. Charles F. Wilson was a rock driller by trade and member of the New York City CLU and the SLP (in
the faction that opposed the Socialist League). Wilson ran for office in both New York City and state
elections on the SLP ticket several times between 1891 and 1893. In 1893 he served on a committee
of the SLP designated as a liaison with a delegation of French socialist workers.
9. Charles Sotheran (1847–1902) was a journalist and socialist who helped launch the SLP. He wrote
for various New York newspapers, including the World and the Sun. He ran for Congress in the tenth
ward of New York City—the Lower East Side neighborhood—in the 1894 election on the People’s
Party (or Populist Party) ticket. Sotheran was expelled from the SLP by Daniel De Leon supporters
in the 1890s, and subsequently supported the Socialist Party. His works include Horace Greeley and
Other Pioneers of American Socialism (New York: Humboldt Publishing, [1892?]) and Percy Bysshe
Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer (New York: C. P. Somerby, 1876).
10. John Edelmann and William C. Owen were both anarchists and members of the Socialist League;
Roman Lewis was a member of the anarchist group Pionire der Frayhayt (Pioneers of Liberty).
11. In 1889 the socialist trade unions and the SLP organized the New York Central Labor Federation
(CLF) after ties were broken with the New York Central Labor Union, which was affiliated with the
American Federation of Labor (AFL). The CLF then applied for affiliation with the AFL, which
Samuel Gompers and the Executive Council of the AFL granted. Later that year, the CLF reunited
with the CLU. However, a quarrel between the organizations led to another split, which was even-
tually reconciled, with the aid of Gompers. However, when the CLF reapplied for its charter from
the AFL, Gompers rejected its application, noting that the SLP was among the organizations it rep-
resented and arguing that the AFL as a trade union could not represent a political party. This led to
a bitter dispute between the SLP and the AFL with Daniel De Leon, editor of the SLP paper Daily
People, calling for socialists to leave the AFL. In August 1891 several New York City unions led by
Henry Weismann organized the New York Federation of Labor in the hope of unifying labor activists
independent of party politics.
12. The Socialist League was a New York anarchist organization founded in 1892 by John C. Kenworthy,
William C. Owen, and John H. Edelmann, among others. It was modeled on the Socialist League of

98 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 About twenty organizations marched to the Square, and when the meeting started
nearly three thousand people were present. When they found how things were going
many left in disgust. The speakers from the cottage were Jacob Latzer, Henry E. Hicks,13
W. C. Owen, Hugh Greenan,14 R. Blissert,15 Andrew Murray, J. Mayers and S. H. Jacobsen.
The hottest speech was made by Hugh Greenan, of D. A. 49,16 who wanted the work-
ing people to make “city officials and policemen understand that they’re our servants
and we’re their masters.”
Resolutions were passed urging the toilers to sink petty differences and band together
for the reduction of the hours of labor.17 It was said that Anarchist Most was seen on the
outskirts of the crowd, but this could not be verified.18

New York World, 3 May 1892, p. 1.

England, which had been established in 1884. The New York group argued that “the social question
has to be served not by any special clique but by the people at large” (Solidarity, 13 August 1892).
13. Henry E. Hicks was a member of the SLP who was active in the New York area around 1892, mostly
as a speaker on labor issues and workers’ rights. In 1892 Hicks ran for election as mayor of New
York City as the People’s Party (or Populist Party) candidate and was defeated by Thomas F. Gilroy,
a Democrat.
14. Hugh Greenan was a member of District 49, the New York branch of the Knights of Labor, which
was later absorbed into the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, a Socialist Labor Party organization.
Greenan emerged as a speaker for the American Federation of Labor in 1892, amidst the contro-
versy surrounding the New York Federation of Labor’s split from the AFL.
15. Robert Blissert (1843–1899) was a tailor, Irish nationalist, and labor activist. After being blacklisted
by employers for participating in the 1867 London tailors’ strike, Blissert immigrated to New York
City. He was active in the Tenth Ward Council of the International Working Men’s Association, the
Amalgamated Trades, and the Labor Union of New York. In 1872 Blissert attended the annual con-
gress of the International Working Men’s Association as the proxy delegate from San Francisco, was
elected president of the convention, and spoke in opposition to employing Chinese labor in the
United States. By 1882 Blissert had become a leader in the New York branch of the Knights of La-
bor, and helped found the Central Labor Union. He also was among those who organized the 1882
parade in New York, often referred to as the first recorded celebration of Labor Day. He was a mem-
ber of the American Free Soil Judicial Commission (1894), which had grown out of the single-tax
movement. When the Knights of Labor began to lose power to the AFL in the 1890s, Blissert relin-
quished his labor leadership position to open his own tailor shop in Manhattan.
16. District Assembly 49 of the Knights of Labor was organized in July 1882 and encompassed most of
the New York City and Brooklyn locals. With the decline of the Knights in the 1890s, District As-
sembly 49 joined with other local labor organizations to create the Socialist Trade and Labor Al-
liance, the first socialist labor federation in the United States.
17. For the text of the resolutions, see Bakers’ Journal, 7 May 1892, p. 1.
18. According to the 6 May 1892 issue of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Johann Most “remained calmly standing
not far away in the square, like a general observing a battle from afar.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 99

 Ar ticle in the NEW YORK WORLD
New York, 25 July 1892

Berkman’s Career Here.

Noted as an Autonomist and a Believer in Peukert’s Ultra Doctrines.

Detectives Hanley and Wade, who, as told in the Sunday World, were assigned by In-
spector Steers to look up any confederates that Alexander Berkman may have had in this
city, did not report yesterday. Inspector Steers refused to allow the detectives to be inter-
viewed. The Inspector’s theory, it is said, is that Berkman has Nihilist 1 accomplices in
New York. These Nihilists, it is believed, were back of Berkman in his infamous plot, and
are ready, in case of any failures to commit individual crimes, to sacrifice themselves in
turn to carry out their murderous schemes.
No information as to the progress Hanley and Wade are making in their search for Ni-
hilists, or as to whether they are shadowing the right people, could be obtained from the
Central Department officers.
It was learned from one source last night that not only Detectives Hanley and Wade,
of Inspector Steers’s staff, but in fact the majority of the sixty men from the Central De-
partment, were scouring the city in search of accomplices who may have plotted with
Berkman. Inspector Steers is also working to obtain as complete a record as possible of
Berkman’s career in New York.

THE ASSASSIN AN AUTONOMIST.

Berkman belongs to the wildest school of Anarchists. They maintain the right of indi-
viduals to seek vengeance for private or public wrongs without any responsibility result-
ing to their society for the criminal acts of each individual member of it. Every member

1. From the Latin nihil (“nothing”), the term was often used derogatorily by opponents to identify radi-
cals who purportedly believed in nothing and rejected all positive social values. The expression be-
came popular in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century and was used to describe intellectuals who,
influenced by Western ideas, advocated revolutionary change. Its literary archetype was Bazarov, a
central character of Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Though commonly and erroneously
applied to anarchists by outsiders, anarchists occasionally used the term to position themselves
within a specific Russian radical tradition. AB himself explained the use of the term in a 1907 letter
to Bolton Hall: “It was Turgenev who originated the term nihilist . . . prior to the introduction of ter-
roristic tactics in Russia. The term was intended to characterize the ‘sons,’ who had emancipated
themselves from the ideas and ideals of their ‘fathers,’ and who consequently denied all existing in-
stitutions and beliefs. . . . In Russia, nihilism was the social and political equivalent of universal athe-
ism, so to speak” (AB to Bolton Hall, 16 April 1907, Alexander Berkman Archive, IISH). The letter
was reprinted in Mother Earth 2, no. 3 (May 1907).

100 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 Alexander Berkman (“Sasha”) in 1890. Goldman’s young lover and
later, lifelong comrade and friend. (Labadie Collection, University of
Michigan)

is supposed to be a self-constituted judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one. They
call themselves Autonomists, and take their name from a paper called Die Autonomie,
published at one time in Vienna by the originator of the organization, one Joseph Peuk-
ert,2 an Austrian. Peukert’s teachings were so criminally rabid he was twice sentenced to
imprisonment for treasonable utterances. He was finally banished from his native coun-
try in 1884.
Then he went to London. He afterwards traveled all over the world, leaving in his track
little knots of hare-brained enthusiasts with a smattering of learning. Berkman was one
of Peukert’s pupils. He read Peukert’s writings about what the Autonomists call the “glo-
rious gospel of humanitarianism.” Peukert paid a visit to this country in 1890 and orga-
nized a band of Autonomists. Berkman was one of the first to join.
In Anarchistic circles it is said that John Most was jealous of Peukert and circulated
rumors to the effect that the Austrian was a spy.3 This led to a rumpus between the Reds

2. Joseph Peukert was editor of several anarchist publications in Europe and the United States, includ-
ing Die Autonomie, which never was published in Vienna.
3. Beginning in the 1880s, much of the German anarchist movement split roughly into two camps: one
led by Joseph Peukert and the other by Johann Most and Victor Dave. Although the split was, in large
part, the result of a personal conflict between Peukert and Most, it was also political: Peukert opposed

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 101

 and the Ultra Reds and is said to have had something to do with Berkman leaving Most’s
employment.4

A DISCIPLE OF PEUKERT.
It was on June 15, 1890, that Joseph Peukert came here to talk Anarchy to the Radicale
Arbeiter Bund.5 The meeting was held in Clarendon Hall. Berkman was at the meeting.
Peukert denounced Most, and was surprised to find the lights go out and hear half the
members shout for Most.
Berkman claimed to be the organizer of the “Pioneers of Liberty, Group of New
York.” 6 The members claimed to be men of the most advanced school of theorists and
do not disclaim their Anarchistic principles. It will be remembered that on the Day of
Atonement the Pioneers of Liberty hired the Labor Lyceum, in Brooklyn, to make a bur-
lesque of the religious exercises.7 As this is one of the most sacred holidays of the Jewish
religion the police were asked to suppress it. Most was to have spoken at the meeting, but
he refrained from doing so when he was threatened with arrest.

the theoretical and tactical tenets of Most’s Bakuninist anarchist collectivism, a system of collective
economic organization where goods are distributed based on work done by the individual or group.
Instead, Peukert promoted Kropotkin’s conception of communist anarchism, a system of collective
economic organization where goods are distributed according to individual or group need. However,
there are nuances and contradictions. The rivalry was also fueled by Peukert’s critique of Most’s pub-
lication Freiheit (distributed in Europe by Dave), for its autocratic censorship, and by Most’s response
to the founding of a new competing anarchist publication, Der Rebell (edited by Peukert in collabora-
tion with Otto Rinke), which threatened the financial and ideological supremacy of Freiheit. The rift
was deepened when Dave and his followers expelled Peukert and his followers from the Whitfield
Street Club in London, the First Section of the Kommunistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein (Commu-
nist Workers’ Education Association). In February 1886, Peukert and his followers formed Gruppe
Autonomie (Autonomy Group) and, in November, began publishing Die Autonomie. The split was ir-
revocably solidified in February 1887 with the arrest of Johann Neve, who was smuggling explosives
and propaganda into Germany. Neve was a charismatic figure highly respected by all for his personal
bravery and his ability to work within the anarchist movement across lines of political difference. Ar-
rested in Belgium, Neve was almost immediately handed over to the German police. Peukert was im-
plicated by many anarchists as complicit in the arrest because of his association with Karl Theodor
Reuss, who eventually was exposed as a member of the Berlin Political Police and the person appar-
ently responsible for Neve’s capture. Although other anarchists characterized Peukert’s involvement
with Reuss as careless rather than malicious, Peukert’s reputation was destroyed by allegations that
he was a police spy. This bitter split in the German anarchist movement would never heal, and its
remnants carried over to the movement in the United States.
4. EG recalled in Living My Life that AB worked as a compositor on Freiheit around 1890. At a national
conference of Yiddish anarchist organizations in New York on 25 December 1890, AB proposed
that the charges between Most and Peukert be investigated. AB’s suggestion enraged Most, which
prompted AB and EG to break ties with Most and Freiheit.
5. Radikaler Arbeiter-Bund (Radical Workers’ League), a German-language New York City anarchist au-
tonomous group, published Der Anarchist.
6. The Pioneers of Liberty was a Jewish anarchist group in New York City, founded on 9 October 1886 —
the day the sentences on the Haymarket anarchists were announced. AB was a member.
7. Provocative anti-religious Yom Kippur “balls” were held in this period by secular Jewish anarchists
and socialists—and especially by the Pioneers of Liberty—the festivities featured dancing, dining,
“atheist entertainment,” and, intermittently, more direct attacks on Orthodox Jews.

102 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 Peukert is a firm believer in bombs and firearms. He is a tall man, with black mus-
tache and goatee.

WHAT THE ASSASSIN’S ACQUAINTANCES SAY.

Berkman had very little money while in this city, yet he appears to have devoted the
greater part of his time to promulgating his pessimistic ideas, and devoted time that he
might have occupied in bettering his material fortunes to frequenting Anarchistic and
Socialistic gatherings and their headquarters and proclaiming his opposition to existing
social conditions. Well educated, philosophic, cool, deliberate in his methods, temperate
in his habits of life, bold in his plans, cool in executing them, and wholly unscrupulous,
he was possessed of those characteristics which go to make up the Anarchistic assassin.
There may be and doubtless are among the Anarchistic element in New York some
men who approve of what Berkman has done, but from Herr Most down to his humblest
follower none would openly approve the tragic method of “removing” the chief of the
Carnegie works. Most was ready to admit that he felt no regret that Frick had been shot,
and many Socialists and Anarchists expressed similar views, but not one was found who
was willing to proclaim himself a so sufficiently advanced Autonomist as to declare in fa-
vor of attempting to redress wrongs by the bullet or the knife of the assassin.
Several German printers, some of whom worked on Most’s Anarchistic organ, the
Freiheit, who were seen yesterday were willing to recall what they knew about Berkman,
but declined to allow the use of their names in connection with the publication of what
they had to say.
“He was a constant frequenter at Anarchistic headquarters, at No. 85 East Fourth
street,” said one man yesterday, “and never missed one of the weekly meetings.8 At
closed meetings of the Anarchists he did not hesitate to express his radical views of the
individual right to redress the wrongs of the working classes, and he usually spoke with
force and feeling. It was evident that his heart was in the work, and his cool, calm man-
ner indicated that he had the pluck and nerve to carry out any scheme he might plan.”
“I knew Berkman very well,” said another German printer. “He impressed me as pos-
sessing a great deal of personal force and strong character. He made no attempt to dis-
guise his social views, and he was a pronounced though not a loud-mouthed Nihilist. He
had very little money, and was, through necessity, very economical, but this did not ap-
pear to bother him. His habits were very simple, and he spent no money in drink. Al-
though it was apparent that he had seen better days, as far as money went, he made no
complaints and asked no favors, and always managed to pay for what he got. Berkman
was seen in this city only a few days ago, and if he had no money at his command it is
surprising how he managed to support himself and pay his fare to Homestead. It is my
belief that he was supplied with money from some outside source, but by whom I am un-
able to say.”

8. Paul Wilzig’s saloon was the meeting place of the International Club Freiheit.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 103

(top, facing page) Mug shot of Alexander Berkman taken by the Pittsburgh police
shortly after his arrest on 23 July 1892 for the attempted murder of Carnegie Steel
Company manager Henry Clay Frick, shot and wounded by Berkman in an attempt to
avenge the deaths of striking workers shot by Pinkerton guards under Frick’s orders.
(IISH) (top, this page) This handwritten note was presented to Frick’s secretary by
Berkman moments before his assassination attempt. The note reads “Dear Sir! I
would like to see you at your earliest opportunity, Alex Berkman.” The annotation
“A7” below Berkman’s signature matches the police catalogue number on his mug
shot. (IISH) (above) Sketch from the New York World of 26 July 1892, purporting to
show Berkman’s assassination attempt on Frick.
 Nicholas Alenikoff,9 President of the Revolutionist Society of Nihilists, has his place
of business at No. 205 East Broadway. There was a sign on the front door yesterday, la-
beled, “gone for the day.” Similar notices appeared on the doors of other Anarchists who
did not wish to talk about the case.
“All I know about Berkman’s movements while in this city,” said a man who knew him
at Anarchist headquarters, “was that he was employed for some time in the shirt factory
of Mr. Zimmerman, No. 718 East Eleventh street. He went there after he left the Jersey
factory on Greene street, where he formerly worked. All his spare time he devoted to agi-
tation methods. I recollect that several months ago he went to Worcester, Mass., and
other New England towns, with the intention of forming Anarchistic societies and
strengthening those already in existence among Russians there. He was engaged in this
work for some time.”

WHERE IS THIS YOUNG RUSSIAN?

Some people say that Berkman was accompanied to this country by a young Russian
named Aronstam,10 who studied in the same college with him at Kovno, Russia. An uncle

9. Nicholas Aleinikoff (ca. 1861–1921), Russian-born Jewish American socialist, lawyer, and intellec-
tual of the Am Olam (Eternal People) colonization movement. Following the pogroms of the early
1880s, he immigrated to the United States where he organized the Am Olam radical communal Jew-
ish colonies, became a leading spokesman for the Jewish community of New York, and founded or
was involved with a number of working-class Jewish organizations, including the Propaganda As-
sociation for the Dissemination of Socialist Ideas Among the Immigrant Jews (known as the Pro-
paganda Association); the Russian Working Men’s Union; the Russian Working Men’s Party (which
became the Russian-Jewish Working Men’s Association, and later the Jewish Working Men’s Asso-
ciation); the Russian Progressive Association; and the Russian-American National League. By 1892
Aleinikoff was fully engaged in practicing law in New York City and remained a staunch socialist de-
spite his relationships with anarchists. In an interview with the New York Times, which appeared on
26 July 1892, he denied knowing AB and declared himself “the first among any body of men to dep-
recate violent and high-handed notions by Anarchists or any one.”
10. Modest Aronstam, AB’s cousin, immigrated from Russia in 1888 and changed his name to Modest
Stein sometime after 1900.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 105

 of this young man Aronstam, Elias A. Aronstam, is in business as a druggist at No. 1904
Third avenue, this city. Mr. Aronstam said yesterday that his nephew, Modest Aronstam,
came to America about five years ago.
“Whether he was accompanied by any person,” said Mr. Aronstam, “I am not in a po-
sition to say. I do know that Modest gave trouble to his parents by refusing to finish his
course at college. He did not do well when he came to this country.
“He got under certain influences which were not for his good. The last I heard of
Modest was two years ago, when he came to me for money to take him home again to
Russia. I am inclined to think he returned to Russia, but I am not sure.”
What the pernicious influences were that his nephew suffered from Mr. Aronstam
did not say. He said that he had never seen Berkman, and that he had never heard of him
until he read the account of the shooting of Mr. Frick in Saturday’s Evening World.

AN ANARCHIST PAPER’S RE VIEW OF THE HOMESTEAD TROUBLE.

Der Anarchist, a weekly Anarchist paper published by Carl Masur,11 of No. 315 East Forty-
fourth street, has a two-column article from the pen of Bergmann 12 in this week’s issue
of the paper. It is headed, “The Tragedy at Homestead.” It reads:
“What happened at Homestead 13 between the working classes and capitalists during
the past two weeks is the birth of a new era on the American labor question. The major-

11. Carl Masur edited and managed Der Anarchist. Other editors included Claus Timmermann, Joseph
Peukert, and Otto Rinke. The World reporter quoted Masur in the excised portion of this article: “I
knew Berkman when he was in New York, but did not know him intimately. I only know by reputa-
tion of his anarchistic views, but there was no doubt that he was a pronounced Anarchist. As to his
relations with Miss Goldman I can say nothing. I know very little about the woman. She attended
some meetings of Anarchists, and was in sympathy with them, I believe. I have not heard from her
for some time and have no idea where she is at present.” The 30 July 1892 issue of Der Anarchist in-
cluded an article by EG on AB’s act.
12. Referring to AB, whose legal name was Alexander Schmidt Bergmann.
13. On 29 June 1892, workers at the Carnegie Steel Company in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and mem-
bers of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers went on strike to protest a proposed
wage cut. Three years earlier, in 1889, the union had won a strike against the company and negoti-
ated a three-year contract, which was set to expire on 30 June 1892. Henry Clay Frick, the company’s
general manager known for his anti-union policies, had ordered a solid board and barbed wire fence
built surrounding the steel works while negotiations between the union and the company for the re-
newal of the contract were still taking place. On 28 June the company began a lockout of the work-
ers and stopped negotiations. By 30 June the entire work force was locked out. On 5 July, Frick is-
sued his final orders to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency for the 300 strike-breaking
detectives that he had commissioned before the strike (and, allegedly, the wage negotiations) began.
Early in the morning of 6 July workers spotted the approaching army of Pinkertons and tore
through the company fence in an effort to stop the Pinkertons from entering the factory. A gun
battle ensued between the Pinkerton force and workers that lasted until the evening. Three detec-
tives and seven workers died during the battle or from wounds suffered, and many more were
wounded, including women and children. Six days later National Guard troops ordered by the gov-
ernor of Pennsylvania arrived in Homestead to restore order. Anarchists in the area, including
Henry Bauer, Carl Nold, and Max Metzkow, had gone to Homestead to agitate among the workers.
Nold and another anarchist printed a leaflet in English urging the workers to reorganize the steel

106 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

ity of the American working class are blind to the socialistic side of the question. They
believe in the old story of self-made men, that is, that every man has the key to the
method of becoming a millionaire.
“Those who do not believe this must believe that they are born as a beast of burden,
that is to work continually. In no other part of the world do the capitalists trample on the
workingmen with such brutality as they do in this country against all laws and morals.
The public offices and institutions in city and State are used for squeezing money out of
the people. The American people can see this every day. The working class believe firmly
that they have the law with them, and that the rich and poor are alike as far as the law is
concerned, but when the iron fist of the tyrant crushes them it is about time to give up
this sentiment. The drama which was played at Homestead illustrates this plainly. After
the workingmen sent back the hired assassins who were employed by the capitalists, the
capitalists then sent the State machine going. In the name of the law the people bow to
capitalism. But what position did the working class take to this outrage? They believed
they were entitled to the same rights as millionaires. Such things as cannons, Winches-
ter rifles, swords and other implements of war were not made for capitalists alone. They
have nothing to do with settling the wage question. The workingmen are just as good cit-
izens as their employers. The workingmen went so far in their blind obedience to the law
that they took the militia, banquetted them, made much of them in every respect, and
would have treated them as friends, had not the commanding officers given the work-
ingmen the well-earned kick. This was the first stream of cold water and it did its work
well. The General, with real American brutality, made the strikers understand that they
did not come there for their benefit, but they came there in the interest of the robber sys-
tem of capitalists. This was not sufficient to the workingmen, who wanted to see what
Frick & Co. would do in the works, with scab labor under guard of cannon and bayonets.
“Finally the capitalists caused warrants to be issued for the arrest of the most intelli-
gent and energetic of their leaders in the name of the law.
“This was not enough to open the eyes of the workingmen.
“They still believe in the law and think they have an impartial Judge, from whom they
will get their rights. They believe they have the same right to prosecute the millionaire as
they are being prosecuted.
“What irony! You would not think it possible that people who have gone through so
much would stand it very long. But it is so. The workingmen are thick-headed and it will

mill in accordance with revolutionary anarchist principles. On 8 July Bauer and two other anarchists
traveled from Pittsburgh (six miles away) to Homestead to distribute both the leaflet and anarchist
periodicals in English, German, French, Bohemian, and Italian. AB, who arrived in Pittsburgh late
on 13 July, met Nold the following day and stayed with him for the next eight days, where he also met
Bauer. (Nold’s home was also the location of the printing press used to publish Nold and Bauer’s
leaflet.) On 23 July AB entered Frick’s office, shot and stabbed him, but did not succeed in killing
him. AB was arrested immediately. Two days later, on 25 July, Nold was arrested on conspiracy
charges and the next day Bauer was also arrested on suspicion of conspiring with AB.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 107

 take a good many hard knocks to put sense into them. The blows, however, must fall so
heavy that they must be made to understand it. Frick & Co. seemed to be well pleased
with the idea that they will get along with scab labor.
“The second act has only begun. The thick-headed American workingmen should at
last see that the laws are all against them and in favor of the great robbers. In the latter
end they will ascertain that the working organizations as they are to-day will not be strong
enough to work against the robber system. They must learn that non-union men who are
driven to work in their places through hunger and starvation are their friends, and to us
Anarchists it is left to sow the seed on good ground, so that Anarchism should thrive.
“And this trouble at Homestead must be the beginning of the crusade.”

A SOCIALIST PAPER SAYS FRICK HAS HIS OWN MEDICINE.

The Volks-Zeitung, the socialistic daily paper published at 184 William street, came out
Sunday with the following headlines of the Homestead tragedy. First, in German, were
the words “Bullets for Frick.” Next came the word “Nemesis.” Then, in English type,
were the words “A Dose of His Own Medicine.”
At the office of the Volks-Zeitung it was said that Berkman had been a subscriber to the
paper and that it was sent to him regularly in New Haven, where he worked as printer up
to five months ago. Then he came to this city and purchased the paper from the stand.

BERKMAN AND MISS GOLDMAN.

Although Assassin Berkman while in this city appears to have had very little leisure, and,
if the statements of his associates are to be credited, very little money, yet he found op-
portunity to indulge in at least one romantic adventure. The woman who figures in the
case was Miss Emma Goldman. She is described as being a Russian or German, about
twenty-seven years of age, of medium height, inclined to plumpness of figure, and of
comely face. She is a blonde and wears glasses.
Like Berkman, she is a Nihilist, or Anarchist, and was a regular attendant at the
weekly meetings of the International Workingmen’s Association,14 at No. 85 East Fourth
street, of which body both she and Berkman were active members.
She made herself conspicuous at the May Day demonstration of the Central Labor
Union at Union Square on the evening of May 2 last, at the time the meeting was cap-
tured by the adherents of Herr Most.15
As the crowd began to assemble about 8 o’clock it was noticed that the greater num-
ber of people was congregating on the east side of the square, from which Most had an-
nounced his intention of speaking. When Chairman Witkowski called the crowd to or-
der there were cries for “Most!” “Most!”

14. This is a reference to the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), sometimes known as
the Black International.
15. See “Anarchists in Charge,” Article in the New York World, 3 May 1892, above.

108 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 Secretary Lloyd,16 of the Central Labor Union, came forward and said:
“John Most is not here, and if he was he couldn’t speak, as we are not Anarchists.”
Lloyd sprang from the wagon, and at the same moment friends of Most rushed for-
ward in a threatening manner. Capt. McLaughlin, with 100 policemen, restored order,
but after that time the Anarchists ran things to suit themselves.
Then it was that Miss Goldman, the sweetheart of Berkman, made herself conspicu-
ous by climbing on top of the truck. The Central Labor Union men were puzzled to know
how to get rid of the crowd, when some one suggested hitching a horse to the truck. This
was done, and just as Miss Goldman began to harangue the crowd the horse was
whipped up and the truck was driven away. The agitator in skirts was not, however,
wholly suppressed by this device, and she continued to appeal to the crowd and pro-
claimed her Anarchistic ideas as long as her voice could be heard.

HER SPEECH AF TER THE SHOOTING.

Miss Goldman has a strong face, with intelligent, animated expression, and the use of
spectacles gives to her a studious, intellectual appearance. She speaks German, English
and Russian. At a secret meeting of Anarchists, at No. 85 East Fourth street, Saturday
night, she was present and made a forcible address.17 She alluded to the shooting of Frick
by Berkman and appeared to be well satisfied with what Berkman had done. She said she
knew that he was sincere and earnest in the cause of Anarchism and that his deed in
Pittsburg showed what he would risk for the sake of the cause he had espoused. Miss
Goldman spoke in an excited manner, and many of the listeners were surprised at her
radical notions. After her speech she talked about Berkman. She admitted he was a
friend of hers, but declined to say whether he was her lover. She said that Berkman’s par-
ents were not living and that she did not believe he had any relatives in this country.
Whatever the precise relations between Berkman and Miss Goldman were, it is
known that he was an ardent admirer of the young woman and there is reason for be-
lieving that she reciprocated his attachment. The attentions Berkman bestowed upon the
young woman necessarily compelled an expenditure of money in escorting her to places
of amusement and entertaining her in other ways. This leads many who knew Berkman
to speculate as to where the money came from if he was so poor as represented by other
persons to be. It seems to be conceded by a good many of Berkman’s old associates that
while he made no display of money, yet he had some mysterious source from which he
drew supplies, as a great part of the time he was idle and at others his earnings would
barely support him in the most economical fashion.

16. The wording of George K. Lloyd’s statement here varies slightly with his disclaimer as quoted in the
3 May New York World article.
17. The meeting was not secret; Freiheit had announced that Most was scheduled to lecture that night
before a meeting of the IWPA.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 109

 ONCE WORKED IN NEW HAVEN.
A dispatch from New Haven says that Berkman appeared in that city five years ago with
a woman whose name is given as Emma Goldbaum. This is possibly the Emma Gold-
man with whom Berkman, or Bergman, was seen here. The woman gave several lectures
in New Haven in small German halls and lived with Berkman at No. 25 Silver street.
Whether they were ever married does not appear, but the inference is they were not. Af-
ter living together some time they separated, and Berkman went to work for Paul
Gephardt, who publishes a German paper called the Connecticut Volks Blatt. He was six
months with Gephardt, and there gained a little knowledge of typesetting.
He was a very quiet fellow while in New Haven, belonged to none of the anarchistic
or socialistic societies, and was known to only half a dozen people in the town. After a six
months’ stay in New Haven Berkman disappeared. [. . .]

New York World, 25 July 1892, p. 3. The excised remainder of this article reprints resolutions passed at an
11 July meeting of the Socialist Labor Party urging the abolition of capitalism and the uniting of labor into
one political party and demanding “that the thugs, who took part in the midnight assault on the Homestead
workingmen, and their employers, H. G. Frick and William and Robert Pinkerton, be tried and executed as
murderers.” The article spuriously places AB at the meeting and suggests he may have been driven to his act
by the proclamations made there.

110 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 Inter view in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 28 July 1892

Anarchy’s Den.

Emma Goldman, Its Queen, Rules with a Nod the Savage Reds.

Peukert, the Silent Autonomist, the Power Behind Her.

Berkman, the Assassin, the Tool of These Leaders.

Their Headquarters in a Cheap Flat on Fifth Street.

[. . .]AND HERE WAS EMMA GOLDMAN.

In the far right-hand corner of the second room, near a dusty, cobwebbed window, sat a
woman. Alone in that gathering of hard-faced, half clad men, enveloped in a dense at-
mosphere of choking smoke, she reclined placidly in a barroom chair, reading. She
seemed rather pretty. The back of her chair was tilted against the rear wall, and her left
foot rested on the rung of a chair in front of her. A white straw hat, with a blue band
streaked with dotted white, lay on the table at her elbow.
Chestnut-brown hair that had been parted on the side fluffed over her forehead, leav-
ing only a trace of the part. At the back the short hair was as negligently arranged. She
has a shapely head; a long, low, white forehead; light bluish-gray eyes, shielded by
glasses; a small, finely chiselled nose, rather too wide at the nostrils for symmetry; a col-
orless complexion; cheeks that once had been full, but now are slightly sunken, giving a
moderately pinched appearance to a face that loses its beauty of form in the rapid decline
to the chin. The mouth in repose is hard and sensual, the curves gross, the lips full and
bloodless.
A neck that once was rounded was still well poised, but as she turned her head the
tendons bulged out into scrawniness, and blotches here and there added to the sharp
disappointment one met with after leaving the upper part of the face. A trim figure, five
feet four or five inches tall, well moulded with hard flesh, clothed in a white blouse, a tan-
colored belt and a gown of blue sateen striped with white, and tan shoes.
That was Emma Goldman as she sat in the Anarchist drinking den 1 at 5 o’clock yes-
terday afternoon.

1. Zum Großen Michel, the saloon at 209 Fifth Street and the regular meeting place of the Gruppe Au-
tonomie (Autonomy Group) as well as the address of Die Brandfackel and of Claus Niedermann, who

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 111

 A sketch of Goldman at Justus Schwab’s saloon in New York City’s Lower East
Side, an anarchist meeting place. The sketch appeared with an article in the
28 July 1892 New York World.

“You are Miss Emma Goldman?”

“I am.”
The reporter passed some pleasantry and she smiled. Her lips wreathed into lines that
were uglier than when her face was in repose. The two front teeth were set wide apart,
and on either side there were dental hollows, making the interior of the mouth look
black, or rather that dull opaque hue characteristic of the mouths of some snakes. She
spoke English well, with a positive tone, but there was a noticeable accent.

edited Die Brandfackel while its editor and founder Claus Timmermann was imprisoned on Black-
well’s Island in 1893. The reporter later noted that “the walls were hung with advertisements of An-
archistic papers and on a rack were bound files of La R[é]volt[é], [Die] Autonomie and other periodicals
evidently of Anarchistic views.”

112 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

PROUD OF BEING AN ANARCHIST.
“Yes, I know Berkman. He is a splendid man—a man of brains and courage. Am I an
Anarchist? I am, and I am proud of it. They have arrested Mollock, I see. Well, I am sure
that Mollock had nothing to do with that little affair in Pittsburg.” 2
“But Mollock and Berkman were friends?”
“Oh, yes, they were friends, and I suppose Mollock owed Berkman some money. In
fact, I know he did, and that is why he sent it to him.”
“When did you last see Berkman?”
“Oh, some time ago; a week, maybe, or ten days. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Did he tell you where he was going and what he was going to do?”
“No, he does not make confidences with people in that way about such matters!”
“But you are his wife?”
“Ha! ha! yes, I am his wife, but in the anarchistic way, you don’t know what that is! The
anarchists don’t believe in marriages by law. We want no law and when we agree to marry,
why ha! ha! there you are.”
“The anarchist wife then does not expect the confidences of her husband?”
“Why should we? But that is a matter I don’t propose to discuss.”
“You lived with Mrs. Mollock?” 3
“Yes.”
“The name under the bell is Pollak, is that her real name?”
“I suppose so. She is Mollock’s wife, as I am Berkman’s. She couldn’t live with her first
husband and went with Mollock.”
“But Mollock signs his name to his letters to her as Pollak?”
“Is that so?”
Miss Goldman tried to be arch. It was a dismal failure she did not repeat.

“ THE POLICE MAKE ME TIRED.”

“Mollock met his wife in Buffalo, and when they came here Berkman assisted them and
we all lived together in Chrystie street. No, I don’t know where his wife is now, but I be-
lieve she has gone to Long Branch to see her husband. The papers made a big fuss about
me, but I have not been concealing myself. I have been around town all the time.”
“Were you called upon last night by Chief O’Mara, of the Pittsburg police?” 4

2. Police in Long Branch, New Jersey, acting on a request from Pittsburgh police, arrested Frank Mol-
lock on the basis of his having sent six dollars to AB in Pittsburgh on or around 23 July. Mollock ad-
mitted sending the money but denied any part in AB’s attempted assassination of Henry C. Frick, the
“little affair” EG refers to in this interview. AB recounted in prison how he had tried to collect money
owed him by various comrades immediately after arriving in New York on 10 July.
3. Josephine Mollock, whom EG and AB had lived with, apparently locked EG out of the apartment un-
der pressure from the landlord after AB’s attentat.
4. Pittsburgh police chief O’Mara had recently claimed that AB’s attempt on Henry C. Frick’s life was
part of an anarchist conspiracy to murder seventy millionaires whose names appeared on a list dis-
covered in the desk drawer of Pittsburgh anarchist, and suspected accomplice, Henry Bauer.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 113

 “No, I was not. The police make me tired. They are mostly fools. They go about mys-
teriously and do nothing. All they ever did was to put that old fool, Most,5 in jail.”
“You are a friend of Most’s?”
“A friend! The old fraud! I only wish that when I had a chance to do it, I had made him
give me some of his money. He is a coward, and an Anarchist for revenue only.”
“Were you not his Anarchistic wife before he took up with Lena Fischer 6 and you met
Berkman?”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
Again that hard, unmusical laugh. This time it had a ring of insincerity in it that be-
lied her words. “I was not,” she said decisively.7
“When was it that you had a chance to make him give you money?”
“You reporters are too impertinent. I hate reporters.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate all inquisitors. I have travelled all over this country, lecturing to the
groups, and I have spoken here when that paltroon Most was afraid of the police. Yes, I
am a Russian, but from what part of Russia I don’t propose to tell. But above all I am an
Anarchist.”
“You are proud then of your lover’s achievement?”
“Indeed I am; we all are.”
“You received several telegrams last Saturday; were they from Berkman?”
“Now, I don’t propose to say any more. I have told you enough, and I suppose you will
write a lot of lies. You all do, because your people must pander to the capitalists who give
you bread, and the capitalists like to read the lies about us Anarchists.”
“Won’t you tell me when you last heard from Berkman?”
“That is no concern of the public. Now, sir, I will say no more. If you were to ask ques-
tions all night I would not answer.”

THE OTHER ANARCHISTS AROUSED.

One by one the swarthy, half-clad and grimy Anarchists in the front room had been com-
ing near to where their queen sat. Some one of them probably gave her a sign to say no
more. A dozen stalwart black and redbearded Anarchists stood a few feet back of the re-
porter. Another reporter approached and asked Emma Goldman a question. With her

5. Johann Most had recently been released from prison where he had served a sentence (June 1891 to
April 1892) for his alleged “incendiary” speech on 12 November 1887, the day after the Haymarket
anarchists were executed.
6. Lena Fischer was the sister of Haymarket anarchist Adolph Fischer, although the reporter may have
confused her with Helene Minkin, a young anarchist who had lived with EG and AB, and later mar-
ried Johann Most.
7. In fact, EG had been drawn to Most as a lover and mentor soon after she first moved permanently to
New York. He encouraged and helped organize her first lectures, sparking the beginning of her pub-
lic speaking career.

114 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

eyes glancing with a significant look at the group of her friends, she said in a voice far
louder than was necessary, so loud that it could have been heard in the front room:
“I have nothing to say. Will you not let me alone?”
As if her words were a signal, half a dozen Anarchists closed about the reporter, wav-
ing their fists in the air and hurling oaths and objurgations in German and Russian at
the reporters. One man stood near a table with an ice-pick in his hand.

“ALL REPORTERS SHOULD BE KILLED.”

The group grew larger. Emma Goldman rose to her feet. One burly Anarchist, broader
chested than Sullivan,8 clinched his fists and, with face aflame with beer, heat and anger,
exclaimed in German that all reporters should be killed.
“Yes, he can understand German!” he howled. “You——!”
“No,” replied the woman in German, “he is an American.” She smiled that hollow cav-
ernous smile, her eyes shone behind her glasses. A glad and proud look was on her face,
and while she made a faint display of quieting her slaves her pale face took on some color
and she stood there wreathed in smiles amid smoke and beer fumes. [. . .]

New York World, 28 July 1892, p. 2; includes sketch of EG. Excised from this article are brief interviews with
Claus Timmermann and Fritz Oerter, both of whom protected themselves from police investigation with
vague and evasive responses to the reporter’s queries. The headline refers to Joseph Peukert, anarchist com-
munist and a leader of the Gruppe Autonomie (Autonomy Group).

8. A reference to the first American world heavyweight bare-knuckle boxing champion, John L. Sullivan,
who held the title from 1882 to 1892.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 115

 To D E R A N A R C H I S T
New York, 30 July 1892

Eingesandt.

Lange Jahre hat es ein Mann fertig gebracht, sich als Held und Märtyrer hinzustellen,
die größten Schurkereien zu verüben und zu verläumden und so die besten Kräfte zu
untergraben.
Und dies alles unter dem Deckmantel des Anarchismus, ohne daß auch nur eine
Hand sich erhoben hätte, die Maske von dem Gesicht dieses Mannes herab zu reißen.
Der Mann von dem ich hier spreche ist John Most der “Anarchistenführer”, der
Mann, der es wagt, sich an die Seite eines Krapotkin, einer Perowskaya und anderer
Helden unserer Bewegung zu stellen.
Genossen und Freunde, wenn ich jetzt die Feder ergreife, um Euch diesen Most in
das richtige Licht zu stellen, so ist es wahrlich nicht persönlicher Haß, (ich bin gerade
im Interesse der Bewegung noch nicht gegen Most aufgetreten), sondern die Empörung
über die Haltung dieses Schuften, unserem Genossen Berkmann gegenüber. Ja, die Em-
pörung die einen jeden ehrlichen Arbeiter ergreifen muß, über dieses verläumderische
Treiben, über dieses Denunziantenthum dieser Demagogen.
Die Genossen werden das Interview, das M. mit einem Reporter hatte, an anderer
Stelle übersetzt finden.
Was, frage ich, kann einen Menschen veranlassen, so gemein, so niederträchtig zu
handeln?
Einfach der schmutzige persönliche Haß, der Neid und die Furcht ist es, was diesen
Menschen treibt so zu sprechen. Most ist feig, feig bis zum Äußersten, daß ist jeden
bekannt, der ihn nur ein bischen genau kennt.
Ich, die ich ihn leider gut kennen gelernt habe, die jeden Charakterzug zur Genüge
studirte, ich behaupte, daß Most ein ganz erbärmlicher Feigling, ein Lügner, Schaus-
pieler und zugleich ein Waschlappen ist.
Alle seine sogenannten heroistischen Thaten sind nicht der Liebe zur Sache, der Er-
gebenheit zum Prinzip entsprungen. Oh nein! Es war Berechnung, es war ganz schmut-
ziger Ehrgeiz, der ihn zwang “sein” Prinzip (?) zu vertreten. Was hat denn Most bisher
Großes geleistet? Ein paar Jahre hat er im Gefängniß, wo es ihm nebenbei bemerkt, sehr
gut erging, zugebracht, das ist alles. Die Arbeiter haben ihren letzen Cent hingegeben,
um es diesen Parasiten an nichts fehlen zu lassen.
Wo es aber galt, irgend eine That zu vollbringen oder andere zu unterstützen, da hat
er sich stets feige und erbärmlich gezeigt.
Ich führe nur aus letzter Zeit einige Beispiele an, die Versammlung auf Union Square

116 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

Masthead from Der Anarchist, German-language anarchist communist paper edited by Joseph Peukert, in which
prison correspondence between Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman was published. (Labadie Collection, Uni-
versity of Michigan)

am 1. Mai, wo er aus Furcht nicht hinkam, troztdem er Wochen zuvor aufforderte die
Genossen möchten sich an der Maidemonstration betheiligen—Weiter die Versamm-
lung in Philadelphia, die er deshalb sich nicht zu adressiren getraute, weil kurz zuvor
Genosse Hoffmann verhaftet wurde.
Und die größte und gemeinste Feigheit die jetzigen Handlung Most’s. Aus Angst und
persönlichem Haß erzählt er allerlei Lügen über Genossen Berkmann. Anstatt diese
That propagandisch auszunützen, versucht er sie in den Koth hinab zu ziehen. Nichts ist
ihm zu schlecht, um es gegen B. anzuwenden. Er erzählte unter anderem dem Reporter,
daß B. ein sehr ungeschickter Arbeiter sei, troztdem er mir und anderen gegenüber
hundertemal betheuerte, daß B. ein sehr geschickter und fleißiger Arbeiter sei.
Aber weil B. frei und offen M. die Meinung in’s Gesicht sagte, weil er gesagt hat, daß
er alles andere eher sei, als ein Anarchist, weil B. die Corruption und den Schmutz in
der “Freiheit” aufgedeckt, wurde er Mitte Juli entlassen, mit dem Versprechen bald
wieder eingestellt zu werden.
Genossen! wenn in Euch noch ein Funken Selbstachtung vorhanden ist, wenn Ihr
nicht theilnehmen wollt an den Schurkereien dieses Charlatan, dann bedenkt diese
Worte.
Ihr seid es, die ihn ernähret, die ihn Mittel schafft, um ein feines Leben zu führen.
Durch Euren Schweiß und Euer Blut, hat er sich einen Namen erworben. Hat er doch
so oft gesagt, er sei lieber Carl Schurz als John Most.
Genug der Worte, denn man müßte ein Buch schreiben, um all die elenden Hand-
lungen zu behandeln.
“Die Polizei will ihn verhaften.” Eine größere Dummheit, eine größere Schande
könnte der That B.’s nicht gemacht werden. B. würde Most niemals etwas anver-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 117

 trauen, einfach weil er diesen Schwätzer kennt. Most hat schon manche That eines
Genossen hintertrieben, so manche Tapfern abgehalten etwas zu thun. Das fanatische
russische Volk hat die Niedertracht eines Alexander III. erkannt, hoffentlich werden
auch die aufgeklärten deutschen Genossen endlich die elenden Handlungen eines Most
erkennen.
Denn solange wir solche Demagogen groß ziehen, welche durch uns und unsere
Groschen “Größen” werden, wird die Bewegung gehemmt sein und die herrschende
Klasse triumphieren.
Worte helfen bei solchen Menschen nichts; eine Tracht Hiebe würde diesen Men-
schen wohl nicht ändern, aber ihm das Maul stopfen.

Emma Goldmann.

118 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 To D E R A N A R C H I S T
New York, 30 July 1892

Submitted.

For many years one man has succeeded in portraying himself as a hero and martyr, per-
petuating the greatest roguery, slandering, and thus undermining the best forces.
And all this under the veil of Anarchism, so that not even one hand would ever be
raised to rip the mask from the face of this man.
The man about whom I am speaking is John Most, the “Anarchist Leader,” 1 the man
who dares to place himself alongside Kropotkin, Perowskaya and other heroes of the
movement.

1. EG was responding to an interview with Most that appeared in the New York World on 27 July. Most’s
position on AB’s act is also articulated in the article “Attentats-Reflexionen,” which he composed on
31 July and in which he questioned the efficacy of propaganda by the deed under present conditions
in the United States. Most submitted his article to anarchist press committees in New York and Al-
legheny. Both unanimously approved the piece, but the former thought it best to withhold publica-
tion until tempers cooled while the latter argued for its immediate publication. Most’s article finally
appeared in Freiheit on 27 August. The following excerpts from Freiheit (27 August 1892, p. 1; trans-
lated from German) display both Most’s argument against the tactical efficacy of AB’s act and his at-
tempt to acknowledge the personal courage of AB’s intent.
The other set of people in this country only needed to hear who the would-be assassin was, to forget about all the re-
sentment they may previously have held against the cad and assassin Frick and to make a hullabaloo about the for-
mer, joining in the hysteria of the nativist press. A Russian Jew—a man without regular employment—an enfant
perdu—that was enough to stir up all the prejudices of Americans against the would-be assassin, as in a dust cloud
made by buffaloes stampeding through a wildfire. The fact that this man is also an Anarchist—all the more terri-
ble. Americans have never heard anything good about the Anarchists—now suddenly all the nonsense was revived
which their press had been funneling into their indecently long ears— especially since 1886. Should such a mood
signify propaganda in our sense? If so, then go on! Let’s keep shooting the next best monopolists. One cannot really
call that dangerous because the panderers of Americanism want to fricassee us anyway.
But we have a different opinion, have had it since time immemorial and have always said it—: in a country where
we are so poorly represented and so little understood as in America, we simply cannot afford the luxury of assassi-
nation. Where on every main square in the country one has barely a few active forces, there it is more than frivo-
lous, there it is suicidal, to hand them over to the clutches of the overpowering enemy provoked through the atten-
tat, without drawing even one person into the movement [ohne daß im Übrigen auch nur ein Hund vor den Ofen gelockt
wird; literally, “without enticing even one dog to leave his warm and cozy little corner behind the oven”]. [. . .]
If some stranger had said to us that he wanted to shoot Frick, we probably would have said to him that that was his
business. And in our hearts would have stirred something like joy, for haters of tyrants such as we can surely have
no sympathy for a monstrous bloodsucker such as Frick. A Berkmann would surely have been the last person whom
we would have instructed to commit such a deed, for he has, as has been implied above, no less than all of the char-
acteristics which would stimulate the most idiotic prejudices of idiotic Americans and thereby awaken a general an-
tipathy for the act and make easier the inevitable campaign against Anarchists.
So that we are not misunderstood, we want to express our opinion somewhat more clearly about the assailant
himself.
We were always somewhat uneasy about Berkmann because we considered him to be eccentric; we became thor-
oughly his enemy when he joined the New York Autonomist clique whose entire doings consisted already for years
in rolling obstacles in the way of a reasonable and systematic anarchistic agitation, in ripping apart that which we had
built up etc., and when he behaved among those people in a particularly fanatical and poisonous manner toward us.
All that, however, cannot and must not stop us from saying here openly: Berkmann demonstrated great heroism

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 119

 Comrades and friends, if I now seize the pen to put Most in the proper light for you,
it is truly not out of personal hatred (in the interest of the movement, I have not yet spo-
ken out against Most), but out of indignation over this scoundrel’s behavior toward our
comrade Berkmann. Yes, the indignation that must grip every honest worker, indigna-
tion over the malicious conduct and denunciatory practices of this demagogue.
The comrades will find the interview that M. had with a reporter translated in another
place.2
What, I ask, can induce a person to act in such a petty and base manner?
It is simply ugly personal hatred, envy, and fear that drove this man to speak in such a
way. That Most is rotten, rotten to the core, is apparent to everyone who knows him at all.
I, who unfortunately came to know him well and have sufficiently studied his every
characteristic, maintain that Most is a wholly miserable coward, a liar, a dissimulator, and
above all a weakling.
All his so-called heroic accomplishments did not arise from devotion to the cause or
dedication to principles. Oh no! It was calculation, wholly disgusting ambition that com-
pelled him to advocate “his” principles(?). What great things has Most accomplished up
to now? He spent a couple of years in prison, where, by the way, he had quite an easy time
of it, and that is all.3 The workers have given up their last cent so that this parasite would
not want for anything.
But wherever he was counted on to complete an action or support others, he showed
himself to be cowardly and miserable.
I will cite a few recent examples. The gathering in Union Square on May 1 where, out
of fear, he did not appear, although weeks before he called upon comrades to participate
in the May Day demonstration 4 —also the gathering in Philadelphia that he did not dare
to address because Comrade Hoffmann had just been arrested.5

with the attentat, just as since then he has behaved quite bravely in jail. In this regard one owes him all respect and
one can only regret— completely apart from the fact that in spite of everything else the attentat was a complete fail-
ure and also that the most serious consequences will in all probability result from it for our party—, that this en-
ergy was not saved up for a bigger and more suitable deed.

2. Most’s interview first appeared in rough translation on 27 July 1892 in the New York World and was
reprinted in the 30 July issue of Der Anarchist.
3. Most, in fact, served a number of prison sentences. In 1869 he spent a month in prison in Vienna for
an incendiary speech. In 1870 he was sentenced to five years in prison for high treason for his par-
ticipation in a free speech demonstration, although he was released after serving a few months. Af-
ter being expelled from Austria he was summoned to court forty-three times while editor of the Chem-
nitzer Freie Presse, again serving prison time in February 1873. In 1874 he was sentenced to two years
in prison for giving a speech on the Paris Commune in Berlin. In March 1881 he was sentenced to
sixteen months in prison in England for applauding the assassination of Alexander II in Freiheit. In
the United States, Most served a prison term from June 1891 to April 1892, for an allegedly “incen-
diary” speech he gave on 12 November 1887, the day after the Haymarket anarchists were executed.
4. A reference to the May Day demonstration at Union Square orchestrated by the New York City Cen-
tral Labor Union. Most, who was scheduled to speak at the event, was not present (although some re-
ports alleged his presence). See “Anarchists in Charge,” Article in the New York World, 3 May 1892,
above.
5. Possibly Dr. Julius Hoffmann, who in 1893 paid EG’s $5,000 bail bond after her arrest for incitement
to riot.

120 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 And the greatest and most vile cowardice comes in Most’s current behavior. Out of
fear and personal hatred he tells all kinds of lies about Comrade Berkmann. Instead of
using this act for propaganda purposes, he is trying to bring it down to the level of filth.
For him nothing is so bad that it cannot be used against B. Among other things he told
a reporter that B. was an inept worker, although he swore to me and others a hundred
times that B. is a very skillful and diligent worker.
But because B. told M his honest opinion to his face, because he said that he was any-
thing but an Anarchist, because B. uncovered the corruption and filth in Freiheit, he was
let go in the middle of July with the promise that he would be brought on again soon.
Comrades! If you still possess a spark of self-respect, if you do not want to take part
in the mean tricks of this charlatan, then consider these words.
It is you who nourish him, who create the means for him to lead a fine life. Through
your sweat and your blood he has acquired his name. How often he has said that he
would rather be Carl Schurz 6 than John Most.
But enough words. One would have to write a book to deal with all his miserable
deeds.
“The police want to arrest him.” A greater idiocy, a greater disgrace could not be made
out of B.’s deed. B. would never entrust something to Most simply because he knows this
gossipmonger. Most has already frustrated several of his comrades’ acts, and thus has
kept several courageous people from doing anything. The fanatical Russian people have
recognized the vileness of Alexander III,7 hopefully the enlightened German comrades
will finally recognize Most’s wretched behavior.
For as long as we cultivate such demagogues, who through us and our pennies be-
come “great men,” the movement will be hampered and the ruling class will triumph.
Words do not help with such a person; a good thrashing would probably not change
such a person, but it might shut his mouth.8

Emma Goldmann

Der Anarchist, 30 July 1892, p. 4. Translated from German.

6. Carl Schurz (1829 –1906) was a German immigrant and participant in the 1848 revolution. In Amer-
ica he befriended Abraham Lincoln and took part in the Civil War. He was a Missouri senator, radi-
cal Republican, lawyer, and journalist. After the Civil War, Schurz advocated civil service reform and
the formation of the Liberal Republican party. He served as secretary of the interior from 1877 to 1881.
7. Alexander III (1845–1894), tsar of Russia from 1881, reversed many of the liberalizing trends of
his father, Alexander II, who had emancipated the serfs, instituted a system of limited local self-
government, and relaxed censorship and control over education. After his father’s death at the hands
of radicals, Alexander III reinstated control over the peasantry. He subjected minorities to Russifica-
tion, increased police power, limited the power of the local assemblies, and tightened censorship and
control over education.
8. Later, on 18 December 1892, EG would confront Most and strike him in the face with a toy horsewhip
at a meeting at 98 Forsyth Street in New York City.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 121

 Appeal in D E R A N A R C H I S T
New York, 13 August 1892

Aufruf!

Genossen und Freunde!

Der heldenmüthige Versuch des Genossen Berkmann, die menschliche Gesellschaft

von einer Bestie zu befreien, hat in allen hoch- und edelfühlenden Menschen ein sym-
pathisches Echo gefunden, und gewiß sind viele, wenn nicht alle, bereit, diese ihre Sym-
pathie dadurch auszudrücken, für die Erleichterung des in den Klauen kapitalistischen
Schergenthumes befindlichen Opfers ihr Scherflein beizutragen.
Genosse Berkmann ist ebenso wie wir gesonnen, die bodenlosen Säckel der
herrschenden Gerechtigkeitshuren und ihren Zuhältern nicht mit sauer verdien-
Arbeitergroschen zu füllen. Aber Berkmann ist gänzlich mittellos im Kerker und daher
außer Stande, die nothwendigsten Lebensbedürfnisse—außer mit ungenießbarer
Gefängniskost—zu befriedigen. Eine Anzahl Genossen hat es daher übernommen, den
Genossen Berkmann durch Collecten mit Mitteln zu versehen, sich mit menschliche
Nahrung versehen zu können. Zu diesem Zwecke sind Sammellisten angefertigt wor-
den, welche allen Genossen zur Verfügung stehen, die Gelder zu sammeln bereit sind.
Die Eingänge und Verwendung der Gelder wird im “Anarchist” quittirt.
Gelder und Nachfragen nach Sammellisten sind einstweilen an die Adresse des “An-
archist” zu richten.

Für die Unterstützungs-Gruppe

E. Goldmann.

122 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 Appeal in D E R A N A R C H I S T
New York, 13 August 1892

Attention!

Comrades and Friends!

The heroically brave attempt of Comrade Berkmann to liberate human society from a
beast has found a sympathetic echo in all high- and noble-minded people, and certainly
many, if not all, are ready to express their sympathy by contributing their bit to the relief
of the victim caught in the clutches of capitalistic myrmidons.
Comrade Berkmann is as intent as we are on not filling the bottomless purses of the
reigning whores of justice and their pimps with the hard-earned pennies of workers. But
Berkmann is in jail entirely without means and therefore unable to satisfy— except with
inedible prison food—the most essential needs of life. A number of comrades have
therefore taken it upon themselves to provide Comrade Berkmann through a collection
with the means to supply himself with human food. Collection lists have been prepared
for this purpose and are available to all comrades who are willing to collect monies.
Receipt and use of the monies will be acknowledged in the Anarchist.
For the time being, monies and inquiries about collection lists are to be directed to the
address of the Anarchist.

For the support group

E. Goldmann.

Der Anarchist, 13 August 1892, p. 1. Translated from German.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 123

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Allegheny Count y Jail, 20 August 1892

Liebe Freundin!

Deinen Brief vom 15. d. M. habe ich erst heute erhalten und sage ich Dir tausend Dank
für denselben. Gewiß hast Du Recht, daß die Genossen nicht prinzipiell handeln, wenn
sie Geld zu einem Vertheidiger sammeln. Zwei Pittsburger Vertheidiger haben sich er-
boten, mich unentgeltlich zu vertheidigen. Als Anarchist, der das Gesetz voll und ganz
verwirft, die heute bestehenden bekämpft und sie als Klassengesetze nicht anerkennt,
brauche ich keine Vertheidiger, die vom Gesetz für mich ein Almosen erbetteln. Ich
erkenne über mich keine Gesetze als meinen Willen.
Als überzeugter Egoist, als Anarchist, als Revolutionär habe ich meine That voll-
bracht. Ich werde meine That vor Gericht nicht zu beschönigen suchen, sondern ich
werde frank und frei erklären, daß ich von den Richtern keine Gerechtigkeit erwarte,
daß ich mir bewußt war, als ich die That beging, daß ich die ganze Strenge einer Geset-
zgebung fühlen werde, die nur für die Besitzenden und gegen die Armen gemacht ist.
Ich werde mich selbst vertheidigen, d. h. ich werde meine Gründe, warum ich Frick
tödten wollte, auseinandersetzen, ich werde sagen, was wir Anarchisten wollen, und wie
wir zu handeln haben. Ich fühle mich glücklich, daß ich den Feinden Anklagen ins
Gesicht schleudern kann, denn ich fühle mich als Ankläger, nicht als Angeklagter.
Ich habe keine Gerechtigkeit zu erwarten von Leuten, die uns knechten und zu
Thieren herabwürdigen. In einer Gesellschaft, in der die einen prassen, die anderen
hungern, wo jede natürliche Regung unterdrückt wird, wo der größte Barbarismus
herrscht, giebt es keine Gerechtigkeit. Ich hätte noch viel zu sagen, aber es nähme zu
viel Platz ein. Ich werde alles beim Prozeß sagen, was dann ja bekannt wird.
Den Anarchisten aber, die stets das Gesetz bekämpfen und doch Tausende von Dol-
lars für Vertheidiger ausgeben, diesen erkläre ich, daß sie kein Recht haben, sich Anar-
chisten zu nennen, denn dieses Geld wird viel besser zur revolutionären Propaganda
(wo es sehr nothwendig ist) verwendet.
Die jüdischen Genossen ersuche ich, kein Geld zu einem Vertheidiger zu sammeln,
mögen sie es zu einer Propaganda, wie die Meinige verwenden.
Meinen näheren Genossen und Freunden danke ich für alles, was sie für mich
gethan haben. Ich befinde mich wohl, und mögen mich unsere Feinde auch auf lange
Zeit einkerkern, ich werde stets derselbe bleiben. Allen Genossen ein Lebewohl. Hoch
die Anarchie!

Alexander Berkmann

124 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Allegheny Count y Jail, 20 August 1892

Dear Friend!

I have only today received your letter of May 15th, and I extend to you a thousand thanks
for it. You are certainly right that the comrades are not acting in a principled way if they
are collecting money for a defense attorney. Two Pittsburgh defense attorneys have of-
fered to defend me without pay.1 As an Anarchist who completely and totally rejects the
law, who stands against it in its present form and, it being class law, does not recognize
it, I need no defense attorney who begs for alms from the law for me. I recognize no law
over me except my own will.
I carried out my deed as a dedicated egoist,2 as an Anarchist, as a revolutionary. I will
not seek to whitewash my deed before the court, rather I will frankly and openly explain
that I expect no justice from the judges, that I knew when I committed the deed that I
would feel the full severity of legislation that is made only for the possessors and against
the poor.
I will defend myself; thus I will explain my reasons for wanting to kill Frick, and in
explaining this I will say what we Anarchists want and how we have to act. I am happy
that I can fling accusations in the face of the enemies, for I feel like the accuser, not the
accused.
I do not expect any justice from people who enslave us and reduce us to the level of
animals. In a society in which some feast while the others starve, where every natural in-
stinct is repressed, where the greatest barbarism rules, there is no justice. I would say
more, but it would take too much space. I will say everything during the trial, and then
all will be known.
To the Anarchists, however, who constantly fight the law and nevertheless spend thou-
sands of dollars for defense attorneys, to them I declare that they have no right to call
themselves Anarchists, for this money would be much better used for revolutionary
propaganda (where it is badly needed).
I ask of my Jewish comrades not to collect any money for a defense attorney; they
should use it for propaganda like mine.

1. Carl Nold’s and Henry Bauer’s attorneys, E. D. Moore and Joseph Friedman, offered to represent AB.
2. The term “egoist” (or, alternately, “egotist”) was understood to be associated with the individualist
branch of anarchism, often considered incompatible with anarchist communism. Grounded in the
writings of Max Stirner, the philosophy of egoism claimed that enlightened self-interest was the only
realistic basis for human conduct; the state and communism were rejected because they sought to
chain the individual to the general will. AB identified himself as an egoist again in a letter to Solidar-
ity. See Solidarity (New York), 9 February 1893, p. 1. EG also used the term in an 1893 interview. See
“Nellie Bly Again,” Interview in the New York World, 17 September 1893, below.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 125

 As for my intimate comrades and friends I thank them for everything that they have
done for me. I am well and should our enemies choose to imprison me for a long time,
I will remain the same always. To all comrades a farewell. All hail Anarchy!

Alexander Berkmann.

Der Anarchist, 27 August 1892, p. 4. Der Anarchist printed AB’s 20 August 1892 letter with this introduction:
“Comrade Goldmann received the following letter from Comrade Berkman.” Reprinted in Die Autonomie,
10 September 1892, p. 4. Translated from German.

126 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., October 1892

Theuere Freundin!

Du wirst gewiß geglaubt haben, daß ich Dich und alle lieben Freunde vergessen habe,
weil ich so lange nicht schrieb. Ich habe Dir einige Briefe geschrieben, da ich jedoch auf
keinen derselben eine Antwort erhielt, so kam ich zu der Gewißheit, daß man dieselben
gar nicht abschickte. Den letzten Brief erhielt ich am 25.8.
Ich war mir bewußt, daß ich als Proletarier und dazu als verhaßter Anarchist von den
Richtern keine Gerechtigkeit zu erwarten hatte, daß man aber mit soviel Gemeinheit,
mit solchem Raffinement bei meinem Prozeß vorgehen würde, hätte ich doch nicht
gedacht. Ich wurde ähnlich den russischen politischen Gefangenen auf administrativem
Wege fortgeschafft.
Die ganze Komödie dauerte kaum 2 Stunden. In größter Eile verurtheilte mich der
Richter zu 22 Jahren Zuchthaus. Natürlich gab man mir keine Zeit zum Sprechen und
da ich noch dazu nicht fließend genug englisch spreche, so konnte ich nicht viel sagen.
Ein paar Stunden später brachte man mich in mein neues “Heim”. Die herrschende
Klasse ist sehr konsequent in ihren Handlungen; wir Anarchisten sind ihnen im Wege,
bekämpfen sie; mit einem Wort, sind ihre gefährlichsten Feinde. Kriegen sie darum
einen von den unseren in ihre Hände, dann machen sie kurzen Prozeß. Die Bourgeoisie
hat die Macht und sie versteht sie der Gerechtigkeit zum Hohne anzuwenden. Würden
wir Anarchisten ebenso in unserm Handeln sein, würden wir mit eiserner Rücksicht-
slosigkeit vorgehen, würden wir mit jedem Tyrannen und Ausbeuter ebenfalls kurzen
Prozeß machen, die Macht der herrschenden Klasse würde platzen wie eine Seifenblase.
Denn ein Nichts ist ihre Macht, ohne die Unterstützung der Proletarier. Leider sehen die
Arbeiter nicht ein, daß sie es sind, die ein Recht auf alle Genüsse der Erde haben und
daß alle Herrscher, vom kleinsten Ausbeuter bis zum Zaren, überflüssig sind. Aber Ihr
Überzeugten, Ihr die Ihr wißt, wer unsere Feinde sind, laßt Euch durch meine Verur-
theilung nicht abhalten, weiter zu agitiren, die Lehren des Anarchismus zu verbreiten,
bis alle Menschen frei sind. Glaubt mir liebe Freunde, daß ich mich nicht im Geringsten
unglücklich fühle. Ich habe das Bewußtsein: recht gehandelt zu haben und das ist das
höchste Glück, die höchste Befriedigung für einen Revolutionär. Auch weiß ich, daß es
noch viele Frauen und Männer gibt, die trotz Kerker und Schaffot weiter arbeiten zum
Stürze der heutigen Gesellschaft. Mit diesem Brief nehme ich Abschied von allen Freun-
den und Genossen und sage allen Lebet wohl. Ich werde nur einmal im Monat schreiben
können und auch da nur sehr wenig. Besuchen kann man mich einmal in drei Monaten.
Man hat mir noch keine Arbeit gegeben. Zum Lesen bekomme ich die täglichen Zeitun-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 127

 gen und Bücher aus der Bibliothek. Schreibe oft, ich darf Briefe erhalten, ebenso sende
mir Geld. Lebe wohl, bleibe muthig und stark.

Mit revolutionärem Gruß, Dein Freund!

Alex. Berkmann

128 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., October 1892

Dear Friend!

You must think that I have forgotten you and all my dear friends as I haven’t written in
so long. I wrote you a few letters, but because I never received an answer to them, I came
to the conclusion that they were never sent. I received the last letter on August 25.
I understood that as a proletarian and as a hated Anarchist I could expect no justice
from the judges, but I would not have thought that my trial would be conducted with so
much cruelty and with such cunning. Like the Russian political prisoners, I was dis-
patched by administrative means.
The entire comedy lasted barely two hours. In great haste, the judge sentenced me to
22 years in the penitentiary. Naturally I was given no time to speak, and since I also can’t
speak fluent enough English I could not say much. A few hours later I was brought to
my new “home.” The ruling class is very resolute in its actions; we Anarchists are in their
way fighting them; in a word, we are their most dangerous enemies. When they get one
of us in their hands, they make short work of it. The bourgeoisie has the power, and,
scorning justice, understands how to use it. If Anarchists acted that way, proceeding with
brutal disregard and summarily dispatching every tyrant and exploiter, the power of the
ruling class would burst like a bubble. Its power is nothing without the support of the
proletariat. Unfortunately the workers don’t realize that they are the ones who have a
right to all the pleasures of the earth and that all rulers, from the smallest exploiter to the
tsar, are superfluous. But you Believers, you who know who our enemies are, don’t let
yourselves be hindered by my sentence from continuing to agitate and spread the teach-
ings of Anarchism until all people are free. Believe me, dear friends, I don’t feel the least
bit unhappy. I have the peace of mind of having done right, and that is the greatest hap-
piness, the greatest satisfaction for a revolutionary. I also know that there are still many
women and men who, despite jail and the scaffold, work toward the overthrow of today’s
society. With this letter I take leave of all friends and comrades and say farewell. I will
only be able to write once a month, and even then only very little. I can have visitors once
every three months. I still have not been given any work. I receive the daily papers and
books out of the library to read. Write often, I may receive letters; likewise send me
money. Farewell, stay courageous and strong.

With revolutionary greetings, your friend!

Alex. Berkmann.

Die Autonomie, 29 October 1892, p. 4. Translated from German.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 129

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
New York, 8 October 1892

Dear Comrade!

Received your letter already days ago, but I couldn’t answer you because I expected a let-
ter from B.1 I can hardly consider your suggestion because I don’t intend to stay in Amer-
ica for that long. Should my hope to leave America in the beginning of November not
come true I will certainly accept your proposal. But it is very possible that I will be in P 2
by the end of next week. This is the case for the following reason. I have already told you
that no one can see B for another 3 months, in other words on December 20. I have also
written to B that I won’t be able to see him anymore in that case, as I won’t stay in Amer-
ica until then.3 He asked the prison inspector if it would be possible to make an excep-
tion as I, his girl friend, would be leaving and would not be able to see him, and whether
I could be allowed to visit him now. The inspector granted B’s request and because of it
has sent me a visitor’s card issued in my name (naturally not G.) that is only given in ex-
ceptional cases.4 B insists that I should now come to P as he has to see and speak to me
once more. However I would have to go there no later than next week. But what to do
now? I have not one cent and in such a short time can raise very little. If I calculate only
from here to P, I will need at least 12 D. Maybe I will be able to raise 6 D. Could you help
me out a little? I expect some money to be sent from Detroit next Saturday, but that
will already be too late. I will have to leave on Thursday at the latest. If you could spend
6 –7 D, I would pay it back to you in P because I would write to D 5 that the money should
be sent to P. I urge you to respond immediately. I gave the 2 D to Masur.6 You write that
I should not correspond with anybody regarding my arrival and yet you yourself have
spoken to Nold 7 about it as he wrote to me. I don’t write to anybody except N every now
and then. I didn’t write to him about my arrival. By the way, I consider him an honest

1. EG refers to Alexander Berkman by his last initial only.

2. Pittsburgh.
3. This is the only extant suggestion that EG was planning to leave the United States at this time.
4. EG obtained a pass to see AB under the name Niedermann, adopting the surname of Claus Nieder-
mann, who had assumed the editorship of Die Brandfackel in 1893 while Timmermann was in prison;
she described herself as AB’s married sister traveling to the United States from Russia. Given the dis-
tance his sister had supposedly come to see him, AB was to be granted two visits, but the second was
rescinded when EG’s real identity was discovered.
5. Detroit.
6. Carl Masur.
7. Carl Nold; EG refers to Nold in the following sentence by his last initial only.

130 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

comrade who just cannot tear himself away from the fanaticism for M.8 Again I ask you
to answer me immediately even if you can’t send any money. Naturally I hope that you
will try hard.

ALf, Joseph Ishill Collection, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Li-
brary, Harvard University.

8. Johann Most.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 131

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 19 October 1892

Dear Sister: 1

It is just a month, a month to-day, since my coming here. I keep wondering, can such a
world of misery and torture be compressed into one short month? . . . How I have longed
for this opportunity! You will understand: a month’s stay is required before we are per-
mitted to write. But many, many long letters I have written to you—in my mind, dear
Sonya. Where shall I begin now? My space is very limited, and I have so much to say to
you and to the Twin.2 —I received your letters. You need not wait till you hear from me:
keep on writing. I am allowed to receive all mail sent, “of moral contents,” in the phrase-
ology of the rules. And I shall write whenever I may.
Dear Sonya, I sense bitterness and disappointment in your letter. Why do you speak
of failure? You, at least, you and Fedya, should not have your judgment obscured by the
mere accident of physical results. Your lines pained and grieved me beyond words. Not
because you should write thus; but that you, even you, should think thus. Need I enlarge?
True morality deals with motives, not consequences. I cannot believe that we differ on
this point.3

1. Because a letter to EG was likely to be read more closely by prison censors and possibly even inter-
cepted, AB did not address her by name, nor express the full range of his thoughts and feelings un-
less he was fortunate enough to smuggle them out sub rosa. He clarified the coded terms of endear-
ment with which he addressed EG in his own annotation to this letter as printed in his 1912 Prison
Memoirs of an Anarchist: “The Girl; also referred to as Sonya, Musick, and Sailor” (p. 136).
2. AB refers here to his cousin, Modest Stein, as “the Twin” and later in this letter by the Russian
diminutive “Fedya” (for Fyodor, or Theodore in English). AB and Fedya were so inseparable that
friends often called them “the Twins.” AB, EG, and Fedya lived together just before AB’s imprison-
ment. AB in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and EG in LML used the code name Fedya so as not to im-
plicate Modest Stein in their illegal activities.
3. In the handwritten prisoners’ publication Prison Blossoms, AB articulated his motives for the attack
on Frick: “For several days succeeding my arrest I remained in ignorance concerning the physical
condition of Mr. Frick. But when it transpired that Mr. Frick would recover, it seemed to me that this
circumstance, purely accidental as it was, would not tend to produce any minimizing effect on
the signification and importance of my act; for a deed, such as mine, that is its meaning does in no
way depend upon the physical consequences (to the parties concerned) incidental to that act, but must
have for its criterion the purpose underlying the deed and should be estimated according to the moral
effect— called propaganda—produced by such an act. As far as my purpose and aims were con-
cerned, it mattered very little whether my shots were fatal or not; indeed viewed from the true anar-
chistic standpoint, it did not matter the slightest difference what the outcome, the physical results of
my attempt were. I had, as already stated, no private axes to grind, no personal wrongs to avenge, no
private feelings to satisfy. Whether Frick was among the living or the dead was a matter comparatively
indifferent to me. It might popularly be supposed that the object of my attempt was to remove an ob-
noxious person. Yet nothing could be further from my real purpose. It was my aim, first and last, to
express, by my deed, my sentiments toward the existing system of legal oppression and industrial des-

132 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

 I fully understand what a terrible blow the apostasy of Wurst 4 must have been to you.
But however it may minimize the effect, it cannot possibly alter the fact, or its character.
This you seem to have lost sight of. In spite of Wurst, a great deal could have been ac-
complished. I don’t know whether it has been done: your letter is very meagre on this
point. Yet it is of supreme interest to me. But I know, Sonya,— of this one thing, at least,
I am sure—you will do all that is in your power. Perhaps it is not much—but the Twin
and part of Orchard Street 5 will be with you.
Why that note of disappointment, almost of resentment, as to Tolstogub’s relation to
the Darwinian theory? 6 You must consider that the layman cannot judge of the intrica-
cies of scientific hypotheses. The scientist would justly object to such presumption.
I embrace you both. The future is dark; but, then, who knows? . . . Write often. Tell
me about the movement, yourself and friends. It will help to keep me in touch with the
outside world, which daily seems to recede further. I clutch desperately at the thread that
still binds me to the living—it seems to unravel in my hands, the thin skeins are break-
ing, one by one. My hold is slackening. But the Sonya thread, I know, will remain taut
and strong. I have always called you the Immutable.

Alex.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 136 –37.

potism; to attack the institution of wage-slavery in the person of one of its most prominent represen-
tatives, to give it a blow—rather morally than physically—this was the real purpose and signification
of my act” (Prison Blossoms, ca. 1893–1894, not paginated). Carl Nold later published a very similar
piece reflecting on AB’s understanding of his attentat. See Nold, “A Reminiscence of Alexander Berk-
man,” Firebrand, 25 July 1897, p. 4.
4. Annotated by AB in Prison Memoirs as “John Most.” AB and EG had been in the habit of referring to
Most as Hans Wurst (“John Sausage”), a common phrase meaning “clown,” or someone not to be
taken seriously. According to Most’s biographer Rudolf Rocker (himself an anarchist), AB later de-
nied any such derogatory intention, insisting that this was a code name to protect Most from being
implicated in the attentat.
5. Annotated by AB in Prison Memoirs as “54 Orchard Street—the hall in which the first Jewish Anar-
chist gatherings were held in New York. An allusion to the aid of the Jewish comrades.” The office of
the Pioneers of Liberty was located at this address.
6. AB’s annotation reads: “Tolstogub—the author’s Russian nickname. The expression signifies the
continued survival of the writer.” The Russian word means “fat lip” and was used to describe AB, who
was known for his full lips.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 133

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 18 November 1892

My dear Sonya:

It seems an age since I wrote to you, yet it is only a month. But the monotony of my life
weights down the heels of time,—the only break in the terrible sameness is afforded me
by your dear, affectionate letters, and those of Fedya.1 When I return to the cell for the
noon meal, my step is quickened by the eager expectation of finding mail from you.
About eleven in the morning, the Chaplain makes his rounds; his practiced hand shoots
the letter between the bars, toward the bed or on to the little table in the corner. But if the
missive is light, it will flutter to the floor. As I reach the cell, the position of the little white
object at once apprises me whether the letter is long or short. With closed eyes I sense
its weight, like the warm pressure of your own dear hand, the touch reaching softly to my
heart, till I feel myself lifted across the chasm into your presence. The bars fade, the walls
disappear, and the air grows sweet with the aroma of fresh air and flowers,—I am again
with you, walking in the bright July moonlight. . . . The touch of the velikorussian 2 in your
eyes and hair conjures up the Volga, our beautiful bogatir,3 and the strains of the dubi-
nushka,4 trembling with suffering and yearning, float about me. . . . The meal remains
untouched. I dream over your letter, and again I read it, slowly, slowly, lest I reach the end
too quickly. The afternoon hours are hallowed by your touch and your presence, and I am
conscious only of the longing for my cell,—in the quiet of the evening, freed from the
nightmare of the immediate, I walk in the garden of our dreams.
And the following morning, at work in the shop, I pass in anxious wonder whether
some cheering word from my own, my real world, is awaiting me in the cell. With a glow
of emotion I think of the Chaplain: perhaps at the very moment your letter is in his
hands. He is opening it, reading. Why should strange eyes . . . but the Chaplain seems
kind and discreet. Now he is passing along the galleries, distributing the mail. The bun-
dle grows meagre as the postman reaches the ground floor. Oh! if he does not come to
my cell quickly, he may have no letters left. But the next moment I smile at the childish
thought,—if there is a letter for me, no other prisoner will get it. Yet some error might
happen. . . . No, it is impossible—my name and prison number, and the cell number
marked by the Chaplain across the envelope, all insure the mail against any mistake in
delivery. Now the dinner whistle blows. Eagerly I hasten to the cell. There is nothing on

1. “Fedya” is AB’s code name for his cousin Modest Stein.

2. The term velikorussian means “Great Russian,” or the essential Russian.
3. Annotated by AB: “Brave knight—affectionately applied to the great river.” A bogatyr’ is a hero in Rus-
sian folklore.
4. Annotated by AB: “Folk-song.”

134 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

the floor! Perhaps on the bed, on the table. . . . I grow feverish with the dread of disap-
pointment. Possibly the letter fell under the bed, or in that dark corner. No, none there,—
but it can’t be that there is no mail for me to-day! I must look again—it may have dropped
among the blankets. . . . No, there is no letter!
Thus pass my days, dear friend. In thought I am ever with you and Fedya, in our old
haunts and surroundings. I shall never get used to this life, nor find an interest in the re-
ality of the moment. What will become of me, I don’t know. I hardly care. We are revolu-
tionists, dear: whatever sacrifices the Cause demands, though the individual perish, hu-
manity will profit in the end. In that consciousness we must find our solace.

Alex.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 148 – 49.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 135

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 30 November 1892 — Sub rosa

Beloved Girl:

I thought I would not survive the agony of our meeting, but human capacity for suffer-
ing seems boundless. All my thoughts, all my yearnings, were centered in the one desire
to see you, to look into your eyes, and there read the beautiful promise that has filled my
days with strength and hope. . . .1 An embrace, a lingering kiss, and the gift of Lingg 2
would have been mine. To grasp your hand, to look down for a mute, immortal instant
into your soul, and then die at your hands, Beloved, with the warm breath of your caress
wafting me into peaceful eternity— oh, it were bliss supreme, the realization of our day
dreams, when, in transports of ecstasy, we kissed the image of the Social Revolution. Do
you remember that glorious face, so strong and tender, on the wall of our little Houston
Street hallroom? How far, far in the past are those inspired moments! But they have filled
my hours with hallowed thoughts, with exulting expectations. And then you came. A
glance at your face, and I knew my doom to terrible life. I read it in the evil look of the
guard. It was the Deputy himself. Perhaps you had been searched! He followed our every
moment, like a famished cat that feigns indifference, yet is alert with every nerve to
spring upon the victim. Oh, I know the calculated viciousness beneath that meek exte-
rior. The accelerated movement of his drumming fingers, as he deliberately seated him-
self between us, warned me of the beast, hungry for prey. . . . The halo was dissipated.
The words froze within me, and I could meet you only with a vapid smile, and on the in-
stant it was mirrored in my soul as a leer, and I was filled with anger and resentment at
everything about us—myself, the Deputy (I could have throttled him to death), and—at
you, dear. Yes, Sonya, even at you: the quick come to bury the dead. . . . But the next mo-
ment, the unworthy throb of my agonized soul was stilled by the passionate pressure of
my lips upon your hand. How it trembled! I held it between my own, and then, as I lifted
my face to yours, the expression I beheld seemed to bereave me of my own self: it was
you who were I! The drawn face, the look of horror, your whole being the cry of torture—
were you not the real prisoner? Or was it my visioned suffering that cemented the spiri-
tual bond, annihilating all misunderstanding, all resentment, and lifting us above time
and place in the afflatus of martyrdom?
Mutely I held your hand. There was no need for words. Only the prying eyes of the
catlike presence disturbed the sacred moment. Then we spoke—mechanically, triviali-

1. Note the relative openness of AB’s letters smuggled out of prison sub rosa, avoiding the censoring eye
of the prison authorities.
2. AB’s annotation reads: “Louis Lingg, one of the Chicago martyrs, who committed suicide with a dy-
namite cartridge in a cigar given him by a friend.”

136 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892

ties. . . . What though the cadaverous Deputy with brutal gaze timed the seconds, and for-
bade the sound of our dear Russian,—nor heaven nor earth could violate the sacrament
sealed with our pain.
The echo accompanied my step as I passed through the rotunda on my way to the cell.
All was quiet in the block. No whir of loom reached me from the shops. Thanksgiving
Day: all activities were suspended. I felt at peace in the silence. But when the door was
locked, and I found myself alone, all alone within the walls of the tomb, the full
significance of your departure suddenly dawned on me. The quick had left the dead. . . .
Terror of the reality seized me and I was swept by a paroxysm of anguish—
I must close. The friend who promised to have this letter mailed sub rosa is at the door.
He is a kind unfortunate who has befriended me. May this letter reach you safely. In to-
ken of which, send me postal of indifferent contents, casually mentioning the arrival of
news from my brother in Moscow. Remember to sign “Sister.”

With a passionate embrace,

Your Sasha.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 150 –51.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1892 137

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 4 March 1893

Girl and Twin: 1

I am writing with despair in my heart. I was taken to Pittsburgh as a witness in the trial
of Nold and Bauer.2 I had hoped for an opportunity—you understand, friends. It was a
slender thread, but I clung to it desperately, prepared to stake everything on it. It proved
a broken straw. Now I am back, and I may never leave this place alive.
I was bitterly disappointed not to find you in the courtroom. I yearned for the sight of
your faces. But you were not there, nor any one else of our New York comrades. I knew
what it meant: you are having a hard struggle to exist. Otherwise perhaps something
could be done to establish friendly relations between Rakhmetov and Mr. Gebop.3 It
would require an outlay beyond the resources of our own circle; others cannot be ap-
proached in this matter. Nothing remains but the “inside” developments,—a terribly
slow process.
This is all the hope I can hold out to you, dear friends. You will think it quite negli-
gible; yet it is the sole ray that has again and again kindled life in moments of utmost
darkness . . . . I did not realize the physical effects of my stay here (it is five months now)
till my return from court. I suppose the excitement of being on the outside galvanized
me for the nonce . . . . My head was awhirl; I could not collect my thoughts. The wild hope
possessed me,—pobeg! The click of the steel, as I was handcuffed to the Deputy, struck
my deathknell . . . . The unaccustomed noise of the streets, the people and loud voices in
the courtroom, the scenes of the trial, all absorbed me in the moment. It seemed to me
as if I were a spectator, interested, but personally unconcerned, in the surroundings; and
these, too, were far away, of a strange world in which I had no part. Only when I found
myself alone in the cell, the full significance of the lost occasion was borne in upon me
with crushing force.

1. AB is referring to EG and his cousin and close friend Modest Stein.

2. On 9 February 1893 Carl Nold and Henry Bauer were both sentenced to five years in Western Peni-
tentiary on two charges: incitement to riot (stemming from their distribution of a handbill addressed
to the striking Homestead workers on 8 July 1892) and conspiracy (with AB) to commit murder.
Bauer was also charged a fine of $50 and sentenced to sixty days in county jail for contempt of court
when he refused to name the other men involved in distributing the leaflet. For Bauer’s discussion of
the leaflet and its effect, see “A Fateful Leaflet,” Free Society, 17 April 1898.
3. AB’s annotation for “Mr. Gebop” reads: “Reading backward, pobeg; Russian for ‘escape.’ ” (AB uses the
Russian word pobeg again, in the next paragraph.) Rakhmetov is the model revolutionist of N. G.
Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). AB used the name here as a pseudonym for him-
self, as he had at the hotel in Pittsburgh the night he arrived there on his mission to kill Frick.

138 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 But why sadden you? There is perhaps a cheerier
side, now that Nold and Bauer are here. I have not seen
them yet, but their very presence, the circumstance
that somewhere within these walls there are comrades,
men who, like myself, suffer for an ideal—the thought
holds a deep satisfaction for me. It brings me closer, in
a measure, to the environment of political prisoners in
Europe. Whatever the misery and torture of their daily
existence, the politicals— even in Siberia—breathe the
atmosphere of solidarity, of appreciation.4 What cour-
age and strength there must be for them in the inspi-
ration radiated by a common cause! Conditions here
are entirely different. Both inmates and officers are
at loss to “class” me. They have never known political
prisoners. That one should sacrifice or risk his life with
no apparent personal motives, is beyond their compre-
hension, almost beyond their belief. It is a desert of
sordidness that constantly threatens to engulf one. I Carl Nold, arrested for incitement to riot and conspiracy to
would gladly exchange places with our comrades in murder Henry Clay Frick (with Alexander Berkman and
Siberia. Henry Bauer). Nold met Berkman in 1892, worked with him in
The former podpoilnaya 5 was suspended, because of prison on the journal Prison Blossoms, and later worked on
the great misfortune that befell my friend Wingie, of the Berkman Defense Association. (Labadie Collection, Uni-
versity of Michigan)
whom I wrote to you before. This dove will be flown by
Mr. Tiuremshchick,6 an old soldier who really sympa-
thizes with Wingie. I believe they served in the same
regiment. He is a kindly man, who hates his despicable
work. But there is a family at home, a sick wife—you know the old, weak-kneed tale. I
had a hint from him the other day: he is being spied upon; it is dangerous for him to be
seen at my cell, and so forth. It is all quite true; but what he means is, that a little money
would be welcome. You know how to manage the matter. Leave no traces.
I hear the felt-soled step. It’s the soldier. I bid my birdie a hasty good-bye.

Sasha.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 174 –75.

4. In Russia, unlike in the United States, the state recognized the concept of political prisoners and ex-
iled many to Siberia, including AB’s uncle and inspiration, Mark Natanson, in 1872 for his revolu-
tionary activities.
5. AB’s annotation reads: “Sub rosa route”; podpoilnaya is Russian for “secret” or “underground.”
6. AB’s annotation reads: “Russian for ‘guard.’ ”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 139

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
Rochester, N.Y., 27 June 1893

Dear Comrade Metzkow.

Owing to illness I find myself in this city, not far from NY.1 Why is it that you have not
even responded with one line to my last letter, which I wrote close to 6 weeks ago? What
crime have I committed? Or were you so busy that nothing could be heard from you? As
I said before, it looks sad in NY. The A 2 is in the process of closing down and hasn’t been
published in 3 weeks. These Anarchists have given up. I think I will stay here until the
end of July. Please write about how things look in Pittsburg, and how you are doing.

with rev greetings

Your EG.

My address E Hochstein 188 St Joseph st R NY

APcI, Joseph Ishill Collection, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University.

1. EG fell ill in the spring of 1893 while organizing for the commutation of AB’s sentence and working
ten to twelve hours a day at a sewing machine to support herself. She recuperated for two months in
Rochester, where her sister Helena Hochstein rented a private room and found her a lung specialist
who diagnosed EG with early stages of tuberculosis. Though EG improved under her sister’s care, she
left for New York in July before she had recovered completely to take part in the political activities sur-
rounding the nation’s severe unemployment crisis (see LML, pp. 120 –21).
2. The initial A refers to the journal Der Anarchist.

140 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Ar ticle in the N E W Y O R K E R S TA AT S - Z E I T U N G
New York, 22 August 1893

Schlecht Beraten

In’s Fahrwasser des Anarchismus gerathen die Arbeitslosen.

Die gestrige Demonstration auf Union Square.—In Brandreden wird radikaler

Unsinn verzapft und denen, die nach Brod schreien, wird ein Stein gegeben.

Professionelle Hetzer, Volksverführer, Utopisten und Demagogen machen sich die

mißliche Lage, in welche infolge der allgemeinen Geschäfts-Depression ein großer
Theil der Arbeiter gerathen ist, weidlich zu Nutze und tragen durch die maßlose
Aufreizung der niederen Klassen das ihrige dazu bei, daß die Situation sich, wenn dies
möglich ist, noch verschlechtert. Beweis hierfür ist die Demonstration, welche gestern
Abend stattfand.
Mit einer zweiten großen Massenversammlung auf dem Union Square, noch größer
als die am Samstag stattgehabte, schloß der gestrige Tag für die Arbeitslosen.
Etwa fünf tausend Menschen hatten sich auf dem großen Platze, der so manche
Volks-Demonstration gesehen, eingefunden und besonders unter ihnen auffallend war
die Zahl der jungen Leute unter 25 Jahren. Der Demonstration auf dem Square ging
ein Umzug der Arbeitslosen heran, welcher um 7 Uhr Covenant Hall, No. 56 Orchard
Str., verließ und etwa 2500 Mann stark die Orchard Str. hinauf ging, die Houston Str.,
Ave. A, 2. Str., 2. Ave., 13. Str. passirte und um 71/2 Uhr auf dem Square eintraf.
Der Umzug war ein sehr ruhiger und der einzige zu erwähnende Vorfall war, daß
Kapitän Devery in der Orchard Str., zwischen der Rivington und Delancey Str., einem
der Männer eine schwarze Flagge wegnahm und sie konfiscirte.
Auf der Terrace vor der Cottage am Square präsidirte David Levy, während zwei Last-
wagen zu beiden Seiten der Cottage als Rednertribünen verhielten. Dr. Theodore Kinzel,
der erste Redner, erklärte, daß er ein Anarchist sei, worauf er die bestehende Gesell-
schaftsordnung kritisirte, die “sociale Revolution” ankündigte und den Anwesenden
rieth, sich für dieselbe vorzubereiten.
Unter den anderen Rednern war es besonders der Schneider John Timmermann,
welcher durch seine aufreizende maßlose Redeweise die Anwesenden packte. “Wir
müssen Brod haben”, rief er; “wenn die Kapitalisten Euch ohne Brod lassen, so sind sie
Mörder und wenn sie uns kein Brod geben, so müssen wir es nehmen. Wir sind keine
Politiker und haben nichts mit der Politik zu thun.” Nachdem er von der französischen
Revolution gesprochen, erklärte er, daß auch hier Straßenkämpfe stattfinden würden.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 141

 “Bereitet Euch auf die sociale Revolution vor. Gewalt gegen Gewalt! Ich sage Euch, die
Zeiten werden noch schlechter werden, wie sie jetzt bereits sind, und man wird uns auf
den Straßen tödten. Ihr habt die Paläste gebaut, Ihr habt alles geschaffen, aber Ihr selbst
habt nichts. Fordert Brod! Es ist Euer Recht, dasselbe zu verlangen, und könnt Ihr es
nicht bekommen, so könnt Ihr es ja nehmen.” Er schloß mit den Worten; “Hoch lebe die
Anarchie!”
Nach ihm sprachen Arthur Morton, F. Herschdorfer und Barnet Brave. Letzterer erk-
lärte, daß man sie Anarchisten nenne, weil sie Brod verlangten, und man rufe dann die
Polizei herbei, sie zu verhaften. “Wenn sie einen verhaften, sollen sie alle mitnehmen,
alle unsere Familien. Man hat mir mitgetheilt, daß ich verhaftet werden soll. Sie sollen
es nur thun. Ich kann im Gefängnis nicht schlimmer daran sein, als ich es jetzt bin,
denn morgen soll ich ermittirt werden. Giebt man uns kein Brod, so werden wir es
nehmen.”
Emma Goldmann sprach dann zu der Menschenmenge, welche begierig den Wort-
schwall der Petroleuse verschlang und denselben stürmisch applaudirte.
“Das ist das Land eines Thos. Jefferson, eines John Brown, eines Abe Lincoln,” gei-
serte die Maulheldin in schlechtem Englisch, “und in ihm schreien Hundertausende
nach Brod. Könnten jene dieser Versammlung beiwohnen, so würden sie vor Scham er-
röthen. Die Reichen wohnen herrlich und in Freuden und ihre Frauen haben alles, was
das Herz begehrt, aber die Lohnsklaven sind schlimmer daran, wie die Farbigen in der
Sklavenzeit. Die schlechte Zeit kommt nicht von der Silberkrise her, sie hat andere Ur-
sachen. Ihr verlangt Brod und wenn Ihr es nicht auf friedlichem Wege bekommen
könnt, so werdet Ihr es Euch mit Gewalt holen. Vereinigt Euch und nehmt es mit
Gewalt, wenn Ihr es nicht friedlich bekommen könnt. Man hat in den Zeitungen be-
richtet, daß Arbeiter nach Albany gehen wollen, um dort Forderungen zu stellen; was
werden sie erhalten? Nichts. An solche Geschichten glaube ich nicht mehr. Verlaßt Euch
auf Eure eigene Kraft, da die Kapitalistenklasse die Polizei bewaffnet hat. Nochmals,
könnt Ihr kein Brot bekommen, so nehmt es mit Gewalt. Geht hinaus in die sociale
Revolution!”
Der Wortlaut der Brandrede ist nur deshalb bemerkenswerth, weil sich voraus-
sichtlich die Polizei mit der Urheberin derselben befassen wird.
Nur wenige Redner sprachen nach Emma Goldmann. Es hatte sich inzwischen das
Gerücht verbreitet, daß die Polizei beschlossen habe, Timmermann und Emma Gold-
mann wegen ihrer Reden zu verhaften und dies sah um so wahrscheinlicher aus, als sich
wohl ein Dutzend Detektives auf der Platform befand.
Plötzlich verschwand Timmermann, und man konnte nicht in Erfahrung bringen, ob
er verhaftet worden sei oder ob ihn seine Freunde fortgeschmuggelt hätten. Nachdem
Emma Goldmann geendet, entfernte sie sich langsam in Begleitung einiger Freunde.
Mehrere Reporter folgten, sowie ein kleiner Menschenhaufen. Durch den Park ziehend,
schwoll der Zug im Nu um Hunderte an und als er um die Cottage gehend die Ecke

142 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

der 17. Str. und 4. Ave. erreicht hatte, befanden sich nahezu tausend Leute in Emma’s
Gefolgschaft.
Immer größer wurde das Gedränge. Es ging die 4. Ave. hinunter bis zu 14. Str. und
als man dieselbe erreichte, waren wenigstens 2000 Personen in dem Zuge. Plötzlich
kam der Haufen zum Stillstehen. Emma hatte eine in westlicher Richtung fahrende Car
bestiegen und mehrere Leute waren nach ihr hinaufgesprungen. Die Car entfernte sich
und langsam ging die Menge auseinander. Es hieß, daß sie noch später verhaftet wer-
den würde.
Im Laufe des Tages fanden zwei sehr ruhige Massenversammlungen der Arbeit-
slosen statt, eine in Covenant Hall, No. 56 Orchard Str., und die andere in Pythagoras
Hall in der Canal Str. nahe der Bowery. In letzter sprachen A. Jablinowski, Jos. Lederer,
M. Hillkowitz und Jac. Milch, welche die Anwesenden ermahnten, keine Ruhestörun-
gen zu begehen. In der ersteren sprach Emma Goldmann, welche die entgegengesetzte
Maßnahme empfahl. [. . .]

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 143

 Ar ticle in the N E W - Y O R K E R S TA AT S - Z E I T U N G
New York, 22 August 1893

Badly Advised.

The Unemployed Step onto Anarchist Ground.

Yesterday’s Demonstration in Union Square.—Radical Nonsense Pronounced in

Fiery Speeches and those Screaming for Bread are Given a Stone.

Professional agitators, fanatics, utopians and demagogues are heartily taking advantage
of the critical situation in which a large number of the workers have fallen into as a re-
sult of the general economic depression, and are contributing through the extreme
provocation of the lower classes to making the situation, if such a thing is possible, even
worse. Proof of this is the demonstration that took place yesterday evening.
Yesterday ended for the unemployed with a second large mass demonstration in
Union Square, even larger than the one that occurred on Saturday.1
About five thousand people showed up in the large square which has had its share of
peoples’ demonstrations, especially noticeable among them were the number of young
people under 25 years old. Also joining the demonstration in the square was a proces-
sion of the unemployed which had set out from Covenant Hall, No. 56 Orchard St., at
7 o’clock, and, some 2500 men strong, went up Orchard St., crossed Houston St., Ave. A,
2nd St., 2nd Ave., 13th St., and arrived in the square at 7:30.
The procession was calm and the only incident worth mentioning was that Captain
Devery 2 seized a black flag 3 from one of the men on Orchard St., between Rivington and
Delancey St., and confiscated it.

1. On Saturday, 19 August, EG attended an afternoon meeting of the unemployed at Golden Rule Hall.
In the early evening (about 6 o’clock) she and Adolph Ury led a march of about a thousand anarchists,
according to the New York Times, from the hall to Union Square. The meeting was hampered by a
heavy police presence and a steady rain. One of many to address the crowd at Union Square, she
spoke on “the grinding heel of the monopolies” and the “capitalist press” (New York Times, 20 August
1893, p. 1).
2. Captain William S. Devery was head of the 11th precinct of the New York police during the series of
unemployment demonstrations by anarchists in August of 1893, repeatedly breaking up meetings
and closing meeting halls. He later served as chief of police from 30 June 1898 to 21 February 1901.
3. Black, as the color symbolic of anarchism, first appeared in 1883 in France at a demonstration of the
unemployed headed by Louise Michel and Émile Pouget. They carried a black banner to honor
the martyrs of the Paris Commune. The same year an anarchist paper in Lyons adopted the title Le
Drapeau Noir (The Black Banner). Lyons had a long tradition of using black banners in “bread and
work” demonstrations. On 27 November 1884 the black flag was flown at a rally addressed by Albert
Parsons in Chicago, and in 1905 a Russian anarchist terrorist group called itself Chernoe Znomia
(The Black Banner). In this period, however, red generally dominated as the color symbolic of anar-

144 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 David Levy presided on the terrace in front of the cottage in the square while two
trucks on either side of the cottage served as speakers’ podiums. Dr. Theodore Kinzel,
the first speaker, declared that he was an Anarchist, upon which he criticized the exist-
ing societal order, proclaimed the “social revolution,” and advised the audience to pre-
pare themselves for it.
Among the other speakers it was the tailor John Timmermann 4 in particular who
thrilled the audience with his provocative, intense speaking style. “We must have bread,”
he cried; “if the capitalists leave you without bread, then they are murderers and if they
don’t give us any bread, then we must take it. We are not politicians and have nothing to
do with politics.” After he spoke about the French Revolution, he declared that street
fighting would also take place here. “Prepare yourselves for the social revolution. Vio-
lence against violence! I say to you, the times will get even worse than they already are
now, and we will be killed on the streets. You have built the palaces, you have made every-
thing, but you yourselves have nothing. Call out for bread! It is your right to demand it,
and if you are not able to get it, then you can take it.” He concluded with the words; “Long
live Anarchy!”
Speaking after him were Arthur Morton, F. Herschdorfer and Barnet Brave. The lat-
ter declared that they were called Anarchists because they were demanding bread, and
that the police would be called in to arrest them. “If they arrest one person, they will have
to take everyone along, all of our families. I have been told that I am supposed to be ar-
rested. They might as well do it. I couldn’t be any worse off in prison than I am now, for
tomorrow I will be evicted. If we are not given bread, we will take it.”
Emma Goldmann then spoke to the crowd, which eagerly devoured and thunderingly
applauded the torrent of words from the Petroleuse.5
“This is the land of Thos. Jefferson, John Brown, Abe Lincoln,” 6 shouted the loud-
mouth in bad English, “and in it hundreds of thousands are crying out for bread. If those
men could witness this meeting, they would blush in shame. The rich live splendidly and
in their pleasures and their women have everything that the heart desires, but the wage
slaves are worse off than the colored people in the time of slavery. These bad times are
not due to the silver crisis, they have other roots. You demand bread, and if you cannot

chism. Many anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin, insisted upon retaining red to mark the anarchist
movement’s association with the socialist tradition, of which they considered themselves a legitimate
part. Not until after the First World War would black be widely adopted as the predominant symbol.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936 –1939) both red and black were incorporated into anarchist flags
and banners.
4. The reference is to Claus Timmermann, who was arrested, convicted of inciting to riot for this
speech, and sentenced to six months imprisonment.
5. Petroleuse is the French word for “firebrand”; it was adopted during the Paris Commune of 1871 to
identify the women who used petroleum to set fire to buildings.
6. EG, following a pattern set by the Chicago anarchists in the era of the Haymarket incident, often
evoked the names of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Wendell Phillips, and John Brown to demon-
strate a perceived American anti-statist tradition. Chicago anarchists, in publications such as the
Alarm and Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, frequently quoted the Declaration of Independence and alluded

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 145

 acquire it through peaceful means you will get it by force. Unite and take it by force, if
you cannot get it peacefully. It has been reported in the newspapers that workers want
to go to Albany to make demands there; what will they get? Nothing. I no longer believe
in such things. Rely upon your own strength, since the capitalist class has armed the po-
lice. Once again, if you cannot get any bread, then take it by force. Go forth into the so-
cial revolution!”
The wording of the incendiary speech is only worth mentioning because presumably
the police will be concerned with its author.7
Only a few speakers came after Emma Goldmann. In the meantime the rumor had
been spread that the police had decided to arrest Timmermann and Emma Goldmann
because of their speeches, and this seemed all the more likely as a good dozen detectives
were on the platform.
Suddenly Timmermann disappeared, and no one was able to learn whether he had
been arrested or whether his friends had smuggled him away. After Emma Goldmann

favorably to a perceived anti-statism of the founders of the United States, particularly Thomas Jeffer-
son. In his speech to the jury on 7 October 1886, August Spies named Paine, Jefferson, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson as predecessors to his ideas.
7. The New York World gave the following account of EG’s English-language speech (she addressed the
gathering first in English and then in German):
“I would first like to appeal in English to the American workingmen. If Jefferson and Paine, who fought for free-
dom, Wendell Phillips and John Brown were here to see your misery they would be ashamed of their country. You
have Senators and Congressmen who live in luxury while you have nothing to eat. Their children live in grand style.
Their wives and mistresses wear silks and diamonds. You have thought that the liberty of America gives you free-
dom and bread. Now you know how very much mistaken you have been. You are not free citizens. You are worse
than black slaves.
“Americans! if you really want to be free citizens, take your rights into your own hands. Go and fight with your
brothers, no matter if they are foreigners. You are starving as well as they. Don’t be prejudiced against these poor
people who have come to this country. They are not responsible for the prevailing conditions. The capitalist class is
responsible. The capitalist system is near its ruin.
“Unite and go from street to street. Go among the capitalists and rich people and ask for bread, and if they do not
give it to you peacably, then take it by force. Do as the North did against the South! You will find your John Brown
and your Wendell Phillips as the North did.
“If you do not get bread and freedom peacably, take it by force. As long as you are slaves, with nothing to eat; as
long as you are dragged down, you cannot be human beings, respected by any nation. Unite with others. Go out in
the street and fight for your bread, and take it if they will not give it to you.”

The World translated EG’s German-language speech as follows:

“Do not be afraid of the clubs of the police. The advice the Anarchists have given you is good. What they told you a
few years ago would happen is now taking place. Do not be afraid of such creatures as the Pinkertons, the police and
the reporters. They are all blood suckers. (Cheers.)
“You have as much right to arm yourselves as the police. (Cheers.) You have as much right to use arms as the po-
lice (cheers), and we know where to get the weapons, and you know! and what will the fat policemen do then?
(Tremendous cheering.)
“Long live anarchy!
“Hurrah for revolution.” (Cheers.)

The reporter was David G. Bailey. “A young Hebrew boy” in his employ translated EG’s German-lan-
guage speech (for other versions of EG’s speech in German, see Excerpt from Trial Transcript, 4 Oc-
tober 1893, below). For Bailey’s complete report of the Union Square meeting, see “Urging Men to
Riot,” New York World, 22 August 1893, EGP, reel 47.

146 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

finished, she withdrew slowly, accompanied by some friends. Several reporters followed,
as well a small crowd of people. Moving through the park, the procession swelled in no
time into the hundreds, and when it had reached the corner of 17th St. and 4th Ave. while
going around the cottage, there were nearly a thousand people in Emma’s following.
The crowd grew larger and larger. It went down 4th Ave. to 14th St., and by then there
were at least 2,000 people in the procession. Suddenly the crowd came to a standstill.
Emma had climbed onto a car driving in the westerly direction and a few people had
sprung up after her. The car moved away and slowly the crowd dispersed. It was rumored
that she would be arrested later.
During the course of the day two very calm mass meetings of the unemployed took
place, one in Covenant Hall, No. 56 Orchard St., and the other in Pythagoras Hall on
Canal St. near the Bowery. A. Jablinowski,8 Jos. Lederer, M. Hillkowitz 9 and Jac. Milch
spoke in the latter meeting, admonishing the audience not to disturb the peace. Emma
Goldmann spoke in the former, recommending the opposite measures. [. . .]

New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 22 August 1893, p. 12. The excised remainder of this article reprints a resolu-
tion by the “Labor Conference,” signed by Samuel Gompers and others, calling on government and private
industry to come to the aid of the unemployed and for continuing peaceful struggle through unions. The ar-
ticle concludes with a description of a small workers’ assembly organized by Ferdinand Levy, at which he
warned his audience to remain calm and ignore anarchist pronouncements. The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
was a daily mainstream German-language paper published from 1834 to 1954 and edited by Oswald Otten-
dorfer from 1858 to 1900. Edward John Thimme, the reporter for this article, was called to testify at EG’s
4 October 1893 trial on charges of unlawful assembly resulting from her 21 August speech. Translated from
German.

8. Probably Ludwig Jablinowski. See note 6 in “Anarchists in Charge,” Article in the New York World,
3 May 1892, above.
9. M. Hillkowitz is Morris Hillquit, a prominent member of the Socialist Labor Party and United He-
brew Trades as well as a labor lawyer.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 147

 Po l i c e A f f i d a v i t
New York, 25 August 1893

Charles R. Young 1 of 11th Precinct Police Street,2 occupation Police Officer being duly
sworn, deposes and says, that on the 19th day of August 1893, at number 125 Rivington
Street 3 in the City of New York, in the County of New York, one Emma Goldman being
an evil disposed and pernicious person and of turbulent disposition, together with divers
other evil disposed and pernicious persons to the number of fifty and upwards, unlaw-
fully, wickedly and maliciously intending and contriving to disturb the public peace, and
to excite the citizens of this State to hatred and contempt of its government and laws, and
to raise and make riots, routs and unlawful assemblies within this State and to commit
crimes against the laws of this State, with force and arms, did unlawfully wickedly, tur-
bulently and maliciously assemble and gather together and being so then and there as-
sembled and gathered together as aforesaid, the said Emma Goldman and the said other
evil disposed and malicious persons did then and there unlawfully wickedly and mali-
ciously threaten to raise insurrections, routs and riots in the Said City of New York, and
did threaten to take steal and carry away the goods, chattels and personal property of the
good citizens of the State of New York, and did make other wicked, malicious and un-
lawful threats.
Wherefore deponent prays that the said Emma Goldman be apprehended and dealt
with as the law directs.
Sworn to before me
this 25 day of Aug. 1893

Charles R Young
Bernard Martin
Police Justice

ADS, NNMA. “District Attorney’s Office” is struck out on printed form, and “First District Police Court” in-
serted by hand.

1. The affidavits of three police officers pertaining to this case are extant. This one, by police officer
Charles R. Young, purports to describe EG’s address to a meeting at Golden Rule Hall on 19 August.
The language of the three affidavits is virtually the same. The affidavits by police officers Morris
Schwartz and Charles Jacobs, covering EG’s activities on 21 August, added only one point of sub-
stance, that with others EG threatened “to procure arms, ammunition and weapons” to carry out “her
most wicked and unlawful threats.” The date of the infraction on the indictment originally was 19 Au-
gust; it was subsequently changed by hand to 21 August. For these and other documents in the case,
see EGP, reel 47.
2. “Street” is a printed element of the form; the author neglected to delete it and add “Station.”
3. Located in the rear of a bar at 125 Rivington Street, Golden Rule Hall was a meeting hall and gather-
ing place for anarchists. After leading a march with Adolph Ury from Golden Rule Hall to Union
Square as part of an unemployment demonstration, EG spoke at Union Square on Saturday, 19 Au-
gust (see New York Times, 20 August 1893).

148 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Essay in D I E B R A N D F A C K E L
Tombs Prison, New York, 13 September 1893

Das Recht der freien Rede in Amerika.

Es ist schon lange nichts Neues mehr, daß die herrschende Klasse Amerikas unter dem
Deckmantel der sog. freiheitlichen Institutionen einer Republik, die größten Nieder-
trächtigkeiten und schamlosesten Vergewaltigungen dem arbeitenden Volke gegenüber
begangen hat. Die Gefängnisse Amerikas bergen eine große Zahl von Menschen, die es
gewagt hatten für ihre unveräußerlichen Rechte einzutreten; garnicht jener Zahlreichen
zu gedenken, die von Seiten des herrschenden Raubgesindels auf feige und niederträch-
tige Art hingemordet wurden. Das Recht der freien Rede wurde zwar schon längst mit
Füßen getreten, die herrschende Klasse konnte aber bisher die Ausrede gebrauchen,
daß bei dieser oder jener Gelegenheit ihre Schergen von den Arbeitern attaquirt wurden,
oder daß das Eigenthum irgend eines Blutsaugers gefährdet schien und sie daher das
Recht hätte, dieselben zu bestrafen und Reden zu unterdrücken, die zu derartigen
Handlungen aufreizen.
Das Elend der Arbeiterschaft Amerikas wächst von Jahr zu Jahr und niemals haben
es noch die Hungernden gewagt, ihre Stimme laut werden zu lassen. In diesem Jahre
aber wurde die Noth zu groß, der Hunger zu gräßlich und die Arbeiter wollen ihr Joch
nicht länger mehr ertragen. Der Schrei der Unterdrückten und Hungernden ertönt aus
allen Ecken und Enden Amerikas, und die Entrechteten versammelten sich zu Tausen-
den, um den Ausführungen der Redner mit Spannung und Aufmerksamkeit zuzuhö-
ren. Solches liegt abernicht im Interesse der herrschenden Blutsaugerbande— das wäre
ja das Recht der freien Rede auf eine ganz sonderbare Art interpretirt. Wie, die Arbeiter,
diese unsere Sklaven, unsere Ausbeutungs-Objekte, ihnen soll dieses Recht auch zuge-
standen werden? Nie und nimmermehr! In dem Momente wo die Arbeiter sich ihrere
wahren Lage bewußt werden, derselben Ausdruck zu geben suchen und so an unse-
ren Vorrechten rütteln, in diesem Momente ist unsere Existenz auf das Ernstlichste
bedroht.
So und ähnlicher Art hat die capitalistische Bande in den letzten Tagen gedacht und
gesprochen und in ihrer Angst und Bestürzung ihr Heer von Schergen auf diejenigen
gehetzt, die es unternommen, die hungernden Arbeitslosen aufzuklären und denselben
Mittel und Wege anzugeben—sich Brot zu verschaffen.
Nach Ansicht der herrschenden Capitalistenbande, haben also die Arbeiter, diese
modernen Sklaven des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, hierzulande nicht den geringsten
Anspruch auf das Recht der freien Rede; sie haben kein Recht, ihre Forderungen um
Brot geltend zu machen; sie haben kein Recht, über ihre Noth und ihr Elend und über
die Mittel zur Beseitigung derselben zu sprechen: sie haben kein Recht, von der reich

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 149

 gedeckten Tafel des Lebens etwas für sich in Anspruch zu nehmen—sie haben nur ein
Recht: das Recht, geduldig zu verhungern.
Von diesem Geiste beseelt, hetzten also die aus ihrer Ruhe und Behaglichkeit ge-
scheuchten Volksbedrücker ihre Bluthunde auf einige der Redner, die in den Arbeit-
slosen-Versammlungen der letzten Zeit es versuchten, das gedrückte, entrechtete und
ausgesogene Volk auf die richtige Bahn zu leiten und demselben zu zeigen, wie es sich
von einem schmählichen Sklavenjoche befreien könne. Der ganze Büttel-Apparat von
New York und Philadelphia wurde beispielsweise in Bewegung gesetzt und eine ganze
Schaar von Spionen war in Thätigkeit um meiner Person habhaft zu werden, trotzdem
ich nicht das Geringste unternahm mich vor den Häschern zu verbergen, vielmehr über-
all offen und frei meine Thätigkeit weiter entfaltete. Ich will mich über die mir seitens
der Polizeibrut zu Thei gewordenen brutalen Behandlung und über die ganz nie-
derträchtige Vergewaltigung, die mir von den Philadelphier Behörden wiederfuhr, hier
nicht weiter ergehen— das eine nur will sagen, daß in meinen Augen der Leichen-
schänder des Schlachtfeldes ein ehrenwerter Mann ist im Vergleich zum Polizisten im
Allgemeinen, und zum amerikanischen Polizisten im Besonderen.—Ich hatte es in
ganz kurzer Zeit während meiner Haft in Philadelphia herausgefunden, daß man mich
mit den angewandten raffinirten Torturen und niedrigen Anträgen zu demoralisiren
suchte.
Bekanntlich soll das Weib hierzulande mehr Rechte haben. Ja, aber nicht das Prole-
tarierweib, nicht eine Anarchistin. Mit Verachtung sieht der Amerikaner auf die Des-
potie Rußlands hin und doch werden hier unter dem Deckmantel der Freiheit dieselben
Greuelthaten am Volke begangen. Nun wohl, wenn ich nicht frei meine Meinung sagen
kann, so werde ich noch andere Mittel und Wege finden um dem Volke die Augen zu öff-
nen, zu ihm zu sprechen, daß den capitalistischen Cäsaren Amerikas das Herz im Leibe
beben wird; ich werde der feigen Bande die Maske der Lüge noch vom Gesichte reißen.
Die Idee der wahren Freiheit wird fortleben bis zum Tage der großen Abrechnung; an
diesem Tage wird das jahrtausende lang getretene und gedrückte Volk zu neuem Leben
erwachen—zum wahrhaft freien Leben in der Anarchie.

Emma Goldmann.

150 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Essay in D I E B R A N D F A C K E L
Tombs Prison, New York, 13 September 1893

The Right of Free Speech in America.

It’s a well-known fact that the ruling class in America has been committing the most de-
spicable acts and most shameless assaults upon the working people using the so-called
liberal institutions of a republic as a cover. The prisons of America hold a large number
of people who dared to speak up for their inalienable rights,1 not to mention the count-
less number who were executed in a cowardly and despicable manner by the ruling gang
of robbers.2 The right of free speech has been trampled upon for a long time, but until
now the ruling class could use the excuse that in this or that case their lackeys were at-
tacked by the workers, or that some bloodsucker’s property seemed at risk and therefore
they had the right to punish those same workers and suppress the speech that provoked
such actions.
The misery of America’s workers grows from year to year, and those who are going
hungry have never dared to raise their voices. This year, however, the poverty is too great,
the hunger too terrible, and the workers will not bear their yoke any longer.3 The cry of
the oppressed and hungry sounds from all corners of America, and those deprived of
their rights have gathered by the thousands to listen to the pronouncements of speakers
with excitement and attentiveness.4 This, however, is not in the interest of the ruling

1. Along with her own arrest, EG may be referring to several free-speech advocates who had been pros-
ecuted under the Comstock Act of 1873. Ezra Heywood, the publisher of The Word, a free love paper,
was imprisoned in 1878 and 1890 for mailing material considered obscene. D. M. Bennett, editor of
The Truth Seeker, served thirteen months of hard labor for mailing obscene material (the pamphlet
Cupid’s Yokes, which was Heywood’s argument for free love) in 1879. In 1890, Moses Harman was
found guilty of publishing obscene material in Lucifer and sentenced to five years in prison for pub-
lishing letters about sex education, women’s liberation, and free speech. Many labor activists were
also arrested and imprisoned during this time. The 16 July 1891 issue of Twentieth Century Magazine,
for instance, reported at least eight recent arrests for union organizing and labor protests.
2. Among other incidents, EG is referring to the 6 July 1892 killing of striking and locked-out workers
at Homestead.
3. EG refers to the current economic crisis, which could be traced back to the Sherman Silver Purchase
Act of 1890. Some argued that the act had hurt the economy by undermining the value of gold and
sending inflation soaring. The Wall Street Panic of 7 May 1893 had deepened the crisis as hundreds of
banks and thousands of businesses failed, leaving between two and three million people unemployed.
4. In August 1893 several demonstrations by the unemployed took place in New York City. On 17 Au-
gust 1893, a mass meeting of about five thousand unemployed Jews on the East Side at Walhalla Hall
erupted into the streets. Three men were arrested—Abraham Rosenfarb, Jacob Gold, and Abram Si-
mon. The speakers denounced the brutality of the New York police against the working-class demon-
strators, and defended the right to speak on their condition. During the next several days EG spoke at
a series of meetings of the unemployed, including on the 18th of August, the occasion of the first re-
port quoting her advocacy of taking bread by force (see New York Times, 19 August 1893); on the 19th

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 151

 Cover from July 1893 issue of Die Brandfackel, German-language an-
archist communist paper edited by Claus Timmermann, in which many
of Goldman’s earliest essays were published. (By permission of the
Houghton Library, Harvard University)

band of bloodsuckers—that would be quite an unusual interpretation of the right of free

speech. What, the workers, our slaves, our objects of exploitation, should also have this
right granted to them? Never! At the moment in which the workers become aware of
their true position, try to express it and thus threaten our privileges, at this moment our
existence is in the most serious jeopardy.
In the last few days the capitalistic band has thought and spoken in this and similar
ways, and in their fear and dismay have set their lackeys upon those who have undertaken

she participated in a march of over a thousand people, and she joined ongoing meetings on the 21st
and the 23rd. Her speech on the 21st would lead to her arrest.

152 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

to enlighten the starving unemployed 5 and offer them ways and means to get hold of
some bread.6
In the opinion of the ruling bands of capitalists, therefore, the workers, the modern
slaves of the nineteenth century, do not have the least claim to the right of free speech;
they have no right to assert their demands for bread; they have no right to speak about
their poverty and their misery or about the means to eliminate these; they have no right
to claim something for themselves from the richly set table of life. They have only one
right: the right to die patiently of starvation.
Imbued with this spirit and driven from their comfort and contentment, the oppres-
sors of the people set their bloodhounds on several of the speakers who have tried in re-
cent workers’ meetings to lead the oppressed, alienated, and exploited on the right path
and show them how to free themselves from the despicable yoke of slavery. The whole
lackey apparatus of New York and Philadelphia, for example, was set in motion and an
entire army of spies were at work to apprehend me, even though I did not make the
slightest attempt to hide myself from my pursuers and in fact continued to carry out my
activities openly and freely.7 I will not go on any further here about the at times brutal
treatment inflicted upon me by the police and the vile assault coming from the Phila-
delphia authorities—I only want to say that in my eyes one who defiles corpses on a
battlefield is an honorable man in comparison to policemen in general, and to American
policemen in particular. I discovered in a very short time during my arrest in Philadel-
phia that they would try to demoralize me with refined tortures and vile requests.8
It is well known that women in this country are supposed to have more rights. Indeed,
but not the proletarian woman, not an Anarchist woman. Americans look upon the des-
potism of Russia with disdain, yet here under the cover of freedom the same atrocities
are committed against the people. Well, if I am not free to speak my opinion, then I will

5. Two hundred people marched in Rochester, New York, on 10 August 1893 to protest widespread un-
employment. The mayor prohibited the marchers from carrying black flags and instead instructed
them to carry American flags.
6. Bread as the most basic of people’s needs and a reason for revolt was a fundamental theme of anar-
chism during this period. See for example the manifesto by Peter Kropotkin, Louise Michel, and other
anarchists upon their arrest and trial in Lyon in 1883, in which they declared “Scoundrels that we are,
we demand bread for all; for all equally independence and justice”; see also Kropotkin’s The Conquest
of Bread (1892).
7. After her Union Square speech, EG spoke in Long Island and Philadelphia. The New York City police
told newspaper reporters that they were unable to locate EG and asserted that she was in hiding. EG
was arrested in Philadelphia on 31 August, along with Otto H. Lieble and Albert Hanson, who at-
tempted to shield and rescue her from detectives. Lieble and Hanson were held on $1,000 bail and
eventually released.
8. In Living My Life, EG recalls that while awaiting extradition in Philadelphia she was allowed no mail,
only the Bible to read, and was given towels to hem. She also claimed that Detective Sergeant Jacobs,
who escorted her to New York, offered to pay her a large sum of money in return for periodic reports
on the activities of radicals among the workers on the East Side, which she flatly refused (LML,
pp. 125–26; see also Excerpt from Trial Transcript, 4 October 1893, below).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 153

 find other ways and means to open the eyes of the people and speak to them so that the
hearts of the capitalist Caesars of America will tremble; I will yet rip the mask of lies from
the faces of this cowardly band. The idea of true freedom will live on until the day of the
great reckoning; on this day the people who have been trod upon and oppressed for thou-
sands of years will awake to a new life—to a truly free life in Anarchy.

Emma Goldmann.

Die Brandfackel 1 (September 1893): 3 –5. Translated from German.

154 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Inter view in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 17 September 1893

Nellie Bly Again.

She Interviews Emma Goldman and Other Anarchists.

[. . .]EMMA GOLDMAN.
Do you need an introduction to Emma Goldman? You have seen supposed pictures of
her. You have read of her as a property-destroying, capitalist-killing, riot-promoting agi-
tator. You see her in your mind a great raw-boned creature, with short hair and bloomers,
a red flag in one hand, a burning torch in the other; both feet constantly off of the ground
and “murder!” continually upon her lips.
That was my ideal of her, I confess,1 and when the matron stood before me saying,
“This is Emma Goldman,” I gasped with surprise and then laughed.
A little bit of a girl, just 5 feet high,2 including her bootheels, not showing her
120 pounds; with a saucy, turned-up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes that gazed
inquiringly at me through shell-rimmed glasses was Emma Goldman!
Her quiet little hands held rolled a recent copy of the Illustrated American.3 The mod-
est blue serge Eton suit, with a blue muslin shirtwaist and scarf, had no suggestion of
bloomers, and the light brown hair, not banged but falling loosely over the forehead and
gathered in a little knot behind, was very pretty and girlish.
The little feet were decorously upon the floor, and when the rather full lips parted,
showing strong, white teeth within, a mild, pleasant voice, with a very fetching accent,
said not “murder,” but—
“What is it you wish, madam?”
I told her. I sat down beside her, and we talked for two hours.
“I do not want anything published about me,” she said, “because people misjudge and
exaggerate, and, besides, I do not think it looks well for me to say anything while I am
in jail.”
“But I want to know something about your former life; how you became an Anarchist,
what your theories are, and how you mean to establish them.”

1. Nellie Bly’s was the first extensive interview of EG in the mainstream daily press. The interview, which
took place while EG was awaiting trial in the Tombs jail, also marked Bly’s return to the front pages
of the New York World after a three-year hiatus.
2. Her 1893 Philadelphia arrest record gave EG’s exact height as 4 feet 10 and 3/4 inches.
3. The recent issue contained an article entitled “Anarchism in New York,” featuring a disparaging ac-
count of EG as a reckless agitator among the unemployed of the Lower East Side (see Illustrated Amer-
ican, 9 September 1893, pp. 295–98).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 155

 Nellie Bly in 1890, the New York World journalist whose
17 September 1893 front-page interview marked Goldman’s
debut in the American press as a serious political thinker with
broad popular appeal, especially to a growing constituency of
women. (Library of Congress)

SHE TELLS HER AGE.

She smiled at me, rather amused, but the smile was a very becoming one, lighting up the
gravity of her face and making her look more girlish than ever.
“How old are you?” I asked as a beginning.
“Twenty-five last June,” she replied without the faintest hesitancy.
What greater proof do I need that she is an unusual and extraordinary woman?
“But the month of roses has not brought many into my life,” she added, with a little
smile.
“When did you become an Anarchist, and what made you one?”
“Oh, I have been one all my life, but I never really entered into the work until after the
Chicago riot, seven years ago.” 4

4. The aftermath of the Haymarket riots led to both fear and suspicion of anarchism and, interestingly,
a resurgence of interest in anarchism in the United States. EG, AB, Voltairine de Cleyre, Bill Hay-

156 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 “Why are you one?” I asked. “What is your object? What did you hope to gain?”
She smiled again, and slowly smoothed her book upon her knee.
“We are all egotists,” 5 she answered. “There are some that, if asked why they are An-
archists, will say, ‘for the good of the people.’ It is not true, and I do not say it. I am an
Anarchist because I am an egotist. It pains me to see others suffer. I cannot bear it. I
never hurt a man in my life, and I don’t think I could. So, because what others suffer
makes me suffer, I am an Anarchist and give my life to the cause, for only through it can
be ended all suffering and want and unhappiness.

A WORD ABOUT CAPITALISTS.

“Everything wrong, crime and sickness and all that, is the result of the system under
which we live,” she continued earnestly. “Were there no money and, as a result, no capi-
talists, people would not be over-worked, starved and illy housed, all of which makes
them old before their time, diseases them and makes them criminals. To save a dollar
the capitalists build their railroads poorly, and along comes a train, and loads of people
are killed. What are their lives to him if by their sacrifice he has saved money? But those
deaths mean misery, want and crime in many, many families. According to Anarchis-
tic principles, we build the best of railroads, so there shall be no accidents. There is
the Broadway cable, for instance.6 Instead of running a few cars at a frightful speed, in
order to save a larger expense, we should run many cars at slow speed, and so have no
accidents.”
“If you do away with money and employers, who will work upon your railroads?”
I asked.
“Those that care for that kind of work. Then every one shall do that which he likes
best, not merely a thing he is compelled to do to earn his daily bread.” 7
“What would you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?”
“No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and
give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would
have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.”
“What will you do with your criminals if every one is free and prisons unheard of ?”

wood, and others all point to the injustices of the trial and hangings of Albert Parsons, August Spies,
George Engel, and Adolph Fischer as deeply influential in their own development as radicals. EG
wrote in Living My Life that a speech about Haymarket made by Socialist Labor Party member Johanna
Greie Cramer while EG was still living in Rochester had a great impact on her, as did articles written
by Most in his paper Freiheit. Above all it was Louis Lingg’s defiance during the trial and his taking of
his own life before the scheduled hanging that resonated with EG and AB.
5. For discussion of anarchism and egoism, see note 3 to Letter from Alexander Berkman, 20 August
1892, above.
6. Fully operational in July 1893, the Broadway cable car line was the site of frequent accidents, particu-
larly at Twenty-third and Fifty-third streets and at the segment along Fourteenth Street known as
“Dead Man’s Curve.”
7. EG’s comments on work under anarchism and the following discussion of crime and criminals are
similar to those in Peter Kropotkin’s pamphlet Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles (London:
Freedom Press, 1891).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 157

 WHY ARE THERE CRIMINALS?
She smiles, sadly.
“The subject takes a lifetime of study,” she answered, “but we believe that we would
not have a criminal. Why are there criminals to-day. Because some have everything, oth-
ers nothing. Under our system it would be every man equal. The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt
not steal.’ Now, to steal, it is granted, there must be something to steal. We do not grant
there is anything to steal, for everything should be free.”
“Do you believe in God, Miss Goldman?”
“Once I did. Until I was seventeen I was very devout, and all my people are so, even
to-day. But when I began to read and study, I lost that belief. I believe in nature, noth-
ing else.”
“Where were you born?”
“I was born in Russia and afterwards my family removed to Germany. Although my
people were of a good family, I was always in deep sympathy with the poor. I did not think
of being an Anarchist then, but I was always trying to see some way to benefit the work-
ing classes. I was taught a trade. My father thought that no difference what one’s posi-
tion was, one should master a trade, so I learned dressmaking at a French school. I have
worked at this for years, sometimes in my own rooms, and again in establishments.”

SHE LIKES TO BATHE AND DRESS.

“Do you care for dress at all?”
“Oh, of course,” she answered, laughing. “I like to look well, but I don’t like very fussy
dresses. I like my dresses to be plain and quiet, and, above all things,” here she laughed
as if recalling the oft-repeated declaration of Anarchists’ hatred for soap, “I love my bath.
I must be clean. Being a German, I was taught cleanliness with my youth, and I do not
care how poor my room or my clothes are so long as they are clean.”
“What did you do with the money you earned by sewing?”
“Spent it all for books,” she said emphatically. “I kept myself in poverty buying books.
I have a library of nearly three hundred volumes, and so long as I had something to read
I did not mind hunger or shabby clothes.”
Think of that, you girls who put every dollar upon your backs! Can you not testify to
this woman’s earnestness of purpose when she voluntarily sacrifices her looks for books?
Miss Goldman speaks Russian, German, French and English, and reads and writes
Spanish and Italian.

HER IDEAS OF MARRIAGE.

“There is something else I must ask you. We look upon marriage as the foundation of
everything that is good. We base everything upon it. You do not believe in marriage. What
do you propose shall take its place?”

158 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 “I was married,” she said, with a little sigh, “when I was scarcely seventeen.8 I suf-
fered—let me say no more about that. I believe in the marriage of affection. That is the
only true marriage. If two people care for each other they have a right to live together so
long as that love exists. When it is dead what base immorality for them still to keep to-
gether! Oh, I tell you the marriage ceremony is a terrible thing!
“Tell me,” she added very seriously, “how can a woman go before a minister and take
an oath to love ‘this man’ all her life? How can she tell but to-morrow, next week, she may
get to know this man and hate him. Love is founded on respect, and a woman cannot tell
what a man is until she lives with him. Instead of being free to end the relation when her
feelings change, she lives on in a state that is the most depraved of all.
“Take the woman who marries for a home and for fine clothes. She goes to the man
with a lie on her lips and in her heart. Still”—with a little uplifting of the hands—“she
will not let her skirts touch the poor unfortunate upon the street who deceives no man,
but is to him just what she appears! Do away with marriage. Let there be nothing but vol-
untary affection and there ceases to exist the prostitute wife and the prostitute street
woman.”
“But the children? What would you do with them? Men would desert; women and
children would be left uncared for and destitute,” I protested.
“On the contrary, then men would never desert, and if a couple decided to separate
there would be public homes and schools for the children. Mothers who would rather do
something else than care for their children could put them in the schools, where they
would be cared for by women who preferred taking care of children to any other work.
In this way we would never have diseased or disabled children from careless and incom-
petent mothers.
“Besides this,” she went on, “in our free schools every child would have a chance to
learn and pursue that for which it has ability. Can you imagine the number of children
to-day, children of poor parents, who are born with ability for music or painting, or let-
ters, whose abilities lie dormant for the lack of means and the necessity to work for their
daily bread as soon as they are out of their cradles.”

HER REL ATIVES.

“Have you any brothers or sisters, Miss Goldman?”
“Yes; a married brother,9 who does not bother about anything, and only reads the pa-
pers when there is something in them about me. My sister is also married and, while not

8. In February 1887 EG married fellow factory worker Jacob Kershner, thereby gaining U.S. citizenship.
She divorced him between November 1887 and February 1888, then remarried him and was never
officially divorced from Kershner after their remarriage.
9. Herman Goldman (1872 –1934), EG’s younger brother and a Rochester machinist, was interviewed
about his sister at the time of AB’s attempt on Frick. See Rochester Union and Advertiser, 28 July
1892, p. 5.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 159

 actively engaged in our cause, is bringing up her children to our principles.10 My father
and mother are also living, near Rochester, and, while not Anarchists, sympathize with
me and do not interfere with my work.” 11
“What is your future?”
“I cannot say. I shall live to agitate to promote our ideas. I am willing to give my lib-
erty and my life, if necessary, to further my cause. It is my mission and I shall not falter.”
“Do you think that murder is going to help your cause?”
She looked grave; she shook her head slowly.
“That is a long subject to discuss. I don’t believe that through murder we shall gain,
but by war, labor against capital, masses against classes, which will not come in twenty
or twenty-five years. But some day, I firmly believe, we shall gain, and until then I am
satisfied to agitate to teach, and I only ask justice and freedom of speech.”
And so I left the little Anarchist, the modern Joan of Arc, waiting patiently in the
Tombs until her friends could secure bail for her.
“I shall certainly get a year or a year and a half,” 12 she said to me in parting, “not be-
cause my offense deserves it, but because I am an Anarchist.”[. . .]

New York World, 17 September 1893, pp. 1, 3. Excised from the beginning of this article is Bly’s declaration
that the “labor wars” were the central issue of the period, since racial, regional, and religious tensions had
“vanished.” The excised remainder of the article includes interviews with Johann Most and Justus Schwab,
and an account of EG’s visit to Schwab’s saloon Zum Großen Michel, a gathering place for radicals. Also in-
cluded with the article are drawings of EG, Schwab, Most, and Claus Timmermann. For the complete article,
see EGP, reel 47.

10. The sister EG refers to could be Lena Zodikow Cominsky (1862 –1950), EG’s half sister and the
mother of six children, including two who would become close to EG, Stella (Cominsky) Comyn Bal-
lantine (1886 –1961) and Saxe Commins, born Isidore Cominsky (1892 –1958); or EG could be re-
ferring to Helene Hochstein (1860 –1920), who was a socialist and had three children, including the
violinist David Hochstein (1892 –1918).
11. EG’s parents lived in Rochester, New York. Her father had a small furniture shop and her mother
took an active part in Jewish philanthropy in that city.
12. EG was in fact sentenced to a year in prison and released after ten months for good behavior.

160 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Excerpt from T R I A L T R A N S C R I P T
New York, 4 October 1893

The People vs. EMMA GOLDMAN.

COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS OF THE PEACE,

City and County of New York.1

Before, HON. RANDOLPH B. MARTINE,2 and a Jury.

Tried, October 4th, etc., 1893.

Indicted for UNLAWFULLY ASSEMBLING.

Indictment filed SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1893.

APPEARANCES: ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY

VERNON M. DAVIS,3 For THE PEOPLE.

A. OAKEY HALL 4 and BENJAMIN F. DOURAS,5 ESQRS.,

For THE DEFENSE.6

CHARLES JACOBS,7 called by the People, being duly sworn, testified that he was a de-
tective sergeant, connected with the Detective Bureau. He had been connected with that

1. The following court record is an excerpt from the official transcript of EG’s 1893 trial. It does not of-
fer a verbatim account of the proceedings, but only the government’s summary of selected testimony.
Newspaper coverage of the trial, some of which is excerpted in the following notes, provided verba-
tim reports of trial testimony not in the official court record. See also LML, pp. 129 –32 for exculpa-
tory court testimony omitted here.
2. Judge Randolph B. Martine (1844–1895), a prominent figure in Tammany Hall, presided over EG’s
trial.
3. In fact, Assistant District Attorney John F. McIntyre prosecuted the case.
4. Abraham Oakey Hall was a prominent New York attorney. EG’s 1893 trial marked his return to the
courtroom in New York, after nine years of practicing law in London. In her autobiography, EG gave
a glowing account of Hall.
5. Benjamin F. Douras was a New York attorney and law partner in the firm of Oakey Hall, Douras and
Bayer.
6. EG initially resisted the idea of hiring a defense lawyer, adhering to the anarchist position that justice
was unattainable in capitalist courts. According to Living My Life, AB sent EG a letter suggesting that
a lawyer could help her reap the propaganda value of the trial by protecting her right to speak during
the process (see LML, p. 128).
7. New York City detective sergeant Charles Jacobs was the star witness at EG’s 1893 trial. The jury con-
victed EG largely on the basis of Jacobs’s firsthand account of her 21 August 1893 Union Square
speech. He was also the key witness for the state in the trial of Claus Timmermann on 1 September
1893. Jacobs went to Philadelphia in August 1893 to serve EG with a warrant and, according to EG,

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 161

 bureau about seven years, and had been on the police force about nine years. He knew
the defendant. He first saw the defendant on the night of the 19th of August, 1893, at a
meeting in Union Square. He next saw the defendant on the night of the 21st of August,
on the stand at the Plaza, in Union Square. There was a labor meeting there that night,
and about three or four thousand people were in the square. He, the witness, arrived at
that place about 7 o’clock that night, accompanied by Detective Sergeants Krauch, Hei-
delberg, McNaught and Von Gerichten, Inspector McLaughlin, and Roundsman Schau-
wecker. The chairman of the meeting was a man named Joseph Levy.8 He heard the de-
fendant speak on that occasion, and he stood right behind her when she was speaking.
He understood the German language; he could read and write German. On the night in
question the defendant addressed the persons assembled, first in English and then in
German. In the course of her English speech the defendant, “called the attention of the
American workmen who were assembled in the crowd to the fact that that was a meet-
ing held by the unemployed who were out of employment and wanted bread and were
hungry. They were mostly all foreigners. She begged that the American workmen who
were present would take some interest in it because it was a meeting for a good object,
and she hoped that they would all give her their attention.” While the defendant was
speaking in German, he, the witness, took down what she said. He could not state, ex-
actly, from memory, what she said. The witness then gave the following as a translation
of what the defendant said, in her German speech, on that night: “My friends and Work-
men: We have assembled here for the purpose of speaking about our condition, and to
better our condition. But with idle talk you will accomplish very little. You must have
courage. You want bread, but who will give it to you? No one. Nobody will give it to you.
If you want it, you must take it. If you do not get it when you ask for it, upon your de-
mands, take it by force.” Immediately after the word “force,” the crowd responded, “That
is what we will do; that is what we will do.” The defendant continued: “Go out into the
street and prepare yourselves. The capitalists have prepared themselves with the police,
who are armed—the capitalists have prepared themselves with the police, who are
armed with clubs and pistols, but you can defend yourselves with clubs and stones, if you
are attacked.” After the word “attacked,” the crowd cheered, and said, “That is what we
will do.” The defendant continued: “I tell you again, organize yourselves, and go out and
demand what you want, and, if you do not get it, take it by force. And if you take bread
alone, it will help you but very little.” The crowd then cheered and shouted, “Hurrah!
Hurrah! That is what we will do.” The defendant continued: “Go to the houses of the
capitalists and demand your rights, and, if you are refused them, take them by force. You
will be attacked by the militia and the police. You must be prepared to defend yourselves
with clubs and stones.” The crowd shouted, “Yes, that is what we will have to do.” The

tried to bribe her into becoming an informant on the activities of her fellow anarchists on the train
ride back to New York City.
8. In the article “Badly Advised” (see New-Yorker Staats-Zietung, 22 August 1893, above), this “Joseph
Levy” is identified as David Levy.

162 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Cover sheet of trial transcript, The People vs. Emma Goldman, 4 October 1893. (Municipal Archives, De-
partment of Records and Information Services, City of New York)

defendant then said: “Prepare yourselves. Either you will do what I tell you or you can go
home and lay down quietly and die of hunger. You cannot accomplish much by making
speeches. You will have to act, and, if you want to act, you will have to prepare yourselves,
so that you can defend yourselves.” The crowd shouted, “She is right; we will have to be
able to defend ourselves.” The defendant continued: “It is true you are not prepared, but
we know that the police are prepared with weapons, but we know where they can be got.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 163

 Police mug shot of Goldman, 31 August 1893, just after her arrest in Philadelphia on charges of unlawful assembly aris-
ing from the New York City demonstration of the unemployed on 21 August 1893. (Rogues’ Gallery, Department of
Records, City of Philadelphia)

The crowd shouted, “We know where to buy them.” The defendant then said: “You are
living in a time when you must act. The laws will not fill our empty stomachs. The rich
live in luxury. Their wives and children have the nicest and best, while our wives and chil-
dren roam about in rags.” The crowd shouted, “We know that; she is right, she is right.”
Continuing, the defendant said: “Now, that you know what you have to do, prepare your-
selves. Long live anarchy!” The defendant also made many references to the French Rev-
olution and to the American Revolution, but he, the witness, at the time, did not think
they were material, and he “didn’t make copies of them.” The defendant also referred to
the riots in this country in 1863.9 The defendant spoke about twenty-five minutes. At

9. The New York City Draft Riots in July of 1863 were a response to a recent draft lottery and a provision
in the 1863 Conscription Act that allowed men to avoid military service if they sent a substitute or paid
a $300 commutation fee. Complex sentiments were aroused against the act, especially from Demo-
crats who opposed Republican President Lincoln’s proclamation to free black slaves in the southern
states. Many unskilled workers in northern states, who were mainly Irish and Democrats, feared that
free blacks would move north and take away their jobs by working for less pay. Many among the work-
ing class also felt that they were being forced into war, while the rich could pay their way out. From 13
July to 16 July mobs rioted, destroying property, attacking prominent Republicans, and murdering
free blacks. Labor unrest, inflation, and two years of the Civil War added to the tensions that started
the riot.

164 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Philadelphia police arrest record, labeling Goldman a “fugitive Anarchist” after her cita-
tion for unlawful assembly in connection with the New York demonstration of the unem-
ployed on 21 August 1893. (Municipal Archives, Department of Records and Information
Services, City of New York)

times, during the defendant’s speech, hats were waved in the air, and the crowd appeared
to get very much excited. When the defendant walked across the park, after her speech,
she was followed by about fifty or a hundred people. He saw the defendant, about two
weeks after that, in a cell in Police Headquarters, in Philadelphia. He had been looking
for the defendant between the 21st of August and the time when he found her in Phila-
delphia. He brought the defendant back to New York.
In cross-examination the witness testified that the notes from which he had read the
speech of the defendant were taken at the time of the meeting, and nothing had been
added to them thereafter. He was instructed to take down anything of an incendiary na-
ture that was said at that meeting. He was not instructed to arrest persons who made in-
cendiary speeches. He was not in uniform at the time of the meeting. He was not a ste-
nographer. He was not gratified when he heard what he thought was an incendiary
speech; he had no interest in the matter, except an official interest. He supposed that he
had left out of his notes some parts of the speech; he could not recall which part he had
left out. The defendant did not say anything in her English speech that he thought was
worthy of recognition in his book. The defendant’s German speech was not a perfect Ger-
man translation of the English speech. He, the witness, was born in this country. He
went to a German school, in his youth, and, when he became a policeman, he was on
duty in a German section of the city, where he acquired a good deal of German. He did

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 165

 not consider the meeting unlawful until the defendant spoke, in German, and then he
thought it was very unlawful. He did not see any unlawful act committed there, aside
from mere language; nor did he see any act that was against police discipline. So far as
he knew, no arrests were made at the meeting. He had no feeling against the anarchists;
but he did not believe in anarchism. He had been frequently detailed to report their meet-
ings, but had never been instructed to arrest any of them. There were not more than
twenty-five or thirty people on the platform. He didn’t see any one jostled on the plat-
form. He was prepared to take down any incendiary words in the defendant’s English
speech, had he heard any. If anybody testified that the defendant used incendiary terms
in the English speech, he had not heard any such thing. His father and mother were Ger-
mans, and his wife was a German.10
CHARLES L. SCHAUWECKER, being duly sworn, testified that he was a Roundsman in
the Police Department, in charge of the School of Instruction at Police Headquarters. He
had been a police officer over nineteen years. He was born in Germany, and came to this
country when he was ten years of age. He spoke the German language fluently, and could
read and write it. He was acquainted, in an official way, with Detective Sergeants Jacobs,
Krauch, Heidelberg and McNaught. He was detailed, on the night of the 21st of August,
by the acting Superintendent, Inspector Conlin, to attend the Union Square meeting. He
was on the speakers’ stand, at the Plaza. There were about three or four thousand people
at the meeting in the square. There were eleven speakers, including the chairman. He
saw the defendant on that night, and heard her speak. The defendant first spoke in En-
glish, for about ten or twelve minutes, and then she changed into German. At that time,
he, the witness, was standing a little to the right of the defendant, about four or five feet
from her, on the stand from which she was speaking. He saw Detective Sergeants Jacobs,
Heidelberg, Von Gerichten, McNaught, and others there. He saw Detective Jacobs stand-
ing behind the defendant, with a note-book in his hand, but he, the witness, was too busy
himself to notice whether or not Jacobs was taking notes. He could testify to the defen-
dant’s words on that occasion from memory, but he could not remember particularly as
to the rotation of the words. He took notes of the defendant’s speech, in German, and he
had the notes in his possession at the time of the trial. The witness then testified as fol-
lows: “Miss Goldman then opened her German speech by the following words: ‘My
Friends and Workmen: We are here assembled to-night to speak of the way of improving
our condition, but with mere speaking we accomplish nothing, if you have no courage.’
The speaker here digressed into relating the history of the French Revolution, and the
self-sacrifice and courage that it took to bring about the over-throw of the then existing
condition; and, after that, she also referred to John Brown and his advocating the aboli-
tion of slavery and the self-sacrifice that he was compelled to put up with in order to bring
it about, through the war of the Rebellion, the abolition of slavery and other matters.

10. At the conclusion of Jacobs’s testimony, on the first day (4 October), the judge denied continuation
of EG’s bail. She remained in custody throughout the trial and sentencing hearing.

166 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

Also, incidentally, she referred to the matter at Chicago, where the bomb was thrown,
and then continued, in referring to the present condition of this assembly, and said, ‘You
want bread, but who will give it to you? No one will give it to you. If you want it, you must
take it; if you do not get it on your demand, take it by force.’ During the speech I heard
responses from the crowd, such as approving, cheering, and an occasional voice, a little
louder than the rest, that would declare they would, and so on, but I paid no special at-
tention to them, because I was too busy keeping track of what she said. Then she con-
tinued: ‘Go out into the social revolution. Prepare yourselves. The capitalists have pre-
pared themselves with the police, who are armed with pistols and clubs.’ There was
another interval of applause and cries, and she continued, ‘You can defend yourselves
with sticks and stones, if assaulted, and, I say, again, organize and go out and demand
what you want, and, if it is not given to you, take it by force; and if you only take bread, it
will not help you much. Take all.’ There was another interval here of applause, and cries
from the crowd, during which time I caught up with her remarks. ‘Go to the palaces of
the capitalists. Demand your rights, and, if they are not given to you, take them by force.
You will be assaulted by the soldiery and the police, and you must be able to defend your-
selves. With sticks and with stones prepare yourselves. Either you must do what I tell you
or you can go home and lie down quietly and die of hunger. You can’t accomplish any-
thing with holding speeches. You must act; and if you want to act, you must prepare your-
selves in order to be able to defend yourselves. It is true, you are not prepared, and we
know that the police are prepared with weapons. We know also where they are to be ob-
tained. You are living in a time wherein you must act. The law will not fill your empty
stomachs. The laws are made for the rich and not for the poor. The wealthy live in lux-
ury. Their wives and children have the handsomest and best, while your wives and chil-
dren are starving and running about in rags. Now that you know what you are to do, pre-
pare yourselves.’ Then, with a wave of the hand, she concluded her speech by saying,
‘May Anarchy live!’” The defendant spoke on that for about thirty-five minutes. He took
notes of one Timmerman, on the same night, and he had testified on Timmerman’s
trial.11
In cross-examination the witness testified that his instructions were to go to the meet-
ing and take down such portions of the speeches, in writing, as would be serviceable as
evidence, in case anything unlawful was spoken and the party apprehended. He had no
instructions to arrest anybody who spoke in an incendiary manner. He took down the
defendant’s English speech, but had destroyed the copy, it was of so little importance.
He was not a stenographer. He wrote in abbreviated long-hand. The crowd, as a body,
was not disorderly. He did not arrest the defendant, because that was no part of his in-
structions, and his opinion was that an immediate arrest would have provoked acts of
disorder. [. . .]

11. For a description of the trial of Claus Timmermann, see “Urging Men to Riot,” New York World,
22 August 1893, EGP, reel 47.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 167

 FOR THE DEFENCE, JOSEPH BARONDESS, being duly sworn, testified that he was a
cloak-maker, by trade. He remembered having been convicted of a misdemeanor, for
which he had suffered imprisonment and been pardoned by the Governor.12 He had se-
cured a permit, from the proper authorities, for the meeting which was held in Union
Square. The object of the meeting was to appeal to the local, state and federal govern-
ment to inaugurate public works for the unemployed. He, the witness, was not present
at that meeting on the 21st.
In cross-examination the witness testified that at the time of the trial he was an or-
ganizer of the Operators’ and Cloakmakers’ Union. He had last worked at his trade about
three years before the trial. He was a married man and supported his family. He received
seven dollars and a half a week as an organizer, but there was no one to take his place.
He never extorted money from the firm of Popkin & Marks, Benjamin & Caspary or
Fishel Brothers. He remembered being tried in the Court of Oyer & Terminer, found
guilty, and sentenced to a year in State prison. He was pardoned by the Governor, upon
the recommendation of the District Attorney. He was an anarchist. He believed in living
up to the laws of the land, and believed in the proper administration of the laws. He had
read the Constitution of the United States and of the State of New York, and he believed
in them. He was a member of labor organizations, and believed in improving the condi-
tion of the toiling masses. He knew the defendant. He knew John Most. He had known
the defendant about four years, and had seen her about three or four times during that
period. He had never heard the defendant say, in any other speeches to the unemployed,
that, if they could not get bread, they would be justified in taking it by force.
EDWARD JOHN THIMME, being duly sworn, testified that he was a reporter on the
New York Staats-Zeitung.13 He attended the meeting in Union Square, on the night of the
21st of August, in the pursuit of his occupation. He mingled with the crowd before go-
ing on the platform; it was a very peaceable crowd. He was on the platform when the de-
fendant spoke. He heard the English speech of the defendant, and took notes of it. He
was a German by birth. He had been a reporter since 1886. Before he was employed by
the Staats-Zeitung, he was on the New York Volks-Zeitung.14 He heard the defendant’s
German speech. He took notes of the defendant’s English speech, and when the defen-
dant started to speak in German he waited to see whether or not she was simply trans-
lating her English speech into German. When the defendant was about half-way through

12. Joseph Barondess was arrested in 1891 in New York for leading a cloakmakers’ strike the previous
year. Under allegations of accepting a bribe (he had accepted a check for $100 from the firm of Pop-
kin and Marks as part of the settlement of a strike against the company, although he claimed the
check was for the union), Barondess went to trial where he was convicted of extortion and sentenced
to twenty-one months in jail. He fled to Canada while on bail, but soon after returned to New York,
where he spent a few weeks in jail before being pardoned by Governor Sulzer.
13. The New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung was a German-language mainstream daily newspaper. See Thimme’s
reporting in the 22 August 1893 article “Badly Advised,” above.
14. The New York Volkszeitung was the daily German-language organ of the Socialist Labor Party.

168 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

her German speech, he concluded that it was as close a repetition of her English speech
as possible, without being literally a translation. While the defendant was speaking, he,
the witness, did not hear any of the remarks which Detective Jacobs had testified were
made by the crowd, but he thought he would have heard them if they had been made.
The defendant spoke in a medium manner, neither very rapidly nor very slowly.
In cross-examination the witness testified that in taking notes he wrote in abbrevi-
ated long-hand, and sometimes with stenographic signs intermixed. The New York Volks-
Zeitung was a paper of Socialistic tendencies. He, the witness, was certain he belonged
to one of the schools of socialism. He was not connected with any Socialistic societies.
He did not know the defendant personally. He approved of some of the defendant’s ut-
terances. If the defendant said, “If you do not get bread and freedom peaceably, take it by
force,” he would not approve of it. He did not remember seeing Jacobs on the platform
that night, nor did he see Heidelberg or Krauch. He did see Officer Schauwecker on the
stand. Schauwecker was not taking notes when he, the witness, saw him. He remem-
bered hearing the defendant say that the workingmens’ stomachs were empty, that they
should be filled with bread, and that they ought to get bread and have bread, and if they
could not get it by easy measures they should take it by forcible measures.
EDWARD BRADY,15 being duly sworn, testified that he was a compositor. He was at the
Union Square meeting on the night of the 21st. He was a German. He read and spoke
German fluently. He went to the meeting with the defendant. He heard the defendant’s
English and German speeches. So far as he could remember, there was no difference
in the spirit of the speeches. He heard common expressions of approval from the as-
sembled people. He had heard the testimony of Detective Jacobs. He heard some of the
sentences which Jacobs had testified to, at the meeting, but it seemed to him, the witness,
that the defendant’s language was misconstrued and contorted by the officers. He did not
hear the defendant utter any threat at the meeting.
In cross-examination the witness testified that he had been in this country twelve
months. He had [a] printing office of his own, and did any kind of printing that he could
get. He printed a paper for a society of working men; he did not know who wrote the ar-
ticles for the paper, but it was a Socialistic paper. He was an anarchist. He had known the
defendant about six months. He made her acquaintance in a saloon in Fifth street,16
where Anarchists were in the habit of meeting. He saw about half a dozen anarchists at
the Union Square meeting, whom he recognized. He had heard the defendant say some
of the things which Schauwecker testified she had said. The defendant did not say that
the people would do right if they went to the palaces of the capitalists and took anything
that they could get. The defendant spoke as though prophesying, “If certain things would

15. Edward Brady, an anarchist born in Vienna who immigrated to the United States in 1892, was EG’s
companion and mentor from 1893 to 1899.
16. Probably Zum Großen Michel, a saloon located in the basement of 209 Fifth Street and a gathering
place for radicals.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 169

 happen, then the people would be compelled to do such and such a thing.” He did not
hear the defendant say, “I tell you again, organize; go and demand what you want, and,
if it is not given to you, then take it by force. If you take bread alone, it will not help you;
take everything. March to the palaces of the capitalists and demand your rights. If they
are not given to you, take them by force.” He did not hear the defendant say anything
about getting weapons. He heard some persons in the crowd shout, “Bravo!” He did not
hear any one in the crowd say, “She is right; we will do it.” He did not remember seeing
Officer Jacobs writing on that night. He had not read the Constitution of the United
States or of the State of New York.
EDWARD JOHN THIMME, being recalled for further cross-examination, testified that
he had a copy of the Staats-Zeitung of August 22 in his possession. He reported the story
of the Union Square meeting for that paper. In the report of the defendant’s English
speech was the following language: “You demand bread, and, if you cannot get it in a
peaceable way, you will get it by force. Unite, and take it by force, if you cannot get it
peaceably.” . . . “Again, if you cannot get bread, take it by force.” That language was con-
tained in the English speech, notwithstanding the testimony of the detectives that they
had heard nothing incendiary in the English speech.
EMMA GOLDMAN, THE DEFENDANT, being duly sworn, testified, in her own behalf,
that she had lived in this country eight years. She had delivered many public speeches in
this country. She was in the habit of preparing her speeches and committing them to
memory. She had written out the German speech which she delivered on the night of the
21st of August, 1893, and she had memorized it. She had made notes of the English
speech which she delivered on that night, before she went to the meeting. There was not
very much difference between the English speech and the German speech. She had been
requested by several of the unemployed to speak at that meeting. She saw Detective
Jacobs at the meeting. She had heard the testimony of Detective Jacobs, on the stand; she
denied everything that he said, it was not true. She was arrested in Philadelphia. She left
New York on Tuesday, the 22nd of August, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and went to Phil-
adelphia. She went to Philadelphia for the purpose of forming a union and delivering a
lecture. She had had that purpose in her mind before the 21st of August. She was not
paid for her speeches. She did not leave New York from any apprehension of arrest. She
was arrested, in Philadelphia, on the night of the 31st of August. She was willing to re-
turn to New York without the formality of a requisition, but she was held to await a req-
uisition.17 The defendant then read, from manuscript, in German, the following, which
she stated was the speech delivered by her, in German, on the night in question, and
which was written on the Sunday preceding the 21st: 18

17. See Living My Life for EG’s account of her Philadelphia arrest: “In the morning I was asked whether
I was willing to go back with the detectives to New York. ‘Not of my own free will,’ I declared. ‘Very
well, we’ll keep you until your extradition has been arranged’ ” (LML, p. 124).
18. The court interpreter, Professor Benedict Morossi, translated EG’s speech into what one account de-
scribed as “half an hour of pure, unadulterated fun.” Another described him as “a born actor, [who]

170 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 “I see thousands of working men and working women before me who are assembled,
driven by a common necessity. Hunger does not make any difference between nations—
no, there is no difference between nations and races—and the cry of hunger re-echoes
now in all the cities of America. Hunger is the incentive for workingmen since the mil-
lionaires are uttering sounds of abolishing them and the riots caused by hunger are re-
peating themselves oftener and oftener. Certain demagogues want to persuade us that
the Silver bill is the cause of the crisis, but the Silver bill is only one of the links of the
long chain of the system of spoilation.19 They want to throw before us a morsel of bread.
They want to give us alms. They want to give us alms in order to quell our excitement,
but alms are not the means by which the capitalistic class can abolish need. The needs
of the working class are not caused by universal improvidence but by the un-equal sub-
division of goods, in so far as private property is concerned. A small group of oppressors,
idle people, have seated themselves above the proletariat and they suck the blood from
their veins. The monopolists, the rich people, are those who command all the treasures
of the earth and who use the workingmen only as an animal—a beast of burden and the
discouraged classes are the victims of such injustice. In this country nature has arrayed
everything which is beautiful and magnificent for the benefit of the whole of mankind,
and men have only to reach for and take everything which they need for the satisfaction
of their wants, but a band of thieves stands by the State and by the Church and has taken
everything to themselves, and you, workingmen, get nothing, only toil, year in and year
out and carry the burden until you lose all your strength and until you drop down dead.
Everything which is true and great to you you sacrifice to your despoilers. Your daugh-
ters and sons are like flowers who lose their freshness. They wither in the factories and
your women are compelled to sell themselves in the street because you are not able to
support your families. Nevertheless you have borne your misery with patience as long as
you had a piece of bread, and now they take from you the very last thing and while you
are starving your persecutors and tormentors are seated at a big table drinking cham-
pagne and squandering enormous amounts of money for their pleasures and servants.
What for is there here a police? Look at them, those well-fed representatives of the oth-
ers—how they are flourishing their clubs and how they lay in wait in order to throw
themselves upon you at the first opportunity and kill you, but you ain’t yet entirely de-
prived of all your strength by hunger. You still are possessed of your energy, of your
courage, and you ought to gather up yourselves. You can not allow yourselves to be pa-
tiently killed. Think of your wives and children. There are yet those who advise you to

makes up in histrionic talents what he lacks in the knowledge of German.” EG clashed repeatedly
with Morossi over his translation; even jury members appeared to take exception to his rendering
of lines from Schiller. See New York World, 6 October 1893, EGP, reel 47; and New York Times, 6 Oc-
tober 1893, EGP, reel 47.
19. A reference to the Cleveland administration’s blame of the current economic crisis on the Sherman
Silver Purchase Act of 1890. Cleveland succeeded in repealing the Silver Act in late 1893, and the
economy gradually recovered.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 171

 keep patient and to go for alms. Already, for a time, did you allow yourselves to be led by
the nose by demagogues and to be held as fools but you can not have been degraded as
much as to go and ask for alms because to become a mendicant is a degradation both
to men and women, and it is the desire of your oppressors to degrade you and to have
you appear as idle people and mendicants. No, workmen, you ought to protect what be-
longs to you—what you yourselves have produced, and, in the first place, you ought to
take bread, to procure bread in order to quench your momentary needs. Workmen, you
must demand what belongs to you. Go forth into the streets where the rich dwell, before
the palaces of your dominators because these dominators which otherwise are coura-
geous, when they see you stand there single, they tremble before you as soon as they see
you united and through your loud and energetic demands now we can see by the times
those harmless people will be compelled to provide work for you. Why should they not
do it? Workingmen were the delight of the poet Schiller for it was labor who attacked
tyranny when the oppressed one could nowhere find right and justice. When the burden
becomes insupportable, then he lifts up his hand with confidence towards the sky, or
heaven, and he takes down from above—he is as indestructible as the stars themselves.20
The pains of hunger know no boundaries or of no limits. If your depradators are not to
help you then you will know how to find other means to procure bread, because you can
not for a long time suffer under the pangs of hunger. But again, you have satisfied your
hunger. Even then, you remain slaves, workingmen, and as long as you remain slaves
the times will never change, not for the momentary satisfaction of hunger, but we are
driven to distraction by the cause of hunger and this cause resides in slavery and in the
spoilation of the people. We ought to deliver ourselves from our tyrants and dominators,
because man is happy only when he is free and such happiness would only go down
through a struggle with a people dispossessed of their rights and their oppressors. By
means of the social revolution there is a possibility of a distribution of private property
of State and Church for the benefit and the peace of the whole of mankind, and you un-
employed, unite under the folds of a great banner and liberty will be your watchword.”
The only reason she had for going to that meeting was to tell the unemployed the real
reason for their starvation. She had no intention of creating a riot. She did not hear any
ejaculations or exclamations from the crowd, except cheering and applause.
In cross-examination the defendant testified that she did not believe in a Supreme Be-
ing; she was an atheist.21 She was twenty-five years of age, and was born in Russia. She
left Russia because her parents did, and for no other reason. She first came to New York

20. From Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, act 2, scene 2.

21. Compare the account in the New York World (7 October 1893, EGP, reel 47; see also New York Times,
7 October 1893, EGP, reel 47):
Q—You don’t believe the Church exercises a moral influence? A—No.
Q—Not any church? A—Not any church whatever.
Q—Do you believe in the tenets and precepts of Judaism? A—I do not. I only am an atheist. I believe in atheism.

172 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

to live in 1888. The first house she lived in in New York was in East Broadway, where she
had a furnished room. After that she went to live in 44th street, with several young ladies.
She was married, but had been separated from her husband six or seven years. An anar-
chist, Berkman, also lived in the house in 44th street. She knew that Berkman was the
man who shot Frick, in Pittsburgh.22 She was an anarchist. She understood anarchism
to be “the establishment of a system without government of any kind, and perfect liberty
to every individual to enjoy their life and cultivate their abilities as well as the attainment
of the highest knowledge.” She did not believe in any laws whatever. She knew John
Most, and believed that he was a good agitator and educator. She knew that Most was an
anarchist.23 She heard Timmermann speak on the night of the 21st of August, and she
approved of all she heard him say. She knew that he had been tried and convicted, but
she did not believe that justice had been done to him. She did not receive any money for
the lectures which she delivered. She was a dress-maker, by trade, and she worked at
that. Her income was from $5.00 to $7.00 per week. Previous to her arrest she lived at
266 East 16th street. Her father and mother were not anarchists; they believed in a Su-
preme Being. She had two brothers, and a sister. Her sister was a socialist. Her brothers
and sister lived in Rochester, New York. She did not know of any existing government
which agreed with her views. She had read the Constitution of the United States. In an-
swer to a question as to whether or not she believed in the Constitution of the United
States, she replied: “If it should be quoted as it is there, I would believe in it, more or
less.” She had also read the Constitution of the State of New York, which she believed in,
but she did not believe that the people lived up to it. Although she did not know positively
that she was to be called upon to speak on the night in question, she expected to be, and,
therefore, she had prepared her speech. She always reduced her speeches to writing be-
fore delivering them. She had made four or five speeches during the financial distur-
bance, and had prepared a different speech for each occasion. Various branches of in-
dustry were represented at the meeting on the night of the 21st of August. She destroyed
the manuscript of speeches which she did not give for publication. She had the manu-
script of the speech which she delivered on the 19th.24 She preserved the manuscript
of that speech, because she thought it would be published in some of their papers. She

22. At this point, according to the New York Times (7 October 1893, EGP, reel 47),
The witness denied that she had ever lived with Berkmann as his wife. She also denied that she went to Home-
stead or Pittsburg with him.
Q.—You approved of Berkmann’s attempt to kill Frick? A.—I never approved of it.
Q.—Don’t you approve of his action now? A.—I have sympathy for him, and I admire his courage in doing what
he did, but that is all.

23. The New York Times (7 October 1893, EGP, reel 47) recounted the exchange as follows:
Q.—Do you believe in Most and his teachings? A.—Most is an Anarchist and I am an Anarchist, but we do not
agree in a great many particulars.

24. On 19 August EG attended a meeting of the unemployed at Golden Rule Hall, where she spoke and
helped lead a march of about a thousand people from the hall to Union Square.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 173

 could not recite the speech from memory at the time of the trial. She did not say, at the
meeting on the 21st: “You want bread, and who will give it to you? No one will give it to
you. If you want it, you must take it. If you do not get it at your demand, take it by force.”
She said exactly what was contained in the speech which she had testified to delivering,
and she did not say anything else. She did not say anything that would inflame the minds
of the people there assembled. She did not conclude her remarks by saying, “May anar-
chy live!” When she said, in her German speech, on the night of the 21st, “A band of
thieves, sustained by Church and State, have taken everything,” she meant that the mo-
nopolists and capitalists robbed the poor of what belonged to them. She thought if the
unemployed were to organize and unite and march through the streets, to let the city au-
thorities and the rich see their misery, that they would be compelled, by seeing their mis-
ery, and the great number of the unemployed, to help them. If the unemployed saw fit to
rise up and violate the law, she would not encourage them, but she would not keep them
back, because she had no right to do so. She knew that anarchists looked upon her with
respect, but the anarchists did not compose all the unemployed of New York. She did not
know that the people in the lower walks of life looked up to her with respect. If she saw
those people banded together, to commit an unlawful act, she would not stop them. She
thought if the tyrants would not give the unemployed bread or employment, starvation
would drive them into taking bread, wherever they could find it. She remembered the
Haymarket riots in Chicago; she did not think the anarchists threw the bomb which
killed the officers; she thought the police themselves threw the bomb. She approved of
the agitation of the anarchists at that time in Chicago. By “the tyrants” she meant the rep-
resentatives of government, the rich, the monopolists, the upholders of any state—Van-
derbilt, Gould, &c. She did not believe in the police system of this country, although she
believed that, “under the present system, policemen might be necessary.” She thought
there was a great prejudice against her, as an anarchist. The peroration of her speech
was, “Unite under the folds of the red banner, and then there will be liberty or death, and
let that be your watch-word.” By that, she meant that the people of education should be-
come anarchists, and demand their rights under the flag of anarchy. There was no liberty
in this country. She did say, in her English speech, “I would first appeal to the American
workingmen. If Jefferson and Paine, who fought for freedom, Wendell Phillips and John
Brown were here to see your misery, they would be ashamed of their country.25 You have
Senators and Congressmen, who live in luxury, while you have nothing to eat. Their chil-
dren live in grand style; their wives and mistresses wear silks and diamonds. You have
thought that the liberty of America gives you freedom and liberty. Now you know how
very much mistaken you have been. You are not free citizens. You are worse than black
slaves. Americans, if you really want to be free citizens, take your rights into your own

25. EG often evoked Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Wendell Phillips, and John Brown to ground her
ideas within a perceived American anti-statist tradition.

174 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

hands. Go and fight with your brothers, no matter if they are foreigners. You are starv-
ing, as well as they. Don’t be prejudiced against these poor people who have come to this
country. They are not responsible for the prevailing conditions. The capitalist class is re-
sponsible. The capitalist system is near its ruin.” She did not say, in that speech, “If you
do not get bread and freedom peaceably, take it by force.” The report of the speech was
substantially correct, with the exception that she did not tell the people to take it by force.
She did not tell the people to go out into the social revolution; that was impossible. She
did not know the witness Thimme personally. After reading the report which he wrote,
and which was published in the Staats-Zeitung the next day, she said that it was substan-
tially correct, except that it stated that she said, “If they do not give it to you peaceably,
take it by force,” and she had said nothing of the kind. One of the purposes for which she
went to Philadelphia was to organize a group of anarchists for their newspaper, the Soli-
darity.26 She delivered a speech in Philadelphia on the night of the 28th. She had read in
the newspapers that a warrant had been issued for her arrest, and she intended to return
to New York as soon as she had finished in Philadelphia. The party at whose house she
stopped in Philadelphia, was an anarchist; she would not give his name. She believed in
the use of dynamite, if the time should come for it. She did not expect to live long enough
to see the time come for the use of bombs, and she couldn’t tell whether she would use
them or not.
In re-direct-examination the defendant testified that she was not divorced from her
husband; they had only separated. She was on good terms with her parents. She believed
that there is a moral law which “obligates us not to misuse the liberty of the next one, not
to do any harm to the one, nor to hurt him, or, at least, not to do any harm whatever to
the person and to try by all possible means to help the next one, and to help as much as
possible for the benefit of the other.” She did not believe in murder, or theft, nor that
which the laws of this country or the laws of any country make criminal. The press mis-
represented anarchists, by trying to represent them as murderers, thieves and robbers,
and as if they were only desirous of taking all the money of the capitalists and putting it
in their own pockets. She did not believe in that. She denied the words that Officer
Jacobs put into her mouth, although she did not deny the ideas. She wished it to be un-
derstood that she did not tell the workingmen to do anything at present, or to do it later,
but she simply said that their terrible condition of starvation would drive them to do this
and that.
In re-cross-examination the defendant testified that she approved of the course that
was taken by the Communists, in France, in 1871.27 Her object in going to all these meet-

26. Solidarity, based in New York, was then in difficult financial straits and suspended publication in Au-
gust 1893, its last issue appearing on 23 August. EG traveled to Philadelphia in part to raise money
for the paper. Solidarity would be revived in 1895 and 1898.
27. A reference to the Paris Commune, 18 March to 28 May 1871.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 175

 ings and addressing the meetings was that it was simply the use of her right of free
speech, as she understood it had been granted here to every man and woman, and she
had no other object than to use her right of free speech, and she knew it was honorable
to use the right of free speech, so she did, and she had not done anything unlawful
against the Constitution of the United States. [. . .] 28

TD, New York City Municipal Archives. Excised from this document is the testimony of three more police de-
tectives for the prosecution and two unemployed workers for the defense as well as David Barly of the New
York World in a rebuttal for the prosecution.

28. Defense attorney A. Oakey Hall’s address to the jury rounded out the proceedings on Friday, 6 Oc-
tober. Prosecutor McIntyre’s summation was held over to the following Monday. For accounts of
Hall’s closing address, see New York World, 7 October 1893, EGP, reel 47; and New York Times, 7 Oc-
tober 1893, EGP, reel 47; for McIntyre’s summation, see New York World, 10 October 1893, p. 1; and
New York Times, 10 October 1893, p. 1.

176 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Ar ticle in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 17 October 1893

The Law’s Limit.

Emma Goldman Is Sentenced to a Year’s Imprisonment.

Anarchists Are Warned.

Judge Martine Says They Should Be Kept Out of the Country.

No Speech from the Prisoner.

But The World Presents in Full the Remarks That She Had Intended to Deliver.

Swore She Would, But Relented.

Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, who was convicted of “unlawful assembly” in General
Sessions last week, was yesterday sentenced by Judge Martine to one year’s imprison-
ment in the penitentiary. In sentencing the woman, Judge Martine intimated that he was
sorry the Penal Code prohibited him from giving her a heavier sentence. When he had
concluded his remarks, the spectators applauded, some cheering, others stamping their
feet. There was no demonstration by the woman’s compatriots, as threatened.
Miss Goldman was brought to General Sessions in company with a dozen other fe-
male prisoners. She demurred to the crowds staring at her and asked permission to walk
alone. Of course, this was denied, and when the women reached the old brown court
house, a crowd of fully four hundred people were at their heels. Emma was pointed out
by the crowd and heard some very unpleasant remarks about herself.

OAKEY HALL GIVES UP.

As soon as Judge Martine took his seat Clerk Hall called Emma to the bar. In answer to
the Clerk’s questions regarding her pedigree, the woman responded loudly. She said that
she was twenty-five years old.
“Where do you live?” inquired the Clerk.
“Why, in the Tombs,” 1 replied Emma loudly.

1. The Tombs was the popular name for the municipal jail— constructed in 1838 and occupying the
block bounded by Center, Lafayette, Franklin, and Leonard streets—so-called for the Egyptian theme
of its architecture. EG repeated this response as her city address during her trial. See “Only the Moral
Laws,” New York World, 7 October 1893, EGP, reel 47.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 177

 “Before that, I mean,” explained Mr. Hall.
“Oh! At No. 422 East Fortieth street.”
In answer to the Clerk’s question as to what she had to say why sentence should not
be pronounced, Emma started to speak, when ex-Mayor A. Oakey Hall, who defended
her on her trial, arose. He surprised everybody by informing Judge Martine that, owing
to a misunderstanding with his client, he would withdraw from the case. He said that he
had advised her not to make a speech in court, but she had declared that she would.
Emma, who was standing then at the bar, awaiting her sentence, nodded her head.
She again started to say something, when Judge Martine warned her to confine her re-
marks to the case in hand. Her face flushed and she grasped the railing in front of her.
She spoke in a rasping voice, humble and meek.

NO SPEECH AF TER ALL.

“Your Honor,” she said nervously, “in view of the fact that the police have done everything
they could to incite my friends, the Anarchists, to some demonstration, so that they could
put them in jail also, I shall refrain from delivering any speech here.”
That is all she said. When she had concluded she looked at her ex-counsel and smiled.
Mr. Hall was watching her intently. He colored slightly and motioned to her to sit down.
She started to do so when Judge Martine began to talk, and a court officer yanked her
around to face the bench.
Judge Martine lost no time in sentencing her. This is what he said:
“In this case the Court has given much consideration as to what would be a just dis-
position to make of this defendant after this conviction. You were represented in this case
by one who is as able to present the facts as any lawyer now at the bar. His vast experi-
ence and his ability as counsel were called upon to their utmost extent in your behalf.
The facts were submitted to the jury. There were witnesses deemed worthy of credence
by the jury who stated that they heard the remarks which you made. There is no ques-
tion but that those remarks brought you clearly within the statute. Your language was
such as to incite disorder, to incite to riot, and the language as interpreted by those who
heard it was such that a riot might have ensued.”

ANARCHISTS SHOULD BE EXCLUDED.

“You are a woman beyond the average in intelligence. What your advantages have been
in the way of education I do not know, except as they were exhibited here in court. You
are certainly an intelligent person. In the light of reason you must have known the effect
of language such as you uttered on that occasion. Now you have testified in your own be-
half, and you told us you did not believe in our institutions; that you did not believe in
our laws, and that you have no respect for them. Such a person cannot be tolerated in this
community by those who believe in law, and I am happy to say that the greater num-
ber of our people do believe in law. I think it very improper that the great strength of this
nation is not exercised to the extent that you and those who entertain the same ideas

178 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

should be met at the portal of our country to the end that they should not be allowed to
enter here.
“We are proud of our institutions, and much money and much blood have been spent
to build them up, and we do not propose that any person, man or woman, shall under-
take to tear them down. We do not propose to allow you to bid defiance to our institutions
without showing you that the strong arm of the law will take hold of you and that the law
cannot be defied. I look upon you as a dangerous woman in your doctrine. Fortunately,
there are only a few, compared with the great number of our citizens, who believe in your
doctrines, but it is necessary that those who believe the way you do should be taught that
the law will be vindicated.”

THE L AW’S FULL PENALTY.

“I have no hope of doing any good for you. I am satisfied that you are depraved, and have
no respect for law. The sentence of the Court is that you be confined for the full term al-
lowed by law, which is one year in the penitentiary.”
Miss Goldman paid no attention to Judge Martine’s words. All the time he was talk-
ing she was smiling at several of her friends who sat within the inclosure. When Judge
Martine concluded, she was led away to the Tombs. Outside the court room she met Jus-
tus Schwab.2 She whispered something in his ear. Schwab smiled. Turning to a police
officer, Schwab inquired the woman’s sentence. He was told. “You’ve done your best,” he
replied.
The speech which Miss Goldman intended to deliver in court and which she aban-
doned at the last moment, was prepared in advance. This is it:

THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH.

“I speak not to defend myself, but to defend my right of free speech, trampled upon by
those who have caused the curtailing of my liberty.
“I know that the right of free speech was once guaranteed to every man and woman
in this land.
“What do those who have brought me here understand by the right of free speech?
Does it give a right to all to say what appears to the individual good or bad, or has it been
granted to permit the expression of only that which to a certain class of the citizens ap-
pears right?
“Is free speech solely for the purpose and use of the Government and its officers, are
individuals prohibited from saying that which is true, even though hardly to the taste of
a certain class or portion of the public? Can I only say that in which I do not concur, and
must I say it?
“I am positive that the men who shed their blood for the independence of this land,

2. Justus Schwab, German-born anarchist, ran a popular Lower East Side saloon and was a close friend
and supporter of EG.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 179

 and who offered up their lives to secure the liberty and rights of the American people,
must have had a very different understanding of the right of free speech than those who
to-day represent the Government, and who so interpret the right as to permit the ex-
pression only of that which is conducive to their benefit.3
“According to such an interpretation of the right of free speech I must call them
despots, and as such, without the right to commemorate in celebrations the memory of
those who fell in the fight for Independence, for the former deliberately trample under
foot the principles of those heroes, and when decorating their graves commit blasphemy.
“Why don’t the representatives of the State drop the so-called mantle of free speech,
discard the mask of falsehood and admit that absolutism reigns here?
“Under such a condition of things the American citizen has no shadow of right in
pointing the finger of contempt at European institutions and in speaking of the down-
trodden hungry of the Old World.
“The sorrowful condition of the workingmen of the Old as well as the New World in-
creases from day to day, and it reached a high point in its horizon this very year.
“Devoid of all means of sustenance, the workingmen assemble to consult, to devise
means to remedy their need. Those who throughout the year utilize the people and
gather riches at their cost perhaps feel that it would not go well with them should the
workingmen become half conscious of their exigencies, and in their terror the latter seek
the aid of government. Innumerable policemen and spies are sent into the meetings of
the unemployed, to control all their deliberations, to control the speakers.”

DEFENDING HER SPEECHES.

“I belonged to that class of speakers who endeavored to show the workingmen the real
reason of their misfortune.
“The speeches made by me must have contained much that was unpleasant for the
rich of the City of New York, because they set in motion whole bands of spies to cause
my apprehension and confinement, for the reason, as the indictment reads, that I had of-
fended against the law and exhorted those present at my speeches to acts of violence.
“If what I said at Golden Rule Hall and at Union Square was a violation of the laws,
then all those who were present at those meetings, and who by protracted and loud ap-
plause evinced their approval of what I said, were equally guilty with me. Why, then, did
the city authorities proceed against me alone? Why? Because the authorities know that
no danger lies in the workingman’s ignorance of the true cause of his privations.
“From the moment that I, as an Anarchist, showed them that the workingman could
never expect relief from his despoilers, from that moment I made the ruling masses un-
comfortable, and had to be put out of the way.

3. For a discussion of allusions to the founders of the United States by EG and preceding anarchists, see
note 6 to “Badly Advised,” Article in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 22 August 1893, above.

180 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 “I do not acknowledge laws made to protect the rich and oppress the poor. Who are
the law makers? Senators, the great of the land? Capitalists. Capitalists who torture thou-
sands to slow death in their factories they are people who live in affluence, robbing the
workingman of his strength to deprive him of the results of his labor; they are men
whose fortunes have been built upon a foundation formed by pyramids of children’s
corpses.
“The wealth, the luxury, the pomp and glory of power are bought at the price of mur-
dered and disfigured mankind.
“Ever rises the voice of the disinherited people, a voice growing in volume, and to
which the overbearing classes will not listen, and to still which they devise new laws in-
tended to silence the masses. Bands of priests are sent out to teach subjection, to propa-
gate superstition and keep the people in ignorance.
“The demands of the workingmen are met with the Winchester rifle and the Gatling
gun,4 and I must confess that my brethren and myself will ever oppose such a state of
‘order,’ an ‘order’ in which we do not believe, and whose representatives we will never be
compelled to meet in the struggle for advancement.”

AIM OF THE ANARCHISTS.

“I can fully understand that such people hate the Anarchists, for it is our endeavor to
abolish private property, State and Church. In one word, we aim to free men from tyrants
and government.
“The striving for freedom is not the creature of my brain, nor that of any other being;
it lies rooted in the people, and the contentions of the past, the struggles between the
people and their oppressors, show but too plainly that the people are desirous of being
freed from their burdens.
“The burning at the stake and the gallows have been the reward of numberless men
of advanced thought, and even to-day thousands feel the icy blasts of Siberia and the tor-
rid breath of New Caledonia,5 while others yield up their lives in the cause, hidden by the
grim walls of dungeons deep. And yet the desire for freedom grew, and grows.
“The world is gliding ever nearer the fact that in Anarchy can be found the happiness
and content of man.
“You will not be able to stifle Anarchy by the erection of gallows and of jails.
“You endeavor to make us appear to the public eye veritable murderers, wholly de-

4. EG’s complaint that the legitimate demands of the workingmen were “met with the Winchester rifle
and the Gatling gun” is similar to the words of Albert Parsons in his autobiography, Life of Albert Par-
sons (Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1889), wherein he states that the capitalist press advised the use of
militia bayonets and Gatling guns to suppress strikers and put down discontented laborers struggling
for better pay and shorter work hours (p. 16).
5. EG refers to Siberia, where Russian political prisoners were exiled, and New Caledonia, the French
penal colony where many Paris Communards were exiled, including Louise Michel, who lived there
from 1873 to 1880.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 181

 praved, but when we show the people our true objects they find that we only desire the
benefit of mankind.
“We seek the establishment of Anarchy, or, in other words, a freedom from govern-
ment of any kind; a community of interests based upon common production of equal
and necessary character; we seek a perfect liberty for each individual to enjoy the grand
and glorious products of nature; we seek for each an equal liberty to cultivate the talents
and abilities as well the attainments of the highest knowledge.
“All wrongs now perpetrated, such as theft, murder, lying and prostitution, are an out-
come of the injustice at present obtaining in the social state, and will disappear with its
downfall.
“I tell you, the day of reckoning is not far—a time when no concessions will be
granted to the tyrants and despots.
“Such is my belief, spread by me among the workingmen, and this belief will cease
only with my life.
“You have convicted me, you may pass sentence of imprisonment upon me, but I tell
you that I hate your laws; that I hate your ‘order,’ for I know but one ‘order’—it is the
highest potency of order—Anarchy.” 6

WATCHED BY DETECTIVES.
On the way to the Tombs Miss Goldman was surrounded by a crowd of Central Office de-
tectives. Her grandmother, Mrs. Fredrika Goldman, who attended her during the trial,
followed her to the gates of the Tombs, where she kissed her an affectionate good-by. An
old, gray-whiskered man, who looked every inch an Anarchist, followed Emma to the
prison. The detectives watched him closely.
“Perhaps he’s got a bomb,” was suggested.
“If he raises his hand, he’ll drop,” a Central Office man replied.
Emma Goldman will be taken to the penitentiary to-morrow along with a number of
other women. In the Tombs, when asked what she thought of her sentence, she replied:
“I have nothing to say to you. What I have to say shall be through my own paper.” 7
When asked what she thought of the spectators’ applause of Judge Martine’s remarks,
she replied: “They were applauding me, not him.”
Mr. Hall, when asked why he withdrew from the case, tapped his forehead and
pointed at Miss Goldman. “She is like all fanatics,” he said, “a little bit gone.”

New York World, 17 October 1893, p. 7.

6. A German transcription of this speech appeared in Die Brandfackel 1 (November 1893): 4– 6; and,
with minor variations, in Freiheit, 21 October 1893, p. 2. Free Society reprinted it twice in 1904 during
EG’s attempt to speak in Philadelphia, the second time “by request for propaganda purposes” (Free
Society, 17 April 1904, pp. 5– 6, and 1 May 1904, p. 6).
7. EG’s comments were published the following month in Die Brandfackel; see “American Justice,” Ar-
ticle in Die Brandfackel, November 1893, below.

182 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Essay in D I E B R A N D F A C K E L
New York, November 1893

Amerikanische Justiz.

Durch die Verurtheilung der Genossin Emma Goldmann kann es zum erstenmale in
der Geschichte der Ver. Staaten verzeichnet werden, daß man eine Frau wegen eines sog.
politischen Vergehens verurtheilt hat. Die Ehre dieser Priorität gebührt dem Staate New
York, und im engeren Sinne der Stadt gleichen Namens.
Wenn wir den culturellen Entwicklungsgang der verschiedenen Völker und die mit
demselben verbundenen Läuterungen der Rechtsbegriffe ins Auge fassen, dann können
wir wahrnehmen, daß die Menschheit im Allgemeinen humaneren Ansichten über
Verbrechen und Strafen huldigt. Es werden heutzutage in den sog. civilisirten Ländern
keine Hexenprozesse aufgeführt; es werden nicht mehr Menschen wegen ihrer religiö-
sen Überzeugung gefoltert, gerädert, geviertheilt oder verbrannt; nicht fürhrt man mehr
den armen Sünder zur Richtstätte, weil er sich am Eigenthume des Nächsten vergangen;
vorbei sind die Zeiten, wo es dem “Herrn” gestattet war, nach Belieben über die Freiheit
und das Leben seines Knechtes zu schalten, und sein Mägde dem jus primae noctis zu
unterwerfen.
Der Geist der Rachsucht, das Streben nach Wiedervergeltung der dem Einzelnen
oder der Gemeinschaft zugefügten Unbill, ist wohl auch heute noch aus den Strafgeset-
zen aller Culturländer wahrzunehmen; es kann aber nicht abgeläugnet werden, daß die-
ser Geist nicht mehr jene unmenschlichen und barbarischen Formen der Wiedervergel-
tung heischt, wie dies in vergangenen Zeiten der Fall war; die Ansichten der Menschen
haben sich in diesem Punkte eben gemildert.
Versetzen wir uns in die Denkungsart des Durchschnittsmenschen der heutigen Ge-
sellschaft, behaftet mit all seinen Vorurtheilen und falschen Conceptionen über Ehre
und Rechtlichkeit, dann werden wir ihm beipflichten müssen, wenn er in Fällen un-
zweifelhaft bewiesener Verletzung von Gesetzen, die er als den Ausfluß der lauteren
Rechtsanschauungen und zum Schutze seiner persönlichen Sicherheit als nothwendig
betrachtet, seiner Befriedigung über die Bestrafung eines Gesetzübertreters Ausdruck
verleiht. Diesem Durchschnittsmenschen war es eben infolge seiner, durch Erziehung,
Vererbung und durch die Macht des Einflusses seiner Umgebung erworbenen An-
sichten nicht möglich, sich zu jener Höhe der Ethik aufzuschwingen, von der aus dem
Menschen die Berechtigung abgesprochen werden muß, über die Menschen zu Gericht
zu sitzen.
Es kann dem Unaufgeklärten nicht einleuchten, daß nicht das Individuum, sondern
die bestehende Gesellschaft mit ihren grausam widerrechtlichen Einrichtungen die

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 183

 Schuld am Verbrechen und dem Verbrecherthume trägt; daß jeder Missethäter ein
beredtes Zeugnis der Schuld der bestehenden Gesellschaft ist, und daß nicht er, sondern
eben diese Gesellschaft bestraft werden sollte.
Zu dieser Ansicht vermochten sich bisher nur verhältnismäßig wenige Menschen
emporarbeiten: Einige ideal angehauchte Rechts-Philosophen der neueren Schulen
und die wenigen Psychologen einer gewissen Richtung, die aber alle zusammen diese
Ansicht nur vom Standpunkte der abstrakten Theorie aus verfechten; dann die Vertreter
der anarchistischen Weltanschauung. Dem vorerwähnten Durchschnittsmenschen war
dies, wie gesagt, nicht möglich und aus diesem Grunde können wir es ihm auch gar
nicht verdenken, wenn er dem Urtheile eines Richters seine Zustimmung gibt, der mit
ihm auf der gleichen Höhe der ethischen Rechtsbegriffe steht und seiner Überzeugung
nach ebenso ehrlich ist, wie er selbst.
Ehrlich?!——Wo in aller Welt findet man dies seltene Thier, einen ehrlichen Richter?
Sind wir denn nicht vollständig davon überzeugt, daß die Justiz aller Länder des Erdballs
nur eine Klassenjustiz ist, die immer nur zum Vortheil der Besitzenden und zum
Nachtheil der Nichtbesitzenden ausgeübt wird? Wissen wir es denn nicht ganz genau,
daß die Phrase: “Gleichheit aller vor dem Gesetze” der größte Hohn ist, den je die
Menschheit über sich ergehen ließ? Ist es denn überhaupt nur möglich, einen ehrlichen
Richter zu finden?
Dennoch muß ich zugeben, daß, soweit die sog. gemeinen Verbrechen in Betracht
kommen, die Strafrechtspflege selbst des despotischesten Landes der alten Welt eine
Muster-Institution im Vergleich zur Gerichtsbarkeit in Amerika ist. Selbst in Rußland,
mit seinen asiatisch barbarischen Einrichtungen, sieht sich der Richter gezwungen—
wenn es sich um oben qualifizirte Vergehen handelt—gewisse Formen zu beachten;
selbst in diesem fluchbeladenen Lande hat der Richter nicht die absolute Macht, so nach
Willkür zu handeln wie—im “freien” Amerika!
Die scheußlichste Creatur, die je die Menschheit entwürdigt, kann nur ein ameri-
kanischer Richter sein; bar aller wie immer gearteten Rechtsbegriffe, in den meisten
Fällen ganz unwissend, fähig zu den gemeinsten Schandthaten, zum Betrug, zur Er-
pressung, zum Meuchelmord— erkennt diese im Dienste der capitalistischen Klasse
stehende Hyäne nur eine Macht über sich: Den Mammon. Wehe Dir, wenn Du als armer
Mensch einem amerikanischen Richter in die Hände geräthst! Das größte Verbrechen
in den Augen dieses Scheusals ist es, wenn der Angeklagte arm ist— er kann ja doch die
von ihm feilgehaltene “Gerechtigkeit” nicht kaufen und er wird deshalb, bevor er noch
den Mund aufthut, für schuldig befunden. Insoweit ist der amerikanische Richter dem
der anderen Länder voraus; seinesgleichen kannst Du in den europäischen Staaten
finden, wenn es sich um ein Vergehen politischer Natur handelt und ganz besonders
wenn ein Anarchist vor Gericht steht.
Trotzdem kann man aber behaupten, daß in keinem Gerichtshofe der Welt,
Anarchisten-Prozesse von der Art aufgeführt werden können, wie wir sie in den letz-
ten Jahren hierzulande erlebt haben. Der Chicagoer Anarchisten-Prozeß vom Jahre 1886

184 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

steht ohne Beispiel in der Geschichte aller Zeiten und Völker. Wie ich im Eingang dieser
Zeilen anführte, wurden wohl in früheren Zeiten Menschen ihrer religiösen und poli-
tischen Anschauungen halber verfolgt und hingerichtet; die Rechtsanschauungen jener
Zeiten ließen dies als gerechtfertigt erscheinen; es war damals nicht nothwendig, daß
man erst Mitmenschen tödten mußte, um sein eigenes Leben zu verwirken; und
schließlich mußte doch irgend eine Schuld vorliegen, die ein Todesurtheil in Einklang
mit der Anschuldigung brachte. Dies war der Fall, wie gesagt, in denen finsteren Zeiten
der Barbarei, die, wie ich ebenfalls bemerkte, nun vorbei sind. Vorbei?. . . . .
Nein, sie sind noch nicht für immer entschwunden, diese Zeiten; an der Neige des
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts sehen wir sie wiederkehren, in ihrer ganzen schrecklichen
Gestalt. Wir sehen, wie Menschen ihrer Ideen wegen und nur dieser wegen hingerichtet
oder ihrer Freiheit beraubt werden. Im Jahre 1886 klagt man in Chicago eine Schaar
Menschen des Mordes an, kann ihr dieses Verbrechen nicht im Geringsten nachweisen,
verurtheilt sie aber dennoch zum Tode, nicht weil sie Menschen getödtet, sondern,
eingestandenermaßen, weil sie Anarchisten sind. Aus demselben Grunde beraubt man
an einem anderen Orte Amerikas zwei Menschen für Jahre hinaus ihrer Freiheit, denen
ebenfalls nicht das Geringste bewiesen werden konnte, dessen sie angeklagt waren. Und
erst in den jüngsten Tagen konnten wir dasselbe Schauspiel hier in New York aufgeführt
sehen. Claus Timmermann und Emma Goldmann werden angeklagt “an einer unge-
setzlichen Versammlung theilgenommen zu haben”; bei den inscenirten Gerichtscomö-
dien stellt sich aber heraus, daß die Versammlung, an der die Beiden theilgenommen,
ganz und gar nicht ungesetzlich war; daß dieselbe einen friedlichen Verlauf nahm und
daß die Theilnehmer auch friedlich und ruhig auseinander gingen. Nichtsdestoweniger
werden die beiden Genannten, Ersterer zu sechs Monaten und Letztere zu einem Jahre
Zuchthaus verurtheilt; nicht weil sie an einer “ungesetzlichen Versammlung” theilge-
nommen, nein—weil sie Anarchisten sind, “weil sie eine Gefahr für den Bestand un-
serer Institutionen bilden, deren Erhaltung uns jährlich so viele Millionen kostet”.—
Das ist amerikanische Justiz im “Zeitalter der Aufklärung und Civilisation”!
Wenn nun der Culturhistoriker einen derartigen Rückschritt, der noch die Rechtsan-
schauungen der vergangenen Tage als die richtigeren erkennen läßt, damit motiviren
will, daß die Culturetappen der Menschheit abwechslungsweise ein Vor- und Rück-
wärtsschreiten in der Entwicklung anzeigen, dann täuscht er sich in der Natur der heuti-
gen Etappe—sie bedeutet kein Rückschritt mehr, sondern sie biethet das unzweideu-
tigste Sympthom einer Zersetzung und Auflösung des Gesellschaftskörpers; das erste
Aufbrechen der Pestbeulen; das tollwüthige Wehren der Vertreter der heutigen Ordnung
gegen die Verbreitung von Ideen, die darauf hinauslaufen, diesen Zersetzungs-Prozeß
zu beschleunigen und die menschliche Gesellschaft einer Einrichtung zuzuführen, die
zu ihrer Stütze keine Gesetze und keine Schergen benöthigt.

E. G.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 185

 Essay in D I E B R A N D F A C K E L
New York, November 1893

American Justice.

With the sentencing of Comrade Emma Goldmann it can be recorded for the first time
in the history of the United States that a woman has been sentenced because of a so-
called political offense.1 The honor of this precedent can be claimed by the state of New
York, and strictly speaking the city of the same name.
If we take a look at the cultural evolution of various peoples and the refinements of
the legal principles connected with it, we can assert that people in general adhere to a hu-
mane point of view with respect to crimes and punishments. There are no witch trials
being carried out in so-called civilized countries these days; people are no longer tor-
tured, broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, or burned because of their religious
convictions; no longer is the poor sinner led to the place of execution because he com-
mitted an offense upon the property of his neighbor; gone are the times where the “lord”
was allowed to command as he pleased over the freedom and life of his servants and sub-
ject the women among them to the jus primae noctis.2
The spirit of vengeance, the pursuit of retaliation for an injustice inflicted upon an in-
dividual or the community, is indeed still noticeable today in the criminal laws of all civ-
ilized countries. But it cannot be denied that this spirit no longer demands those inhu-
man and barbaric forms of retaliation as was the case in past times; the views of human
beings have indeed softened in this area.
If we put ourselves in the position of the everyday man in today’s society, afflicted with
all his prejudices and false conceptions about honor and justice, then we must agree with
him if he expresses satisfaction over the punishment of a lawbreaker in cases of a clear
violation of laws that he regards as founded on established legal principles and as nec-
essary for the protection of his personal security. Indeed, it was impossible for this every-

1. This statement is difficult to verify. Unlike Russia or Germany, for example, countries that had stat-
utes criminalizing political affiliation or opposition, the idea of a “political” crime or prisoner in the
United States up to and including this period is ambiguous at best. Even EG, in 1897, admitted that
the United States did not recognize “such a specified class” as political criminal (see Letter to Au-
gustin Hamon, 13 April 1897). By the same criterion used by Die Brandfackel in EG’s case, Susan B.
Anthony, who was arrested in 1872 for voting in New York, and Lillian Harman, arrested in 1886 for
illicit cohabitation, could both be considered “political” prisoners because like EG, though they op-
posed current socio-political conventions, they were arrested under criminal and civil statutes.
2. “Jus primae noctis” or right of the first night, was in the European late medieval period a belief in the
privilege of the lord to share the bed of his peasant women prior to their wedding night. However, his-
torians debate how common this practice was.

186 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

 Advertisement placed in the December 1893 issue of Die Brandfackel for a
benefit concert to raise legal expense funds for the imprisoned Emma Gold-
man. (Labadie Collection, University of Michigan)

day man, owing to upbringing, heredity, and the powerful influence of his surroundings,
to raise himself to that ethical height from which one must challenge man’s right to sit
in judgment over other men.
The unenlightened cannot be made to understand that it is not the individual, but
rather the present society, with its cruel, unjust institutions, that bears the blame for
crime and criminality; that every wrongdoer is eloquent testimony to the guilt of the
present society, and that it is not the wrongdoer, but rather this society that should be
punished.
Until now relatively few people have been able to arrive at this view: a few idealistic le-
gal philosophers of the newer schools and the few psychologists of a particular slant who,
however, all defended this view only from the standpoint of abstract theory; and then
there are the representatives of the Anarchist worldview. For the above-mentioned every-
day man this was, as I said, impossible, and for this reason we can hardly blame him if
he gives his approval to the decision of a judge who is on the same level he is with re-
spect to ethical notions of justice and who he is convinced is as honorable as he is.
Honorable?!——Where in the world does one find this strange animal, an honorable
judge? Haven’t we been completely convinced that justice in all countries of the globe is
merely class justice, which is always carried out only to the advantage of the haves and to
the disadvantage of the have-nots? Don’t we know very well that the phrase “Equality of
all before the law” is the greatest scorn that humanity has ever put up with? Is it there-
fore at all possible to find an honorable judge?
Nevertheless I must admit that as far as so-called common crimes are concerned, the
practice of criminal law in the most despotic countries of the old world is a model insti-
tution compared to jurisprudence in America. Even in Russia, with its Asiatic, barbaric

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 187

 institutions, the judges are forced, when it comes to the above mentioned process, to ob-
serve certain forms; even in this curse-laden country the judge does not have the absolute
power to act as arbitrarily as in “free” America!
The most atrocious creature ever to degrade humanity can only be an American
judge; lacking in all legal understanding of any kind, completely ignorant in most cases,
capable of the most cruelly shameful deeds, fraud, blackmail and assassination—this
hyena, standing in the service of the capitalist class, recognizes only one power above
himself: Mammon. Woe be to you if as a poor person you fall into the hands of an Amer-
ican judge! In the eyes of this monster the greatest crime is if the accused is poor—he
cannot buy the “justice” put up for sale by the judge and will therefore, before he even
opens his mouth, be found guilty. In this sense the American judge is ahead of judges
in the other countries; you can find the likes of him in European states when it comes to
an offense of a political nature, and especially if an Anarchist stands before the court.
However it can be said that in no court in the world can Anarchist trials be carried
out as we have experienced them in this country in the last few years. The Chicago An-
archist trial of 1886 stands without precedent in the history of all epochs and peoples. As
I stated in my opening lines, people in earlier times were tortured and executed owing
to their religious and political views. The legal views of those times allowed this to ap-
pear justified. It was not necessary back then to have murdered fellow human beings in
order to forfeit one’s own life; and yet indeed some kind of guilt had to be present that
would bring a judgment of death in accord with the accusation. This was the case, as I
have said, in the darkest times of barbarism, which, as I have also pointed out, are now
over. Over? . . .
No, they have not yet disappeared forever, those times; as the nineteenth century
draws to a close we see their return in their entire, terrible form. We look on as people
are executed or robbed of their freedom because of their ideals and only their ideals. In
1886 a group of people in Chicago were accused of murder; these crimes could not be
substantiated in the slightest, yet nevertheless these people were sentenced to death not
because they had committed murder but rather, admittedly, because they were Anarchists.
For the same reason two people in another part of America are being robbed of their free-
dom for years, once again without any proof of that of which they had been accused.3 And
most recently we can observe the same spectacle being carried out here in New York.
Claus Timmermann and Emma Goldmann are accused of “participating in an unlawful
assembly”; at this staged judicial farce it became apparent, however, that the assembly in
which both took part was not at all unlawful, that it proceeded peacefully and that the par-
ticipants also departed peacefully and calmly. Nevertheless the aforementioned persons
were found guilty and sentenced, the former to six months and the latter to a year in jail,

3. EG refers to Carl Nold and Henry Bauer, who began serving five-year sentences in the Western Pen-
itentiary in February 1893 for incitement to riot and conspiracy in the attempted assassination of
Henry C. Frick.

188 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893

not because they took part in an “unlawful assembly,” no—because they are Anarchists,
“because they represent a danger to the existence of our institutions, whose maintenance
costs us so many millions yearly.” 4 The is American justice in the “era of enlightenment
and civilization”!
If the cultural historian now wishes to offer as justification for this backward step, in
which the legal views of bygone days are recognized as the more correct ones, that the
cultural stages of humanity indicate varying forward and backward steps in its develop-
ment, then he is deceiving himself about the nature of the current stage—it no longer
indicates a backward step, but rather it represents the most irrefutable symptom of an
undermining and dissolving of the social structure; the first bursting of plague-infested
boils, the rabid resistance of the representatives of today’s order to the dissemination of
ideas that lead to an acceleration of the undermining process and bring a structure to hu-
man society that does not need to rely upon laws and lackeys for its support.

E. G.

Die Brandfackel 1 (November 1893): 1–3. Translated from German.

4. EG is paraphrasing Judge Martine’s statements at her sentencing. See “The Law’s Limit,” Article in
New York World, 17 October 1893, above.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1893 189

 To C L A U S T I M M E R M A N N
Blackwell’s Island Penitentiar y, New York, 25 May 1894

Lieber Freund Timmermann!

Zu meinem größten Bedauern vernehme ich von dem Unfalle der Ihnen begegnet—
was Sie doch für ein Pechvogel sind! Kommt der Mensch vom Regen in die Traufe!—Ich
war so froh als ich die letzten zwei Nummern der “Brandfackel” las, zu sehen, daß die
regelmäßige Herausgabe des Blattes nun gesichert sei und daß auch der Inhalt dessel-
ben ein guter ist—hoffentlich werden Ihre Freunde Sie auch diesmal nicht im Stiche
lassen und für das Erscheinen Ihres Blattes einstweilen Sorge tragen.
Dieser Tage habe ich wieder nach langer Zeit einige Nummern des von den “Ve-
reinigten autonomen Gruppen Amerika’s” (welch bombastischer, frech-verlogener Tam-
Tam!) herausgegebenen Blattes zu Gesicht bekommen. Ich staune nur, wie dies
Unternehmen denn noch vegetiren kann—na, die Zähigkeit und Härtnäckigkeit der
Maulthiere kann man den jetzigen Herausgebern, deren Zahl, wie mir schon vor län-
gerem berichtet wurde auf drei Nullen, Pardon, drei Stück gesunken, nicht absprechen;
es ist ja aber auch so schwer, ein liebgewordenes Steckenpferd aufgeben zu sollen! Diese
Ärmsten der Armen im Geiste begehen außer vielen anderen Irrthümern noch den, sich
in ihren verrückten Bocksprüngen für “feurige” Pferde zu halten, eine Prätention, über
die selbst ein Pferd lachen müßte; denn dieses Thier ist klug genug um herauszufinden,
daß die intelektuellen Fähigkeiten der jetzigen Herausgeber der betreffenden Publika-
tion höchstens gleich denen einer Schildkröte anzunehmen wären.—Was da aber auch
für Geisteskoth in diesem Organ abgelagert wird! Leute, die als “Mistbauern” wohl in der
Führung von Mistgabeln bewandert sein mögen, denen aber so jede Spur irgend eines
positiven Wissens abgeht; denen die Wiedergabe der menschlichen Sprache durch die
Schrift ein ewiges, ihnen tückisch scheinendes Mysterium bleiben wird; die in ihrer Ver-
schrobenheit, Unduldsamkeit und niedrig-gemeinen Verläumdungssucht es dorthin ge-
bracht haben wo sie nun stecken—im Unrath nähmlich, in welchem sie doch in kurzer
Zeit ersticken werden; diese Leute wollen nun wie es scheint um jeden Preis ein von
fähigen Elementen gegründetes und von solchen ehemals unterstütztes literarisches
Unternehmen aufrechthalten.—Auf eine spezielle Critik der im betreffenden Blatte in
letzter Zeit gebotenen Leistungen will ich gar nicht eingehen—mit solchem “Mist” sich
länger zu befassen, wäre denn doch höchst überflüssig. Nur das Eine will ich noch be-
merken: Solche Emanationen des unzweifelhaftesten Blödsinns können doch als nichts
anderes als ein Attentat auf den menschlichen Verstand erachtet werden und geeignet
erscheinen, den minder gebildeten aber wißbegierigen Leser zu verdummen; außerdem
kann es nur als die reinste Beutelschneiderei bezeichnet werden, wenn man dem armen
Arbeiter seine mühsam errungenen Cents für solch literarische Kost entlockt.—

190 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 Was die direkten Ihre Person anlangenden Angriffe dieses sauberen Trifoliums bet-
rifft, rathe ich Ihnen, lieber Freund, dieselben ganz einfach zu ignoriren—“Wer da
antwortet auf jedes Gespei, macht aus einem Übel zwei”, sagt ein gutes deutsches
Sprüchwort.
Ich befinde mich jetzt ziehmlich wohl, obschon die Umstände bisher darnach ange-
than waren mich zu biegen und zu brechen—aber es ist den verschiedenen Vertretern
der “Ordnung” noch nicht gelungen und es wird ihnen auch nicht mehr gelingen mich
zu “bekehren”; sie werden nur das erreicht haben, daß sich mein Haß gegen jegliche
Tyranei und Unterdrückung noch vergrößert hat. Wie Ihnen bekannt ist, habe ich wenig
Verkehr mit der Außenwelt; dennoch in der letzten Zeit von den muthigen Thaten un-
serer Genossen in Europa gehört. Wahrlich, solange es noch solche Männer giebt, die
nicht von Solidaritätsdusel und “Moral” faseln sondern handeln, solange braucht man
auch hinter Kerkermauern nicht verzagen! Nur noch 3 Monate etwa und ich werde
wieder in der Lage sein, mit neuer und gesteigerter Kraft und Energie für die geliebte
Freiheit zu kämpfen.

Emma Goldmann.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 191

 To C L A U S T I M M E R M A N N
Blackwell’s Island Penitentiar y, New York, 25 May 1894

Dear Friend Timmermann!

It is with the deepest regret that I learned of your accident 1—what an unlucky fellow you
are! It goes from bad to worse!—I was so happy when I read the two most recent issues
of Brandfackel to see that the regular publication of the paper is now assured and also that
its content is good—hopefully your friends will not abandon you this time and will take
responsibility for the appearance of your paper for the time being.
Recently after a long time I once again saw several issues of the paper published by
the “United Autonomy Group of America” 2 (what bombastic, brazenly dishonest drum-
beating!). It surprises me that this undertaking can still vegetate—indeed the tenacity
and stubbornness of mules must be attributed to the current editors, whose number,
as I was informed long ago, has sunk to three nobodies, pardon, three people; yet it is
indeed so difficult to have to give up a hobby one has grown fond of ! Among the many
other mistakes committed by these poorest of the poor in spirit, the old goats believe
themselves in their crazy cavorting to be “fiery” horses, a pretension about which even a
horse would have to laugh; for this animal is wise enough to discover that the intellectual
abilities of the current editors of the publication in question would at most be assumed
to be equal to those of a tortoise.—And what kind of spiritual dirt is deposited in this
organ! People who as “dung farmers” may be well versed in the operation of pitchforks,
but lack any trace of positive knowledge; for whom the rendering of human language in
writing will remain an eternal, seemingly menacing mystery; who in their perverted-
ness, impatience, and base and vulgar craving for slander have reached the point where
they now find themselves—namely in dirt, in which they will soon suffocate; these
people want to maintain at any price a literary undertaking founded and at one time sup-
ported by capable elements.—I will refrain completely from launching into a particular
critique of the output offered lately in the paper in question—to deal with such “dung”
any longer would indeed be utterly pointless. I will say only one more thing: such ema-
nations of the most unquestionable nonsense can be considered nothing but an attack
upon the human mind and seems designed to dull the mind of the reader who is poorly
educated yet eager to learn; otherwise it can be labeled nothing but the purest racketeer-

1. Timmermann explains in an editorial note that he had broken his right arm and hence had to pre-
pare the June 1894 issue of Die Brandfackel using only his left hand, which accounts for the issue be-
ing shorter than usual (only eight pages).
2. Der Anarchist was published by the Autonomen Gruppen Amerikas (American Autonomy Group),
whose members included Carl Masur, Otto Rinke, Joseph Peukert, and Joseph “Sepp” Oerter.

192 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

ing to worm out of the poor worker his painstakingly earned cents for such literary
nourishment.—
As far as the attacks aimed directly for you by this fine trio are concerned, I advise you,
dear friend, quite simply to ignore them.—“Wer da antwortet auf jedes Gespei, macht
aus einem Übel zwei,” says a good German proverb.3
I am quite well at the moment, although the circumstances until now were suitable
to bend and break me—however the various representatives of “order” have not yet suc-
ceeded and they no longer stand a chance of “converting” me; all that they will have
brought about is a deepening of my hatred for any kind of tyranny and oppression. As
you know, I have little contact with the outside world; nevertheless I have heard recently
of the brave deeds of our comrades in Europe.4 Indeed, as long as there are still such men
who act rather than blather about heady solidarity and “morale,” one need not despair
even behind prison walls! Only about 3 months more and I will once again be in the po-
sition to fight with renewed strength and energy for our beloved freedom.

Emma Goldmann.

Die Brandfackel 2 (June 1894): 7– 8. Translated from German.

3. The phrase means “He who answers every insult, makes out of one evil two.”
4. EG refers to the rash of bombings in Paris in late 1893 and early 1894, and most recently Émile
Henry’s bombing of a Parisian café (Café Terminus) on 12 February 1894.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 193

 Ar ticle in the NEW YORK WORLD
New York, 18 August 1894

My Year in Stripes.

Emma Goldman, Anarchist, Describes Her

Imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island.

She Cannot Forget Its Horrors.

Her Life in the Women’s Prison and the Sufferings

of the Miserable Ones Who Shared It.

Even More in Earnest Now, She Says.

Free Again, She Modestly Declares She Will Not Rest Until
Government Is Overturned and Anarchy Is on Top.

Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, was released from the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island
yesterday. She was imprisoned there for delivering an incendiary speech a year ago. Miss
Goldman wrote a letter relating her experiences and observations in prison, and the idea
seized her that the letter had a certain commercial value. The World bought it,1 just as the
World would buy an unpublished poem by Tennyson or the description of a prize fight
by John L. Sullivan. Besides being interesting to the few who agree with Miss Goldman’s
views touching society and government, this letter will appeal to the great body of the
American people who like to hear both sides of a question.
Here it is:

To the Editor of the World:

The right of free speech and assembly has long been a dead letter, a farce.
Peaceful laborers are not safe from a policeman’s club. Honest men are persecuted,
imprisoned and legally murdered for giving utterance to their feelings. The crimes and
outrages of the police committed during the past year prove only too well that despotism
and tyranny have supplanted the freedom once guaranteed to every man and woman of
America.

1. The World paid EG $150 for the article, which she noted in her autobiography paid for the furnishing
of the apartment she lived in with Ed Brady (LML, pp. 155–56).

194 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 My prosecution was conducted with such injus-
tice, however, that many thinking men and women
all over the country have not only noticed it but have
assured me of their sympathy for the “terrible Emma
Goldman.”
Why was this prosecution conducted with so much
venom and spite? Surely not because the accused was a
woman!
I, this terrible Anarchist, was arrested, not for what
I said, but on a trumped-up charge made by a few le-
galized blackmailers, detectives and spies—men who
have sold their honor and their manhood for a petty
mess of pottage.
The whole trial was conducted with the greatest
unfairness. They proved neither my guilt nor my
innocence.

SCARED BY THE GHOST OF ANARCHY.

Voltairine de Cleyre in 1891, prominent American anarchist
I was convicted, not because of the lecture delivered on and among the few women of stature in the anarchist move-
Aug. 21, but because it was an Anarchist that stood be- ment; she visited Goldman in prison in 1893. (Labadie Collec-
fore them. It was not Emma Goldman that was tried in tion, University of Michigan)
the Court of General Sessions, but the ideas she ex-
pressed. It was the red ghost of Anarchy that made the
courageous “protectors of law and order” tremble—it
was the fear of the future, their guilty conscience which
told them that it was not wise to have Emma Goldman among the people. It was un-
comfortable to have men and women who were able and willing to open the eyes of the
oppressed and show them a way to a better condition. It is safer for corrupt people that
such men and women should be out of the way even if perjury must be resorted to in or-
der to accomplish it. What does it matter if Emma Goldman was brutally attacked by six
ruffians— dragged through the streets, submitted to indignities that would make the
most hardened criminal quail.
What does it matter how it is done, so she is disposed of ?

JUSTICE SHE DID NOT EXPECT; MERCY SHE SCORNED.

What does it matter how many lies these Judases may tell, so the purpose is accom-
plished and the authorities are thereby enabled to rid themselves of one whose presence
is disagreeable. I knew before the trial what the result would be, but engaged counsel not
because I desired to sue for either justice or mercy. The former I did not expect, the lat-
ter I scorned.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 195

 It was to propagate my principles and prevent
my enemies from hustling me off to prison with-
out a hearing or a trial, as they did in the case of my
comrade, Claus Timmermann.2
Well, Emma Goldman was disposed of. Not
so her cause, you “noble knights,” who tremble at
the voice of Truth. You can imprison an Anarchist
and legally slaughter our comrades, but you cannot
kill Anarchy. It defies you, and will live on when
judges, district attorneys, detectives, spies, tyrants
and monsters of every description will be buried un-
der the last fragment of private property, Church
and State.

FROM THE TOMBS TO THE PENITENTIARY.

Two days after my trial I was sent to my new “resi-
dence,” in which I was to spend the following ten
months. After being confined for two weeks in the
Tombs, this was a change, and any change was wel-
come. I enjoyed the trip immensely. When I
reached the dock I saw several representatives of the
Cover page of Voltairine de Cleyre’s 1894 pamphlet In Defense of
press who had become my faithful knights and who
Emma Goldmann, published in support of the ideas expressed in stuck manfully by me all through my trouble. They
Goldman’s 21 August 1893 speech at the New York City demon- seemed to think it their duty to stand by me to the
stration that led to her arrest and imprisonment. (Labadie Collec- last. I had never cared much for reporters, but I was
tion, University of Michigan) very grateful for their company.
Blackwell’s Island is beautifully situated, sur-
rounded by water. Its grounds are lovely. It seems
more like a place of enjoyment than of suffering,
but one look at the gray, gloomy building is sufficient to chill the new prisoner.
“Beggars are not choosers” is the old proverb, and although I neither begged nor
chose this place for my temporary “home,” I was very much interested in it, and made a
thorough examination of the outside of the palace.

DRIVEN THERE BY THEIR SURROUNDINGS.

American prisons compare favorably with foreign ones in cleanliness and order. On the
whole, however, they are just as corrupt, just as miserable. And the food and cells are
worse.

2. Claus Timmermann was convicted shortly after EG on the charge of incitement to riot for his part in
the 21 August 1892 Union Square rally.

196 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 Most of the unfortunates in the penitentiary are victims of the pernicious conditions
of society. They are driven either by need or circumstances to commit the offenses that
place them there. Most of these offenses are of less importance than those committed
daily and hourly by the rich and influential.
During my ten months’ imprisonment I met no convicts that were at all well to do.
All were poor, miserable, broken-down remnants of humanity. Reared in the streets of
New York, surrounded from earliest infancy by the vilest associations, none of them is
educated. All are aged long before their time by privations and poverty.

WHY SHE WRITES THIS.

Personally I cannot complain of my own treatment. From the time I entered I received
much better treatment than the others. I was never punished. I had lighter work and was
always treated with a certain amount of respect. It is not, therefore, any special spite I
wish to vent that prompts me to place my experience before the public, but an earnest
desire to call the attention of thinking people to the miserable conditions of the inmates
there.
When I reached prison I was brought before the head matron, who has entire charge
of the female portion of this institution. This lady is the sister-in-law of the warden, and,
of course, has a “pull.” The warden is an old, feeble man, and seems to be under the
influence of four women—his wife, his sister-in-law and daughter and a cousin. They
are the real managers, the poor old gentleman being only a puppet in their hands. He
has, however, a certain amount of firmness, and if he knew how his sister-in-law abuses
the position she holds she would not hold it a week.

“ALLOWED TO TAKE A BATH.”

The matron is about fifty years of age, tall and very stout, with a cruel, hard face and a
sensual mouth. She makes a chilling impression on the newcomer. To me she was more
than usually kind. She gave me a more civil reception than prisoners usually get, and as-
sisted me to undress myself. Then she gave me a blue and white striped dress and blue
checked apron, the usual prison costume.
After my name, occupation and address were taken, I was allowed to take a bath,
which was greatly refreshing after two weeks of the Tombs.
Prisoners are given a bath each week and furnished with a change of clothing.

“ THE HOTEL ,” AS SHE CALLS IT.

The female wing consists of a large mess hall, with sixty-seven cells, a large room for the
chapel and a ward for the sick. The cells are short and narrow, dark and damp. A piece of
canvas stretched across two irons represents the bed, two blankets, a straw pillow and a
pail completed the outfit.
It was near 5 o’clock when I retired to my “chamber.” I sat down and commenced to
think, “How shall I ever stand it in this hole?”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 197

 I fell asleep while meditating upon the subject, but suddenly I jumped to my feet,
startled by a loud gong. One of the prisoners told me it was supper-time.
Supper consisted of a pan of a greasy black liquid called “coffee,” which is a decoction
made by pouring boiling water over burnt bread.
The “ladies” of the “hotel” seemed very hungry; they ate their portions in silence.
“Women are reforming,” I thought, “for those seemed to have learned the lesson of
keeping silent.” Afterwards I found out that their silence was not due to improvement,
but to the rules, which forbid talking at meals. This was one of the hardest rules for new
female boarders to obey.
Supper did not last longer than five minutes. Then they all went back to their cells.
Then a loud voice said “Close!” and all the doors slammed together. The cells were
locked, and one day of misery had passed.

THE ROUTINE OF A DAY.

At 6 o’clock in the morning I was awakened again by the clang of a bell, at which signal
the cells were unlocked and the “ladies” went down to make their toilets. The “ladies” are
not very fastidious, for only five minutes are allowed for this purpose and they never
are late.
After that they are driven like cattle to their cells again. Then the bell rings for break-
fast and all the inmates march down to the mess-hall. This meal is a repetition of that on
the night before; “coffee” and bread, then back they go to their cells, where they remain
until 7.15 o’clock.
The air in those cells is choking and nauseating. The women remain in them until a
bell calls them down for a walk. With their pails in their hands they all walk to the river,
a short distance from the prison. The “line” or “gang” is led by two matrons.
There are usually about seventy women in this institution. About twenty-five women
work in the laundry, which is considered the hardest work. Five serve at the warden’s
house. Two serve the deputy warden. The others, who are not in the sewing department,
do chamberwork for the keepers.

MADE FOREWOMAN OF THE SEWERS.

I was made forewoman in the sewing-room. I had to give out the work, do all the folding
and packing and keep the accounts of work sent in and out during the week. Here the
women mend shirts, socks and pants for the male prisoners. The sewing women have to
work very hard. Mine was not only a very disagreeable, but also a hard job. I had to be on
my feet all day.
From 7.30 to 11.30 A.M. all is quiet. Then the washwomen come in and take their
seats for dinner. The “menu” for the four days of the week is vegetable soup, with pre-
cious little meat in it. On two days there are corned beef and beans. On Friday there is a
treat—fish and potatoes. A half hour is allowed for dinner and a half hour for rest. Then
all start at work again until 5.30 P.M. On Saturdays the work is stopped at noon and the
prisoners remain in their cells.

198 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 On Sundays those who are religiously inclined are allowed to leave their cells and at-
tend church services.

IN THE HOSPITAL.
I remained on the floor two months, when I had an attack of rheumatism. But not until
I could no longer work was I transferred to the hospital.
Until that time, although my work had been arduous, I had not seen the real horrors
of prison life. But what I witnessed in that hospital made my blood run cold and filled
me with indignation and horror.
The hospital is large and airy. There are sixteen beds, and it is kept exceedingly neat
and clean— considering patients do all the scrubbing and cleaning. There are three doc-
tors—house, senior and junior.
A doctor from the city visits the wards three or four times a week. The others visit
them twice a day.
After a month’s illness I was made orderly in the ward, after which time I had full
charge of all the medicines and patients. I had to wait on the doctors who take care of the
sick and attend all operations. Although one matron is on day duty and one at night, all
the work was left to me, and for seven long months I worked night and day.
The day matron is old and too infirm to take proper care of the sick. She has also to
attend to other duties. While her will is good, she is unable to do the work. The night ma-
tron, who is on duty four nights in the week, is a noble, generous woman, kind and good-
hearted. She makes every effort to make the burden of those poor, sick women lighter.

CHARGES AGAINST THE HEAD MATRON.

The greatest pleasure of the head matron is to torment and plague both her assistant and
the prisoners. Nothing satisfies her, nothing pleases her. Her harsh voice is heard from
one end of the place to another, and she keeps it in an uproar from morning until night.
She encourages prisoners to gossip about each other and about the under matrons.
She often requires prisoners to spy upon the under matrons and report to her—a duty I
flatly refused to do.
She has, however, one unaccountable mania. She is very fond of colored people.
While I see no difference in races, I think all should be regarded as human beings. The
most depraved, ignorant, repulsive black woman is sure of a warm reception from this
head matron and is placed above the most intelligent white woman. No matter what they
do, she will never punish them, but will deprive white women of their food and other
comforts for them. They abuse, insult and even beat their white sisters in misery.3
Some of this head matron’s modes of punishment are as ridiculous as others are
cruel. Fancy a full-grown woman standing all day facing a black-board! Prisoners receiv-

3. In her autobiography, EG wrote that New York City journalist and labor activist John Swinton con-
strued these remarks to mean that EG shared “the white man’s prejudice against the coloured race,”
an interpretation EG contested (LML, p. 154).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 199

 ing this punishment are also deprived of their dinner. If all these things fail then comes
the dungeon, with its cold, dark dreariness—a most cruel and brutal punishment.
Many of the prisoners are kept in the dungeon for weeks.

SOME HORRORS OF THE PL ACE.

My imprisonment is over now and I do not regret it. It has been a school of experience
for me and my time was not altogether lost. For it was my privilege to make the lives of
some of the poor, helpless ones more endurable.
I was often shocked by the cruelties of the place, and I remember one woman who
was not allowed to see a doctor, though her temperature was 103.
Another woman begged to be taken out of the stifling cell. She was choking—the
kind matron said she was only “faking.” A few days after I was sent for and hurried down
with restoratives. But I saw as soon as I reached her that she was no longer in the power
of prison authorities. The doctors said she died of heart trouble.
Another woman seventy years of age came there sick, yet the brutal head matron put
her to scrubbing. She was sick several days before the female Brockway 4 would admit
that she was sick. When the doctor ordered her to be placed in the hospital the head ma-
tron still declared she was “faking,” and continued to abuse her until for some reason she
suddenly became all sympathy and attention. Poor old woman! The sympathy came too
late, for she died just a day or so before she would have been free, legally murdered.

WHAT SHE SAW WILL HAUNT HER.

Again I say that I received no bad treatment. But that could not blind me to the suffer-
ings of the poor inmates there. My friends were unremitting in their attention and gave
me the tenderest care, and the head matron knew that if any harm had befallen me, even
though the law did nothing, she would have had to account to my friends.
I can never forget the faces of the dead, pinched and distorted by suffering. I can never
forget the haggard, worn look of the living. Those sights will haunt me to my dying day.
I do not know why, but our female monster seemed anxious to propitiate me, and
used to send me meals from her own table, which I never tasted—and talked very
confidentially to me. But I am not to be so taken in.

MORE OF AN ANARCHIST THAN E VER.

Yes, I am more of an Anarchist than ever.
I am more than ever determined to use every means in my power to spread my doc-
trines among the people.

4. EG compares the matron to Z. R. Brockway (1827–1920), superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory

in New York. He was investigated (and acquitted) for cruelty to prisoners three times, in 1865, 1893,
and 1894. In his retirement, he published his memoirs, Fifty Years of Prison Service (New York: Char-
ities Publishing Commission, 1912), in which he defended and maintained his innocence against the
charges leveled against his prison administration.

200 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 I defy prison and prosecution.
I could never content myself, now that I have seen the injustice of the law.
However pleasantly I might be situated, I could not banish from my mind the thou-
sands who are oppressed and suffer from the injustice of the present system.
Society lies in its last convulsions. The people are awakening to their condition. Let
them once fully realize it and the present system will go.
Men cannot be happy as long as they are slaves.
They cannot expect theft, murder, prostitution and oppression to be gotten rid of un-
til the system which breeds rottenness is gone.
Mending of any kind won’t do.
The earth must be swept of these parasites—human vampires, despots of crime.
As the last fragments of this system disappear, Anarchy will lift her proud head and
spread out her blessings to all humanity.
For this I shall continue to work.
The true and loving mother of humanity, my motto is as ever, “Death to tyranny!”
Vive l’Anarchie!

Emma Goldman 5

Before Warden Pilsbury, of the penitentiary, went away on his vacation, he left orders
that no reporters should be admitted to Miss Goldman. Ordinarily, the prisoners re-
leased from the penitentiary leave Blackwell’s Island on the 8 A.M. boat, which lands
them at the foot of East Fifty-second street. But Miss Goldman, with the purpose of
avoiding the newspaper men, who she knew would be waiting for her, was permitted to
take the 6.30 A.M. boat, which carries back the officers who have been on night duty in
the prison.
Arrived at East Fifty-second street, Miss Goldman was met by Edward Brady,6 a Ger-
man Anarchist, who was a witness for her at her trial. A few reporters were waiting for
her, but she positively refused to speak to them. With Brady, she boarded a First avenue
car and rode uptown a few blocks. Then alighting, they took an elevated railroad train
downtown. She breakfasted at Dennett’s, on Park Row. 7 Then she went home and yes-
terday afternoon and last night she visited her friends and received their congratulations
on her release. The group of Anarchists in this city made no organized demonstration of
joy at her return.
Miss Goldman was vivacious; her cheeks were red and her eyes were bright. She wore
a new straw hat with gay flowers on it, a blue linen shirtwaist and a black dress skirt. She
lost five pounds in weight during her incarceration.

5. The newspaper reproduced Emma Goldman’s signature, as well as her salutation to this letter.
6. Edward Brady was EG’s lover and companion at this time
7. Park Row was also known as “Newspaper Row.” The New York World, New York Times, and New York
Staats-Zeitung were among the newspapers located there.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 201

 “Physically I am pretty well,” she said to a reporter of the World, “but the mental strain
on me has been very great. It is a frightful thing for a woman of intelligence to be so
placed that she cannot exercise her own free will; that she is a mere machine. But worse
it was to be surrounded by such degraded wretches as are prisoners in the penitentiary.
You must understand that I hold it is not their fault that they are what they are. But there
they were in prison, and I was among them.”
“Have you made any plans for the future?” asked the reporter.
“I cannot go backward,” she answered. “I cannot go sideways. I must go forward.”
Miss Goldman will speak in English at what is announced as a “grand concert, mass-
meeting and reception,” at the Thalia Theatre to-morrow night. John Swinton, Charles
W. Mowbray and others will also make addresses.8
It was at a meeting of the unemployed at Union Square last August that Miss Gold-
man uttered the words that a jury decided were incendiary. Her trial was most sensa-
tional. It opened on Oct. 5, 1893,9 and after four days her trial ended in a conviction. Her
sentence of one year’s imprisonment, which began on Oct. 16, was commuted by her
good behavior to ten months.

New York World, 18 August 1894, pp. 1–2. Drawing of EG accompanies article.

8. Excerpts from addresses by EG and the English anarchist Charles Mowbray at this meeting were
reprinted by the New York World (see “Hailed Emma Goldman,” Article in New York World, 20 August
1894, below). There is no extant record of John Swinton having spoken at the meeting.
9. The trial began on 4 October.

202 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 Ar ticle in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 20 August 1894

Hailed Emma Goldman.

Anarchists Filled the Thalia Theatre to Celebrate Her Release from Jail.

But John Most Stayed Away.

Law, Government and Police Denounced in Several Languages,

While the Audience Sweltered.

Marie Louise, Communist, Presided.

Police Made No Show, but Reserves Were Ready to Prevent an Outbreak—

Goldman’s and Mowbray’s Fiery Words.

There was a polyglot assemblage in the Thalia Theatre 1 last night.

Twenty-eight hundred Anarchists of New York welcomed Emma Goldman, just re-
leased after ten months’ imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island.
A Frenchwoman presided. There were speeches in English, Italian, French, German,
Spanish and a jargon 2 and a recitation in Russian.
In approbation of the speeches “vives,” “vivas,” “hochs,” “bravas” and “bravos” rent
the suffocating, humid air.
But there were no “hurrahs.” It is doubtful if there were twenty people of American
parentage in the big audience.
Incidentally the reception was turned into a source of revenue. It must have been
profitable.
It is a nice question whether a short imprisonment does not pay a popular and ac-
complished Anarchist.
Those who paid ten cents each sweltered in the upper tier, those who paid fifteen
cents sweltered in the balcony, those who paid twenty cents sweltered in the parquet. It
was simply a question of sweltering at different altitudes.
Justus Schwab, his family and friends filled a box.
The police were very little in evidence. Inspector Williams was there in plain clothes,
of course, and so was Capt. Berghold, who commands the precinct. But right back of the
theatre, in Elizabeth street, all the reserves were on duty in the station-house.

1. The Thalia theater a frequent meeting place for Lower East Side radicals.
2. A reference to the Yiddish language.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 203

 mowbray. marie louise. miss goldman’s friend. schwab. she introduced miss goldman. miss goldman.

Growing interest from the mainstream press is marked by sketches of Goldman, including this one accompanying the
New York World’s 20 August 1894 coverage of the public celebration of her release after a ten-month imprisonment on
Blackwell’s Island.

Although the speakers called the police hard names, the police treated the audience
with most distinguished consideration. They cleared the aisles, to be sure, but those who
blocked the aisles violated the law. The fireman on duty at the theatre, a red-headed man,
No. 819, was very nearly violent in his efforts to clear the aisles. But perhaps his profes-
sional eye saw more clearly the danger that threatened should fire break out.
The Frenchwoman who presided was Marie Louise. She was one of the Paris Com-
mune.3 She wore a black satin dress and a red necktie. She was as motherly a person as
ever recommended the overthrow of all governments. She said in a weak voice that they
were there for two purposes:
1. To welcome Emma Goldman.
2. “To protest against organized tyranny, which hides behind that convenient thing
called law.”
Charles W. Mowbray, the English tailor, was the first speaker. He said, privately, that
he was very well but he did not look well. It will greatly rejoice the English police to learn
that Mowbray has a much better opinion of them. They have improved by comparison
with the police of this country.
“I always used to abuse the police of England,” cried Mowbray. “They are gentlemen
compared with your police.”
This was a very popular sentiment.

3. Marie Louise David immigrated to the United States from London “a few months previous to the out-
break of the Franco-German war,” by her own account, and hence could not have been a Communard.
See her autobiographical introduction in the Phrenological Journal 99 (February 1895): 92 –96. The
reporter may well have confused her with the more well-known French anarchist Louise Michel.

204 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

THEY CHEERED MOWBRAY.
When the obese French Communist in black satin who presided, had introduced Mow-
bray, the British Anarchist received what he would call an “hovation.” He did not look
well. He needs new clothes, and he needs a rest.
“We are here,” he said, “to welcome back to liberty a young woman whose crime was
that she dared to tell the starving masses that they, who have created all that is valuable,
all that is beautiful and all that is to be enjoyed, except that which nature has provided—
that they had the right to enjoy life and their share of its comforts. She dared to tell the
masses, as Cardinal Manning himself has said, that a starving man has a right to share
his neighbor’s food.4 Emma Goldman suffered the tortures of Blackwell’s Island for ten
months for this alone, and there are many others who would do the same if the capital-
ists had their way.
“This young woman comes back to tell us that she is just the same at heart as she al-
ways was, to show the capitalists and their slaves, the authorities, that conviction and im-
prisonment make no difference to those who have truly accepted the principles of anar-
chy. (Cheers.) The ideas of anarchy are the only ideas which hold out hope to those who
are now suffering for the necessaries of life. Those who rely on the policeman’s bludgeon
for power fail to understand what anarchy is, and they dare not put forward a man or
woman to argue the issue with us.
“People are beginning to learn that government exists not for their protection, but
for the protection of the thieving capitalists who have them by the throat and are throt-
tling them.”

POLICE EXIST FOR BOODLE.

“The police are here to protect the thieves of society in their work of plunder. It is just as
well that those men who wear the blue coats and the brass buttons should know the dirty
work they are doing, for there may perhaps be a spark of manhood left in their breasts
which will bring them to say that too long they have been armed and fighting against
their fathers, their brothers and their friends.
“You are all a lot of cowards. Yet they call this a civilized nation!
“Civilization, what does it mean? It means to you that in a country won by the blood

4. Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, in response to the Trafalgar Square “Bloody Sunday” deaths on
13 November 1887, wrote: “Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a natural right to his neigh-
bour’s bread” (“Distress in London: A Note on Outdoor Relief,” Fortnightly Review 49, January–
June 1888). There is no contemporary evidence that EG in fact cited Manning in the 1893 Union
Square address that prompted her arrest for “inciting to riot.” Other anarchists, including Charles
Mowbray and Voltairine de Cleyre, did however cite Manning in this context. De Cleyre refers to Man-
ning as early as 16 December 1893 (immediately before visiting EG in prison), in an address in New
York City, “In Defense of Emma Goldmann and the Right of Expropriation,” which was published as
a pamphlet under the same title (Philadelphia, 1894), serialized in Liberty (London, November 1894–
January 1895), and reprinted in Herald of Revolt (London, September 1913) and in the Selected Works
of Voltairine de Cleyre, edited by AB (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 205

 of your fathers, shed for the cause of liberty, you have gradually permitted yourselves to
degenerate into cowards and slaves. Until you get into yourselves some of the courage
which your fathers had you will remain the slaves of the capitalistic classes. (Cheers.)
“Arouse yourselves! be men! (Shouts of ‘We will.’)
“Now give a hearty welcome to Emma Goldman, who comes to you to-night to [show]
you and to show the capitalists [that] after imprisonment and torture she [will] not hesi-
tate to say just what she [said] before and just what she was made [to] suffer for. (Cheers
and shouts of ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’)”

THE ITALIAN SPEECH.

The crowd thought that this would bring Goldman to the front, but it did not.5 Instead,
the chairwoman brought her treble voice into play to present Maria Rhoda,6 a black-
haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned and black-gowned woman of uncertain age, but of no
uncertain power of speech. She was a little woman, and spoke in Italian.
And this little woman worked herself up into a terrible passion, waving her arms and
mopping her perspiring face with a red handkerchief. At least it looked like a handker-
chief. But the crowd soon wearied of her.
“All the people who are grinding us down should suffer the vengeance!” she cried.
“Do not use words, but strike! strike!
“All authority and all officials are rotten, from the dirtiest policeman up to the curs we
call Presidents.”
When she got through it was noted that her exertions had loosened her back hair and
untied the bow of red ribbon she wore around her neck. She drank a tumbler of water
and cooled off while stamping the floor with her foot.

HERE’S EMMA GOLDMAN.

Then came Emma Goldman, and her reception showed that her law-breaking and the
punishment she received for it had almost deified her in the minds of her lawless ad-
mirers. When the fat Chairwoman had announced her as about to come on the stage
pandemonium seemed to have broken loose. Nearly everybody who was sitting down
stood up, and those who had been standing up jumped up in the air. The din and racket
was worse than that on the baseball field when the home nine wins out on a tied score
in the last inning.
She entered from the left wings and strutted to the front centre of the stage. There,

5. In Living My Life, EG remembers that she was to have addressed the room next, but grew faint and
was unable to speak (LML, p. 149).
6. Marie Roda was an Italian anarchist, imprisoned after Sante Caserio, a member of her group, assas-
sinated French president Carnot; Roda then emigrated to the United States, where she immediately
took part in New York anarchist events.

206 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

dressed in simple black, save for a red ribbon at the neck, she stood with her head thrown
back and glared up at the roof with her peculiar, half-closed eyes. The crowd was glad to
see her. There was no doubt of that. There was whooping, howling, yelling and cheering,
until finally she raised her arm and waved her handkerchief, while her countenance lost
its expression of opera-bouffe hauteur and assumed one of weariness. That secured si-
lence. Then she said:
“Friends and Comrades: I have come back to you after having served ten months in
prison for talking. If the representatives of your Government intend to prosecute women
for talking, they will have to begin with their mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts, for
they will never stop women from talking. (Cheers.) But it was not Emma Goldman who
was prosecuted. It was the thoughts of Emma Goldman, the principles of Anarchy, that
were prosecuted: the views held by thousands of brave men and women who have died
and are ready to die as did Santo.7
“It was the right of free speech that was prosecuted in the Court of General Sessions,
and not little Emma Goldman. (Shouts of ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’)
“The authorities are afraid of those who are trying to open the eyes of the people to
their sufferings. I hate the tyrants of the present system too much to have pity on them,
but when I sat before Judge Martine listening to the inflammatory speech of District-
Attorney McIntyre I could but feel sorry for him. I said to myself, Oh, you coward
District-Attorney. It is fear, a false fear of society that makes you try to convince those ju-
rors of the terrible things that would happen if Emma Goldman was not convicted and
imprisoned. (Cheers.)”

SHE LOATHES JUDGE MARTINE.

“I was found guilty, and then I was left to the tender mercy of Judge Martine. He gave
me ten months because he could not give me any more. I loathe Judge Martine. (Cheers.)
“Oh, you Judges and you District-Attorneys, you can imprison and you can guillotine
and send to the gallows all the Anarchists, but you need not delude yourselves with the
idea that you can kill the spirit of Anarchy. (Cries of ‘Never!’ ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’)”

DEFIANT IN TWO L ANGUAGES.

“The future will be ours, brothers and sisters. I am as loyal as ever to liberty, the loving
mother of the poor, the wretched, the miserable. I defy the Judges, the District-Attorneys
and the police, and so I say let them go on with their dastardly work. They are working
on their own coffin. Every blow they strike drives a nail. Every Anarchist they send to jail
or to death takes another spadeful of earth from the hole into which their carcasses will
be placed. (Cheers.)

7. Sante Caserio assassinated French president Carnot on 24 June 1894 and was executed two months
later, on 16 August.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 207

 “I am with you again under the red flag of Anarchy 8 and liberty, and under it we will
march together until we get rid of poverty, of misery and of prostitution. We are children
no longer. Our eyes are open now. They cannot tell us any more that the judges and the
district attorneys are in office to protect us. They are there to protect those who are driv-
ing men to desperation, women to wretchedness and sweet young girls to sell them-
selves body and soul. ‘Vive l’Anarchie’ we will cry with our last breath.”
There was another tornado of noise. Then Goldman repeated her harangue in Ger-
man. When she had finished she strutted off in the same grotesque manner she had en-
tered, but she had to come back and promise the crowd that they should hear again from
her soon.
A very lady-like Anarchist then made an address in jargon. She was Miss Sarah
Schmidt.9 She wore a black lace dress trimmed with pink silk, as if her anarchistic ideas
were not colored with the deepest Anarchist dye.
During John H. Edelman’s 10 speech he said 2,000,000 tramps were wandering over
the highways and byways of this country.
“What is a tramp?” indignantly interrupted a man who had paid 20 cents for a seat in
the parquet.
“I will tell you,” answered Edelmann, hastily. “A workingman who is out of work and
waiting for another job. I know about tramps, for I tramped across the State of Iowa and
studied them. My only surprise is that a workman, who can earn only enough to support
life, does not throw down his tools when he finds he can support life without work.”
Anarchist Estive 11 spoke in Spanish. Marie Louise then advanced to the footlights and
said: “I now introduce you to an old friend—John Most.”
(Loud and prolonged applause.)
But no John Most appeared,12 and the audience went home, disappointed.

New York World, 20 August 1894, p. 8. Article includes pen and ink drawings of the speakers.

8. Though black had been associated with anarchism in France since 1883, the color red was the pre-
dominant symbol of anarchism throughout this period; only after the First World War was the color
black widely adopted.
9. The 20 August 1894 account in the New York Times identifies this speaker as Sarah Edelstadt; the
“jargon” was Yiddish.
10. John Edelmann was a New York anarchist and editor of Solidarity.
11. Spanish anarchist Pedro Esteve worked as a propagandist and labor organizer in Florida and New
Jersey as well as New York.
12. The New York Times (20 August 1894) reported that Most was billed to speak, was present at the
meeting, and at one point stuck his head through stage curtain to peek at the crowd, but never spoke.

208 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 Essay in D I E B R A N D F A C K E L
New York, October 1894

Anarchistengesetze

Ich las einst das Märchen von einem Gott, der den ersten Menschen geschaffen, ihn in
einem herrlichen Garten voll prächtiger Fruchtbäume wohnen ließ, ihm aber ein Gebot
gab, die Früchte von einem gewissen Baume nicht zu berühren. Als aber dieser Mensch,
von Neugierde und Auflehnung gegen das Gebot seines Herrn getrieben, die Frucht des
Baumes genaß, wurde Gott wüthend und vertriebe den armen Sünder aus dem Garten.
Beim Lesen dieses Märchens erfaßte mich unwillkürlich ein Ärger gegen diesen Gott,
der so herzlos verfahren konnte mit dem armen Adam, dessen Verbrechen ja nur darin
bestand, der göttlichen Schöpfung seines Meisters Anerkennung zu zollen und sich an
dem Safte der Frucht zu laben. Oft quälte mich die Frage, was wohl dem Gott, der mir
als gütig und liebevoll geschildert wurde, veranlassen könnte, Schönes und Herrliches
für den Menschen zu schaffen und dann Gesetze zu machen, die denselben verhindern
sollten, es zu genießen? Damals war mir dieses Märchen noch ein Räthsel und mein
kindlicher Geist wiegte sich schließlich in dem Glauben, daß alles was Gott thue, wohl-
gethan sei. Erst nachdem ich groß geworden und die “Güte” des Herrn selbst empfun-
den, konnte ich das Räthsel lösen; aber ich mußte der Lösung meinen naiven Glauben
an einen Schöpfer opfern. Gott war ein Herrscher, und als socher verlangte er unbed-
ingten Gehorsam von seinem Diener Adam; denn so lange er in Bewunderung und An-
dacht zu seinem Meister aufschaute, war Gott seiner Macht, seiner Gewalt über den hül-
flosen Menschen sicher; als aber dieser der Versuchung, Schönes und Gutes genießen
zu wollen, nicht widerstehen konnte, als er trotz der Drohungen seines Schöpfers der
Versuchung unterlag und vom Baume der Erkenntnis aß, da erfaßte den Herrn ein
wilder Grimm ob der Frechheit des Dieners. Er sah seinen Einfluß schwinden und sich
seiner göttlichen Macht beraubt. War schon die Willenskraft des unwissenden und
hülflosen Knechtes so stark, um wie viel stärker die Kraft des zum Selbstbewußtsein
erwachten Mannes. Darum mußte er fort von seinem Heimathsorte, verdammt, im
Schweiße seines Angesichts das Brod zu verdienen, ruhelos umherzuziehen, von Ort zu
Ort. Armer gehetzter Vorbote der leidenden Menschheit! Wie damals Adam, so sind
heute seine “Nachkommen” verdammt, Lasten zu tragen, Paläste zu bauen, Schätze ans
Tageslicht zu fördern und stöhnend und ächzend von Land zu Land zu ziehen. Die pri-
vilegirten Kinder des Herrn aber wandeln noch heute im Garten Eden, genießend,
herrschend, befehlend und Verderben verbreitend für ihre enterbten Brüder.
Gleich damals finden sich heute Menschen von allen Herrlichkeiten der Natur
umgeben, nur dürfen sie dieselben nicht genießen. Immer mehr Verbote und Gesetze

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 209

 für die Rechtlosen, immer mehr Gefängnisse, Galgen und Schaffote für jene die es wa-
gen, sich gegen die Gesetze der Herren aufzulehnen und vom Baume der Erkenntnis zu
genießen. Die bevorzugten Kinder wissen nur zu gut, daß ihre Macht, ihre Throne und
ihr Reichthum auf Unwissenheit, Gehorsam und Geduld des größeren Theils der Men-
schheit erreicht sind; darum die Angst vor der Erkenntnis und der Überzeugung ihrer
Diener und Sklaven. Zitternd und knieschlotternd steht sie da, die Macht der Dreieinig-
keit, Gott Vater (der Geldsack), Gott Sohn (der Staat), und Gott heiliger Geist (die
Kirche). Einer ist eifriger bemüht als der Andere, Mittel und Wege zu finden, den
schrecklichen Feind (das Wissen und die Freiheit), zu vernichten.
Auch hier in Amerika, dem “freiesten” Lande der Welt, schlug ein Bluthund à la Bis-
marck ein Gestez gegen Anarchisten vor, um sich der verhaßten Freiheitskämpfer zu
entledigen. Ein Anarchistengesetz, welcher Hohn! Wurde denn nicht schon längst
der Versuch gemacht, das Brausen des herannahenden Sturmes zu unterdrücken und
wurde nicht schon versucht, den Schrei der Entrechteten am Galgen zu Chicago zu er-
sticken? Versuchte man nicht den Muth und die Willenskraft eines Brutus zu brechen,
indem man ihn auf 22 Jahre hinter Kerkermauern begrub, und wurden nicht schon zu
weiderholten Malen die Forderungen der Hungernden mit Pulver und Blei beantwortet?
Nicht zu reden von den unzähligen Menschen, die ihrer Liebe zur Freiheit wegen ver-
folgt, verhöhnt und ins Gefängnis geschleppt wurden. Sind noch immer nicht genug
Gesetze vorhanden, um das rothe Gespenst zu bannen? Hill, die elende feige Memme,
Hill, der als Gouverneurs-Candidat für den Staat N.Y. aufgestellt ist, dieser Beschutzer
der Reichen schlug ein Gesetz vor, nach welchem man alle Ausländer, die auch nur im
Verdacht stehen, Anarchisten zu sein, einkerkern und auf administrativen Wege
ausweisen resp. an die europäischen Tyrannen ausliefern kann.
Verhülle dein Angesicht, 19. Jahrhundert vor der Schmach dieses “freien” Landes!
Die Geldprotzen Amerika’s schütteln die bluttriefenden Hände des wahnsinnigen Ba-
tuschka, des blöden Lümmels auf Deutschlands Thron und der alten Dirne Englands!
“Freie” amerikanische Bürger rutschen vor den Mächten Europas auf dem Bauche!
Wohl ist das Gesetz noch nicht angenommen, aber nach dem was uns bis jetzt
geboten wurde, läßt sich das Schlimmste erwarten. Sollte die Annahme des Gesetzes er-
folgen, kann dies das Stürzen der Lawine aufhalten, die Verzweiflung der Geknechteten
vermindern und den freien Gedanken hemmen? Nein! Der revolutionäre Geist lebt doch
fort. Er wühlt und ruht nicht, er zerbricht alle Schranken bis die Bahn geebnet und die
Freiheit sich erhebt, leuchtend und erwärmend, gleich der Sonne nach dem Gewitter.

Emma Goldmann.

210 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

 Essay in D I E B R A N D F A C K E L
New York, October 1894

Anarchist Laws.

I once read the fairy tale about a God who created the first human and let him live in a
glorious garden full of splendid fruit trees but commanded him not to touch the fruits
of a certain tree. When, however, this man, driven by curiosity and rebellion against the
commandment of his God, ate the fruit of that tree, God became angry and expelled the
poor sinner from the garden. While reading this fairy tale I was involuntarily gripped
with anger against this God who could act so heartlessly with poor Adam, whose crimes
indeed only involved showing appreciation for the divine creation of his master and ob-
taining refreshment from the juice of the fruit. I was often tormented by the question of
what could have caused this God, who had been described to me as kind and loving, to
create beautiful and glorious things for people and then make laws that are supposed
to prevent these same people from enjoying them? Back then this fairy tale was a riddle
to me and my youthful mind was lulled into the belief that everything God does is good.
Only after I grew up and experienced for myself the “goodness” of the Lord could I solve
the riddle; but for this solution I had to sacrifice my naive belief in a creator. God was a
ruler, and as such he demanded unconditional obedience from his servant Adam; for as
long as he looked up to his master in admiration and devotion, God was secure in his
strength and power over helpless men. But when he was unable to resist the temptation
of wanting to enjoy beautiful and good things, when he submitted to temptation and ate
from the tree of knowledge in spite of the threats of his creator, a wild fury gripped the
Lord over the impudence of his servant. He saw his influence dwindle and was robbed
of his divine power. If the willpower of the ignorant and helpless slave was this strong,
how much stronger would be the power of the man stirred to self-confidence. Therefore
he had to leave his home, damned to earn his bread through the sweat of his brow and
to wander restlessly from place to place. The poor, hunted forerunner of suffering hu-
manity! Just as Adam was back then, so today his “descendants” are damned to carry bur-
dens, build palaces, unearth treasures, and move moaning and groaning from land to
land. Yet still today the privileged children of the Lord wander in the Garden of Eden, rev-
eling, ruling, commanding, and spreading ruin for their disinherited brothers.
Just as back then, men find themselves surrounded by all the splendors of nature, yet
they are not allowed to enjoy them. More and more commandments and laws for those
without rights, more and more prisons, gallows, and scaffolds for those who dare to rebel
against the laws of the rulers and eat from the tree of knowledge. The favored children
know all too well that their power, their thrones, and their riches have been built upon

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 211

 the ignorance, obedience, and patience of the greater part of humanity; thus their fear of
the knowledge and conviction of their servants and slaves. Trembling and weak-kneed
they stand there, the power of the Trinity, God the Father (the Moneybag), God the Son
(the State), and God the Holy Spirit (the Church). One endeavors more zealously than
the other to find the ways and the means to destroy the frightful enemy (knowledge and
freedom).1
Even here in America, the “freest” country in the world, a bloodhound à la Bismarck 2
has proposed a law against Anarchists in order to get rid of the hated freedom fighters.
An Anarchist law, how scornful! Wasn’t the attempt made long ago to suppress the roar
of the approaching storm and wasn’t there already an attempt to choke the cry of the dis-
enfranchised at the gallows in Chicago? 3 Didn’t they try to break the strength and will
power of a Brutus by burying him for 22 years behind prison walls,4 and haven’t the de-
mands of the starving people been answered repeatedly with gunpowder and lead? Not
to mention the countless people persecuted, jeered, and dragged to prison due to their
love of freedom. Are there not yet enough laws in existence to exorcise the red specter?
Hill,5 the interminably craven coward, Hill, who has been nominated as the gubernato-
rial candidate for N.Y. State, this protector of the rich has proposed a law according to
which all foreigners who are even suspected of being Anarchists can be imprisoned and
then deported by administrative means or handed over to European tyrants.6
Cover your face, 19th century, from the disgrace of this “free” country! The wealthy

1. The preceding passage is largely derived from Michael Bakunin’s God and the State, first published in
English in 1883.
2. Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) served as the first chancellor of Germany for nineteen years under
Emperor Wilhelm I. In the late 1870s, after two assassination attempts upon the emperor, Bismarck
convinced the parliament to pass the anti-socialist “exceptional law,” which banned the Social Demo-
cratic Party in 1878, a ban that lasted until 1890 and led to the emigration of many German radicals.
3. A reference to the Haymarket trial of eight anarchists, which resulted in the death by hanging of Al-
bert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer; Louis Lingg, who was also slated to
be hanged, killed himself in his prison cell the night before.
4. EG refers to AB’s sentence of twenty-two years for his attempted assassination of Henry C. Frick.
5. The legislation EG excoriates was supported by David Bennett Hill (1843–1910), lawyer, Democrat,
United States senator (1892 –1897), and twice governor of New York (1885–1892). He was nominated
for governor again in 1894 but lost the election.
6. As chair of the Senate Committee on Immigration, Hill supported an anti-anarchist law proposed in
1894. He argued on the Senate floor that “nearly all the principal European countries are now legis-
lating against this class of people, and if they are not excluded from the United States this country will
soon be the dumping ground of the anarchists of the world.” Charles W. Mowbray’s propaganda tour,
under way while the bill was being debated in August, heightened the anxiety of the legislature. The
proposed law barred anarchists or any person “not attached to the principles of the Constitution and
well-disposed to the peace and good order of the same” from entering the United States and also
called for the imprisonment and deportation of anyone convicted of illegal entry. The Senate and the
House, however, each favored a different version of the bill, and thus it was never passed. See Con-
gressional Record, 53rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1894, 26, pt. 8: 8108 –109, 8230 – 44, 8506, 8557–58.

212 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894

show-offs of America are shaking the bloody hands of the mad Batuschka,7 the stupid
lout on Germany’s throne 8 and England’s old whore! 9 “Free” American citizens squirm
on their bellies before the powers of Europe!
To be sure, the law has not yet been passed, but given what has been presented to
us up to now, we can only expect the worst. Should the acceptance of the law follow, can
this halt the onrush of the avalanche, lessen the despair of the enslaved, and hamper free
thought? No! The revolutionary spirit lives on. It fights on and does not rest, it breaks
down all barriers until the path has been cleared and freedom has arisen, gleaming and
radiant, just like the sun after a storm.

Emma Goldmann.

Die Brandfackel 2 (October 1894): 6 –7. Translated from German.

7. Batuschka, or “Little father,” was a nickname for the tsar, and was usually intended as an affectionate
diminutive.
8. A reference to Emperor Wilhelm II.
9. A reference to Queen Victoria.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1894 213

 Ar ticle in the
P H R E N O L O G I C A L J O U R N A L A N D S C I E N C E O F H E A LT H
New York, Februar y 1895

Character in Unconventional People.

A Pair of Anarchists.

From Personal Examinations by the Editor.

We trust that the readers of the Journal 1 will not be alarmed at the introduction of the two
somewhat noted opponents of the existing order of society which we present herewith.
We can vouch for their harmlessness in the shadows we print, however dangerous they
may be in person and at short range.
As it is only by carefully studying and comparing all the elements of human nature,
both agreeable and disagreeable, that we can hope to acquire accurate and comprehen-
sive knowledge, we propose here to make a little excursion into the realm of unconven-
tional mentality. Our purpose is to show a relation between peculiar ideas of life and cer-
tain types of organization. Of course we shall enter on no discussion as to the merits of
the views held by the two subjects we have chosen, although it is only justice to say that
both these women, especially Marie Louise, repudiate the commonly accepted idea that
they advocate violence as a means of reform. Emma Goldman who recently served a year
in one of the New York prisons for alleged utterances inciting to riot, is no doubt the
more aggressive of the two, and is probably a fair representative of the radical class of
anarchists. Marie Louise, on the other hand, professes to be what she calls a “scientific”
anarchist. She is undoubtedly a scholar, while Miss Goldman is an enthusiast. Having
recently interviewed and examined these two women, we hope to be able to point out cer-
tain facts about them which will be of interest.
Emma Goldman professes to be a Russian Jewess, although it is difficult to see any-

1. Phrenological Journal was published in New York and Philadelphia from 1838 to 1911 under a variety
of titles. The Fowler and Wells Company, publishers of the journal, also published and distributed a
number of editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The editor during the time this article was pub-
lished would have been either Edgar C. Beall or Henry S. Drayton. Beall’s book The Life Sexual: A
Study of the Physiology, Science, Art and Hygiene of Love (New York: Vim Publishing, 1905) would later
be suppressed by the Post Office under the Comstock Act. The phrenological study of EG followed an
examination conducted after her conviction on 16 October 1893 (see “The Law’s Limit,” New York
World, 17 October 1893, above). The journal’s editorial introduction explained the relevance of the sub-
ject matter for phrenology and its enthusiasts. Still popular at the turn of the century, phrenology
maintained that personality traits bore a direct relation to the shape and size of the skull.

214 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

thing in her face or head which we are accustomed to associate with the Hebrews. She
is still a young woman, probably not over twenty-six or eight. She is only five feet in
height but weighs about one hundred and twenty-five pounds. She has rather fine, soft,
light brown hair, and blue-gray eyes of which the expression is very peculiar. Her head
measures twenty-one and a half inches in basilar circumference, and the principal de-
velopments are above this line. The back head is rather long, showing friendship, do-
mestic attachment and love of the opposite sex. There is considerable width just over the
ears at destructiveness and appetite for food which the portrait does not clearly show, as
it is copied from a crayon drawing. But with the further exception of the upper forehead,
which in this picture is not square enough at causality, the likeness is remarkably correct.
This is especially true as to the expression of the eyes and mouth. The facial signs of de-
structiveness and alimentiveness are very pronounced in the form of the mouth, and it
is chiefly in the mouth and eyes that we may detect the signs of quality and temperament
which account for the woman’s disposition to attack the present social fabric.
There is a very considerable development in the rear of the crown. Approbativeness
and firmness are especially strong. Conscientiousness is difficult to define. There is a la-
tent sense of justice, but every thing in the organization points to a lack of discipline, and
there are evidences of what might be called a habit of willfulness; an abandon to the dom-
inant impulses. In that form of chin and mouth, with the large firmness in the brain, we
have the phase of persistence that may be called tenacity, and which is often referred to
in popular parlance by a comparison with the bull-dog. It means a deep-seated, ineradi-
cable instinct to hold to an opinion, a purpose, or a passion. It is a vehement clutch which
is never relaxed, and it differs from obstinacy or perseverance of the ordinary type in be-
ing independent of opposing forces or other external conditions. It nurses its joys or
griefs whether anybody else is present to contradict or not. It does not depend on moods.
It is always present in its activity and stamps the character with an indelible dye.
The incorrigibility of such a nature is also greatly augmented, as in the present in-
stance, by the almost utter lack of reverence and faith. Hope is also weak. This combi-
nation leaves the intellect without incentive to search for evidences of optimism, and as
such a nature readily finds itself at war with the conventionalities, ill adapted to compete
in the struggle for existence with those more harmoniously constituted, a pessimistic
view of life with a consequent desire to alter the existing conditions is the almost in-
evitable result. Of course there are thousands of people who have many of these peculi-
arities of feeling, but who are endowed with very ordinary intellect, so that they make no
outcry, no protest, and indeed have few opinions beyond the consciousness that they are
uncomfortable. But Emma Goldman, although obviously of a lineage far from aristo-
cratic in tone, is endowed with a philosophical cast of mind which is very rare. Her up-
per forehead is beautifully developed and our portrait utterly fails to do her justice in this
respect.
The development of causality and comparison, stimulated by her pessimistic emo-
tions, renders her a radical thinker upon social problems. In her conversation she man-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 215

 ifests that familiarity with the vocabulary of philosophy which is ordinarily expected only
among cultivated professional men. However, her lower forehead is almost as defective
as the upper portion is fine. The eyebrows are almost straight, and the space between
them (the glabella) is depressed much more than appears in the engraving. This shows
a want of observation, precision, accuracy and specification in her collection or applica-
tion of data. In other words, she will reason profoundly but often upon insufficient evi-
dence. After assuming certain premises she follows the rule of the syllogism in the most
consistent, logical manner, but she is in danger of starting with premises which are false.
As may be seen by the flattened outer angle of the eyebrow, she has scarcely a trace of or-
der; and the eyes are deep set, showing little fondness for words or fluency in speech.
There are, doubtless, certain biases or tendencies in this woman which she owes to
some marked peculiarities or habits of her ancestors. She says that her father was a man
of an almost tyrannical disposition, and that her mother was very weak willed. Thus
there is quite a difference between the indications in her head and those in her hand as
regards firmness. Her hand is quite small, very flexible, but with a very poorly developed
thumb, the first or nailed phalanx being very short. It is in this first joint that cheirog-
nomists 2 locate willpower, while the second phalanx is, according to its length, a sign of
logic. This imperfect first joint of the thumb is often found in people who are undevel-
oped or askew in some particular. This peculiarity in Miss Goldman shows how impor-
tant it is to study the brain and not to rely upon any one isolated or remote sign. [ . . . ]

Phrenological Journal and Science of Health 99 (February 1895): 88 –90. The omitted portion of this article
includes an analysis of French anarchist Marie Louise David, who appended her own autobiographical
sketch. A pencil portrait of EG and a photograph of Marie Louise David accompanied the article.

2. Cheirognomy was the science of reading character from the shape and type of the hand.

216 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

 To the F I R E B R A N D
New York, 21 July 1895

I beg to call the attention of the Firebrand comrades, and liberty loving men and women
everywhere, to the fact that the friends of Alexander Berkman are getting ready to appeal
for a commutation of the excessive sentence imposed upon him, in 1892, for attack-
ing Frick, the superintendent of the Carnegie iron works, during the labor troubles of
that time. Most of your readers will, no doubt, remember the outrageous treatment labor
received at the hands of capital, during the Homestead strike; how Pinkerton’s men were
engaged by Frick, smuggled down there and armed with Winchester rifles, with in-
struction from this man Frick, to shoot to kill. Now these hired assassins charged upon
a group of defenseless men and women, who were armed with nothing but their courage
and honesty of purpose, killing eleven and wounding many more. As usual the atten-
tion of the strikers was directed to the poor scabs, who are ever through circumstances
compelled to take their places, while Frick, who was directly responsible for the trouble,
who gave the order to drive the sick wives and children of the strikers from their homes,
and who expressed the desire to have the working men massacred, rather than to see
them win the strike, was not in the least molested. Even the capitalist press joined with
many law-abiding citizens in denouncing Frick, and sympathizing with the unfortunate
workmen.
It was at this stage that Berkman appeared upon the field, July 23d., 1892. Though not
a striker, and not suffering from the cruelty of Frick himself, he keenly felt the wrongs
inflicted upon his brethren. Berkman, the noble youth, recognizing the man who was re-
sponsible for the sufferings of the strikers, determined to strike a blow at the cause of the
evil, and the death of the eleven victims. The cries of starving mothers and innocent chil-
dren gave him courage and will power to combat the enemy. He made an unsuccessful
attack on Frick, slightly wounding him, but creating consternation in the enemy’s camp.
By the light of subsequent events it is shown that the act was not altogether in vain; Plu-
tocracy has never raised its head so proudly since.
Utterly terrified, fearing a similar attack from other sources, the authorities hurried
Berkman away to prison, where he was forced to remain two months, after which time
he was brought before a prejudiced judge and jury, without council, or the least chance
to defend himself. He was, on the 20th. of September sentenced to twenty-two years
imprisonment; 1 such a trial being illegal and without a precedent in the history of
jurisprudence.2

1. AB was sentenced on 19 September 1892.

2. The judge overrode the Pennsylvania law mandating a maximum of nine years in prison for AB’s
crime and compounded the charges, sentencing him instead to twenty-two years.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 217

 Today, while Frick, in perfect health, lives to enjoy his ill-gotten wealth, poor Berkman
is languishing in a dark, musty cell, shut away from his friends and from the world, never
enjoying a stray beam of sunshine; still dreaming of a dawn of perfect freedom, and a day
when labor will no longer be crushed beneath the iron heel of wealth. For behind his
prison bars his big warm heart still throbs with the hopes and fears of the downtrodden;
he still keeps watch on the events of our times, and when permitted to write to his friends
still encourages them not to give up the fight. Though but a boy in years, he has shown
the philosophy and courage of a man; no word of complaint has ever passed his lips in
all these three years, although he has been subjected to even more rigorous discipline
than prisoners usually undergo.
Lovers of justice everywhere, even if not in sympathy with the feeling that prompted
the act of 1892, must recognize the injustice of such a trial, under such circumstances,
and by such a judge and jury, and must agree with us that when, according to the law he
was accused of violating, the extreme penalty should have been seven years, the tactics
pursued in order to sentence him for such a length of time were unlawful, as well as un-
just and inhuman.
Berkman does not petition for a pardon, nor for a new trial, but simply for a reduc-
tion of sentence.3 Comrades and friends that feel interested in this poor prisoner will
bear in mind that money is required for every effort of this kind, and will help us all
they can.
Those desiring further information, or desiring to contribute to the fund, should ad-
dress, until further notice, Charles Schneider, 82 Hill street, 12th Ward, Allegheny, Pa.

Emma Goldman. 4

Firebrand, 21 July 1895, p. 2. This letter also appeared in the Torch (London) 2 (September 1895), EGP, reel 1.

3. In early 1895, upon the advice of a friend, EG, Edward Brady, and others investigated the possibility
of appealing AB’s case to the Supreme Court. They discovered that no grounds for an appeal existed,
since AB had made no formal objections to judicial rulings at his trial. Instead EG convinced AB to
allow an appeal on his behalf before the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, and began that summer to
solicit funds and other aid for that purpose.
4. The newspaper’s editorial annotation reads: “All our Exchanges who favor justice will please copy and
request others to. The comrades everywhere will do well to exert themselves in Berkman’s behalf. Get
your local papers to mention this effort to free Comrade Berkman.”

218 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

 To the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 2 August 1895

Emma Goldman’s Attitude.

She Warns the Striking Tailors Against Their Leaders.

To the Editor of the World:

I beg to correct the statement published in your paper regarding the striking clothing-
makers and myself. I have neither attended any of their meetings nor did I have the least
intention of participating in the strike.1
I am, of course, greatly interested in labor troubles, and especially in the late strike of
the tailors, and while I passed Walhalla Hall 2 one morning I went in to see how the strik-
ers were getting on. I was directed to a room where several girls were chatting, and, not
knowing that they were to have a private meeting, I entered to see Miss Persky.3 She in-
vited me to attend their mass-meeting in the afternoon, and while she was writing down
my address up jumped one of the leaders and shouted that while he had no prejudice to-
wards Miss Goldman, she was an Anarchist, and that was enough.
I quietly told him that he did not seem fit to be a leader, as he was afraid of the pres-
ence of a woman who is an Anarchist. Then I left the hall.
My sympathy is fully with the strikers, and I sincerely hope they will succeed in their
efforts to better their condition, but they will do well not to put too much faith in their
leaders or they will fail, as others have.

Emma Goldman.

New York World, 2 August 1895, p. 3.

1. On 28 July, members of the United Brotherhood of Tailors began a strike that soon involved 16,000
workers in New York, Brooklyn, and Newark. Called over the alleged failure of clothing contractors to
comply with a previous union agreement, the strike ultimately succeeded in winning its demands.
2. Walhalla Hall, located at 52 Orchard Street, was also the site of the 17 August 1893 riot of unemployed
workingmen for which anarchists (including EG) were blamed.
3. Lottie Persky (also spelled Perski) was a walking delegate of the Women’s Branch of the United Broth-
erhood of Tailors, appointed as a trade union official to confer with local unions or to be a represen-
tative in negotiations between the union and the employer. The United Brotherhood of Tailors was
active in the organization of the 1,800 union and non-union “girl tailors” on strike in New York and
Brooklyn. On 31 July the World reported that EG had been escorted from a meeting of women tailors
at Walhalla Hall by “a committee of ten” after she ignored a request to leave. “We don’t want Anar-
chists here,” the paper quoted Miss Persky as saying. “We are trades unionists and have no use for the
sympathy or aid of such persons as Emma Goldman.” See New York World, 29 July 1895, p. 5; 30 July
1895, p. 3; and 31 July 1895, p. 16.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 219

 Official Circular of the German Government
Düsseldorf, 25 September 1895

According to a notice I received,1 the anarchist Emma Goldmann intends in the near fu-
ture to travel from New York to London,2 and possibly from there to Germany.
The above-mentioned Goldmann is about 26 –28 years old and Russian, but has a
mastery of the German language.
For years she has been untiringly active in the United States of North America in the
anarchist movement; there she has been imprisoned repeatedly for her unrestrained, an-
archistic, inflammatory speeches,3 and has managed many times to win comrades for
the revival of propaganda for the cause which she fanatically follows. Another of Gold-
mann’s lovers, the bookbinder Josef Oerter 4 who, together with her lover Berkmann,
reportedly took part in the assassination attempt in 1892 against the director of the
Carnegie plant in Pittsburg, came via England to Germany in 1893, financially supported
by her. He was sentenced by a jury in Duisburg on October 25, 1893, for violations
against §. 10 of the law of June 9th 1884 concerning criminal and dangerous use of ex-
plosives, and violations against §§. 110, 130, 128/129 of the criminal law code, to 8 years
in prison, loss of civil rights, and placed under surveillance.—The above-mentioned
Goldmann must be considered an exceedingly dangerous person.
I most devotedly beseech your honor to take the above-mentioned into custody in the
event of her arrival, and, if possible, to notify me immediately by telegraph.

Der Regierungs-Präsident 5
By proxy:
Zucker.

ALS, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf. Marked “Confidential” and “Secret!” Translated from German.

1. Suspecting that EG, through Joseph “Sepp” Oerter, was involved in anarchist activities within Ger-
many, the German Ministry of the Interior had its operatives compile the following information on
EG and monitor her during her tour of England and Scotland. The Interior Ministry passed this in-
formation to the police, who in turn informed regional and local officials throughout Germany.
2. EG had left New York for London on 15 August 1895 to begin a speaking tour of England and Scotland.
3. EG was imprisoned once, in 1893, for her role in the unemployment demonstrations.
4. There is no extant evidence that Joseph “Sepp” Oerter was involved in AB’s attentat.
5. An appointed office. The title is roughly equivalent to “chief regional administrator.”

220 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

 Ar ticle in L I B E R T Y
London, October 1895

Emma Goldman in London.

Public Meeting at South Place Institute, Finsbury.

Emma Goldman, the woman who voiced the sufferings of the unemployed in New York
in 1892,1 and who consequently suffered imprisonment for this so-called breach of
the laws of the U.S.A., arrived in England on the 22nd of August. Her first appearance
in public was in Regents Park, where she spoke to a large crowd. At later periods she
addressed meetings at Hyde Park, Whitechapel, Canning Town, Barking, and Strat-
ford, her speeches being received in every case with marked approval. And on Friday eve-
ning the 13th ultimo she delivered an interesting address in the South Place Institute,
Finsbury.
The meeting was called to consider the subject “Political Justice in England and
America.” The chair was occupied by R. Peddie, and on the platform and amongst the
audience were Louise Michel, Touzeau Parris,2 E. Leggatt,3 Henry Seymour, Amy
Morant,4 C. Morton, G. Lawrence, and James Tochatti.5
The Chairman having briefly stated the object for which the meeting had been called,
Comrade Leggatt spoke on his imprisonment and said that a magistrate was always more
severe on a man if he happened to be an Anarchist than upon an ordinary man, and that
he as a working man would continue to assert his right to ride in comfort.
J. Tochatti said the question of Political Justice in England no one could afford to ig-
nore, whatever their political views may be, nor could we allow the Continental system
of “agents provocateur” to be introduced without strenuous opposition. Justice was not
administered in accord with equity but used by the classes to suppress all advanced

1. The unemployed demonstration to which the article referred was in 1893.

2. Thomas Collins Touzeau Parris (1840 –1907) was a member of the London Socialist League, an an-
archist, and the owner of a gelatin manufacturing business. He lectured in 1881 to the National Sec-
ular Society, and by 1886 more widely on anarchism, often at outdoor meetings. He was a Hammer-
smith Socialist Society delegate to the 1896 London socialist conference. Occasionally contributing
to the anarchist press, he took a stand against Christian anarchism and attempted to synthesize so-
cialism and individualism.
3. “E. Leggat” was Ted Leggatt, a carman by trade and an anarchist and activist.
4. Amy Morant was a member of the British Independent Labour Party. She worked with the unem-
ployed in London in 1887 and 1888 and served as a writer, translator, and organizer for the Women’s
Liberal Federation. She was author of Carina Songs and Others (Westminster: Roxburghe Press, 1895)
and The Crisis at Cardiff (London: Independent Labour Party, 1895).
5. The London anarchist journal Liberty was edited by James Tochatti and published from January 1894
to December 1896.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 221

Goldman’s tour of England in 1895 was reported in the English anarchist press and highlighted here in
Liberty (October 1895), an anarchist communist journal edited by James Tochatti. “W. M. Rowe,” which
appears as the cover artist’s signature at lower right side of pedestal, is in fact a pseudonym for the il-
lustrator Walter Crane. (By permission of the Kate Sharpley Library)
thought which threatened their interests. Acts of Parliament passed in panic had been
strained in order to brutally punish men who had been trapped by the police. It had been
admitted by ex-detective M’cIntyre that the Wallsall Anarchists were victims of a police
plot. It was difficult to believe that in England men like Charles and Battola were suffer-
ing through the infamy of men like Coulon and the reptile detectives of Scotland Yard,
but such was the case.6
Henry Seymour said the case of Berkmann, who got 22 years for a 7 years’ offence be-
cause he happened to hold anarchistic views showed, according to American law, that if
7 years’ imprisonment was a sufficient punishment for an attempt to kill, 15 years’ im-
prisonment was the adequate penalty for daring to hold an opinion that American law
was rotten. The case of the Chicago Anarchists made it manifest that the United States
police were capable of every conceivable villainy. Turning our attention to our own coun-
try, the Wallsall Case showed that the Secret Service, in the light of the revelations of in-
spector M’cIntyre,7 was an abomination not to be endured. Having recently taken an in-
terest in the Maybrick Case, he said he was acquainted with its details, and could speak
with assurance of the scandalous way in which the police manufactured evidence to se-
cure a conviction, and an acquaintance with the case of John Hay revealed that Home
Office officials were open to barefaced bribery. We might agitate and secure the reduc-
tion of unjust sentences in a few cases, but it must be understood that there is no radi-
cal remedy for this state of things except to put an end to the present inequitable eco-
nomic conditions which permit the privileged few, who control the government, to live
in opulence and ease at the expense of the degradation of the masses.
Emma Goldman dealt with the subject from an American point of view. She said three
years had passed, since Alexander Berkmann, the noble youth, attempted to avenge the
wrongs inflicted upon the strikers at Homestead, during the labor troubles of 1892.
Three years of struggle, hardship and privation for the working class, and wealth, ex-
travagance, amusements and pleasure, for a privileged few.
“What (she asked) was Berkmann’s crime?” Had he stolen the wealth labor had cre-
ated? Had he robbed mankind of the necessary means of life? Had he invested the hard
earned pennies of widows and orphans in swindling schemes? Had he built factories,
where men, women and half grown children, were slowly tortured to death? Had he

6. In January 1892, six anarchists were arrested in London and Walsall (in the English Midlands) and
accused of conspiracy and possession of explosives. As the number of anarchist bombings and attacks
in Europe increased, the possibility of a fair and objective trial became less likely. Three men, Jean
Battola, Victor Cailes, and Fred Charles, were sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Joe Deakin was
sentenced to five years while William Ditchfield and John Westley were acquitted. Many anarchists
believed that the men had been set up by an agent provocateur, Auguste Coulon. The case sparked
mutual suspicions, feuds, and bitterness within the English anarchist movement.
7. In April 1895 the London paper Reynolds News published the memoirs of former Detective Sergeant
McIntyre, who affirmed the suspicion that an agent provocateur (Coulon) had been used to entrap the
Walsall anarchists.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 223

 plagued, cheated, enslaved, and tyrannized humanity? No! Had he done all that, he
might have remained a free man, he would have been honored and respected as a good
citizen, have had a chance of being elected to Parliament, Senate, or Congress, or chosen
as President of the U.S.A. Berkmann was in prison, because he hated and opposed all
this, because he was strong, and let the act follow the thought, because he attempted to
destroy the life of a man, who had brought disaster and privation upon thousands of
people. The condition of the workers in America was just as miserable as in other coun-
tries, the strikes that had taken place within the last ten years demonstrated the long sup-
pressed sufferings of the working classes. It was the Homestead strike of 1892, which re-
vealed to the public the dreadful condition of the amalgamated steel and iron workers,
and the brutal treatment they were subjected to by Frick, the superintendent; the work-
ers were actually owned by Carnegie and Frick; the barracks they lived in belonged to
Carnegie and Frick, the food, tools and clothing had to be bought at Carnegie’s shops,
and the prices they paid for these necessaries were enormous. The result of such tyran-
nical treatment was the strike of July 1892. The men were determined to fight for their
homes and families, they were ready to die if necessary, they would not endure a life of
drudgery any longer. Frick seeing the earnestness and seriousness of his slaves, engaged
a number of Pinkerton’s men at two dollars per day, smuggled them into Homestead and
gave them the order to shoot and to kill. On the 6th of July these armed assassins charged
upon a crowd of men and women, killing eleven and wounding many more. The strik-
ers fought a brave battle, they energetically defended themselves and drove back the
hired blood-hounds; Frick called upon the government to send the militia to his assis-
tance. Of course the Government complied. What was the army in America for? what
was an army kept for in England, or on the continent, if not to protect private property?
But the militia would never have been permitted by the strikers to enter within the
boundaries of Homestead, they would have had to pass over the bodies of the workers.
The authorities saw the people were in earnest, they understood that to use force would
mean a war, so they decided to use a trick. The strikers were promised full protection
against Pinkerton’s men and that “scabs” should not be put to work in the mines; the
poor deluded and confiding strikers, did not see this trap and the militia were allowed to
march into the town cheered and applauded by the people; those people afterwards shot
down like dogs by the cowardly brutes in uniform. Frick who schemed all those things,
and who gave the order to drive the sick wives and starving children of the strikers from
their homes, he who caused the death of the eleven victims on the 6th of July, who ex-
pressed the intention to have the workers massacred, rather than let them win the strike,
was not in the least molested. It was then that Berkmann appeared; though not a striker
himself and not suffering from the brutality of Frick, he keenly felt the wrongs inflicted
upon his brethren. Alexander Berkmann decided to strike a blow at the cause of the evil.
His hatred of tyranny gave him the requisite courage, and on July 23rd, 1892, he made
an unsuccessful attack on Frick, only wounding him but creating consternation in the

224 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

enemy’s camp. Utterly terrified and fearing a similar attack from other quarters the au-
thorities hurried Berkmann away to prison, where he remained months without trial, af-
ter which time he was taken before a prejudiced judge and jury, and without counsel, or
an opportunity to defend himself, was on the 20th of Sept. sentenced to 22 years’ im-
prisonment. Such a trial was illegal and without precedent in the history of American ju-
risprudence. It was an open secret that America was ruled by a band of thieves who mo-
nopolized the land, machinery, rail-roads, mines and factories, in fact all the wealth of
the country. All laws were made and enforced by the few. The rights of free speech, as-
sembly and the press, were things of the past, so far as the interests of the workers were
concerned, and the constitution which provided equality before the law, had never been
observed in the U.S. Men who were in power and had the almighty dollar could commit
any crime, seduction, theft, etc. and remain unpunished. Every official from the police-
man to the President could be bribed; but those not possessing the means were lost—
were helpless. Frick and Carnegie used their stolen money freely in order to obtain a
long sentence for Berkmann, and they succeeded. Twenty-two years’ imprisonment! Did
it not make one’s blood run cold to think of it? Could they imagine what it meant to be
shut out from the world, to be buried alive for such a long term within prison walls?
Could they grasp what it was to suppress one’s feelings, wishes, passions and thoughts,
to become a mere automatic machine, to see the same cold cruel faces of the watchmen,
to hear the same harsh voices of the officials week after week, year after year—to have
darkness around you all that time? No! no one who had not been in prison could under-
stand it. Such however was the lot of hundreds of men and women in Siberia—in mod-
ern bastilles all over the world. Berkmann was one of the great army of free thinkers,
revolutionists and Anarchists, who had sacrificed their life and liberty for the advance-
ment and welfare of mankind. Frick to-day was in perfect health, was enjoying his ill-
gotten wealth. The Brutus of the 19th Century was languishing in one of the prisons of
America, but was dreaming of the dawn, of a day of perfect liberty when labor would no
more be crushed beneath the iron heel of Capitalism. Behind the prison bars, his big
warm heart still throbbed with the hopes and fears of the down-trodden, he still watched
the events of our times and when permitted to write to his friends encouraged them to
continue the fight. No word of complaint had escaped his lips during those three weary
years, although he had been subjected to even more rigorous discipline than prisoners
usually were. The pistol shot of the 23rd of July had found an echo in the hearts of the
oppressed and opened the eyes of many people to the fact that the Anarchists were not a
gang of ruffians, as Society was pleased to call them. Anarchism meant the destruction
of the existing brutal system of exploitation and robbery of the masses, but not by un-
necessarily violent means, and its aim was to establish a society of complete freedom,
and respect for one another, free access to the means of life and to every individual un-
restricted liberty to own the proceeds of his labor, and the right to learn, study, enjoy,
love and live according to his own tastes and desires. The acts of Berkmann, Caserio,

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 225

 Henry, Vaillant, Pallás,8 and other brave heroes were but the
heralds of the coming Social Revolution.
Louise Michel addressed the meeting in French to the ef-
fect that the speakers preceding her had spoken of English
and American justice, but had not mentioned French justice,
probably out of politeness as there was nothing good to be
said of it. As she was not a patriot but an Internationalist she
would complete the picture without talking politics, which is
the art of deceiving others for your own benefit. When they
saw the robberies committed in the Southern Railway scan-
dals and other Panamas 9 known and unknown, and the im-
mense Madagascar cemetery,10 they found that French jus-
tice was very hard on the disinherited and most gentle
towards the privileged. It was the most unequal justice in the
In 1895 Goldman met Louise Michel, the French an-
world. And this we call a republic! Res publica, a public thing
archist arrested in 1883 for urging the Parisian poor
to take bread if they could not afford it—words
representing all, but this republic only represents capitalists
echoed by the admiring Goldman in her address to acting against the workers who were condemned in advance,
the demonstration of the unemployed in New York on while the capitalists were absolved. All French statesmen
21 August 1893. (Labadie Collection, University of were thieves, some murderers, yet justice crept before those
Michigan) offenders, it was bribed by those whose crimes were heaped
as high as heaven. Even the Empire of bloody memory dared
not have committed such injustice for fear of being de-
stroyed. Tyrants did well in showing themselves in their true
light. It was good for propaganda. The political farces are
nearly played out. Anarchists despise weapons used by the enemy for human butchery.
When an obstacle to the Social Revolution is to be removed it may sometimes be neces-
sary to use violence. French potentates however, for the time being, may rest in peace.

8. Sante Caserio, Émile Henry, Auguste Vaillant, and Paulino Pallás were all anarchists who had been
executed for committing attentats or causing explosions. EG’s endorsement of the attentater, or the
power of the individual act, echoes Peter Kropotkin’s argument in his essay “The Spirit of Revolt,”
first published in Le Révolté in 1880 and reprinted in the June–July 1892 Die Autonomie: “by actions
which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people’s minds and wins converts. One
such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.”
9. “Other Panamas” is a reference to the 1889 Panama Canal company bankruptcy and subsequent
scandal, involving charges of bribery and corruption among leading French government officials.
10. The colonial aspirations of the Third Republic had led to war and an anti-French movement in
Madagascar that first began with the Franco-Merian war (1883–1885). The war ended with an am-
biguous treaty, in which France was given a settlement in Madagascar, though not officially recog-
nized as the colonial government. In 1890 the British government recognized Madagascar as a
French protectorate, but the Madagascar government refused to submit to French rule. French
troops landed in Madagascar in January 1895, and occupied the state on 30 September 1895, an act
followed by an anti-foreign, anti-Christian rebellion that French troops suppressed in 1896.

226 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

They are too useful in showing the crimes that power commits for the Revolutionist to
desire their immediate removal by any means, violent or otherwise.
T. Parris thought that the object of the meeting might have been more emphatically
stated as “Legal Injustice” instead of “Political Justice.” Unless the latter was intended to
be sarcastic, and that was not apparent from the reading of the bill. He emphasised the
fact that justice literally meant, what the law yielded us. Equity was usually meant when
the word justice was used, but it was frequently proved that the laws were anything but
equitable. However in the present case they had met to protest against punishments be-
ing given by Judges through prejudice, that even the law, that harshest of all taskmasters,
had allotted for the offences charged against the prisoner Berkmann. The cause of this
was class and social prejudices. Our rulers were the property class, and the laws were
made and strained for the conservancy of their privileges. Our duty and work therefore
was not to use their discredited means of coercion, but to educate the people in the prin-
ciples of Socialistic Anarchism. And when so educated the power of the privileged
classes would pass into the hands of the people, who would use it to destroy the present
legal systems and promote equality of opportunity—the only possible basis of liberty.
Miss Amy C. Morant, of the Independent Labor Party, delivered an address which was
received with considerable applause.
C. Morton told the audience that there had been a great deal of talk about brotherhood,
but that he failed to see how that would improve matters, as brothers quarrelled and
robbed each other. What was wanted was the abolition of government and exploitation.
Lawrence said that as those in possession of the wealth of the countries of Europe
were the educated classes. It would be vain to preach the use of the weapons of brother-
hood to the half educated workers, but seeing that the possessing classes are at all times
prepared to use force to prevent the workers bettering their condition there was but one
course open, and that was to teach resistance by like force.
A comrade having spoken in Russian, the meeting was brought to a close, having
lasted three hours.

Liberty 2 (October 1895): 173 –74. Immediately following the report of EG’s lecture of 13 September, Liberty
provided the following update on the rest of her tour: “Emma Goldman left London for Scotland on Saturday
14th of September, and on the following evening addressed a large audience in Bredalbane Hall, Glasgow.
The welcome accorded her by Glasgow comrades was most hearty. During the week she was very busy, her
engagements including meetings in Edinburgh, and Maybole, as well as in Glasgow. Her appeals on behalf
of the Berkmann Release Fund were productive of good results—23/10 being collected by the cigarette
makers of Glasgow, and at a social gathering 11/3 were subscribed. The various meetings were in every
other way a great success, being largely attended, and the applause given to Emma Goldman and the other
speakers most sympathetic. Our Comrade desires us to say that the reception she has met with in England
and Scotland fills her with hope and energy for the strenuous continuance in the future of her labors for the
cause of Liberty. We have a few ‘Berkmann Subscription Lists,’ and will gladly forward one to any comrade
who will undertake to get it filled up.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 227

 Essay in the T O R C H O F A N A R C H Y
London, England, 18 October 1895

The Condition of the Workers of America.

“Mind your own business” is a proverb very frequently used by every American. But,
unfortunately, its real meaning has so far been misunderstood by the great major-
ity. It has never cared for its own affairs, but has entrusted its business, its life and wel-
fare, to the hands of a few land, mine, and railroad owners, and to merchants of every
description.
This privileged minority, true to the teaching of Christ, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,”
has constantly robbed and exploited the people of America.
In fact only these “noble” gentlemen have grasped the meaning of the proverb “mind
your own business.” During the last century they have taken precious good care to get as
much as possible out of the working class. They have cut down the wages of their em-
ployees at every favorable opportunity, driven them out of their homes, destroyed their
happiness, suppressed all free thought, till at last they have reduced the country to a state
of slavery and degradation.
The bourgeois class of America, which has increased its wealth year by year, batten-
ing on the toil of the people by an organized system of wholesale theft, blood-shed, and
robbery, has had at its disposal a whole host of officials, superintendents, managers, and
foremen, who have considered it their duty to assist their masters in the philanthropic
work of tormenting the lives of those in their power.
While the Astors, the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, and the Dewits are
spending their “valuable” time at the gambling tables of Monte Carlo, or trying to recruit
their health, ruined by excessive drink and other vices, in Italy, Paris, or England, their
humble servants are minding their affairs, inventing new schemes, and looking about
for fresh means to delude and oppress the worker.
While the privileged few are getting richer and richer, the great mass of the people is
sinking year by year lower and lower into poverty and distress. While millions of dollars
are squandered in theatres, diamonds, dresses, and other luxuries, the downtrodden are
leading lives of misery and starvation, working twelve, fourteen, and sixteen hours out
of every twenty-four, in order to eke out a miserable existence.
I cannot deny the fact that a small proportion of the American workers are economi-
cally much better off than a great many of the workers of England and the Continent. But
they are native-born American citizens who have banded themselves together for the
purpose of excluding from the advantages they themselves enjoy all belonging to other

228 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

 Goldman raised money to launch The Rebel (shown here, cover page from No-
vember 1895 issue), among the first anarchist communist newspapers in the
United States and edited by, among others, American anarchist Harry Kelly. (By
permission of the Kate Sharpley Library)

nationalities. They look down upon all foreigners, and consider that nobody is as smart,
as witty, as capable as they themselves.1
Let us try to see who these brave, “free” Americans are.
We say in Russia “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar,” but if you scratch an
American citizen you find either an Englishman, Irishman, Dutchman, Frenchman,
German, or a mixture of nationalities.

1. EG was most likely referring to the American Federation of Labor, a trade union whose membership
was exclusively skilled laborers. She might also have been referring to those anarchists who were in-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 229

 The only true Americans were the native Indians, a kind and peaceful lot of people,
who were cruelly robbed of their land and happiness by the ancestors of those who now
rule the country. I should think myself disgraced had my ancestors been amongst those
who mercilessly slaughtered the Indians wholesale, pretending to do so in the name of
civilization.
Recently a few American missionaries were killed by an angry Chinese mob. Accord-
ing to the statement of one who escaped, the mob was provoked by the insolent, imper-
tinent and overbearing behaviour of the missionaries; yet the American authorities were
thrown into a state of terrible excitement by the “outrage,” and the press joined with the
clergy of every denomination in denouncing the poor Chinese as savages, and urged the
government to demand immediate satisfaction from China.2
Were not the men who first settled down in America robbers and swindlers? Are the
English, who are pretending to civilize Africa whilst killing hundreds of men and
women, any better? Certainly not, and their conduct ought to be all the more strongly
condemned inasmuch as they do it in the name of Christianity, whilst the Chinese and
Negroes only act in self-defence when they resist the encroachments of the missionaries.
Let us now consider the condition of the American worker. As I said before, there is
a small section which is in a good position, has comfortable houses, can afford to send
their children to good schools, and so far has not felt the pangs of hunger.
Having inherited the business instincts of their Dutch, English, and Jewish ancestors,
the Americans are first-rate business men. The average American is calculating, shrewd,
and possesses wonderful skill, which enables him to cheat and swindle his neighbour
of his hardly earned dollars. His chance of getting on in the world is, therefore, greater
than that of his less smart competitor. Bar-keepers, cashiers, clerks, newspaper distribu-
tors and collectors are workers in a good position, but their numbers are so small that it
would be unfair to judge the condition of the American worker by their example. The av-

volved in anti–foreign labor campaigns, like Henry Weismann, who, while in San Francisco, took an
active role in the anti-Chinese campaigns in various Pacific Coast cities.
2. On 9 June 1895, the first reports from China of the destruction of Protestant and Catholic missions
in Cheng Tu appeared in the North China Daily News. The viceroy of Szechwan province, Liu Ping
Chang, was accused by the British and American governments and the press of orchestrating the at-
tack. On 3 August another attack occurred in which Christians were killed at Kiucheng, followed a
few days later by an attack on missionaries and their property in Foo-Choo, both in the Fukien prov-
ince. On 17 August a commission of U.S. and British diplomats arrived in Kiucheng and began es-
tablishing order through arrests. The Chinese government refused to allow any inquiries into the
Christian massacre; sentiment against foreigners in China was high, fueled by resentment of Britain’s
opium trade and murders of Chinese nationals in the United States. Not until 29 August did the Chi-
nese government consent to help the commission. Seven prisoners convicted of complicity in the
most recent massacres were executed at Kiucheng in the presence of foreign consuls, but the Chinese
authorities refused to punish the viceroy. The U.S. State Department’s response was thwarted by geo-
graphical distance and by the many errors and misspellings of Chinese place names, which served to
confuse and exaggerate the issue.

230 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

erage wage of the working class in most branches is 6 dollars a week, for a working day
of 12, 14, or even 16 hours. People working in the tailoring, cloak-making and cigarette
trades do not earn more than 4 dollars a week, and there are thousands of people walk-
ing the streets of New York, Chicago and other great cities who would work for even less
if they only could.
The unemployed movement of 1893 frightened the authorities to such an extent that,
fearing a riot, they felt themselves compelled to do something for the people. But what
these “charitable gentlemen” who feast on luxuriously prepared meats and drink
sparkling wines actually did was but a mockery in the eyes of the starving unemployed.
They arrested first the speakers and leaders of the unemployed, sentencing them to
rigorous terms of imprisonment in the hope of breaking the spirit of the people by so
doing. After that they opened a few kitchens where coffee and tea could be obtained for
1 cent, but, as they needed the cent first, these kitchens did not prove of much use to the
starving. Some land-owners gave a few hundred acres for the unemployed to work on,
but the opportunities for work provided by it were but a few drops in the ocean of mis-
ery, especially as only a few families were supplied with the raw material and machinery
necessary for tilling the soil.
Strange to say all this did not improve the condition of the unemployed. The number
of people living in the slums of New York to-day is greater that it ever was before. Thou-
sands of people live in the utmost poverty, surrounded by filth. They do not know where
to turn for relief. Young women are compelled to sell their bodies on the street, and half-
grown children, shivering with cold, without home or shelter of any kind, are forced to
beg or steal, and some even to lie down in the streets and die.
Even the lot of those who have work is not much better.
Men, women, and children have to work from morn till night, never enjoying a breath
of fresh air, never seeing the sun in the clear heavens, living on a few cents per day, and
having everlastingly before their eyes the terrors of starvation. All this misery exists side-
by-side with wealth and extravagance unequalled elsewhere. These horrors abound in
nearly the richest country in the world, a country on which nature has bestowed its rich-
est gifts. The people who have created all this wealth, who have built the mansions, found
the gold, woven the silk and tilled the land are living in misery and degradation, whilst
those who have robbed them of everything they have created are living in luxury, feast-
ing, gambling, and generally enjoying themselves at the workers’ expense.
If the stones of the mansions in which the rich live, the diamonds, silks and satins
they wear could speak they would tell a horrible tale—a tale which would shake the
nerves of the blood-suckers and exploiters of labour, and make them dread the day when
the people, tired of their long sufferings, the wretchedness of their lot, will rise to re-
venge themselves on those who are responsible for it all.
And the apathy and indifference which have so long crippled the energy of the masses
is at last beginning to disappear. The strikes at Homestead, Tennessee, Buffalo, Chicago,

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895 231

 Brooklyn and New York 3 have proved that the people of America are tired of leading the
lives of dogs. The energy and enthusiasm displayed during these strikes, and the heroic
way in which the worker has met death in the fights with the police and militia have
shown what the people were capable of. They have been in earnest of what the workers
will do when called upon to fight the great fight for the recovery of their rights and the
welfare of all dear to them.
Of course, the authorities have used every means to sap the courage of the strikers.
They have instructed the police and the militia to shoot down the strikers and show no
mercy to anyone who dares to rebel against their power. We are told that the police and
the military exist only for the protection of the people, but it is a fact that always and
everywhere they have been used to protect property and to defend and uphold the pow-
ers that be.
But bullets and imprisonment cannot destroy an ideal. Five men were murdered in
Chicago on the 11th of November, 1887. Lawfully and rightly, say the upholders of the
present social order. But their deaths have not been able to silence their voices, which
sound louder and louder from beyond the grave, and their ideas live on. Alexander Berk-
mann’s brave act showed to all who wish to see the real cause of the people’s misery. An-
archists are no longer looked upon as a set of fools or ruffians, and the principles of those
who have died on the gallows or are languishing in prison are to-day discussed in the
press, in the pulpit, and in the mansions of the rich. Hard work is before us, as it will not
be easy to convince the American workman, who prides himself on his freedom, that he
is a slave. But I see the day before me when the workers of America will unite with those
of other countries, and the people rising in righteous wrath will wreck the system of bru-
tality and tyranny which to-day crushes the life-blood out of them. It is a system which
gives to the few the power to enslave the many, which upholds corruption, prostitution
and degradation, and which must be destroyed before freedom be possible.
On the ruins of the rotten system Anarchy will be established, and Anarchy will ren-
der possible the welfare and happiness of all.

Emma Goldmann.

Torch of Anarchy, 18 October 1895, pp. 75 –77. Reprinted in the Firebrand, 17 November 1895, pp. 3 – 4.

3. In addition to the 1892 Homestead steel strike, EG refers to a coal miners’ strike in Briceville, Ten-
nessee, in 1891–1892; a railroad switchmen’s strike in Buffalo in August 1892; the 1894 Pullman
strike in Chicago; a cloakmakers’ strike in Buffalo, New York, in the fall of 1894; and a strike of street-
car employees in Brooklyn in January 1895. Strikers at Homestead, Briceville, Buffalo, and Brooklyn
were defeated when local authorities called in the National Guard; the Pullman strike was crushed af-
ter President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops.

232 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1895

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
Paris, 23 March 1896

Dear Sir!

You will be surprised to receive this lines, as I am a stranger to you,1 still I think, you have
heard my name. I am here for a short stay and would very much like to see you. Will you
kindly inform me, when I can find you at home? If convinient Wednesday afternoon, I
shall remain here only until Friday next.

Sinserly Yours.
Emma Goldmann 2

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH. Addressed at top to “Mr Hamon.” Return address given as Emma Gold-
mann, c/o Mdm. Resteger, St. André des Ars. 25.

1. EG met the French sociologist and anarchist Augustin Hamon for the first time in Paris in 1896.
2. The “n” in Goldman was written with a bar over it, the German language indicator for doubling a
letter.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 233

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
New York, 28 April 1896

Dear Comrade.

I promised to write to you occasonnally, but I am sorry I cann’t furnish you many news
at present.
There is not a subject important enough to write much upon, except that a London
Anarchist, John Turner by name, (I think you must have met him during your soujourn
in Engl.) is doing some propaganda here.1 The anarchistic Idea’s do not seem to meet
with much success in this blessed Land, of the “free and the “brave.” You rightly judged
the American’s as a practical people; they are always trying to find out the financial value
of an Idea and do not care what the future will bring them, eagerly being after the “divi-
dends” for the present time.
I doubt whether any Anarchist as a representative of his union will go to the London
congress.2 The Comrades have until recently not been in contact with the trades union
movement of this country and the result is, that none of our people will be delegated.
I learned through the papers, that affairs are very lively in Paris, what is the truth
about it?
I mailed copie’s of several anarchistic papers to you, the Alarm is not in existence any
more, neither is the Brandfackel nor the Anarchist. Sturmglacken is a new paper.3
A very good Friend of mine, has read two years ago, the first edition of your book; Psy-
chologie du Militaire Professionnel, he has been delighted with it and at present, he is ea-
gerly studying the “Défense” you prefixed the second edition of your oeuvre.4

1. See note 3 to “Eastern and European Propaganda,” Essay in the Firebrand, 24 May 1895, below.
2. The London congress of the socialist Second International, held from 27 July through 3 August 1896,
was the occasion for the expulsion of anarchist delegates by the socialist majority on the congress’s
second day. Anarchists had previously attempted to gain admittance at international congresses held
in Brussels (1891) and in Zurich (1893), and had planned to hold their own meeting in 1896, in an-
ticipation of the expulsion. Anarchist delegates included Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Élisée
Jean-Jacques Reclus, Gustav Landauer, Louise Michel, Charles Mowbray, Ted Leggatt, Jean Grave,
Émile Pouget, Augustin Hamon, and Fernand Pelloutier.
3. The anarchist weekly Alarm was published in Chicago between 1884 and 1887 and in New York un-
til 1888. The Chicago-based anarchist weekly Sturmglocken (The Alarm Bell) had a four-week run in
March and April of 1896.
4. Psychologie du militaire professionnel (Paris: A. Savine, 1894) was vilified by reviewers, politicians, cler-
gymen, and officers as unpatriotic, undermining of French society, and even treasonous. Their reac-
tions sparked Hamon’s preface to the second edition, which appeared in 1895, in defense of the book
as a work of science, in which he drew on various examples of historical and textual precedents.
Though the French military threatened legal action, it did not carry out a suit against Hamon.

234 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

 I am very sorry, I cann’t read it myself, but my knowledge of the French language does
not go so far. I would highly appreciate to have La. P. du. M. P. in the German translation.5
I presume you are very busy, but should you find a few minute’s of leisure, please let
me know, something of the French movement.

Fraternally
Emma Goldman

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH.

5. Psychologie des Berufssoldaten (Leipzig, 1896). EG later called Psychologie du militaire professionnel
(1894) a “brilliant work” and its author “the man who probably better than anyone else understands
the psychology of the Attentater,” in her essay “The Psychology of Political Violence” (1911).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 235

 Essay in the F I R E B R A N D
New York, 24 May 1896

Eastern and European Propaganda.

I was surprised to learn that you did not know of comrade John Turner’s propaganda in
this country.1 I think it very important for the western friends to know how the propa-
ganda is going on in the east.
I cannot say we have an Anarchistic movement of any importance in the east, but I
am confident we could work one up if there were people both able and willing to partic-
ipate in the work. Just what could be done we have seen by Comrades Mowbray 2 and
Turner’s visits 3 to the States. Mowbray has traveled as far west as St. Louis, holding good
meetings all over, not to speak of the success met with in Boston. Thanks to his work, the
Anarchists held a May day demonstration on the 3d and the Central Labor union ar-
ranged meetings for Comrade Turner 4—things never before heard of here. We see that
if a man is determined and has the ability to make his way he succeeds. It is foolish to
say the American workingmen have no wish to study Anarchistic ideas. Give them a
chance and they will do it. Of course our principles must be propagated in a plain and
popular language, such as the Firebrand uses.
Comrade John Turner has left his work in London and come over to the “freest land
in the world”, though he was aware of the fact that the Americans are a hard lot, to preach
Anarchism to. He is a very energetic and earnest fellow, a fine speaker and an excellent
debator, and, above all, he is not conceited like many others who know less. We could suc-

1. EG’s essay was an undated response to an announcement in the 26 April 1896 Firebrand on John
Turner’s first U.S. tour. One of the editors of the Portland, Oregon, anarchist-communist newspaper,
Henry Addis, lamented that he only learned about the tour from an article in Freiheit: “It seems
strange that none of the comrades were interested enough to send us word of comrade Turner’s ar-
rival, and his work and plans. We wish to make the Firebrand a journal of the movement, but to do
this we must have the co-operation of the comrades everywhere. In order to give news of the move-
ment it must be sent in by comrades”(Firebrand, 26 April 1896, p. 3).
2. English anarchist Charles Mowbray traveled to the United States in 1894, lectured on the East Coast,
and eventually settled in Boston in 1895, where he was responsible for introducing Harry Kelly to
anarchism.
3. English anarchist John Turner spent seven months in the United States beginning in April 1896,
traveling as far west as Denver. He delivered approximately one hundred lectures, debating various
political opponents including single-taxers, Tuckerite individualists, and free-silver advocates. EG
helped organize Turner’s New York lectures. For an interview with Turner about his American tour,
reprinted from the London anarchist newspaper The Alarm, see “John Turner’s View of the American
Labor Movement,” Firebrand, 20 December 1896, p. 4; see also “Personal Impressions of the United
States,” serialized in Freedom (London, March and May 1897).
4. The Boston Central Labor Union arranged meetings for Turner, from the 2nd to the 6th of May, in-
cluding a large May Day meeting on the 3rd.

236 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

cessfully spread our ideas if he knew the localities and did not
have to depend on those comrades who are willing enough to
help, but who have not the least experience and under-
standing as to how to arrange meetings.
Comrade Turner has addressed three meetings in New
York City, which have been well attended.5 Not so those in
Newark and Paterson; 6 but certainly Comrade Turner is not
to blame for that. On the 30th of April we gave a farewell en-
tertainment to our comrade. The hall was packed. A number
of detectives and policemen were present, looking for a job.
Comrades Edelmann, Mowbray, Turner, Withington and my-
self spoke,7 but we did not seem to gratify the wishes of the
officials, as they went away without running any of us in. I
am sorry to state that the financial result of the affair was not
satisfactory.
We have formed a group, meeting for the present at
John Turner, the English anarchist and labor organ-
50 E. First street.8 Our work for the summer will be to raise izer, met Goldman in London in 1895. Turner was the
a fund large enough to carry on propaganda next fall and first prominent European English-speaking anarchist
winter. So far, we have issued an Anarchist May day mani- to tour America; Goldman helped arrange his itiner-
festo of which several thousand were distributed on the 2d at ary and chaired many of his meetings. (Labadie Col-
lection, University of Michigan)
the demonstration of workingmen at Union Square.
I can also inform the Firebrand readers that our brave
Comrade Alex. Berkman’s case is being pushed. No definite
step can be taken until 1897. All we want to do now is to get
money, and the more the better, as we will need about $1000. I beg the comrades of the
Firebrand to appeal for aid; if all will help we are sure to liberate him some day.
I have made a trip through different countries on the continent, where I found our
ideas marching on wonderfully. In England and Scotland meetings are held several
times a week in halls and parks, thousands of workingmen and women listening eagerly

5. Turner spoke on 18 April to the Manhattan Single Tax Club on “Anarchist-Communism,” on 19 April
to the Socialist Labor Party on “The Class Struggle,” and on 21 April to the Anarchist American Group
of New York at Clarendon Hall on “Anarchy an Essential of Socialism,” before traveling to Philadel-
phia where he lectured on the 22nd and 23rd of April. He then returned to New York City where he
lectured on the 24th and 26th at Clarendon Hall on “The Policy of the Future” and “The Power of
Capitalism.”
6. On 27 April Turner spoke in Newark on “Church and State, Twin Enemies of the People” with
Lothrop Withington, and on 29 April in Paterson he shared the platform at a meeting with Charles
Mowbray.
7. On 30 April a farewell meeting was held for Turner at Clarendon Hall, replete with songs, recitations,
a German choir, and speeches by John Edelmann, Lothrop Withington, Charles Mowbray, Turner,
and EG. Turner then traveled to Boston, Buffalo, and Cleveland. EG noted that Turner’s tour gave her
her first real opportunity to address audiences in English (LML, p. 179).
8. Justus Schwab’s saloon was located at 50 East First Street.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 237

 Masthead from 14 March 1897 issue of Firebrand, the U.S. English-language anarchist communist newspaper that fea-
tured Goldman’s first explicitly feminist essay, “Marriage,” in its 18 July 1897 issue. (By permission of the Kate Sharp-
ley Library)

to the speeches, where leaflets, manifestos and papers are distributed in large quantities.
In France the admirable acts of Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, Caserio and others have done
more for the spreading of our principles than ten years of writing and speaking.9 Les
Temps Nouveaux (formerly La Révolte) has increased its circulation from 8000 to 18,000,
and La Sociale (formerly Père Peinard) from 8000 to 20,000. Anarchist publications are
springing up in all parts of France. In Austria the comrades have to confine themselves
to a clandestine propaganda, as the authorities make daily arrests, imprisoning or ex-
pelling everyone who takes any noted part in the movement. The plutocrats are confident
now that they have annihilated Anarchistic propaganda, but they will soon find out that
imprisonment and suffering cannot stop the tide from flowing on.

Firebrand, 24 May 1896, p. 2. Following the publication of her essay, EG wrote to the Firebrand protesting
the omission of her name as author and offering to contribute an occasional report on anarchist activities.
The editors defended their omission of her name on the basis that only her covering letter and not the essay
itself was signed. “It was a matter of regret with us that your name was withheld, but supposed you had rea-
sons for it. We would be glad to announce you as New York correspondent, and other well-known comrades
as correspondents from other cities; then the comrades could report to you and we would get all the news
in proper order and succinct form” (Firebrand, 14 June 1896, p. 4).

9. EG refers to François-Claudius Koenigstein (who was known by his pseudonym, Ravachol), Émile
Henry, Auguste Vaillant, and Sante Caserio. For further discussion of the attentater, see “Emma Gold-
man in London,” Article in Liberty, October 1895, above.

238 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
New York, 23 July 1896

Dear Com.

I hope you will pardon my long silence.

I received your two postal-cards, the Journal L’Aube,1 the German translation of your
interesting book. Psychologie du Militaire Professionel,2 also the newspaper Paris and a clip-
ping of Les temps nouveaux 3 for which accept my thanks. I delighted very much in read-
ing your Book. I think you have done great service to our cause with the work on the Psy-
chologie du Militaire professionel. I am very pleased to learn of the energetic undertaking
of the Carmeaux Workers,4 you wrote about in the newspaper Paris and I shall have it
translated for one of our english anarchist papers.
I have sent L’Aube to a Magazine, asking if they would accept contributions of your
pen. As soon, as I will receive a reply, I will let you know.
I regret very much not to be in a position to attend the Congress, but I am satisfied to
know, that you and other able Comrades will be there to represent our cause.
Do you ever think to visit our “glorious” country America
I should appreciate it a great favor, if you will drop me a line now and than, about the
proceedings of the Congress. You might write in French if English gives you too much
trouble.
I shall send you several copies of different anarchist papers and Pamphlates in a
few day’s.

With best greetings

Emma Goldman

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH.

1. A French literary, political, and artistic journal with libertarian leanings, L’Aube was published in
Paris from April 1896 to July 1897. Edited by Paul Adam, Pierre Guédy, Augustin Hamon, and An-
dré Ibels, among others, it was one of the most ambitious publications of its time, publishing articles
by Edward Carpenter, André Gide, Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Lazare, and August Strind-
berg, and illustrations by Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard. Most likely, EG is referring to one
or more of the issues containing Hamon’s “Notes de Voyage: En Angleterre,” serialized in five in-
stallments between May 1896 and February 1897, which was based on his 1894 London diary.
2. In EG’s letter of 28 April 1896 to Hamon, she asks for a German translation of his book.
3. An article by Hamon in Les Temps Nouveaux was reprinted in the Firebrand, 26 July 1896, p. 2, trans-
lated by “A.D” (possibly A. A. Davies); the article reports and comments on the manifesto of the As-
sociated Anarchists group of Great Britain.
4. The livelihood of glassblowers was threatened in the 1890s by the introduction of continuous-flow
gas ovens and mechanized bottle-turning, two improvements that meant factory owners could hire
less-skilled workers for less pay. After an unsuccessful strike in 1895 in protest of wage cuts and the
letting go of skilled glassblowers, Carmeaux glassworkers established a cooperative factory, the Ver-
rerie Ouvrière, at Albi, about ten miles from Carmeaux, in 1896.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 239

 To the F I R E B R A N D
New York, 5 August 1896

The Berkman Fund Again.

You have published an attack upon me written by a certain P. Franco,1 in the Firebrand of
July 26th,2 and I hope you will not refuse to publish my reply.
First of all I must emphasize that I do not write these lines in order to satisfy the im-
pudent inquisitiveness of P. Franco, or others like him, who would not hesitate a moment
to besmirch one’s honor at any cost.
The publishers of the Firebrand certainly have a right to publish whatever they please,
but they have no right to publish any accusations without knowing whether they are false
or true.
I did not expect the comrades of the Firebrand to defend me, as I can very well defend
myself; nor did I ask them to make me acquainted with the contents of private letters, as
that comrade Isaak 3 received from one of the Firebrand readers and which, according to
Isaak was directed against me, stating that I had spent the money collected for Berkmann
for my personal use, during my tour on the Continent. The man who has thus expressed
himself about me to comrade Isaak has also written one to me, in which he says among
other things; “Of course, I do not mean to say that you had used the money collected for
Berkmann for yourself.” This letter I have sent to comrade Isaak, which ought to con-
vince him that the man has either written a falsehood to him, or has not moral courage

1. P. Franco was a London-based French anarchist possibly residing at the anarchist International
School run by Louise Michel and Agnes Henry.
2. In the column in which Franco’s letter, translated from French, appeared, J. H. Morris lamented that
the Firebrand was being blamed by both sides in the dispute but acknowledged that the weekly had
received other complaints about the solicitation and disposal of funds for AB; the column reasoned,
“since we have published appeals for the fund it seems to us only fair, though we regret the occasion,
to publish objections to the raising thereof and questions as to the disposal of moneys already ob-
tained” (Firebrand, 26 July 1896, p. 2). Franco’s letter read:
During the twelve years that I have been in the Anarchist movement I have never seen anything more distasteful
than the demand for money from all sides “for propaganda,” especially the way it is carried on by Emma Goldman
in the Berkman case, according to the Firebrand Nos. 10 and 19. She says some very fine things, and among others
that $1000 should be raised for extricating Berkman from the toils, but says nothing about how this money is to be
expended. And why is this time and money used for Berkman alone? are there not other comrades equally deserv-
ing of sympathy and assistance? For my part, all comrades who have sacrificed their liberty are as deserving as this
one. The question here is, How many dollars did she get in Europe, and what did she do with them? No one seems
to have courage enough to ask for an accounting. You may ask why I do not go to her for details regarding the mat-
ter. Among other reasons, I do not speak either English or German. I do not believe in using Anarchy as a good
milch cow to be milked on all occasions.

3. Abe Isaak was editor of the Firebrand.

240 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

enough to uphold the same accusations in his letter to me. P. Franco in his letter to the
Firebrand has lied, as well, as the man in his letter to Comrade Isaak. Franco says he did
not ask me about the Berkmann fund, because he can speak neither English nor Ger-
man. Now, those who know him are acquainted with the fact, that he can speak English
enough to be understood, enough to make disturbance in meetings, as he did both in
London and here, and that he knew enough English to spread false reports about Com-
rades Mowbray, Merlino, Cipriani 4 and other well known men who have suffered in the
movement long before anyone knew of the existence of Franco. The reason why he did
not ask me about the Berkmann fund is, because he is a coward, ready to admit this any
time himself. Well, I do not care to take up too much space in talking of Franco; it is be-
neath any honest and decent person to spend time with such a miserable creature.
J. H. Morris, in his comment on Franco’s letter says: “According to the principles of
Anarchist association any member of the group, whose object is the release of Berkmann
may know what is done with the fund to which he has subscribed.” Certainly, and Com-
rade Morris could have saved himself the trouble to tell me that, as I claim to understand
the principles of Anarchist association. According to my understanding of Anarchist
principles, those who have never subscribed a cent, never cared for Berkmann’s release,
have no right to ask any accounts of whomsoever, and to poke noses into other people’s
affairs. I am the last one to give information to people like P. Franco or the conceited and
impertinent fellow who wrote to Comrade Isaak.
To those who have assisted me in my work for my friend Alexander Berkmann, I say
this: The money collected abroad by myself and other comrades amounts to about $20
and was sent to Charles Schneider, Pittsburg, Pa., who was appointed at the time as treas-
urer of the Berkmann fund by the Pittsburg comrades. Anyone wishing to know how the
money was used will do well to address him.
As to Berkmann, he is not only my comrade, but also my friend and a very dear one,
too. I shall continue to work for him as energetically as I have until now and all imperti-
nent attacks and slanders will not induce me to give up the fight.
I am very sorry the Firebrand has taken up personal matters, and can only predict that
if its publishers continue in the same way, they will only put nails to their own coffin.5

Emma Goldmann.

4. EG refers to Charles Mowbray, Saverio Merlino, and Amilcare Cipriani.

5. Immediately below this letter J. H. Morris, speaking for the Firebrand, offered the following response:
“We are glad to publish the above information in reply to inquiries received at this office, but we are
sorry Comrade Goldmann takes the matter in the spirit here exhibited. We have published no accu-
sations, and we could not know the truth or falsity of any we may have received without an account-
ing from her. The letter referred to as having been received by Comrade Isaak was not a private letter,
but written to the Firebrand. In the most friendly spirit Comrade Goldmann was informed of the
question raised as to the disposition of the fund, and we are sorry to say the reply consisted of blus-
ter similar to the above. It was not our personal business to know the truth or falsity of any accusa-
tions or to settle matters between Comrade Goldmann and her questioners; but the Firebrand, as a
representative of the movement, has been made a ‘go-between’ in the case, and however much we

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 241

 Firebrand, 23 August 1896, p. 2. The Firebrand (and later, Free Society) frequently carried appeals for AB’s
expenses, especially his legal fees and the finance reports by the Berkman Defense Association from Pitts-
burgh. Similar reports appeared in other anarchist journals including Lucifer, the Lightbearer.

may regret it, we have been able to see no fair way to avoid it. Were we to follow her suggestion as to
personalities, her own letter would furnish the first occasion for exclusion, because it is the first to in-
dulge in personalities and hard names. Personal enmity may have prompted those letters of inquiry,
but we are not omniscient and could have no knowledge of this. Personally, I want to say that what I
said concerning the principles of Anarchist association was not intended for Comrade Goldmann’s
enlightenment, but was in the nature of a reason for publication of the inquiry coming, supposably,
from a contributor to the fund; also as a hint to such inquirers as were not contributors. If, as appears
from the above letter, the two inquirers mentioned are non-contributors, it is hoped they will have
the good sense to keep still in the future. At any rate the matter closes here, so far as the Firebrand is
concerned.”

242 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

 Ar ticle in the P I T T S B U R G L E A D E R
Pittsburgh, 22 November 1896

A Woman Anarchist.

Emma Goldman Teaches Anarchy to 250 Laboring People.

Her Lecture in German to an Audience in the Duquesne Dance Hall

on Wylie Avenue Last Night—She Pours Red Hot Anarchy Into the Mass
and Leaves It to Work—Her Criticisms of Politics.

A motley crew was the 250 men and women who assembled in the Duquesne dancing
hall, on Wylie avenue, last night to listen to a lecture by Emma Goldman, the Anarchist.
The men in the audience mostly kept their hats on and puffed industriously at vile-
smelling stogies and cigarettes. The air was dense with smoke and reeking with fumes
when Miss Goldman came in about 8:30 o’clock.
H. Gordon, president of the Pittsburg Socialistic society, opened the meeting with a
short talk, and then introduced Miss Goldman.1 The latter is a short and rather good-
looking young woman, whose deep gray eyes and gold eyeglasses give her a decided air
of intellectuality and finesse. Miss Goldman began at once her lecture, which was deliv-
ered in the German language, and in a full, clear voice she continued to exhort her audi-
ence for over an hour and a half.
In substance she said:
“Fellow-workmen and fellow-workwomen, you know it is an old saying that An-
archists do not believe in a God. Yet, were I a praying woman, I should certainly pray that
God would take pity on the poor laborer and give us fair weather for our meeting to-
morrow. Moses of old led the children for 40 long years through the wilderness, wan-
derers on the face of the globe, before they at last reached the land of promise, and from
that day to this have the Jews been a persecuted race, hunted from land to land, until
finally they turned to America, the new land of promise, where they can all do what they
please, until a big policeman with a club comes along and tells them to desist. The dif-
ference between the life of the Jew in Russia and in America is that there he is under the
surveillance of the gendarmes, who are a poor class like themselves, while here in Amer-

1. Immediately following EG’s lectures in Pittsburgh, Harry Gordon, also the treasurer of AB’s defense
fund, wrote enthusiastically about her meetings to the Firebrand, complimenting the press for their
fair and “polite” reportage, and criticizing the police and detectives in the audience for their attempts
to verbally entrap EG during the discussion. He made a point of asserting that EG was an active and
able comrade received with pleasure by her audiences, then he ended his article with an accounting of
the receipts and expenses of the Berkman defense fund. See Firebrand, 20 December 1896, pp. 3– 4.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 243

 ica they are ordered about by burly policemen who live at ease and draw fat salaries.
There he must work like a galley slave whether he will or no. Here he is free—free to
starve, free to be robbed and swindled on every hand. But the moment he seeks to orga-
nize labor, or assert his rights or strike for the defense of his dearest interests he is no
longer free, but is apprehended and thrown in prison. The greatest hope of the few in
this country is that he can save enough from his earnings to make him a wealthy man
when he returns to his family in Europe. He forgets that here in this free land when he
earns $5 he must at once spend it to feed and clothe himself.
“Most Jewish youths when they come to this country know no trade, for in Europe it
is a disgrace for them to work at a trade—that is left to the lower classes among the Gen-
tiles, while the Jews are the tradespeople. Consequently when he gets here and finds all
mercantile pursuits filled by Americans, he is destitute of a means of support, and very
soon learns that when it comes to cheating he is far outstripped by the American born.
“Are not the richest people here Americans? Is there any place in the 400 2 for a Jew?
All the capital is in the hands of Americans and they control every interest. The Jew has
every opportunity, according to law, of rising officially and can fill any office except that
of President. Then why does he not rise unless because he is kept down and deprived of
his rights by Americans? The Americans rail at the European and blame all our social
evils on ‘those foreigners.’ They forget that their forefathers, the English, the Dutch,
French, etc., came to this country and in the name of justice, of civilization, and of God,
robbed and murdered the innocent savage, the sole possessor of the land for ages. Moses,
when he came down from Mt. Sinai, brought us ten laws, one of which was ‘Thou shalt
not steal.’ This law has come to be applied only to a certain class. For example, a poor,
starving wretch, dying from hunger and cold, steals bread or clothing or money. Brought
before a judge it is demanded of him if he did not know of the Divine prohibition of theft.
Then he is given a so-called trial and imprisoned. If the man of wealth steals whole es-
tates, whole factories, entire railroads or immense fortunes on change he is called a
‘shrewd man’ and honored with rank and title. (Applause.)
“If a rich woman is caught shoplifting, the wealthy court has a new word for her, and
says she is afflicted with ‘kleptomania’ and pities her. (Applause and laughter.)
“We are told by the good Christians that we must live and endure these evils in God-
like patience, awaiting our reward in heaven. What do I care what awaits me in heaven!
I have to live now on earth! They tell us laws will regulate these evils. Through study and
education we are becoming more and more convinced that the more laws men have the
more miserable is their condition.
“In politics there are no good parties. When these parties place their candidates be-
fore the public they fill their mouths with sweet-sounding promises of good to be done
and reforms to be achieved, but when these selfsame men come to power they at once
forget their good words and spurn the laboring man, who elected them, underfoot, call-

2. Originally a reference to the rich four hundred New York elites who would supposedly fit into Mrs. As-
tor’s ballroom.

244 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

ing him a fool. Bryan is an intelligent man and an advocate of the people.3 McKinley is
also a good man, but his past record as governor is against him.4 But you cannot put your
trust in any of them, fellow-workmen! Cleveland was paid $200,000 for his four years’
service to this country, and yet he became a multi-millionaire. Perhaps God was good,
and rained down money like manna of old. No! Cleveland it is who made a contract with
the Czar of Russia, the greatest tyrant on earth, stipulating for a consideration of a few
million to send back suspect Nihilists to Russia, where they could be cast in prison or ex-
ecuted.5 Cleveland it is who even now is receiving money from Spain for refusing to lis-
ten to the cry of distress from king-ridden Cuba.6 From President to policeman it is the
same, save that where the ‘copper’ is tipped a dollar Grover rakes in a million. I will not
prophesy of McKinley, for he is not yet in the chair, and has not been tried, but let us hope
he will not spend the time of his administration fishing and duck shooting. (Laughter.)
“It is not the inclination of any man in power to better the condition of the laboring
man unless his own is greatly helped.”
Miss Goldman then repeated in glowing details the story of the creation of the first
man and woman, and their expulsion from the garden because they ate of fruit that gave
them knowledge. “God was right,” she said. “When He kept them in ignorance he had
absolute control over them, and now our potentates are just as wise as God, and would
forbid the mass of the people eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, for they know
that then they will appreciate their degradation and rebel.”
She likened the condition of the Anarchist now to that of the Saviour in His last days,
when He said, “Whoso is not for Me is against Me.” “Workmen of all lands, unite, and
we shall be free,” cried the lecturer. “What wonder we are despised and trodden down
when we do not resist, but say: ‘God will protect us.’”

3. Democratic candidate for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan generally appealed more
strongly to the rural population, who favored his free-silver policy, than to urban workers. His cam-
paign rallies in the East were often organized and attended by radical groups.
4. William McKinley, with the help of Cleveland industrialist and politician Mark Hanna, was elected
governor of Ohio in 1981 and reelected in 1893. In response to widespread strikes and social unrest,
McKinley attempted to maintain order by calling the Ohio National Guard into constant service. State
troops, often under the military supervision of the governor, forcefully suppressed the 1894 coal min-
ers’ strikes at Mount Sterling and in Guernsey County, among others. McKinley also sent militiamen
to intervene in the march of J. S. Coxey’s army of unemployed workingmen, as they traveled across
Ohio in the summer of 1894 to Washington, D.C.
5. Article three of the U.S.-Russia extradition treaty, signed in March 1887, stipulated that any person
who had attacked the tsar or a member of his family, or who had “attempted to commit or participate”
in such an attack, was subject to extradition from the United States to Russia. Opponents of the treaty,
who included George Kennan, Oscar Straus, and William Dean Howells, argued that under article
three any Russian political dissident living in the United States could be extradited. Despite this op-
position, the treaty was eventually ratified by Congress on 6 February 1893. Although the Cleveland
administration negotiated the treaty, Benjamin Harrison signed it into law on 14 February 1893. Sub-
sequent campaigns for abrogation of the treaty failed.
6. The insurrection in Cuba against Spanish rule began in 1895 and attracted considerable attention in
the United States. To preserve peace with Spain and neutrality in the region, in 1895 the Cleveland
administration maintained neutrality toward the Cuban insurgents. Cleveland’s policies were un-
popular among those who supported Cuban independence, particularly Republican party members
and much of the press.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 245

 Continuing, Miss Goldman told the fable of the old, old man who was seen planting
trees, and when asked why he did so when he could hope to eat none of their fruit, re-
plied that he had posterity to provide for. So, she said, should the Socialist do who,
though in ignorance himself, and consequently in poverty, should see to it that his chil-
dren are educated, so that what they earn shall go to themselves and not be taken away
to feed the rich. She made a bitter attack on Carnegie.7 “He slaves you and robs you to
feed his already fat purse and then turns about and to conciliate you, presents you with
a fine library, music hall, and all that sort of thing when you are too poor to even pay to
hear the music.”
She urged upon her hearers that they fight for shorter hours and more pay. She be-
wailed the necessity of child labor and its results. “When such scenes of starvation as are
daily noted about us become common it is time to cry ‘Give us liberty or give us death,’”
she said. Then lowering her voice from its high key of excitement to the modulated tones
of a conversation she began to speak of Alexander Berkman, the Anarchist who is now
serving a twenty-two year sentence in the Western penitentiary for attempting the life of
H. C. Frick at the time of the Homestead strike. She pictured Frick in the enjoyment of
health while Berkman languishes behind prison bars.
“To be an Anarchist is enough to get yourself hung in America for attempting even a
small crime,” she asserted. The judge, she said, knew Frick to be a millionaire, while his
assailant was a hated Anarchist.
“Alexander Berkman,” she exclaimed, “is good, brave, noble. What he did he did of his
own accord, prompted only by a spirit of resentment against the brutality and mishan-
dling he had suffered from the superintendent of the mills.8 We Anarchists make no dis-
tinction as to race or color, so it is our duty to intercede for him because he stood for our
interests. Therefore I appeal to you to contribute a little to alleviate the misery of his
prison existence.”
Miss Goldman herself took up the collection, which amounted to $10.78.
“When I was in prison, to my shame, for ten months, I did not find rich women ever
confined. Only the poor are punished. The rich do not commit crimes. In the name of
Berkman I thank you for your gift and will say that no one knows what may happen in
this country before his long sentence expires. The day may come when he shall see the
walls of his prison fall down, blown up by the hand of the revolutionist.”
This closed the lecture after which followed a sort of question box, conducted by Miss
Goldman. She announced for a meeting in the same place this afternoon at 3 o’clock to
be addressed in English.

Pittsburg (Pa.) Leader, 22 November 1896, p. 6. EG was interviewed in the Leader two days earlier. See
“Emma Goldman Here,” Pittsburg Leader, 20 November 1896, EGP, reel 47.

7. Financier and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was also a major benefactor to libraries, post offices,
and cultural and scientific institutions.
8. AB, who never worked in the steel mills, was motivated by the brutality directed against the workers
at Homestead rather than by any personal injury, and it is unlikely that EG meant to imply otherwise.

246 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

 Ar ticle in the P I T T S B U R G P O S T
Pittsburgh, 27 November 1896

Goldman’s Cry Against Society.

Noted Female Anarchist Deplores the Fate of the Haymarket Murderers.

Bombthrower’s Noble Act.

Doesn’t Believe in What She Calls the Ballot-Box Swindle.

A Collection for Berkmann.

Not much edified with the condition of anarchism in Allegheny county, but still hoping
for the best, Emma Goldman left the city last night for the west. Emma’s last words
formed an appeal to local anarchists to join together and carry on the “good work,” and
to forget all personal differences and cease from bickering.
The famous anarchist’s address was made in a hall at 1012 Penn avenue. The atten-
dance was but sparse, applause was rare and there was not much enthusiasm. Once
when Miss Goldman told what a shame it was that workingmen starved and were scant-
ily clad while the store windows were filled with things good to eat and wear, that they
might take by simply reaching out their hands, utter silence followed her remark. Pitts-
burg anarchists seem to approve of a law against taking what belongs to someone else,
and they were not prepared to go to the length of taking unlawfully what is not theirs. So
they did not applaud that part of Miss Goldman’s speech.
Miss Goldman was introduced as one who would discuss the “murder of Novem-
ber 11, 1887,” 1 namely, the execution of the anarchists. Miss Goldman is a petite, blonde,
good looking woman, to whom a pair of spectacles give a professorial look. She advanced
to the platform and plunged right into her subject. Her address was in German.
“Jesus was crucified, Huss was burned, Bruno 2 was killed,” she said, “because they
were opposed to the order of things existing in their day and dared to advocate the rights
of humanity.” 3

1. On 11 November 1887 Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were exe-
cuted for their alleged part in the bomb that exploded in Haymarket Square on 4 May 1886.
2. EG refers to Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century Dominican monk martyred by the Spanish Inquisi-
tion, and to Jan Hus, an early 15th-century religious reformer burnt at the stake for heresy.
3. EG echoes the words of August Spies at his 1886 trial after the Haymarket incident: “Truth crucified
in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, in Galileo, still lives—they and others whose
number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 247

 “The execution of the Chicago anarchists November 11, 1887,” she continued, “was a
horrible crime. What had those men done? Had they made widows and orphans, had
they murdered, had they robbed?”

THEY COMMIT TED NO CRIME.

“No,” she continued, “I do not believe that anybody can say with a clear conscience that
the Chicago anarchists committed a crime. They did one thing, a thing that from time
immemorial had been punished by society with death and prison—they dared to think.
They explained to the people in a popular way the writings of Rousseau, Paine and Jef-
ferson, that all men are created free and equal and have equal rights.4 They were simply
anarchists, and because they were anarchists they were dragged to the scaffold on No-
vember 11, 1887.
“They were on a great strike for an eight-hour day, and patiently they waited to have
their wrongs righted. They held a demonstration in the Haymarket. They were working-
men, they were quiet and they were peace-loving citizens. After most of the workingmen
had gone home, and when nearly all the speeches were finished, Inspector Bonfield and
his men threw themselves upon these men and began to shoot them down.5
“Although no one knows who threw that bomb; although the closest investigation has
failed to disclose his identity, I must confess that I hold that he who threw the bomb did
a deed that was great and holy. And that bomb was an echo of the miserable condition in
which the workingmen of America find themselves.
“Eight policemen fell. Society doesn’t care for the police. It considers them as its ser-
vants and slaves, but society thought: ‘To-day they threw a bomb at the police; to-morrow
they may direct a bomb at society itself.’ Society knows it is sitting on a volcano; it knows
that to-morrow the storm may break forth that will hurl it to destruction. Therefore, and
for no other reason, it punished the Chicago anarchists.”

BOMBTHROWER’S NOBLE DEED.

Miss Goldman’s statement that the men gathered in the Haymarket were peace-loving
citizens, followed by her praise of the man who threw the fatal bomb, coupled with the
knowledge of the audience that the anarchists were hung, not because they had thrown
the bomb, but because their teachings and speeches were directly responsible for the
deed, proved a little too illogical for her auditors to stomach, and silence followed her re-
marks. She continued:
“Our murdered brothers now rest in Waldheim, but, as Spies predicted, their silence

4. Following a pattern set by Chicago anarchists a decade earlier, EG often evoked the names of Thomas
Jefferson and Thomas Paine to highlight anti-statist ideas within the American political tradition.
5. Captain John Bonfield was commander of the Desplaines Street station; he shouldered much of the
blame for the violence in Haymarket Square. He was known as “Black Jack” for his ruthless attitude
toward demonstrations and picketers. Bonfield ordered his police to disperse the crowd in Haymar-
ket just as the last speaker, Samuel Fielden, was concluding his talk.

248 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

in the grave is mightier than their speeches were upon earth.6 Anarchy will live until so-
ciety of to-day has been shattered to pieces and freedom reigns.”
Miss Goldman then took up the case of Alexander Berkmann, who shot H. C. Frick.
She said it was his belief that if the capitalists used Winchester rifles and bayonets on
workingmen they should be answered with dynamite. Berkmann, she said, picked out
the man who was responsible for the trouble at Homestead, the man who had hired the
Pinkertons. She said Alexander Berkmann did not succeed in his attempt, and yet he was
sent to the penitentiary for 22 years, although for his deed the laws of Pennsylvania pre-
scribed a punishment of not more than seven years.7
While a collection was being taken up for Berkmann, Miss Goldman said he had not
stepped into the breach for love of notoriety, but that it was his love for workingmen that
led him to his deed. Whether his motives were noble or not, she claimed, it must be ad-
mitted that from the standpoint of law his sentence was unjust and excessive.
She spoke of the last election and the “parsons” who, with a full stomach and clad in
broadcloth, had a good time calling on the poor to suffer patiently the ills of this life so
that they could enjoy with greater zest the glories of the kingdom to come.
“It would make no difference to us anarchists if Bryan 8 had been elected,” she said.
“Of course an intelligent being admires intelligence. We sympathize with an intelligent
man like Bryan. He is also energetic, and we must honor those qualities in anybody. Who
could respect the little-souled McKinley, Mark Hanna’s echo? 9 Nevertheless, the election
of Bryan would not have benefited us anarchists, as the old order of society would have
been maintained under him as well as under McKinley.10
“Why is it that while flour, groceries, meat and clothing are plentiful the workingman
starves? He sees plenty everywhere. The stores are full of it. All the workingman needs

6. The words Spies uttered from the scaffold were engraved upon the Haymarket anarchists’ monu-
ment in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery: “The day will come when our silence will be more power-
ful than the voices you are throttling today.”
7. Berkman was tried on six counts, including assault with attempt to kill both Carnegie steel company
chairman Frick and John Leishmann, who was in the office when Berkman attacked Frick; three
counts of felonious entry into the Carnegie offices; and illegally carrying concealed weapons. Berk-
man was found guilty on all charges. The judge multiplied the charges, and sentenced Berkman to
twenty-one years in Western Penitentiary for assault, and one additional year in the Allegheny
County Workhouse for the concealed weapon charge.
8. William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic party candidate for president in the 1896 election.
9. The 1896 Republican party candidate for president, William McKinley, was supported in his politi-
cal aspirations by Cleveland industrialist and politician Mark Hanna.
10. The question of whether or not to coin silver currency, a policy that would benefit farmers and work-
ers by easing the terms of credit, was central to the 1896 McKinley-Bryan presidential contest. When
a Pittsburgh reporter asked for the anarchist position on the election, EG answered: “They were
not exactly on either side, because it would be making a government in either case. But most of
the Anarchists, I think, favored the silver question, as it tended much more to the alleviation
of the workingmen’s wrongs than the gold side, which was the upholding of the powers of monop-
olists and the rich classes.” See “Emma Goldman Here,” Pittsburgh Leader, 20 November 1896, EGP,
reel 47.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 249

 is to stretch out his hand for it and take it, and yet he is such an ass that he does not grasp
it, but says instead: ‘There is no food, no clothing for me and my family.’”
Director J. O. Brown’s 11 determination to arm the firemen and teach the police to
shoot straight Miss Goldman ascribed to a desire to enable them to hit striking work-
ingmen. She spoke of the “old, played out” cry that the ballot-box would right all ills, and
remarked:
“I prophesy that the time will come when the workingmen will throw this whole
ballot-box swindle overboard and right their wrongs in another way.”
The collection for Berkmann amounted to $6.47, and Miss Goldman ordered that
another be taken up, as the expenses of the hall in which the meeting was held had to
be met.
After her speech Miss Goldman invited anybody who desired to defend the “ballot-
box swindle” to step forward. She issued the invitation several times, but as no one ac-
cepted the meeting was adjourned.
To-morrow a meeting will be held in Turner hall at McKeesport. Herr Johann Most,
the king bee of anarchists in this country and a noted advocate of the gold standard, will
speak.

Pittsburg (Pa.) Post, 27 November 1896, p. 3. Copyright 2001 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.

11. J. O. Brown was Pittsburgh’s director of public safety. For a view of Brown and his career see Lincoln
Steffens, “Pittsburgh: A City Ashamed,” McClure’s Magazine, May 1903.

250 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
New York, 2 December 1896

Dear Friend Metzkow.

I come to you today with the Berk. matter. If I’m not mistaken, the Buffalo A-Z 1 has con-
siderable influence in the unions there. Wouldn’t it be possible to present the B matter
in the CLU 2 there or in local unions? Let’s say, a resolution which recommends a reduc-
tion of B’s sentence? You’ll understand that as long as B’s case lies in the hands of anar-
chists we can never hope for success. It is a question of winning the organized workers
for this. The CLU of Boston has adopted a resolution there,3 the CLU of Providence 4
promised to do the same and I succeeded in gaining for the cause several representatives
of local unions who will present a resolution in New York’s CLU. You are undoubtedly
aware that the A.F. of L holds its yearly convention on the 15th of this month in Cincin-
nati. Now, I have already won 2 delegates who will support B’s case at the convention if
one is brought forward. But it is important that the delegate who will introduce a reso-
lution is not a known anarchist or socialist, otherwise there will already be prejudice
against it.5 Who will be sent by the Buffalo unions? and wouldn’t it be possible to win the
delegates in question for B’s case, that is, would the people deign to support a possible

1. The Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung was published in Buffalo, New York, from September 1887 to Septem-
ber 1897 and daily from September 1897 to December 1898, with a weekly edition, Arbeiter-Zeitung
und Buffalo “Herold,” published from September to October 1898. From January 1899 until Febru-
ary 1918 it reverted to a weekly format as the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The organ of the socialist Vereinigten
Deutschen Gewerkschaften (United German Trades), the journal was first edited by George M. Price;
other editors included Max Baginski’s brother, Richard Baginski (from February to September 1897),
and Johann Most (from September 1897 to July 1898).
2. Central Labor Union.
3. Anarchists and Central Labor Union members Charles W. Mowbray and Harry M. Kelly were instru-
mental in gaining the Boston Central Labor Union’s support.
4. Anarchist J. H. Cook was president of the Providence Central Labor Union.
5. The 16 December resolution was introduced by anarchist Henry Weismann of New York City, the del-
egate of the Journeymen Bakers’ and Confectioners’ International Union, and seconded by Henry
Lloyd of Boston, general president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and presi-
dent of the Boston CLU. The resolution, directed to the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, declared AB’s
sentence “excessive and far beyond the limit of the law, brought about by the excitement and preju-
dice prevailing at the time the offense was committed,” and added that “the ends of justice have been
fully satisfied with the four years of imprisonment . . . , considering the act was committed by a mis-
guided youth, and that clemency could be extended in this case, as in many similar ones in times gone
by.” For the full text of the resolution, see Proceedings of the American Federation of Labor: 1893–1896
(Bloomington, Ill., 1905), p. 52. In 1899, the week before a subsequent convening of the pardon
board, AFL president Samuel Gompers personally followed up on the matter, writing to Pennsylva-
nia senator Boies Penrose, asking him to intercede on AB’s behalf. (See Gompers to Penrose, 19 April
1899, in Kaufman et al., Samuel Gompers Papers, 5: 84– 85.)

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 251

First page of letter written by Goldman on 2 December 1896 to Max Metzkow, Berlin-
born anarchist and an anti-militarist. Active in support of the Homestead strikers, Metz-
kow worked as a compositor in Pittsburgh and then with the Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung.
(By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)
resolution or speak in favor of it? I beg you dear Metzkow, to take matters into your own
hands and to let me know your opinion immediately.
It is a sad fact that very few people are interested in Berkmann and if I didn’t con-
stantly speak, write, and push the matter, B would have to end his life in prison. I know
dear friend that you were one of the first ones who spoke up for B. and I hope that you
won’t deny me your help now either.

With regards and a handshake.

E. Goldmann

ALS, Joseph Ishill Papers, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 253

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 4 December 1896

My Dear Girl:

I have craved for a long, long time to have a free talk with you, but this is the first oppor-
tunity. A good friend, a “lover of horseflesh,” 1 promised to see this “birdie” through. I
hope it will reach you safely.
In my local correspondence you have been christened the “Immutable.” I realize how
difficult it is to keep up letter-writing through the endless years, the points of mutual in-
terest gradually waning. It is one of the tragedies in the existence of a prisoner. “K” and
“G” have almost ceased to expect mail.2 But I am more fortunate. The Twin 3 writes very
seldom nowadays; the correspondence of other friends is fitful. But you are never disap-
pointing. It is not so much the contents that matter: these increasingly sound like the lan-
guage of a strange world, with its bewildering flurry and ferment, disturbing the calm of
cell-life. But the very arrival of a letter is momentous. It brings a glow into the prisoner’s
heart to feel that he is remembered, actively, with that intimate interest which alone can
support a regular correspondence. And then your letters are so vital, so palpitating with
the throb of our common cause. I have greatly enjoyed your communications from Paris
and Vienna, the accounts of the movement and of our European comrades. Your letters
are so much part of yourself, they bring me nearer to you and to life.
The newspaper clippings you have referred to on various occasions, have been with-
held from me. Nor are any radical publications permitted. I especially regret to miss Soli-
darity.4 I have not seen a single copy since its resurrection two years ago. I have followed
the activities of Chas. W. Mowbray and the recent tour of John Turner,5 so far as the press
accounts are concerned. I hope you’ll write more about our English comrades.
I need not say much of the local life, dear. That you know from my official mail, and
you can read between the lines. The action of the Pardon Board was a bitter disappoint-
ment to me. No less to you also, I suppose. Not that I was very enthusiastic as to a favor-

1. Robert Richards, the “Horsethief Bob” of AB’s Prison Memoirs.

2. Carl Nold and Henry Bauer were code-named “K” and “G” respectively, to mask their identity as co-
editors with AB of their handwritten, prison-produced, underground paper Prison Blossoms (also pro-
duced in a German-language version, titled Zuchthausblüthen). Based on their relative physical
statures, “K” stood for “klein,” the German word for small, while “G” stood for giant, or “gross” in
German. AB was referred to by the initial “M” for “mittel” or medium (see Berkman, Prison Memoirs
of an Anarchist, p. 182).
3. “The Twin” is AB’s cousin Modest Stein.
4. Solidarity began publication again in 1895, after a two-year hiatus.
5. AB refers to English anarchists Charles Mowbray and John Turner; Turner undertook a seven-month
lecture tour of the United States beginning in the spring of 1896.

254 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

able decision. But that they should so cynically evade the issue,—I was hardly prepared
for that. I had hoped they would at least consider the case. But evidently they were averse
to going on record, one way or another. The lawyers informed me that they were not even
allowed an opportunity to present their arguments. The Board ruled that “the wrong
complained of is not actual”; that is, that I am not yet serving the sentence we want re-
mitted. A lawyer’s quibble. It means that I must serve the first sentence of seven years,
before applying for the remission of the other indictments. Discounting commutation
time, I still have about a year to complete the first sentence. I doubt whether it is advis-
able to try again. Little justice can be expected from those quarters. But I want to submit
another proposition to you; consult with our friends regarding it. It is this: there is a pris-
oner here who has just been pardoned by the Board, whose president, the Lieutenant-
Governor, is indebted to the prisoner’s lawyer for certain political services. The attorney’s
name is K— D— of Pittsburgh. He has intimated to his client that he will guarantee my
release for $1,000.00, the sum to be deposited in safe hands and to be paid only in case
of success. Of course, we cannot afford such a large fee. And I cannot say whether the of-
fer is worth considering; still, you know that almost anything can be bought from politi-
cians. I leave the matter in your hands.6
The question of my visits seems tacitly settled; I can procure no permit for my friends
to see me. For some obscure reason, the Warden has conceived a great fear of an Anar-
chist plot against the prison. The local “trio” is under special surveillance and constantly
discriminated against, though “K” and “G” are permitted to receive visits. You will smile
at the infantile terror of the authorities: it is bruited about that a “certain Anarchist lady”
(meaning you, I presume; in reality it was Henry’s sweetheart, a jolly devil-may-care
girl) 7 made a threat against the prison. The gossips have it that she visited Inspector Reed
at his business place, and requested to see me. The Inspector refusing, she burst out:
“We’ll blow your dirty walls down.” I could not determine whether there is any founda-
tion for the story, but it is circulated here, and the prisoners firmly believe it explains my
deprivation of visits.8

6. In 1896 EG and others began to look to legal means to release AB from prison. The first recommen-
dation was to appeal AB’s sentence, as he was given twenty-two years in prison instead of the seven
allowable under Pennsylvania law. However, it was determined that because AB, without legal repre-
sentation at his trial, had not appealed at the time of his sentence, he could not now appeal. Lawyers
instead recommended that AB or his friends appeal to the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons for a re-
duction in his sentence. Although they were unsuccessful, EG and others continued to work to peti-
tion the state pardon board throughout 1897 and 1898 for a reduction.
7. Bauer’s companion’s name was Gretchen.
8. EG recounted a similar incident in Living My Life, but with herself as Inspector Reed’s antagonist in
1892. Visiting him in his jewelry shop to obtain a pass to see AB, in a fury, EG ended by threatening
Reed’s life when he unilaterally denied her any further access to the prison and added his caveat that
“Berkman will never get out alive!”
In my indignation and rage I swept everything to the floor—plates, coffee-pots and pitchers, jewellry and watches.
I seized a heavy tray and was about to throw it at him when I was pulled back by one of the clerks, who shouted to

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 255

 That is a characteristic instance of local conditions. Involuntarily I smile at Kennan’s
naïve indignation with the brutalities he thinks possible only in Russian and Siberian
prisons.9 He would find it almost impossible to learn the true conditions in the Ameri-
can prisons: he would be conducted the rounds of the “show” cells, always neat and clean
for the purpose; he would not see the basket cell, nor the bull rings in the dungeon,
where men are chained for days; nor would he be permitted to converse for hours, or
whole evenings, with the prisoners, as he did with the exiles in Siberia. Yet if he suc-
ceeded in learning even half the truth, he would be forced to revise his views of Ameri-
can penal institutions, as he did in regard to Russian politicals. He would be horrified to
witness the brutality that is practised here as a matter of routine, the abuse of the insane,
the petty persecution. Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.
Your soul must have been harrowed by the reports of the terrible tortures in Mont-
juich.10 What is all indignation and lamenting, in the face of the revival of the Inquisi-
tion? Is there no Nemesis in Spain?

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 297–99. In AB’s Prison Memoirs, this letter is dated 12 April
1896.The content of the letter strongly suggests, however, that this date is wrong. In particular, AB’s refer-
ence in the last paragraph to the atrocities committed against political prisoners at Montjuich refers to
events following the 7 June 1896 bombing of the Corpus Christi Day procession in Barcelona. The letter
comes from AB’s own transcription and the original is no longer extant, but it is possible that AB misread the
date on the original, converting the numerals signifying the month and day (i.e., “12/4”) from American style
(month /day) to European style (day/month).

someone to run for the police. Reed, white with fear and frothing at the mouth, signalled to the clerk. “No police,”
I heard him say; “no scandal. Just kick her out.” The clerk advanced towards me, then stopped. “Murderer, coward!”
I cried; “if you harm Berkman, I will kill you with my own hands!” (LML, p. 113)

Afterward, according to EG, Metzkow and Nold expressed concern about the repercussions her out-
burst might have for AB. “I was shocked by the thought that Sasha might indeed have to suffer as a
result of my outbreak,” she continued. “But the threat of the Inspector that Sasha would never come
out of prison alive had been too much for me. I was sure Sasha would understand” (LML, p. 113).
9. George Kennan was America’s foremost authority on Russian political prisoners and penal condi-
tions. His book Siberia and the Exile System (New York: Century, 1891) denounced the Russian exile
system, and in 1893 he published George Kennan on Russian Justice, and S. Stepniak’s Appeal to Presi-
dent Cleveland (New York: Russian American National League, 1893).
10. After the bombing by an unknown assailant of the Corpus Christi Day procession in Barcelona on
7 June 1896, the Brigada Social, the Spanish government’s special anti-anarchist police unit under the
command of General Weyler y Nicolau, arrested more than four hundred people including anar-
chists, labor militants, Republicans, and anti-clerics. Those arrested were held in Barcelona’s Mont-
juich fortress. One of the detainees, Fernando Tárrida del Mármol, a Catalonian anarchist and direc-
tor of the Barcelona Polytechnic Academy, published in exile a firsthand account of the tortures they
suffered at the prison. The book, Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne: Montjuich, Cuba, Philippines (Paris: P. V.
Stock; Bibliothèque sociologique, no. 17, 1897), together with other reports smuggled out of Montjuich
and printed in conservative as well as anarchist newspapers abroad, inspired international condem-
nation of the Spanish government. The 11 July 1897 issue of Firebrand published a special supple-
ment, “The Modern Inquisition of Spain.”

256 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
New York, 17 December 1896

My dear Comrade.

Your letter and the book Socialisme et Congrès de Londons 1 to hand. Thank you very much
for both.
I have not been able to look your valuable book through, as I have been very busy. You
ask me to publish a critisism on your work in one of our papers, Freiheit. Sturmglacken,
Freie Gesellshaft,2 etc. Sturmglacken,3 are not in existence any more, The Freiheit, will not
accept anything of my pen and Freie Gesellshaft, is read only by the jewish populace, and
is of miner importance.
I shall however try to insert a critisism in some other paper, if I will like the book. You
also say, that you would be very happy, if I could publish an American edition in english.
I certainly could publish it, If I had the means. You know, no doubt that in order to pub-
lish a book, one must have money something, I lack in, very badly. I have seen very little
of the Gold which was to come in, after the election of McKinley.4 Times are fearfully bad
here and I think, that whithin the next four years, we will have a rebellion here. The
American people are practical, as you remarked, at my visit, but when they find out that
practicability is no policy, they also happen to loose their temper occasonnally, I am sorry
to say they do not loose it too often.
I would like to hear your suggestion, about the publications of your 2 books, do you
intend I can transalate both, but as I said before, I have no money to have it printed.

Hoping to hear from you soon. I remain with fraternal greetings.

E Goldman

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH.

1. Le socialisme et le congrès de Londres: étude historique (Paris: P. V. Stock; Bibliothèque sociologique, no. 11,
1897).
2. A Yiddish-language anarchist monthly published in New York from 1895 to October 1900, Freie
Gesellschaft (Free Society) provided literature and cultural commentary as well as political articles.
The journal was edited by Lev Moiseev (under the pseudonym M. Leontieff ), J. A. Maryson, Moishe
Katz, and Hillel Solotaroff. From 1910 to 1911, Saul Yanovsky published a literary monthly of the
same name.
3. Sturmglocken, edited by Max Baginski, ceased publication after its fourth issue, 18 April 1896.
4. A reference to President McKinley’s support of the gold standard.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 257

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
New York, 17 December 1896

Dear Friend.

That you have always been and will forever remain the brave, good comrade is something
I have never doubted, and if I did not receive a prompt response to my letter I assume in
that case that you were unable to write. I am extremely delighted by your success in the
interest of our friend Berk. I have also submitted an appeal and resolution to the con-
vention and am now awaiting an answer.1
You are right dear friend, I want to
stage a far reaching movement for B.,
and even if we should not succeed in
easing the burden on B. or liberating
him, at least we will have made propa-
ganda for our ideas. Indeed it is nec-
essary, for at the moment we have
damned little of a movement.
I will intend to make a tour through
the countryside next month and rouse
the sleeping brothers a little. What
is going on in Buffalo? Are the com-
rades still with their bodies and souls
so fond of Pope Hannes? 2 Please don’t
think I want to impose myself, dear
friend, but I want to spread our ideas
everywhere and set the movement, es-
pecially the English one, into some
kind of motion. Write me your honest
During late 1896, Goldman’s speaking engagements grew. At
opinion on what you think about this the meeting reported in the 12 November 1896 Pittsburg Post,
business. Goldman made a collection to help pay the costs of Berkman’s
Bauer made 2 pictures out of proposed legal appeal.
colored tissue paper, for which he
made use of 32,842 rolls of paper over

1. See Letter to Max Metzkow, 2 December 1896, above, for EG and Metzkow’s earlier correspondence
on the issue of raising trade union support for the reduction of AB’s sentence.
2. “Pope Hannes” is EG’s sarcastic reference to Johann Most. He had been given this nickname, mock-
ing his perceived autocratic nature, by supporters of Die Autonomie, including AB and EG.

258 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

3 months. He sent me the pictures for the raffle and the proceeds are supposed to go to
the benefit of the trio Nold, Bauer Berk.3 I am enclosing some tickets for you, could you
sell some in B? 4 If so, please let me know how many I should send you.
I expect a really long, detailed letter from you and remain for today with sincere
regards

Emma Goldmann

ALS, Joseph Ishill Collection, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Li-
brary, Harvard University.

3. Henry Bauer and Carl Nold spent four years in the same prison with AB. The “trio”—Bauer, Nold,
and Berkman (EG shortens his name to “Berk” here)— edited the handwritten journal Prison
Blossoms.
4. Buffalo, where Metzkow lived.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 259

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
New York, 30 December 1896

Dear Friend!

Sent you 100 tickets at your request. These cost only 10c apiece, and, as the “Freihei-
tiener” 1 magnanimously declared themselves willing to take 50 tickets at 25c, I think that
these “noble men” will also accept 100 tickets at 10c. The people will indeed still save
2.50D, which could then go to poor “Hannes.” If, my friend, you could perhaps unload
another 40 tickets in addition to the 100, I would send you some more. The money for
the tickets must be sent to me, since I took 600 tickets from the L T.2 to sell and will ac-
count for all of them together. As far as the business related to the agitation tour is con-
cerned, I am firmly resolved to travel on my own and also arrange meetings by myself. I
want to go over my plans with you, dear friend—If I come to Pittsburg I will come at my
own expense to Buffalo, and then, if you want to help me, we could get a hall for one or
several meetings, properly announce them, and I am convinced that we would have a
huge success. We could easily cover expenses from the collections. That is what I have
done in Pittsburg, Baltimore and other cities and always with great success. What do you
think about that? Of course we can not make this known for the time being or the whole
thing would be botched. You offered me your hospitality, didn’t you, I will make use of
that in 4– 6 weeks, the rest will work itself out. The business with the editor of the A Z
is very regrettable,3 but I should think that you and the other participants at the paper
should be resolute enough to give the man his walking papers. Propaganda, in my opin-
ion, is the most important thing, and whoever stands in the way of that must go. You may
be surprised that I speak so categorically, but I know from bitter experience that consid-
eration for one individual ruined the German movement here in this land. I don’t have
to explain myself any further, surely you understand me—
Your inquiry about Jac Fuchs is something I can respond to all too well. I know him
very well and have seen in him a highly talented, capable and intelligent person, as well

1. Freiheitiener are “freedomites,” or supporters of the prominent anarchist newspaper Freiheit edited by
Johann Most. Justus Schwab was the paper’s co-editor during its first year of publication in New York
City.
2. That is, the Internationale Arbeiter Liedertafel (International Workers’ Song Circle), which met every
Wednesday evening at Faulhabers Hall, 1551 Second Avenue. The tickets to which she refers were for
a lottery intended to raise money for AB (see Letter to Max Metzkow, 17 December 1896, above, for
discussion of the lottery). A short note to Metzkow a month later registered a setback: “I must inform
you that the A[rbeiter] L[ieder] Tafel has postponed the lottery until the 4th of April because we have
not sold enough tickets. I would appreciate it if you would publish that in the B[uffaloer] A[rbeiter-]
Zeitung.” EG to Metzkow, 1 February 1897, EGP, reel 1.
3. EG refers to Joseph Mostler, editor of the Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung from September 1893, who left the
paper due to a wage dispute and founded the Buffalo Herold in 1897.

260 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896

as a noble character. He is not an Anarchist, but I like him a thousand times more than
most of the “comrades.” I think he would fit in very well as an editor, but I am afraid that
this young man will not be especially liked, I mean by the comrades and the everyday
lout. He has not made many friends even here because he is too radical, too open and,
above all, too honest. However, perhaps with time he will become wiser and more expe-
rienced and will learn to close off his inner thoughts from the view of the everyday man.
I can bear him the best witness and Justus Schwab will join in my opinion. He is an orig-
inal mind and I am convinced that you will like him very much, dear friend. He is still
very young indeed, only 23 yrs. and still can learn a lot, I mean in terms of doing right by
all people, yet still for his age he knows more than a thousand others.
If you want to know more, dear friend, it would be best to hear from Justus Schwab,
for perhaps you may think that I am too sanguine in my judgment. Jac Fuchs departed
yesterday for Detroit and if you want to write to him you should send the letter to the A T.4
The poor man has suffered terribly here and I would not begrudge it him if he would get
the position at the B A Z.5
That final comment was meant only for you, dear friend. I wouldn’t want anyone else
to learn of the sad condition of my young friend.
In the hope of hearing from you soon, with revolut. greetings.

Emma Goldmann

p.s. Best regards to your family.

ALS, Joseph Ishill Collection, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Li-
brary, Harvard University.

4. The initials “A T” refer to Der arme Teufel.

5. Jacob Fuchs edited the weekly paper Der Herold in Detroit from February 1897 to August 1897 and
apparently did not go to Buffalo to work on the Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung; in February 1897 Richard
Baginski became its editor.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1896 261

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
New York, 25 March 1897

Dear Comrade and friend.

I hadn’t responded to your most recent letter with the enclosed check because 1) I have
been very busy and 2) I had nothing new to write about. The raffle is coming up soon, so
I would like to ask you to send the money for the rest of the tickets since I have to settle
the accounts. There is nothing new here; Most and the choral society 1 are quarrelling
and nobody is doing anything. The Commune celebration arranged by the choral society
was poorly attended because M worked against it with all his energy.2 Both sides are dis-
tasteful to me and I prefer to go my own way. In a very short time I will publish a leaflet
with Biedenkapp 3 and Timmerman and will also undertake a long trip to the West,
mostly for Berkman but also for our ideas in general. Nold and Bauer are coming on
May 25th, then there will be more life in this place.4 How is Baginsky 5 doing at the pa-
per? He is a capable fellow and a very good man indeed. Write soon and a lot.6

With greetings and a handshake.

Emma Goldman

ALS, Joseph Ishill Collection, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Li-
brary, Harvard University.

1. By “choral society,” EG refers to the Internationale Arbeiter Liedertafel (International Workers’ Song
Circle), a German anarchist choir of which Justus Schwab was a leader. The group had been selling
raffle tickets to raise money for AB, hence Johann Most’s attitude to the event.
2. A memorial festival to celebrate the Paris Commune, including lectures, a concert, and ball, was held
18 March 1897 in Germania Hall in New York City. The celebration was organized by the Interna-
tionale Arbeiter Liedertafel in association with the French and Italian groups of New York. Lectures
were given in English, French, German, and Italian.
3. Georg Biedenkapp (1843–1924), a German-born socialist with anarchist sympathies, immigrated to
New York from Germany in 1885; he founded and edited the satirical New York weekly Der Tramp
(1888) with Wilhelm Rosenberg. He published books in German on scientific and historical topics,
including Friedrich Nietzsche und Friedrich Naumann als Politiker, and works of poetry. He wrote a
poem to AB, “In trüber Zeit” (In a gloomy time), that appeared in the September 1893 number of the
anarchist paper Die Brandfackel. In 1895 Biedenkapp recited a poem at the Solidarity Group’s Paris
Commune Celebration in New York City. No extant record of the proposed leaflet EG refers to can be
found.
4. Carl Nold and Henry Bauer were released from the Western Penitentiary on 25 May 1897, after four
years of imprisonment in connection with AB’s attempted assassination of Henry C. Frick.
5. Richard Baginski, Max Baginski’s brother, began editing the Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung in Febru-
ary 1897.
6. Metzkow did not respond, and EG wrote in German: “It appears as if you did not receive my letter
from last week as no response has arrived thus far. I must write you again today with regard to the
money for the lottery since I have to settle accounts. Thus I sincerely entreat you to send me either
the money or the remaining tickets. The raffle did not take place yesterday because it was prohibited,

262 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
New York, 13 April 1897

Dear Comrade.

Your favor of March 24th. to hand.

I regret very much that I am ever in such a position that provents me from carrying
out your request and I fear that I shall not be able to do much better this time.
I will see that the publisher of Freie Gesellshaft forward you their paper.1
In regard to the publication of your book “Socialism & the London Congress” in the
english language in this country, I can only tell you that no american publisher would
consent to publish it, because the american public could not be interested in that.2
The Comrades of course would appreciate it, but I do not know of any of them that
furnish the necessary funds for the publication.
I think, I might find a house, that would publish “Psychology du militaire pro-
fessionel”
Please send me the origenal copy, (I mean in french of course) and let me know if it
ever has been transelated in the english language before; 3 you will also have to send me
a letter of special authority, otherwise the publishers might not accept me as your repre-
sentative. Write the letter in french.
At present my time is too fully occupied to write an article for the Humanité Nouvelle; 4
later on perhaps I may be able to accomadate you. I could find out nothing about books,
or any works, that deal with political criminals. As America does not admit the existence
of such a specified class. Political criminals, are classed in the line of common criminals.
They do not enjoy any other priveliges, nor are they treated differently. I have been told,

but it will be held in private in the next few days. What is R Baginsky up to and how is the movement
in Buffalo doing generally. Our friends Nold and Bauer are coming out on the 25th of May. I intend
to go to P at that time in order to work energetically with both of them for Berkmann’s liberation” (EG
to Metzkow, 5 April 1897, EGP, reel 1).

1. EG is volunteering to send to Hamon Freie Gesellschaft (Free Society), the New York City Yiddish-
language anarchist monthly of cultural and political commentary. Hamon had requested that EG
send him a number of American anarchist papers (for editorial details on Freie Gesellschaft, see note 2
to Letter to Augustin Hamon, 17 December 1896, above).
2. Le socialisme et le congrès de Londres: étude historique (Paris: P. V. Stock; Bibliothèque sociologique, no. 11,
1897). Hamon had requested that EG try and find an American publisher for this book (see Letter
to Augustin Hamon, 17 December 1896, above). No English-language edition of the book was
published.
3. Hamon’s Psychologie du militaire professionnel (Paris: A. Savine, 1895) was never published in English.
4. The anarchist and cultural journal L’Humanité Nouvelle was founded and edited by Hamon between
May 1897 and 1903.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 263

 that the place to find out anything on that subject is; the office de travail in Paris, of
which, no doubt; you know. The president of the institution is Mons. Finance.5 I sup-
pose, you know all particularies about our Chicago Comrades, Spies, Parson 6 ect. If not,
let me know and I will give you all the details, also about the Hoamstead affaire.7 I would
have gladly given you particularies in this letter, but my time is too limitted, as I am about
to leave for Philadelphia and other cities on a lecturing tour.8
We no paper published in the english language on Anarchism Communism, in the
East of N. A. Fultons paper,9 I consider a very poor affaire.
The propaganda in this Country is at present very week. All circles reporte a general
feeling of lethargy.
Times have never been worse, thousends and thousends are out of work and desti-
tute, still they hope and wait and suffer. Even the radical element that knows the evil of
our present system, lack the courage of action and try to satisfy the agonies of hunger of
the people either with the ballot box, free coinage of Silver, tarif, or other rubbish. Those,
who are willing to carry the torch of real aducation, in to the masses lack the means to
carry on the work.
I assure you, it is not very pleasent to live in a country where the almighty dollar is all
and love, passion, truth, honesty and earnestness are laught and scared at. Hoping to
hear from you soon. I remain

Fraternally.
E. Goldman

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH.

5. The Office du Travail was established in 1891 to investigate working conditions in France. Its first
president was Isidore Finance, a house painter and militant positivist.
6. August Spies and Albert Parsons were two of the four anarchists executed in 1887 after the Haymar-
ket affair in Chicago.
7. EG refers to AB’s attentat at the offices of Carnegie Steel in Homestead, Pa., in July 1892.
8. EG spoke in Providence between the 23rd and 25th of April, before lecturing in Philadelphia in May.
9. Edward H. Fulton’s individualist anarchist paper Age of Thought (published in Columbus Junction,
Iowa, from 1896 to 1898) was influenced by Benjamin Tucker’s prominent paper of anarchist indi-
vidualism, Liberty. Fulton had shifted politically from anarchist communism.

264 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 To AUGUSTIN HAMON, with Enclosure
New York, 25 June 1897

Cher comarade.

Your letter of May 29 to hand. I could not answer it at once, because I was very ill from
the effects of operation on my foot, at the time when your letter reached me. I am better
now, but far from being well, and I therefore have to prospone the affair with your book
until later. You need not send me a french copy of Psychologie du militaire professionel, be-
cause I have found the one you gave me. Together with this letter, I send you all the ma-
tirial for your lecture,1 that I could get a hold of. The tings are as follow. a short Biogra-
phy of Alex. Berkmann, Carl Nold, Henry Bauer with Photos. Than, a copy of the
Chicago Vorbote 2 of 1887 with the pictures of the 8 Comrades and there Biography, I have
not translated it, into English, since you have to translate it in to french. Now this copy, I
must have returned, dear comrade, because that is the only copy left of that number. be-
sides that, I send you, a pamphlet by Gen. M. M. Trumball,3 Gov. John P. Altgeld’s reason
for pardoning our Comrade,4 and a pamphlet by Prof. Edward W. Bemis of the Chicago
University on the Hoamstead strike.5 The last pamphlet does not belong to me, and I
have promised to return it to the owner, I therefore beg of you to send this back to me,
as soon as you are done with it, together with the copy of The Vorbote.6
The discription of the Hoamstead strike by Prof. E. W. Bemis is correct, only when
hes critisism of Berkmann act and its influence on the strike, is wrong and from a prej-
udiced point of view.7 The strike was not lost, because of B’s act, but because the strikers
were betrayed and soled by their leaders and because they did not have enough munition

1. Hamon had hoped to write a book on political violence and assassination, but never did. His collected
research material, including what EG sent him, are in his archive at IISH. The enclosures reproduced
here are EG’s biographical sketches of Bauer, Nold, and Berkman, intended for Hamon’s book.
2. Der Vorbote was the weekly edition of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung.
3. EG probably enclosed Was It a Fair Trial? (1887), the first of two pamphlets by Chicago lawyer M. M.
Trumbull defending the Haymarket anarchists and widely circulated.
4. John P. Altgeld, Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab (Chicago, 1893).
5. Edward W. Bemis, “The Homestead Strike,” Journal of Political Economy 2 (June 1894): 369 –96.
6. Hamon never returned this material to EG.
7. Bemis wrote: “A final lesson of the strike is the great injury to the cause of organized labor resulting
from anything savoring of anarchy. It is well known that the eight-hour movement was put back sev-
eral years by the bomb-throwing of the anarchists at the Chicago Haymarket in 1886. Similarly the
Homestead strikers in many ways lost some of the popular sympathy which previously was theirs by
the shooting of Mr. Frick by the anarchist Berkman; while evidence has been presented above show-
ing that the Carnegie Company might possibly have reopened the conference doors, when Berkman,
acting wholly without the knowledge or desire of the strikers, shattered all their hopes” (Bemis,
“Homestead Strike,” pp. 395–96).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 265

 and money to continue the battle. I admit, that had B’s act been successful, it would have
made more propaganda, but the failure is not due to B. nor any body. I have been in
Hoamstead after the act, and have found out that the sympathy of the strikers was with
the act, their only regret was, that it did not kill Frick.
I will try to get specimen of writing of the Chicago Comrades later on, at present I can
get nothing else. I am going to make a propaganda tour through the West next Septe and,
as I also will visite Chicago,8 I will try to get you more matirial in regard to the Com. from
Mrs Parsons.9 At What month in 1900 do you intend to lecture in Brussels? I am asking,
because I intend to go to England and France the same year and I would like to meet you
in Paris.
Hoping that the articles I sent you, will be of some use to you, I remain with

best greetings
E Goldmann

p.s. Please reply, as soon, as you receive this letter and package, also be kind enough to
send back, Vorbote and pamphlet of E. W. Bemis, as soon, as you will get done.

ENCLOSURE
Henry Bauer is the son of paysents and was born 28 April 1861 Grentel. (Hessen). He
learned the Capenter trade and as he had to serve in the army, he preferred to go to Amer-
ica, he landed here Mai 1880 and went to Philadelphia, thand to Cumberland Md and
finely to Pittsburg, he became foreman in a Capenter Shop, but this did not keep him
from taking active part in the 8 hour movement during that time he got acquainted with
the revolutionary Ideas. After his strike was lost, he was decharged and could from that
time find no steady employment. The Chicago trial and the legal murder of our Com-
rades, has draughen him intirely in to the anarchistic ranks and since than he was one
of the most active Comrade. In the Hoamstead strike he distributed revolutionary leafl
leaflets and after Berkmans act he was arrest; for and at the beginning of 93 he was sen-
tenced to 5 years penetentiaery, for distributing incendiary printing matter. Hes time ex-
pired last May 25th having received one year reduction for good behavior.
Carl Nold, was born 26 Sep, 1869 at Weingarten, Wurtenberg, he was a child of love,
what is called to day an illegal child. His father was a phisician in the Army. He fought
in the German-Franco war of 1870 –1871 and after a long absence he came home ill and
brokendown, he died soon afterwards. The mother of little Nold went to America and left
the child with his grandparents, where he was brought up as a strict good Catholic. With
14 years he came to his mother, who meanwhile had married. He was sent to his oncle’s
to learn the trade of locksmith, but after one year he left his relatives, because he could

8. EG lectured in Chicago between 27 September and 13 October 1897, while on tour. She returned to
Chicago and spoke at a Haymarket memorial meeting on 11 November 1897.
9. EG refers to Lucy Parsons, anarchist, labor activist, and widow of Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons.

266 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

no longer stand the cruel and inhuman treatment. He first got acquainted with Socialis-
tic and than with anarchistic Ideas and after having worked in different cities, he decided
in 1889 to tramp to Chicago, but he did not come further than Pittsburg, where he set-
tled down. He studied much and finely rendered great service to the cause, as a speaker
and writer. He was well known to the police Authorities and after Berkmanns act, was ar-
rested as a conspirater and was in Feb 1893 sentenced to 5 years Penetentiary, he also was
released from prison the 25th of last May. Nold has a boy of 6 years and lives with his
wife, of course in a free Union.
Alex. Berkmann My friend and Comrade. Was born the 24 November 1870 in Vilna,
west russia. His father Joseph Berkman, was a merchand in leather and had a large busi-
ness in St Petersburg, where to his family of 3 boys and a girl moved, right after Alex
birth. His father was wealthy and gave all his children a first class aducation, first with
private tutors and than he sent to gimanasium. He died, when Alex, was 12 years old and
his mother with the 4 children moved to Kovno, in the western part of Russia. There Alex
continued his studies in the Gimanasium, His one brother having left to Leipzig, to study
medicin, his second brother studying pharmacy and his sister, was with Alex in Gima-
nasium. Soon Alex aroused the anger of the Authorities for his liberal and revolutionary
Ideas and shortly before his graduation from the 6th class he was expelled from high
scool and put on the black list, that means, that he could no more enter any college of
Russia. After that, at the age of 17 year Alex sailed to America where he landed in 1888.
Not being accustumed to phisical labor, he suffered very much and for over a year he
lived one 5–7 c per day. Than he worked on different trades, as Cigarmaker, taylor and
finely he lurned typesetting and went to work on the Freiheit, the german anarchist jour-
nal, with Most, as editor. During all this time, Berkman, studied the social question, po-
litical and economical. He was always a scolar and was well acquainted with all scientific
work. he became an Anarchist and was very active, speaking, writing and asissting the
movement financially. Alex. Berkman, was such an inthusiast, that he could go without
propre food for days and give his earning for the cause, he was an Nihilist of the Bakunin
type, he did acknowledge friendship love or any other feeling save the cause and this also
led him to his act. He was of a very independend nature and would sumbit to no dogmas
or rulership, he could not stand the dictator-ship of Most and left him in 1891. Berk-
mann, had somewhat of a chara caracter like Casario Santo. He went from New York to
Pittsburg at the time of the Hoamstead strike, with 50 c in his pocket. No one accept one
friend of his knew of his plan. His intention was to use dinamite, but he changed to a re-
volver, because the time was too limited and he could not optain the necessary quantity.
On Saturday the 22 July 2 o’clock in the afternoon he entred Frick office and fired 5 times
at, 3 times struck him, and two bullets went by. Frick was severly wounded, but through
skilful medical attendence, he soon recovered. Alx Berk. After 2 month of imprisone-
ment was, after a trial which lasted 1. 1/2 sentenced to 22 years imprisonement. He had
refused legal deffence and hoping that he will be allowed to deffend himself, but this was
not granted, as the whole trial was led on with the greatest of prejudice. There were

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 267

 5 charges against him, carrying conceiled weepons, entring the of forcing his way into
the Office of Frick, attempting to kill Frick, attempting to kill the Secretary of Frick,
(which by the way was a lie) and comtempt of court. Had there not been so many charges
against him, he could only have been given 7 years, that is the, highest limit of the law.
of Penselvania. Berkmann has now served a term of 5 years, but according to the prison
rules 7 years, that is 2 year counted for good behavior. We are know now working hard to
get a reduction of sentence, and hope to get 10 years. Berkman, has used his imprisone-
ment for active study and has accomplished great knowledge during this time. He is
cheerful and inthusiastic as ever, only, as he calls himself, he has grow wiser.

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH. On stationery of the New York Recoder, Editorial Department. The en-
closure with biographical details of Bauer, Nold, and Berkman was handwritten by EG but unsigned.

268 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 Essay in the F I R E B R A N D
New York, 18 July 1897

Marriage

How much sorrow, misery, humiliation; how many tears and curses; what agony and suf-
fering has this word brought to humanity. From its very birth, up to our present day, men
and women groan under the iron yoke of our marriage institution, and there seems to
be no relief, no way out of it.
At all times, and in all ages, have the suppressed striven to break the chains of men-
tal and physical slavery. After thousands of noble lives have been sacrificed at the stake
and on the gallows, and others have perished in prisons, or at the merciless hands of in-
quisitions, have the ideas of those brave heroes been accomplished. Thus have religious
dogmas, feudalism and black slavery been abolished, and new ideas, more progressive,
broader and clearer, have come to the front, and again we see poor downtrodden hu-
manity fighting for its rights and independence. But the crudest, most tyrannical of all
institutions—marriage, stands firm as ever, and woe unto those who dare to even doubt
its sacredness. Its mere discussion is enough to infuriate not only Christians and con-
servatives alone, but even Liberals, Freethinkers, and Radicals. What is it that causes all
these people to uphold marriage? What makes them cling to this prejudice? (for it is
nothing else but prejudice). It is because marriage relations, are the foundation of pri-
vate property, ergo, the foundation of our cruel and inhuman system. With wealth and
superfluity on one side, and idleness, exploitation, poverty, starvation, and crime on the
other, hence to abolish marriage, means to abolish everything above mentioned. Some
progressive people are trying to reform and better our marriage laws. They no longer per-
mit the church to interfere in their matrimonial relations, others even go further, they
marry free, that is without the consent of the law,1 but, nevertheless, this form of mar-
riage is just as binding, just as “sacred”, as the old form, because it is not the form or the
kind of marriage relation we have, but the thing, the thing itself that is objectionable,
hurtful and degrading. It always gives the man the right and power over his wife, not only
over her body, but also over her actions, her wishes; in fact, over her whole life. And how
can it be otherwise?
Behind the relations of any individual man and woman to each other, stands the his-
torical age evolved relations between the two sexes in general, which have led up to the
difference in the position and privileges of the two sexes today.

1. Probably a reference to the free marriage in 1886 of the sex radicals E. C. Walker and Lillian Harman,
the latter the daughter of Lucifer editor Moses Harman. The couple were tried and sentenced to forty-
five days in prison and fined for all the court fees. When they refused to pay the fines, Walker and Har-
man were imprisoned for six months.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 269

 Two young people come together, but their relation is largely determined by causes
over which they have no control. They know little of each other, society has kept both
sexes apart, the boy and the girl have been brought up along different lines. Like Olive
Schreiner says in her Story of an African Farm “The boy has been taught to be, the girl
to seem.” 2 Exactly; the boy is taught to be intelligent, bright, clever, strong, athletic, in-
dependent and selfreliant; to develop his natural faculties, to follow his passions and de-
sires. The girl has been taught to dress, to stand before the looking glass and admire her-
self, to control her emotions, her passions, her wishes, to hide her mental defects and to
combine what little intelligence and ability she has on one point, and that is, the quick-
est and best way to angle a husband, to get profitably married. And so it has come that
the two sexes hardly understand each other’s nature, that their mental interest and occu-
pations are different. Public opinion separates their rights and duties, their honor and
dishonor very strictly from each other. The subject of sex is a sealed book to the girl, be-
cause she has been given to understand that it is impure, immoral and indecent to even
mention the sex question. To the boy it is a book whose pages have brought him disease
and secret vice, and in some cases ruin and death.3
Among the rich class it has long been out of fashion to fall in love. Men of society
marry, after a life of debauchery and lust, to build up their ruined constitution. Others
again have lost their capital, in gambling sports or business speculation, and decide that
an heiress would be just the thing they need, knowing well, that the marriage tie will in
no way hinder them from squandering the income of their wealthy bride. The rich girl
having been brought up to be practical and sensible, and having been accustomed to live,
breathe, eat, smile, walk and dress only according to fashion, holds out her millions to
some title, or to a man with a good social standing. She has one consolation, and that is,
that society allows more freedom of action to a married woman and should she be dis-
appointed in marriage she will be in a position to gratify her wishes otherwise. We know,
the walls of boudoirs and salons are deaf and dumb, and a little pleasure within these
walls is no crime.
With the men and women among the working-class, marriage is quite a different
thing. Love is not so rare as among the upper class, and very often helps both to endure
disappointments and sorrows in life, but even here the majority of marriages, last only
for a short while, to be swallowed up in the monotony of the every day life and the
struggle for existence. Here also, the workingman marries because he grows tired of

2. EG is paraphrasing Lyndall, the heroine of Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (London, 1883),
who declares to a male listener: “We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural
force, perhaps, but for the rest—blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the
ends it sets before us. To you it says—Work; and to us it says—Seem!” Many turn-of-the-century Eu-
ropean and American feminists saw Lyndall as a model for women’s independence.
3. For a nearly contemporaneous elaboration on this theme, see the excerpt from EG’s lecture entitled
“Sex Problems,” Free Society, 13 August 1899, EGP, reel 47.

270 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

a boardinghouse life, and out of a desire to build a home of his own, where he will find
his comfort. His main object, therefore, is to find a girl that will make a good cook and
housekeeper; one that will look out only for his happiness, for his pleasures; one that will
look up to him as her lord, her master, her defender, her supporter; the only ideal worth
while living for. Another man hopes that the girl he’ll marry will be able to work and help
to put away a few cents for rainy days, but after a few months of so-called happiness he
awakens to the bitter reality that his wife is soon to become a mother, that she cannot
work, that the expences grow bigger, and that while he before managed to get along with
the small earning allowed him by his “kind” master, this earning is not sufficient to sup-
port a family.
The girl who has spent her childhood, and part of her womanhood, in the factory, feels
her strength leaving her and pictures to herself the dreadful condition of ever having to
remain a shopgirl, never certain of her work, she is, therefore, compelled to look out for
a man, a good husband, which means one who can support her, and give her a good
home. Both, the man and the girl, marry for the same purpose, with the only exception
that the man is not expected to give up his individuality, his name, his independence,
whereas, the girl has to sell herself, body and soul, for the pleasure of being someone’s
wife; hence they do not stand on equal terms, and where there is no equality there can
be no harmony. The consequence is that shortly after the first few months, or to make
all allowance possible, after the first year, both come to the conclusion that marriage is a
failure.
As their conditions grow worse and worse, and with the increase of children the
woman grows despondent, miserable, dissatisfied and weak. Her beauty soon leaves her,
and from hard work, sleepless nights, worry about the little ones and disagreement and
quarrels with her husband, she soon becomes a physical wreck and curses the moment
that made her a poor man’s wife. Such a dreary, miserable life is certainly not inclined to
maintain love or respect for each other. The man can at least forget his misery in the
company of a few friends; he can absorb himself in politics, or he can drown his misfor-
tune in a glass of beer. The woman is chained to the house by a thousand duties; she can-
not, like her husband, enjoy some recreation because she either has no means for it, or
she is refused the same rights as her husband, by public opinion. She has to carry the
cross with her until death, because our marriage laws know of no mercy, unless she
wishes to lay bare her married life before the critical eye of Mrs. Grundy,4 and even then
she can only break the chains which tie her to the man she hates if she takes all the blame
on her own shoulders, and if she has energy enough to stand before the world disgraced
for the rest of her life. How many have the courage to do that? Very few. Only now and

4. EG refers to an off-stage character in Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough (1798), who represents the
contemporary standards of respectability. “Mrs. Grundy” later came to signify prudishness, censor-
ship, and the rigidity of social conventions.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 271

 then it comes like a flash of lightning that some woman, like the Princess De Chimay,5
has had pluck enough to break the conventional barriers and follow her heart’s desire.
But this exception is a wealthy woman, dependent upon no one. The poor woman has to
consider her little ones; she is less fortunate than her rich sister, and yet the woman who
remains in bondage is called respectable: never mind if her whole life is a long chain of
lies, deceit and treachery, she yet dares to look down with disgust upon her sisters who
have been forced by society to sell their charms and affections on the street. No matter
how poor, how miserable a married woman may be, she will yet think herself above the
other, whom she calls a prostitute, who is an outcast, hated and despised by everyone,
even those who do not hesitate to buy her embrace, look upon the poor wretch as a nec-
essary evil, and some goody goody people even suggest to confine this evil to one district
in New York, in order to “purify” all other districts of the city. What a farce! The reform-
ers might as well demand that all the married inhabitants of New York be driven out be-
cause they certainly do not stand morally higher than the street woman. The sole differ-
ence between her and the married woman is, that the one has sold herself into chattel
slavery during life, for a home or a title, and the other one sells herself for the length of
time she desires; she has the right to choose the man she bestows her affections upon,
whereas the married woman has no right whatsoever; she must submit to the embrace
of her lord, no matter how lothsome this embrace may be to her, she must obey his com-
mands; she has to bear him children, even at the cost of her own strength and health; in
a word, she prostitutes herself every hour, every day of her life. I can find no other name
for the horrid, humiliating and degrading condition of my married sisters than prostitu-
tion of the worst kind, with the only exception that the one is legal, the other illegal.6
I cannot deal with the few exceptional cases of marriage which are based on love, es-
teem and respect; these exceptions only verify the rule. But whether legal or illegal, pros-
titution in any form is unnatural, hurtful and despicable, and I know only too well that
the conditions cannot be changed until this infernal system is abolished, but I also know
that it is not only the economic dependence of women which has caused her enslave-
ment, but also her ignorance and prejudice, and I also know that many of my sisters
could be made free even now, were it not for our marriage institutions which keep them
in ignorance, stupidity and prejudice. I therefore consider it my greatest duty to de-
nounce marriage, not only the old form, but the so-called modern marriage, the idea of
taking a wife and housekeeper, the idea of private possession of one sex by the other. I
demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to live for herself; to

5. Princess Jeanne-Marie-Ignace-Theresa de Chimay (1773–1835) was known during the French Revo-
lution as “Our Lady of Thermidor” for interceding on behalf of those sentenced to death. She was di-
vorced by her husbands three times for committing adultery.
6. EG often compared marriage to prostitution, an idea current among anarchists of the period, espe-
cially in such papers as Firebrand, Lucifer, and Liberty. Compare this statement to EG’s comments on
marriage in her 1893 New York World interview (“Nellie Bly Again,” Interview in the New York World,
17 September 1893, above).

272 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes,
freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
Do not tell me that all this can only be accomplished under Anarchy; this is entirely
wrong. If we want to accomplish Anarchy, we must first have free women at least, those
women who are economically just as independent as their brothers are, and unless we
have free women, we cannot have free mothers, and if mothers are not free, we cannot
expect the young generation to assist us in the accomplishment of our aim, that is the es-
tablishment of an Anarchist society.
To you Freethinkers and Liberals who have abolished one God and created many
whom you worship; you Radicals and Socialists, who still send your children to Sunday
school, and all those who make concessions to the moral standard of today; to all of you
I say that it is your lack of courage which makes you cling to and uphold marriage, and
while you admit its absurdity in theory, you have not the energy to defy public opinion,
and to live your own life practically.7 You prate of equality of the sexes in a future Society,
but you think it a necessary evil that the woman should suffer at present. You say women
are inferior and weaker, and instead of assisting them to grow stronger you help to keep
them in a degraded position. You demand exclusiveness for us, but you love variety and
enjoy it wherever you can get a chance.
Marriage, the curse of so many centuries, the cause of jealousy, suicide and crime,
must be abolished if we wish the young generation to grow to healthy, strong and free
men and women.

E. Goldman.

Firebrand, 18 July 1897, p. 2. This essay, probably the text of a lecture delivered in 1897, is the first version
in print of EG’s lecture on marriage, and the kernel of many such lectures delivered throughout her life. Dur-
ing this same period, her lecture series widened to include “Woman’s Cause,” “The Women in Present and
Future,” “Free Love,” and “Prostitution.” She reworked elements of her lecture on marriage into the essay
“Love and Marriage,” which appeared in her book Anarchism and Other Essays (1910).

7. Michael Bakunin, in God and the State (first English translation, 1883), makes a similar statement
when criticizing “bourgeois Socialists” who have rejected the absurdity of religion but cannot reject
the authority of god or state: “they have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to fol-
low out their thought and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavoring to reconcile the
irreconcilable.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 273

 Ar ticle in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 17 August 1897

Anarchy in Spain and in New York.

Anarchists Here Applaud the Assassination of Cánovas.

Golli Hailed as a Hero.

Emma Goldman Excites Cheers by a Wild, Bloodthirsty Harangue.

The Police Listen Inactive.

“I Glory in the Murder of Cánovas,” Screamed the Frantic Woman.

President McKinley Assailed.

“We Are Enemies of Government; Government Is Tyranny,”

the Goldman Woman Said.

“President McKinley and Mark Hanna are shedding crocodile tears over the killing of
Cánovas del Castillo.1 In their own hearts they are saying ‘Perhaps I will be the next.’
“I do not advise anybody to kill, but whether I advise it or you advise it fortunately
makes no difference. Heroes like Golli do not ask permission of me or of anybody else
to do their duty as they see it.
“So long as tyrants oppress mankind Gollis will be found to execute them.
“We are not enemies of society. We are enemies of government, for government is
tyranny.”
One thousand men and women cheered this sentiment uttered by Emma Goldman,
the Anarchist, at a meeting held at Clarendon Hall, Thirteenth street, between Third and
Fourth avenues, last night.
The crowd was not one upon which the hand of poverty seemed to rest very heavily.
They were, as a rule, more than comfortably dressed, and they looked well fed.
Such a crowd could not have been brought together in any other American city than
this. They listened to speeches in five languages—English, French, German, Italian and

1. On 8 August 1897, Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo (mistakenly identified as “Golli” in the inter-
national press) shot and killed Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in retribution for
the 4 May 1897 execution of five anarchists in the wake of the 7 June 1896 bombing in Barcelona of
a Corpus Christi Day procession.

274 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

Spanish—and they interrupted the speakers with expressions not only in those lan-
guages, but in a variety of patois and dialects.

CELEBRATION OF A CRIME.
A circular that had been widely distributed brought the crowd together. The circular was
really an invitation to rejoice over an assassination. It read:

mass-meeting to
celebrate
the death of the
leading despot of spain,
canovas del castillo,
executed by
anarchist michel angelo golli.

The meeting was the first at which the spirit of anarchy as it exists in this city has
dared to show itself with any strength since Herr Most, High Priest of the Order of Dis-
order, was made to serve a term in the penitentiary. He has been quiet since and was not
present last night.2

POLICE WERE INFORMED.

The police were fully informed of the purpose of the meeting, and although Acting Cap-
tain Diamond, of the East Fifth Street Station, was present with twenty men, who had to
stand by, and hear themselves called “dogs and thieves,” the meeting was not broken up.
Emma Goldman evidently hoped that it would be, and did her utmost to say some-
thing that would cause the police to act.
The Goldman woman entered the big hall after it was crowded, accompanied by
young and pretty girls, who seemed to idolize her. They were followed by as many young
men, who wore red neckties and vainly tried to look unconcerned.
Cheers for Goldman swelled into frantic shouts of approval as she went to the plat-
form and hung up two pictures. One was a picture of Pallás,3 the Barcelona bomb
thrower. The other was a picture of Sante,4 who assassinated President Carnot, of France.

RED FL AG NOT DISPL AYED.

The red flag was not displayed in the hall, for the police had ordered that it should not
be, but scores of the women wore flaming red shirt waists and the men waved red hand-
kerchiefs.

2. Johann Most was released from Blackwell’s Island penitentiary on 18 April 1892.
3. Spanish anarchist Paulino Pallás was executed 6 October 1893 for throwing two bombs at a Catalonia
military commander who had suppressed the January 1892 Jerez uprising.
4. Italian anarchist Sante Caserio assassinated Carnot on 24 June 1894, in retaliation for the Febru-
ary 1894 execution of French anarchist Auguste Vaillant.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 275

 One queer feature of the meeting was that several of the women carried babies in
arms and there were a great many boys and girls there.
A consumptive little man named H. M. Kelly was called upon to preside. He tried to
make a fierce, bloodthirsty speech, but his feeble piccolo voice was not equal to the task,
and the crowd shouted for something stronger.

HE DID HIS BEST.

Kelly struggled on though, and among other things, said:
“We are here to-night as Anarchists to express our emphatic indorsement of the exe-
cution of Cánovas by Golli on Aug. 8.
“We are so anxious to have peace all over the world that we celebrate and rejoice over
the death of the Spanish despot. Cánovas has gone! May his like never be seen again!”
A German made a short speech in which he called Cánovas “a beast” who was “only
fit for slaughter.”
He was followed by a dark-bearded and dark-skinned man from Porto Rico named
Abelardo A. Moscoso, who spoke in Spanish. His torrent of language, as interpreted by
a friend, all went to show that the tortures inflicted upon the men arrested in connection
with the Barcelona bomb throwing had of necessity signed the death warrant of Cáno-
vas, and that Anarchists everywhere should rejoice that the warrant had been executed.

WENT INTO HYSTERICS.

An Italian named Pallavencini 5 claimed to speak as the delegate of the Italian Typo-
graphical Union. He became so excited in his speech that at times he laughed and cried
hysterically. His countrymen in the hall went quite as wild.
“They say that we Anarchists are ferocious beasts, who should not be allowed to ex-
ist,” he said. “Not so! Cánovas was a beast, and had no right to live in this enlightened
age. I have seen documentary proof of his heinous acts.
“The man who killed Cánovas is a martyr to the cause of humanity and progress. The
police knew fifteen days before the execution that the act was decreed,6 for they know that
anarchy works with precision and with certainty.”

“JUST RETRIBUTION.”
“The killing was an act of just retribution. The day of the emancipation of the world is
not far away. Anarchists do not fear the guillotine or the gallows. Anarchy will soon be
the religion of the world.

5. EG described Italian anarchist Salvatore Pallavencini as “a cultivated man, well-informed not only on
the international labor movement, but also on the new tendencies in Italian art and letters” (LML,
p. 238). Pallavencini hosted EG’s visit in 1899 to Barre, Vermont, where he was editor of Lo-Scalpellino
from 1896 to 1897. He moved to Paris in 1900 where, the same year, EG visited him and his family.
6. Following Cánovas’s assassination, American and European newspapers printed rumors that it was
no surprise. The New York Times, for example, reported that the Spanish government had word of an
alleged meeting of anarchists in early July where it was decided to assassinate Cánovas by 15 August.
See New York Times, 9 August 1897, p. 1 and 10 August 1897, p. 1.

276 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 “Anarchists think it is better to kill a ruler who is a tyrant than to have a revolution in
which thousands have to die because of his acts.
“All honor to the Italian people for furnishing the assassin. They call us all assassins.
Well, Italians do sometimes try their hand at that game.
“I am a peaceable man, but when I read of the torture of the Anarchists of Barcelona
my blood boiled, and if there had been one hundred Cánovases I would have rejoiced to
have killed them all.”

AF TER BLOOD-MONEY.
The feeble voiced Kelly got up and plaintively announced that it cost money to hold An-
archist meetings, that bills for rent and printing had to be paid. He asked for $100. The
rent of the hall alone was $40.
The pretty girls passed the collection baskets, with Emma Goldman directing them.
When they got through and counted up they found that they had only $12.80.
Emma Goldman looked savagely through her gold-rimmed glasses at the big crowd,
which just then was cheering the statement of a Spaniard named Arrango,7 who said that
the killing of Cánovas by Golli was the act of a slave rising against long oppression.

EMMA GOLDMAN SPEAKS.

Goldman was introduced. The woman talks with wonderful speed in a high pitched,
harsh voice with a strong German accent. Although a small woman she is very mascu-
line in her actions and manner, and seems to delight in saying risqué as well as blood-
thirsty things in order to evoke applause.
“Some people think it cruel that we should celebrate the death of such a great and no-
ble man as Cánovas,” she said. “Those who have read history and know what Cánovas
has done to the people of Spain, of Cuba and of other Spanish colonies will know, how-
ever, that we are perfectly justified in rejoicing over the death of such a beast.
“If it was an honest workingman who was dead we would be sorry for him, or sorry
for his family, but we cannot even be sorry for the family when the dead man was noth-
ing but a monster. He has spent his whole life devising methods of torturing and kill-
ing men.”

“I GLORY IN THE DEATH OF CÁNOVAS.”

“I glory in the death of Cánovas. I am ashamed of the Cuban patriots that they did not
execute this monster long ago. I glorify the killing of Cánovas by Golli, the hero, because
it removes an obstacle from the path of progress.
“They tell us that Cánovas was really not to blame for it all; that he was but an instru-
ment in the hands of others. I say no. Cánovas was the tyrant and the tens of thousands
of Spanish soldiers were his instruments. Down with all such!
“The tyrants of men are all cowards. Look at President Faure, of France. He hired a

7. Possibly Alfredo Arrango, a Spanish army colonel who fought on behalf of Cuban independence.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 277

 man to throw a bomb in order that he might become notorious, and then used his mis-
erable scheme to try and punish and kill innocent men.8
“They tell us that by despatching one tyrant we will not change society; that another
tyrant will take his place. Yes, my friends, that is true, and another Golli will come up to
meet every such new tyrant. Wherever there is a Caesar there must be a Brutus.”

A SHOT AT THE POLICE.

“It seems to me that this glorious and free country is in great sympathy with Cánovas.
Otherwise they would not send so many policemen and detectives here to watch us to-
night. I do not blame the policemen. They find it easier to stand around a corner twirling
a club and watching for a chance to crack some honest man’s skull with it than they do
to go to work in the shops for twelve or fourteen hours a day. Some of them may be good
men. There is honor even among thieves, you know.
“The authorities of this country, including President McKinley and Mark Hanna, who
promised you prosperity a few months ago but are giving you starvation, are shedding
crocodile tears over the death of Cánovas. In their minds they are perhaps saying to
themselves, ‘Maybe I will be the next.’”

ASSAILS THE PRESIDENT.

“This man McKinley said he had Cuba’s cause at heart before he was elected. Now he is
expressing his sorrow over the death of this Cánovas, who has killed thousands of our
Cuban friends.
“If this man Cánovas believed in a heaven he is probably sitting on the right hand of
the throne now telling the angels all about his life. All tyrants go there, I believe. All of
us Anarchists, free-thinkers, revolutionists and philosophers go to hell, and we have a
lively time there. When I die I would rather go to hell than to heaven.
“It is a shame, I say, that we cannot hold a peaceable meeting here unmolested. Look
at the watchdogs around you. I understand that they are here to make an arrest if they
find any excuse for doing it. Well, I will not bridle my tongue one bit, even at the risk of
having one of them put his delicate hand on my shoulder and say ‘Come with me.’”

MURDERS PREDICTED.
“Cánovas is not the only man who will have to die violently before the social revolution
is accomplished. There are hundreds of people all over the world only waiting for the op-
portunity to show that they are tired of despotism and tyranny.
“It seems to me queer that such a contemptible wretch as Gen. Weyler 9 has been al-
lowed to live so long. His atrocious acts, inhuman almost beyond conception, against

8. EG later wrote Hamon asking him if this staged bombing was actually true (see Letter to Augustin
Hamon, 20 August 1897, below).
9. Spanish general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau (1838 –1930) became governor of Cuba in February 1896.
In order to repress the Liberation Army, General Weyler y Nicolau initiated the “Reconcentration

278 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

Cubans and Americans, deserve death. He murdered Dr. Ruiz, an American citizen.
What is America going to do about it? Sue Spain for $50,000.10
“Shame on such a cowardly country, I say!”

WOE UNTO TYRANTS!

“Do not think that if they kill the brave Golli they will put down Anarchy! The silence of
the martyred anarchists of Chicago in their graves is more eloquent than were their
voices when they lived. Woe unto the tyrants of the world! We have thousands of Gollis!”
The crowd had cheered itself hoarse by the time that Goldman finished speaking, but
many remained to hear speeches by a Frenchman and another Spaniard. When Chair-
man Kelly got up to adjourn the meeting a big man got up and shouted in English:
“Long live Anarchy!”
The crowd echoed the sentiment in all tongues as it filed out of the hall.

New York World, 17 August 1897, pp. 1–2; includes sketch of EG addressing the meeting and portraits of
other speakers. At a meeting of English-speaking anarchists on 22 August, EG defended the assassination
against criticisms voiced by Charles B. Cooper and others. See “Her Comrades Rebuke Emma Goldman,”
New York Tribune, 23 August 1897, EGP, reel 47.

Plan,” to separate local peasants from the insurgents, placing thousands of women and children in
loosely organized concentration camps where disease and malnutrition spread, ultimately killing
hundreds of thousands of people. In America, he was denounced by elements of the press who re-
ferred to him as “The Butcher.” Recalled to Spain in the latter half of 1897, he continued his career
and in July 1909, as captain-general of Catalonia, actively suppressed the anarchist uprising which
ended with the execution of Spanish anarchist and Modern School educator Francisco Ferrer.
10. Ricardo Ruiz de Ugarrio y Salvador (d. 1897) was an Cuban American dentist living in Cuba. Part
of the Cuban resistance, Ruiz was arrested 7 February 1897 and held in solitary confinement in Gua-
nabacoa prison, charged with participation in the derailment, capture, and robbery of a passenger
train in Cuba on 16 January 1897. Found dead in his cell some ten days later, the guards claimed he
committed suicide. However, written in his own blood on a chair (the only piece of furniture in the
cell) were found the words, “They intended to kill me.” His suspicious death in prison prompted an
international incident between the Spanish and U.S. governments the year preceding the Spanish-
American War. At President McKinley’s request, Judge William J. Calhoun of Danville, Illinois, con-
ducted a judicial investigation in Cuba from 13 May to 7 June and determined that the Spanish
government was responsible for Ruiz’s death. EG’s remark about “$50,000” is a reference to the
$75,000 indemnity claim that the U.S. minister to Spain, Stewart Woodford, solicited from the
Spanish government on behalf of the Ruiz family.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 279

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
New York, 20 August 1897

Dear Comrade:

Your letter of July 10th received but have been unable to answer before. up to the present
I have been unable to find any one to write the articles you desire. the following are a
few names of Officers of some of the largest trade Unions, here Samuel Gompers Pres.
American Federation of Labor Washington D.C. Frank Morrison 1 Secretary American
Federation of Labor. Jas. R. Souverign 2 Grand Master Workman K. of L., Little Rock
Arkeansaw. M. M. Garland 3 Pres. Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers.
Pittsburg Pa. W. B. Prescott 4 Pres. International Typographical Union, Desoto Block In-
dianapolis Ind. M. D. Ratchford 5 Pres. United Mine Workers. Columbus Ohio G. W.
Perkins 6 Pres. Cigar Makers International Union Chicago Ill. P. J. McGuire 7 General Sec.

1. Frank Morrison (1859 –1949) was elected secretary of the American Federation of Labor in 1897, a
post he occupied for more than forty years. He first joined the International Typographical Union
in 1886.
2. James R. Sovereign (b. 1854) was grand master workman of the Knights of Labor from 1894 to 1897,
having joined the Knights of Labor in 1881. An active labor journalist and lecturer, he was a member
of the national executive committee of the People’s Party in 1896.
3. Mahlon Morris Garland (1856 –1920) was president of the National Amalgamated Association of Iron
and Steel Workers from 1892 to 1898 and fourth vice-president of the American Federation of Labor
from 1885 to 1898. Garland later served as a U.S. Congressman for the Republican party from 1915
until his death in 1920.
4. William Blair Prescott (1863–1916) joined the International Typographical Union in Toronto in 1883;
he served as president of the union from 1891 to 1898.
5. Michael D. Ratchford (1860 –1949) was president of the local Massillon, Ohio, branch of the United
Mine Workers of America from 1890 to 1892, general organizer from 1893 to 1894, and president of
the Ohio Miners from 1895 to 1896; he served as president of the United Mine Workers of America
from 1897 to 1898 and went on to become a representative on the national Industrial Commission
from 1898 to 1900.
6. A close associate of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, George W. Perkins
(1856 –1934) was president of the Cigar Makers International Union. Serving first as vice-president
of the union from 1885 to 1891, he acted as president for six months during 1888 and 1889. In 1891
he was elected president, a post he kept for thirty-five years.
7. Peter James McGuire (1852 –1906) was chief executive officer of the United Brotherhood of Carpen-
ters and Joiners of America from 1881 to 1901. A member of the International Working Men’s Asso-
ciation, he helped organize the Social Democratic Workingmen’s Party in 1874. McGuire was also a
founder of the New York City Central Labor Union in 1882. In 1886, he was one of the founders of
the American Federation of Labor and its first secretary. But he was forced to resign as vice president
of the AFL in 1889 because of bad health and alcoholism, and then in 1902, when charges of em-
bezzlement were brought against him, McGuire was forced to resign from the AFL.

280 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of A. Philadelphia Pa. and Jas. A. O’Connell 8 Pres.
International Association of Machinsts, Monon Bldg. Chicago Ill. also write to Eugune V.
Debs 9 Chicago Ill.
As to your book I have been to one of the largest publishing houses here. Scribners.
and they could not handle it, several other publishers would not pass judgement on it un-
til they saw an English translation of it and at the present time I can hardly tend to it as
I start away on a three months propaganda tour in two weeks. still there is a Comrade in
Boston who I will see about translating it and then try again.10
What effect did the death of the Canovas del Castillo 11 have on the general public in
France, here in America it created a big sensation and it is safe to say that Anarchism has
not been talked about by the newspapers and public at large since 1886 &-87 12 as dur-
ing the past 10 days. pages of the daily press have been taken up by a description of the
tortures and while all of the American Newspapers have admitted that Canovas was a
monster, still when we held our meeting to celebrate the event on Monday night we were
denounced as glorifing murder, the New York Journal the most sensational paper in
American Daily papers, had some remarkable Editorals on the subject, which could
hardly have been improved on by Anarchists, yet they turned tail when we had our meet-
ing and denounced us in the most bitter terms. hypocrisy of the press is one of the fea-
tures of American Journalism.
How do the Comrades in Paris regard the recent bomb explosions in Paris, as gen-
uine attempts on Faure’s life or police plots. the address of Mrs. Parsons 13 is as follows.
Mrs. L. E. Parsons 1777 Troy st. Chicago Ill. U.S.A. with kind regards to all Comrades.

Fraternally
E Goldmann

p.s. I send you by same mail clippings of N.Y. papers.

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH. Except for the signature, the handwriting of this letter is not EG’s; it may
possibly be Edward Brady’s.

8. James A. O’Connell (1858 –1936) served as grand master machinist of the International Association
of Machinists from 1893 to 1911. He first joined the union in 1889 and became a member of the ex-
ecutive board in 1891. O’Connell was the third vice-president of the AFL from 1895 to 1913 and sec-
ond vice-president from 1914 to 1918.
9. As president of the American Railway Union, in 1897 Eugene Debs helped found the Social De-
mocracy of America socialist organization.
10. EG had offered to help Hamon find an American publisher for his Psychologie du militaire profes-
sionnel. No English-language edition was ever published.
11. Spanish prime minister Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated by anarchist Michele Angiolillo on
8 August 1897.
12. EG refers to the tumult surrounding the Haymarket affair and subsequent execution of four anar-
chists in 1886 and 1887.
13. EG had promised in her 25 July 1897 letter to Hamon to get him more material on the “Chicago com-
rades” from Lucy Parsons, anarchist, labor activist, and widow of Haymarket anarchist Albert Parson.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 281

 Ar ticle in the P R O V I D E N C E E V E N I N G B U L L E T I N
Providence, R.I., 4 September 1897

Anarchy.

Emma Goldman Held Forth on Olneyville Square Last Night.

Addressed Her “Fellow Slaves” in Usual Strain.

There Were Rival Attractions, but They Were Completely Eclipsed

by the Little Dark-Complexioned Woman Mounted on a Dry-Goods Box,
Who Said Long Hair Was Not Necessary to be an Anarchist.

There were rival attractions on Olneyville square last night. They were the gospel wagon,
a gentleman who sold everything from a shoestring to a complete shaving outfit and
threw in a ventriloquistic entertainment free of charge, a series of pictures and adver-
tisements thrown on a screen and finally Emma Goldman, whose Anarchistic beliefs are
too well known to need much further description.
The gospel wagon was doing pretty well until the ventriloquist, alias shoestring sales-
man, arrived. When that gentleman proceeded to converse with a wooden dummy and
exchange compliments with an invisible personage on a nearby roof the fickle crowd de-
serted the gospel wagon and flocked to the fakir’s standard.
As soon as the dummy began to grow less voluble in his remarks and the peddler be-
gan to cry his wares the crowd gazed at the panoramic mixture of advertisements and
pictures, principally advertisements, that were thrown on a screen stretched above the
roof of a building.
Then Miss Goldman arrived. It was nearly 9 o’clock, and the crowd was looking for
some new excitement. A packing box was improvised into a platform, and John H. Cook 1
of this city mounted upon it. Mr. Cook did this principally to draw the crowd. It did not
draw very well at first. The fakir had renewed his seductive conversation with a gor-
geously bedecked doll whose lower jaw worked on a hinge. It was a last effort to keep the
crowd around him. The doll’s lower jaw flapped to and fro frantically, and the ventrilo-
quist wiped drops of perspiration from his forehead, although the night was cool.
Yet one by one the crowd went to the place where Mr. Cook was setting forth the ob-
ject of the meeting.

1. John H. Cook was an anarchist and longtime labor activist in his hometown of Providence, R.I.

282 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 Finally a little woman, with a complexion that many of her sisters with less unpopu-
lar ideas might envy, and clad in a dress of some dark material, stepped upon the plat-
form with head uncovered. Immediately the crowd, in a body, deserted the ventriloquist
and surrounded the Anarchistic teacher.
The gospel wagon withdrew. The pictures on the screen quivered in indignation be-
cause of the lack of attention to their artistic details.
Miss Goldman’s salutation was characteristic:
“Fellow slaves,” she said. “I think you will all be indignant because I call you slaves.”
If any one was he did not say a word. Not even a bomb was forthcoming. The crowd was
made up almost entirely of men. There were only one or two women in the audience.
Continuing, Miss Goldman said: “If you would only consider the question you would
at once admit that I am right and give me credit for telling you the truth. I admit that you
are not slaves in the sense that you are sold upon a block, but you are slaves nevertheless.
The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves. You have to dread
the idea of being unemployed and of being compelled to support your masters.” 2
Miss Goldman then made a fierce onslaught on all clergymen, characterizing them
as hypocrites, and the Gospel which they preached as something which ought not to be
allowed the place in the minds of men that it is given.
“Christ said: ‘I will love My neighbor as Myself.’ The people do not do this— each one
strives to put himself at the front, regardless of the rights of others. Under the present
days of capital, poverty and wealth, to preach of love or of sympathy is simply a farce. You
are but the working class, the common people. The capitalist says that if you don’t have
him you can’t get along. He says you are dependent upon him, and that without him you
would die on the street.
“This is not right. The police, the Government machine and all the officials are ruled
by money. Can I call you anything less than slaves when you allow your right of free
speech to be trampled under foot? I can’t blame the police or the members of the police
force. I look upon them as wage slaves as well as you. The only difference is that they have
an easier job. They show their brotherly love by letting their clubs fall on your heads
every once in a while.
“To believe in any labor leader who goes up on a platform and says ‘I am your saviour’
will keep you in slavery. It is only you that can help yourselves. It is only common sense
you want. I don’t preach robbery or death. I am against them both. Anarchy means noth-
ing else than peace and happiness to all. The press has reported that only a man with
long and unkempt hair and wild eyes and crazed speech can be an Anarchist. I was talk-

2. EG’s comparison of the hired slave and the slave bought and sold on a block echoes Albert Parsons in
his address to the jury in October 1886, reproduced in The Accused, the Accusers . . . (Chicago: Social-
istic Publishing Society, [1886?]). In his speech Parsons stated, “The chattel slave of the past—the
wage slave of today; what is the difference? The master selected under chattel slavery his own slaves.
Under the wage slavery system the wage slave selects his master.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 283

 ing with a man to-night. I said: ‘I am an Anarchist.’ He said: ‘You don’t look like one.’
They have a false idea of us. If you wish to hold the right to the claim of being the freest
union in the world, you must allow the women to have equal rights with you. Then you
can hope for a free union. Till then I shall certainly have the right to call you slaves.”
Miss Goldman will give another open-air meeting in Burgess square to-night 3 and
will hold a meeting in the Casino Sunday afternoon.4

Providence (R.I.) Evening Bulletin, 4 September 1897, p. 2.

3. EG’s speech in Burgess Square on the evening of 4 September prompted Providence mayor Edwin
McGuinness to threaten her arrest if she attempted to speak in a public plaza again. EG defied his or-
ders, speaking three days later in Market Square, the principal open-air forum in Providence. She was
arrested, the first time since 1893, and was held overnight at the central police station. See her account
in “Letters from a Tour,” no. 2 (1 January 1898), Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897–15 February
1898, below. Although EG suspected that her next visit to Providence would end in her arrest and trial,
her return the next January passed without incident.
4. On 5 September, at the Providence Casino at 936 Westminster Street, EG spoke on the subject of the
8 August 1897 assassination of Spanish prime minister Cánovas del Castillo by Italian anarchist
Michele Angiolillo. A pamphlet entitled “The Modern Inquisition of Spain” (also issued as a supple-
ment to the Firebrand, 11 July 1897) was distributed to everyone in attendance. See “More Anarchy,”
Providence Daily Journal, 8 September 1897, and “Told to Get Out,” Providence Evening Bulletin, 8 Sep-
tember 1897, EGP, reel 47. For EG’s view of the assassination of Cánovas, see “Anarchy in Spain and
New York,” Article in the New York World, 17 August 1897, above.

284 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 Ar ticle in the B O S T O N D A I LY G L O B E
Boston, 13 September 1897

Advised Strenuous Measures.

Emma Goldmann Denounced Shooting of Miners and

Advocated Resort to Arms to Obtain Rights.

Miss Emma Goldmann talked on “The Rights of the People” before 500 people in Phenix
hall yesterday forenoon, and delivered a characteristic anarchistic address, which was lib-
erally applauded.
She denounced the attack upon the striking miners at Hazleton by the deputy sher-
iffs,1 and condemned the social system, advising strenuous measures to put it down, and
crying out for revenge.
“When I think of this latest legalized murder,” she began, “it seems like a mockery to
the dead miners today to talk and talk, when it is necessary to act. The workingmen were
fired upon because they were human beings who wanted bread for their children and
homes for their families. They have been kept starving by the authorities and then fired
upon because they peaceably asked for bread.
“You do not have to be an anarchist. If you want bread you are an enemy to society and
must be put down. The order to kill the workingmen was given because they asked
peaceably for the necessaries of life. If such a thing is a crime against society then soci-
ety should be attacked and put down.
“I feel that nothing short of action is to be done today. If I am not with the widows of
those miners today extending my sympathy to them it is because I have not the money
to pay the railroad kings to take me there.
“My friends, you have free speech just so long as you say what the authorities desire
that you should say, and they determine what constitutes free speech. You have this same
kind of free speech in darkest Russia, in Germany, or even under the sultan, just as in
enlightened America, where men are shot down like dogs. But I can tell you if this had
been done in Russia the sheriff would not have lived 24 hours. Laws here are made by
the capitalists and monopolists and enforced in the interest of capitalists and monopo-
lists, against the people.

1. On 10 September 1897, at least 19 men died and between 35 and 50 were injured, most of them shot
in the back, when deputies opened fire on a peaceful march of striking miners at Lattimer, near
Hazleton, in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. In March the following year, Sheriff
James L. Martin and his deputies were acquitted of murder charges. Among anarchists and others on
the left, “Hazleton” (historians now call it the Lattimer Massacre) became a symbol of the unpunished
violence that could be meted out to organized labor.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 285

 Sketches of Goldman and her audience speckled the pages of mainstream newspapers;
this drawing appeared in the 6 September 1897 Boston Daily Globe. (Reprinted courtesy
of The Boston Globe)

“If those strikers had been Americans the sheriff would not have dared to fire upon
them. But they were foreigners, and foreigners do not amount to anything. The foreigner
is good enough to build your elegant houses and your roads, sew your clothes and do
everything for your comfort, but he is not good enough to enjoy the advantages that be-
long to the heads of the government. If you want to get your rights you must go armed;
you must meet your oppressors with the sword. If that sheriff had known those miners

286 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

were armed he would not have dared to act as he did. He would have feared the conse-
quences. But he knew they were unarmed. They were Hungarians and Poles, and no one
knew or understood what they wanted or for what they were peaceably asking.2
“It is time to act. I know how hard it is to arouse the Anglo-Saxon race. They are so
phlegmatic, so cold, so slow to action. It is only when 100 of them are shot down that
they will rise to defend themselves.”
The greater part of Miss Goldmann’s address was given to excoriations of the wealthy,
the depicting of the attitude of the employer towards his workmen as a slave driver crush-
ing a serf, and to a general denunciation of the laws and their enforcement. The militia,
the police officers and every representative body charged with the enforcement of the
statutes were the objects of her caustic criticism.

Boston Daily Globe, 13 September 1897, p. 6.

2. The unarmed marchers were approached by Sheriff Martin, who ordered them to stop marching
and disperse. The marchers, most of whom were Polish, Slovakian, and Lithuanian immigrants and
did not understand English, continued marching. The sheriff and his eighty-six deputies then
opened fire.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 287

 Ar ticle in the C H I C A G O T R I B U N E
Chicago, 30 September 1897

Emma Goldman Has Her Say.

Regulated in Reform Convention She Speaks in a Hall All by Herself.

Emma Goldman, who found too much law and regulation in the reform convention 1 in
this city, had a meeting all of her own at Union Hall, 45 North Clark street, last evening.
“I am not going to bring about a revolution,” she said. “I have not the power, I am
sorry to say, or I would do so tomorrow. I will be content if I sow the seeds of discontent.”
Anarchists of the Social Democracy Branch 2 brand, she declared, were fit subjects
for the insane asylum.2
“An Anarchist who believes in division of property, the killing of the rich, and the
burning of fine houses is an idiot,” she exclaimed.

Chicago Tribune, 30 September 1897, p. 5.

1. This national labor convention took place in Orpheus Hall in Chicago from the 27th to the 29th of
September, bringing together representatives of reform clubs, trade unionists, and anarchists. It was
actually the follow-up to a convention called by the striking United Mine Workers of America that took
place at the end of August in St. Louis. The American Federation of Labor advised its unions not to
attend because the miners’ strike had been settled; consequently, the Chicago conference was
sparsely attended. Led by EG, the anarchists walked out of the convention on 28 September, but not
before EG expressed her opinion in a half-hour address to the group assembled. For EG’s account, see
“Letters from a Tour,” no. 4 (1 February 1898), Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897–15 February
1898, below.
2. In Chicago, Branch 2 of the Social Democracy of America responded to the Hazleton massacre by
passing various resolutions on 12 September. It cast “plutocracy” as the real culprit in the shooting of
strikers by police deputies, and urged that “for every miner killed and wounded a millionaire should
be treated in the same manner.” One resolution recommended “the torch as the most successful
weapon to wield against them,” a theme picked up by other Chicago radicals. Roy M. Goodwin, a
member of the Social Democracy’s national board of directors, speaking “for himself and not for his
organization,” said he “would burn every dollar’s worth of their property” and “would destroy their
fine palaces.” Only Branch 2 passed such retaliatory resolutions, for which it had its charter sus-
pended on 18 September by the executive council of the national office, headed by Eugene Debs (and
including Roy Goodwin), after a four-hour meeting with Branch 2’s board of directors. The leadership
of Branch 2 included well-known anarchists, among them T. Putnam Quinn, Lucy Parsons, Jay Fox,
and Eric B. Morton. Both Fox, a member of the special committee that drew up the resolutions, and
Quinn, president of Branch 2, later defended in Free Society the actions of their branch and con-
demned Debs for bowing to pressure from the Chicago press and police and silencing Social De-
mocracy’s more radical voices. Debs defended the action of the executive council in the party’s organ,
the Social Democrat, as well as in the Chicago Tribune where he declared, “We believe in the ballot, not
in bullets.” See Chicago Tribune, 13 September 1897, pp. 1–2; Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1897,
p. 1; Free Society, 14 November 1897, p. 6; Free Society, 3 July 1898, pp. 6 –7; and Social Democrat (Chi-
cago), 23 September 1897, p. 2, for reports of this controversy.

288 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 Inter view in the
S T . L O U I S P O S T - D I S P AT C H S U N D AY M A G A Z I N E
St. Louis, 24 October 1897

What Is There in Anarchy for Woman?

By Emma Goldman.

“What does anarchy hold out to me—a woman?”

“More to woman than to anyone else— everything which she has not—freedom and
equality.”
Quickly, earnestly Emma Goldman, the priestess of anarchy, exiled from Russia,
feared by police, and now a guest of St. Louis Anarchists,1 gave this answer to my
question.
I found her at No. 1722 Oregon avenue, an old-style two-story brick house, the home
of a sympathizer 2—not a relative as has been stated.
I was received by a good-natured, portly German woman, and taken back to a typical
German dining-room— everything clean and neat as soap and water could make them.
After carefully dusting a chair for me with her apron, she took my name back to the bold
little free-thinker. I was welcome. I found Emma Goldman sipping her coffee and par-
taking of bread and jelly, as her morning’s repast. She was neatly clad in a percale shirt
waist and skirt, with white collar and cuffs, her feet encased in a loose pair of cloth slip-
pers. She doesn’t look like a Russian Nihilist who will be sent to Siberia if she ever
crosses the frontier of her native land.
“Do you believe in marriage?” I asked.
“I do not,” answered the fair little Anarchist, as promptly as before. “I believe that
when two people love each other that no judge, minister or court, or body of people, have
anything to do with it. They themselves are the ones to determine the relations which

1. EG’s eight days in St. Louis, beginning 16 October 1897, were extensively covered by the local press
and drew the keen interest of the authorities. When it was erroneously reported that she planned to
speak at an open-air meeting on 19 October in front of the city’s statue of President Ulysses Grant,
Mayor Ziegenhein declared such a gathering illegal and ordered police to bar any attempt. Simulta-
neously, the city’s House of Delegates passed a resolution approving the actions of the mayor and po-
lice department in stifling the “un-American” and “unpatriotic” teachings of a “notorious Anarchist.”
Under police surveillance, EG spoke the next night at Walhalla Hall to an overflow audience of hun-
dreds. So successful were her meetings in St. Louis that her stay there the following year garnered no
coverage at all since, according to Solidarity, “the dailies found out they were helping the Anarchists
in their propaganda.” See St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 20 October 1897, EGP, reel 47; and Solidarity,
1 May 1898, p. 4.
2. EG stayed at the home of August Sendlein, an anarchist and cheesemaker.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 289

 Front-page feature story on Goldman in the 24 October 1897 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine. Journalist
Miriam Michelson’s interview departed from the usual mocking tone of the mainstream press and displayed intellec-
tual curiosity and excitement about Goldman’s ideas. (Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, copy-
right 1897)

they shall hold with one another. When that relation becomes irksome to either party, or
one of the parties, then it can be as quietly terminated as it was formed.”
Miss Goldman gave a little nod of her head to emphasize her words, and quite a pretty
head it was, crowned with soft brown hair, combed with a bang and brushed to one side.
Her eyes are the honest blue, her complexion clear and white. Her nose though rather
broad and of a Teutonic type, was well formed. She is short of stature, with a well-
rounded figure. Her whole type is more German than Russian. The only serious physi-
cal failing that she has is in her eyes. She is so extremely nearsighted that with glasses
she can scarcely distinguish print.
“The alliance should be formed,” she continued, “not as it is now, to give the woman
a support and home, but because the love is there, and that state of affairs can only be
brought about by an internal revolution, in short, Anarchy.”

290 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 She said this as calmly as though she had just expressed an ordinary every-day fact,
but the glitter in her eyes showed the “internal revolutions” already at work in her busy
brain.
“What does Anarchy promise woman?”
“It holds everything for woman—freedom, equality— everything that woman has
not now.”
“Isn’t woman free?”
“Free! She is the slave of her husband and her children. She should take her part in
the business world the same as the man; she should be his equal before the world, as she
is in the reality. She is as capable as he, but when she labors she gets less wages. Why?
Because she wears skirts instead of trousers.”
“But what is to become of the ideal home life, and all that now surrounds the mother,
according to a man’s idea?”
“Ideal home life, indeed! The woman, instead of being the household queen, told
about in story books, is the servant, the mistress, and the slave of both husband and chil-
dren. She loses her own individuality entirely, even her name she is not allowed to keep.
She is the mistress of John Brown or the mistress of Tom Jones; she is that and nothing
else. That is the way I think of her.”
Miss Goldman has a pleasant accent. She rolls her r’s and changes her r’s into v’s and
vice-versa, with a truly Russian pronunciation. She gesticulates a great deal. When she
becomes excited her hands and feet and shoulders all help to illustrate her meanings.
“What would you do with the children of the Anarchistic era?”
“The children would be provided with common homes, big boarding schools, where
they will be properly cared for and educated and in every way given as good, and in most
cases better, care than they would receive in their own homes. Very few mothers know how
to take proper care of their children, anyway. It is a science only a very few have learned.”
“But the women that desire a home life and the care of their own children, the do-
mestic woman, what of her?”
“Oh, of course, the women that desire could keep their children home and confine
themselves as strictly to domestic duties as they desired. But it would give those women
who desire something broader, a chance to attain any height they desired. With no poor,
and no capitalists, and one common purse, this earth will afford the heaven that the
Christians are looking for in another world.”
She gazed contemplatively in the bottom of the empty coffee cup, as though she saw
in imagination the ideal State, already an actuality.
“Who will take care of the children?” I asked, breaking in upon her reverie.
“Every one,” she answered, “has tastes and qualifications suiting them to some occu-
pation. I am a trained nurse. I like to care for the sick. So it will be with some women.
They will want to care for and teach the children.”
“Won’t the children lose their love for their parents and feel the lack of their compan-
ionship?” A thought of the affectionate little darlings being relegated to a sort of an or-
phan asylum crossed my mind.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 291

 “The parents will have the same opportunities of gaining their confidences and af-
fections as they have now. They can spend just as much time there as they please or have
them with them just as often as desired. They will be the children of love—healthy,
strong-minded—and not as now, in most cases, born of hate and domestic dissensions.”
“What do you call love?”
“When a man or woman finds some quality or qualities in another that they admire
and has an overweening desire to please that person, even to the sacrificing of personal
feeling; when there is that subtle something drawing them together, that those who love
recognize, and feel it in the inmost fiber of their being, then I call that love.” She finished
speaking and her face was suffused with a rosy blush.
“Can a person love more than one at a time?”
“I don’t see why not—if they find the same lovable qualities in several persons. What
should prevent one loving the same things in all of them?
“If we cease to love the man or woman and find some one else, as I said before, we
talk it over together and quietly change the mode of living. The private affairs of the fam-
ily need not then be talked over in the courts and become public property. No one can
control the affections, therefore there should be no jealousies.
“Heartaches? Oh, yes,” she said, sadly, “but not hatred because he or she has tired of
the relations. The human race will always have heartaches as long as the heart beats in
the breast.
“My religion,” she laughingly repeated. “I was of the Hebrew faith when a girl—you
know I am a Jewess—but now I am an atheist. No one has been able to prove either the
inspiration of the Bible or the existence of a God to my satisfaction. I believe in no here-
after except the hereafter that is found by the physical matter existing in the human body.
I think that lives again in some other form, and I don’t think that anything once created
over is lost—it goes on and on in first one shape, then another. There is no such thing
as a soul—it is all the physical matter.”
Pretty Miss Goldman finished speaking, and a delicate flush mounted to her cheek as
I asked her if she intended to marry.
“No; I don’t believe in marriage for others, and I certainly should not preach one thing
and practice another.”
She sat in an easy attitude with one leg crossed over the other. She is in every sense a
womanly looking woman, with masculine mind and courage.
She laughed as she said there were fifty police at her lecture on Wednesday night, and
she added, “If there had of been a bomb thrown I would surely have been blamed for it.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 24 October 1897, p. 9; includes three sketches of Goldman based
on “photographs taken by the Sunday Post-Dispatch photographer for whom Miss Goldman posed.”
Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

292 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 Series in S T U R M V O G E L
15 December 1897 and 15 Januar y 1898

Reise-Briefe.

I.
Es wurden in der letzten Zeit, sowohl in Europa als hierzulande, so viele Reisebriefe
geschrieben, daß es eigentlich die reinste Nachahmung ist, meine Erlebnisse und Erfah-
rungen, die ich während meiner 14-wöchentlichen Bummelei im Westen gemacht habe,
zu publizieren. Wer imitirt übrigens heutzutage nicht? Redner und Journalisten, Schrift-
steller und Poeten, Sänger und Schauspieler. Alle wiederholen nur das, was schon An-
dere vor ihnen gesagt, geschrieben, gesungen und gespielt haben. Das Originelle wird
nicht jeden Tag geschaffen, noch viel weniger Originale jeden Tag geboren. Es giebt zwar
eine Menge von Leuten, die sich einbilden, große Geister, ja, sogar Genies zu sein; aber
in Wirklichkeit sind diese armen Menschenkinder wie die Fliege, welche auf dem Felde
sich gemütlich auf das Horn des Ochsen gesetzt, und nach vollbrachter Tageslast stolz
mit dem Ausrufe in die Stadt kam: “Wir haben gepflügt!” Da ich weder eingebildet bin,
noch mich je zu den Größen, oder gar Genies gerechnet habe, so mögen meine Freunde
mir das Imitiren verzeihen, das heißt, wenn sie mir überhaupt etwas zu verzeihen
haben.
Das Reisen ist gewiß eine schöne Sache, wenn man plenty cash in der Tasche hat und
weder von Freunden noch Genossen abhängig ist. Aber reisen, wenn man gerade so viel
hat um in die nächste Stadt zu gelangen, heute bei dem einen zu essen bekommt, (oder
auch nicht), morgen bei dem andern entweder am Fußboden, oder im Familienbett,
(mit Ausschluß des Hausvaters natürlich) schlafen muß, ist zwar nicht besonders an-
genehm, aber gerade solche Schwierig- und Widerwärtigkeiten verleihen meinen Reisen
stets einen besonderen Reiz. Vielleicht weil ich, wie mein Freund, the Irish-dutchman
sagt, eine geborene Vagabondin bin.
Es wurde mir oft gesagt, und wie ich es selbst am besten weiß, wie wenig ich mit
meiner Rasse gemein habe; nicht daß mir dieser Umstand, zur besonderen Ehre ge-
reichen soll—aber es ist nun einmal so, und da kann weder ich noch die Rasse dafür ve-
rantwortlich gemacht werden. Das Bedürfnis zu wandern; von Ort zu Ort zu ziehen, und
wie der ewige Jude, nirgends Rast noch Ruhe zu finden, habe ich aber doch von den Ju-
den geerbt. Meine Russengenossen konnten zwar ihren eigenen Willen selten in An-
wendung bringen, denn sie wurden nie gefragt, ob sie gehen wollen oder nicht. Sie wur-
den einfach von Land zu Land, von Stelle zu Stelle gehetzt, gehaßt und gemieden gleich
Aussätzigen. Selbst in diesem Jahrhundert der Intelligenz, des Wissens, des Fortschritts
und der Aufklärung werden die Juden überall nur geduldet und es giebt wohl sehr
wenige Arier, welche ganz frei von Vorurtheilen in diesem Punkte sind.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 293

 Mein Hang zum Vagabundieren, pour la vie bohème, wäre demnach genügend Be-
weis, daß mir nicht alle Eigenschaften der Semiten fehlen. Nicht die Nothwendigkeit,
die Menschen von meinen Ansichten zu überzeugen oder die Welt aus den Angeln zu
heben, veranlaßt mich, zeitweise von Stadt zu Stadt zu ziehen; sondern, wie gesagt,
mein rastloser, unruhiger Geist, das Bedürfnis, neue Gesichter, andere Menschen und
ihre Eigenschaften, Sitten und Gebräuche, Vorzüge und Mängel kennen zu lernen,
treiben mich aus der gewohnten alltäglichen Umgebung. Monate-, jahrelang, ja viel-
leicht fürs ganze Leben an einem Platze weilen zu sollen, immer mit denselben Men-
schen verkehren zu müssen, in derselben Bierhöhle zu trinken— dieses trostlos öde
Einerlei der Alltäglichkeit würde mich mit Entsetzen erfullen. Einer meiner Freunde,
bei dem sich die Gewohnheit, den Handlungen anderer unlautere Motive zu unter-
schieben, zur Krankheit entwickelt hat, behauptet allerdings, die Sucht zur Masse zu
sprechen, die Befriedigung, welche mir der Beifall der Zuhörer verschafft, das wären die
eigentlichen Motive, welche mich von Zeit zu Zeit veranlassen, auszureißen. Gefehlt,
mein Lieber. Ich glaube auch nicht einen Augenblick daran, daß ich durch mein Reden
die Menschen ändern oder zu Anarchisten machen kann; gar keine Spur. Erstens reicht
meine Rednergabe hierzu nicht aus; und zweitens bin ich längst zur Überzeugung
gelangt, daß die Sprache zu armselig, zu ohnmächtig ist, um das wiederzugeben, was
man empfindet. Will mir einer meiner sprachkundigen, intelligenten Freunde be-
weisen, daß sich die Liebe, der Haß, der Schmerz, die Freude, das Gemüths—und See-
lenleben in Worte kleiden läßt? Empfindungen lassen sich nur durch die That, niemals
aber durch die Sprache ausdrücken. Wenn ich von der Plattform aus zuweilen zu Tau-
senden meine Meinung auch noch so warm und begeistert gesprochen, empfinde ich
nachträglich doch so etwas wie moralischen Kater; weiß ich doch, um das wiederzuge-
ben was in meinem innern vorgeht, ich mir das Herz aus dem Leibe reißen und es den
Anwesenden vor die Füße werfen müßte, überzeugt, daß sie mich auch dann noch nicht
verstehen wurden. Ja, weshalb sprichst du denn überhaupt? wird mancher fragen.
Wahrhaftig, nich des Redens, des Applauses oder der Notorität halber.
Jeder auch nur einigermaßen sensativ und selbständig veranlagte Mensch muß sich
gegen die ihm umgebende Gemeinheit, Kleinlichkeit, gegen die Lügen und die Besch-
ränkung seiner individuellen Freiheit auflehnen; und wenn er keine Gelegenheit hat,
seinen Widerwillen gegen das Bestehende zu zeigen, so speichert sich der Haß, Zorn,
Groll und die Verzweiflung in seiner Brust so lange auf, bis sie ihn zu ersticken drohen;
dann muß er gleich dem Ertrinkenden, der den Strohhalm erfaßt, auf irgend einer
Weise die ihm erdrückende Last abwerfen. Aus diesen Gründen rede ich, nur um mir
Luft zu machen, um aufzuschreien gleich dem verwundeten Thiere; denn ich bilde mir
ein, ein einziger von all den Tausenden muß mich ja doch hören, wird mich verstehen,
wird meine Empörung begreifen, mit mir empfinden und die Gemeinheit, den Zwang
und die Unterwürfigkeit hassen und dagegen kämpfen. Um den einzelnen war es und
wird es mir zu thun sein, und da man unter vielen doch einen wahren edlen und großen
Menschen finden kann, so gehe ich eben zu ihnen. Und ich habe gefunden wirklich
wahre, herrliche Charaktere; ich habe denen in Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit,

294 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

Cleveland, Buffalo und anderen Plätzen getroffen: verborgene Edelsteine, welche unge-
kannt leben und leiden und doch so viel Licht ausstrahlen, um einem das bestehende
Jammerthal auf Augenblicke vergessen zu machen.
Vorstehende Einleitung zum Bericht über meine Agitations-Tourist etwas weitläufig
ausgefallen—ich wollte soeben mit dem eigentlichen Bericht beginnen, da kommt der
Redacter, Sturm-, Pech- und Eisvogel, das Scheusal, oder wie er auch sonst noch von
wohlwollenden Freunden benannt wird und befiehlt kategorisch Schluß. Ganz gegen
meine Gewohnheit muß ich mich (aber nicht ohne Protest) also fügen, sonst wird mir
noch die Gelegenheit entzogen in den nächsten “Sturmvögeln” meine Fortsetzung brin-
gen zu dürfen, und das wäre schrecklich.——

III.
In Boston sprach ich in zwei gut besuchten Versammlungen; von da gings nach New
Haven, wo ich ebefalls eine starke Versammlung adressirte. Von New Haven fuhr ich
nach New York und von da nach Philadelphia. In N.Y. sprach ich in einer Protestver-
sammlung gegen den Hazeltoner Mord von 21 Strikern. Ah, dieses Protestiren mit
Worten nur, es ist die reinste Ironie! Ich möchte mich immer selber ohrfeigen, wenn ich
nach einem geradezu bestialischen Gewaltakt, wie der vom Sheriff Martin verübte, nur
dagegen rede, während jeder Nerv in mir zuckt, solch einen Bluthund zu erwürgen; und
wäre es auch nur, um der herrschenden Klasse einen Beweis zu liefern, daß sie nicht
immer ungestraft wehrlose Arbeiter morden kann . . .
In Philadelphia fanden sehr gut besuchte englische Versammlungen statt, welche
von der Ladies Liberal League, Single Taxers und Friendship Liberal League, für mich ar-
rangirt wurden. Von dort ging ich über Washington nach Pittsburgh.
In Washington fand keine Versammlung statt, aber ich machte dort Halt, um ver-
schiedene Freunde des “Armen Teufel” kennen zu lernen. Ich konnte nur einige dieser
Brüder treffen und ich muß gestehen, daß mich der Abstecher nach Wash. nicht reute,
denn ich habe dort ein paar treffliche Menschen kennen gelernt.
Leider bleibt es einem in der Welt nicht erspart, neben wackeren Menschen auch
solchen Gesellen zu begegnen, bei deren Zeugung ein unverzeihlicher Irrthum began-
gen wurde. Diese Leutschen hätten nämlich als Vierfüßler zur Welt kommen sollen;
denn als Zweifüßler sind sie weder Menschen noch Thiere.
Da war unter anderen ein Architekt, alter Abonnent des “A.T.”, ein Regierungs-
knecht, ein Mensch mit einem “Ohrfeigengesicht”, wie Freund Reitzel sagt, der nicht
begreifen konnte, daß ich als Anarchistin den Sinn für das Schöne und Gute im Men-
schen erwecken möchte. So ein Staatsverbrechen— der Masse begreiflich machen zu
wollen, daß sie auch ein Recht zum Leben hat! . . . Es wollte diesem Patron gar nicht in
den Schädel, daß ein Anarchist das Predigen von Entbehrung, Opfern, Geduld und Re-
signation den Pfaffen überläßt, um für den Genuß des einzelnen auf Kosten der an-
deren, sondern für das Wohlleben des Individuums, als auch für das der Gesammtheit.
Was versteht übrigens so eine Regierungsseele vom Genuß?
Der zweite ähnlichen Schlages war ein dicker Bierbrauer aus Cincinnati, ebenfalls

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 295

 ein alter Leser des “A.T.”, der sich gerade in Washington aufhielt und im Hotel Fritz
Reuter wohnte, wo auch ich abstieg. Dieser schien zwar irgend welche Begriffe vom
Genuß zu haben—seine stark geröthete Nase veranlaßte mich, einen solchen Schluß zu
ziehen. Ein Riesenkerl mit einem Wanst, bei dessen Anblick ich mir meiner Mängel in
der Mathematik bewußt wurde; denn um das Quantum Bier zu berechnen, das dieses
Faß in sich barg, dazu gehörten die mathematischen Kenntnisse einer Kowalewska. Sein
Schmalzgesicht glänzte nur so, als er hörte, daß ich die E.G. bin und er traktirte sogle-
ich die ganze Gesellschaft; ich arme Seele aber mußte dafür alle seine Familiengeschich-
ten hören, und da er schon Großvater ist, so kann man sich denken, wielang dieselben
ausfielen. Er vertraute mir sogar die Nummer seines Zimmers an und frug so ganz
nebenbei, welches Zimmer ich inne hätte. In der Hitze des Gefechts, oder des Gelages,
um die Wahrheit zu gestehen, fiel mir die Frage gar nicht auf und ich sagte ihm meine
Nummer.
Nach langem hin und her Discutiren über alle möglichen Tagesfragen, wurde es 2
Uhr Morgens und an der Zeit aufzubrechen. Ich war kaum eine halbe Stunde im Bett,
als jemand ganz leise an meiner Thür klopfte. “Wer da?” rief ich; keine Antwort. “Who
is there?” frug ich nochmals, indem ich glaubte, der Klopfer verstehe nicht Deutsch.
Richtig war’s mein dicker Bierbrauer aus Cincinnati. In meiner Empörung schnauzte
ich den nicht übel an; höre dann wie der alte Sünder stammelt: “Not so loud, somebody
may hear us; excuse me. I only was looking for the chambermaid.” Diese freche, verlo-
gene Antwort reizte mich noch mehr und ich brauche nicht erst zu betonen, daß ich
dem Kerl einen solchen Sack voll Grobheiten sagte, daß er sich schleunigst trollte. Ich
hätte die ganze Episode wohl kaum des Niederschreibens werth gehalten, würde
dieselbe nicht Betrachtungen trauriger Natur in mir wachgerufen haben.
Seit Jahren liest dieser “ordnungsliebende” Bürger, (er sagte mir ganz stolz, daß er
Republikaner und sein Ideal Carl Schurz ist) den “A.T.”, pardon, ich wollte sagen, erhält
den “A.T.” Denn, wenn er den Inhalt desselben all die langen Jahre gelesen hätte, müßte
doch ein wenig Freiheitssinn haften geblieben sein; er würde dann begreifen, daß eine
Frau eben so viel Recht hat allein zu reisen, wie er, ohne Beleidigungen ausgesetzt zu
sein. So weit reichen aber die Rechtsbegriffe dieses versoffenen und verspießerten Kaf-
fern eben nicht.——
Pittsburgh— dieses traurige, rußige Nest mit seinen modernen Zwingburgen der Ar-
beit und seinem Gefängnis, weckt immer die trübsten Erinnerungen in mir;—weilt
doch in letzterem seit Jahren einer meiner theuersten Freunde, Alex. Berkmann, den
eine Bourgeois-Justiz nach einem leider mißglückten Vergeltungswerk an einem
Scheusal, einer Geißel des arbeitenden Volkes, verdammt hat, seine jungen Jahre hinter
grauen Wällen zu verbringen.
In P. wollte man dieses Mal keine Versammlungen für mich arrangiren, weil gerade
Freund Berkmanns Angelegenheit vor the Board of Pardon gebracht werden sollte und
die dortigen Genossen befürchteten, durch mein öffentliches Auftreten die Sache zu
schädigen. Nachdem ich aber in Monaca, 27 Meilen von P., sprechen sollte und außer-

296 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

dem meine erst kürzlich aus dem Gefängnis entlassenen Freunde, Nold und Bauer, se-
hen wollte, so beschloß ich, einige Tage in P. zu bleiben.
Während meiner ganzen Fahrt von Washington nach Pittsburgh regnete es fortwäh-
rend und als ich meinen Bestimmungsort erreichte, goß es nur so, als ob eine zweite
Sündfluth auf die Menschheit herniedergesandt werden sollte. Schaden würde es
wahrhaftig nicht, denn nur durch solch ein Ereignis könnte die Welt von allerlei Unge-
ziefer befreit werden. Unser Nold, der angehende Dichter, (ach, wenn der nur das
Dichten unterlassen würde —) und der große Bauernjunge mit dem goldenen Her-
zen, erwarteten mich am Bahnhof. “Bringt mich nur gleich auf mein altes Quartier zu
Gordon,” bat ich die Brüder, “denn ich bin totmüde.” “Ja, ja, aber zuerst müssen wir
einkehren!”
Ich war über das Wiedersehen mit meinen lieben Zuchthausvögeln so erfreut, daß
ich nicht nein sagen konnte; zudem war meine Kehle ziemlich trocken und so ging es
denn mit Sack und Pack bei gräßlichem Regen in eine Wirthschaft, deren Besitzer zur
“A.T.” Familie gehört; trotzdem fällt ihm aber doch das Herz in die Hosen, wenn ein An-
archist sein Lokal betritt, wie mir Freund N. sagte; mit einer Anarchistin könnte man
übrigens schon eine Ausnahme machen, dachte ich mir. Der gute Mann schien über
meinen Besuch erfreut zu sein und ließ gleich Essen und Trinken auftragen. Er war sehr
aufgeräumt, rückte immer näher an meine Seite, zwinkerte mit den Augen, gleichzeitig
ängstiche Blicke auf eine gegenüberliegende Thür werfend. “Was ist los, daß Sie immer
nach der Thür blicken?” frug ich ihn. “Ja, wissen Sie, ich möchte gar zu gerne bei Ihnen
bleiben, aber im anstoßenden Zimmer sitzt meine Alte mit noch einigen Klatsch-
schwestern und wenn sie erfährt wer Sie sind, dann bin ich verloren. Um Gotteswillen,
sprechen Sie nicht so laut.” Trotzdem der Mann so gastfreundlich war, konnte ich doch
nicht umhin, ihn wegen seiner Feigheit zu strafen; ich sprach und erzählte mit lauter
Stimme, bis der arme Kerl es nicht mehr auf seinen Sitz aushalten konnte.
Gegessen und getrunken hatten wir ja, gekostet hatte es auch nichts und dazu noch
die Schadenfreude. Die Karawane konnte nun getrost abschieben.
“Jetzt können wir Dich nicht mehr zu G. bringen, es ist zu spät”, pustete Bauer, der
sich noch immer vor Lachen über das Erlebte schüttelte. “Wir gehen jetzt in ein nah-
liegendes Boardinghouse, dessen Inhaber auch ein ‘A.T.’ Leser ist.” “Na, hoffentlich
nicht so einer als unser Wirth.” “O nein, das ist einer von den Radikalen”, riefen meine
Begleiter unisono. Also los. Dort angekommen, wurden noch einige Gläser hinter die
Binde gegossen, während das Bäuerlein mit dem Hauswirth betreffs eines Zimmers
verhandelte. Endlich, nach langem warten, hieß es up stairs gehen. Im Begriffe, von
meinen Cumpanen Abschied zu nehmen, höre ich dicht neben mir eine kreischende
Stimme; “Wir haben keine Zimmer für Frauenzimmer!” Was war zu thun? Ich konnte
doch gegen den Willen der züchtigen Hausfrau nicht dort bleiben. Also Bündel und Be-
gleiter gepackt und weiter geschoben. Der Wirth, dem meine Freunde gehörig den Kopf
gewaschen, war ganz trostlos, als er hörte, wer dieses Frauenzimmer eigentlich ist und
er bat mich unter vielen Entschuldigungen, ja nur zu bleiben; aber ich hatte keine Lust,

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 297

 eine Keilerei zwischen Ehegesponsen zu verursachen und so blieb ich eben nicht.
Wohin jetzt? “Weißt Du”—sagte Bauer, der den Mut noch nicht verloren hatte, während
der arme weichherzige Nold ganz verzweifelt war—“jetzt führen wir Dich zu einem
Genossen, da kannst Du übernachten.” “Meinetwegen in die Hölle, wenn ich nur schon
ein Unterkommen habe.” Auf dem Wege zu diesem Genossen fiel mir mein kranker
Freund R.R. mit seinem “A.T.” ein. Was der für Augen machen würde, könnte er sich
manche seiner Abonnenten aus der Nähe besehen; wüßte er, was das für Michel sind,
wie wenig Einfluß sein Wirken auf diese Menschen ausgeübt hat.—Natürlich kannte ich
bis dahin nur wenige Leser seines Blattes, sonst hätte ich nicht so urtheilen können. Ich
habe mich während der übrigen Zeit meiner Reise überzeugt, daß der größte Theil der
Freunde desselben wirklich liebe und freie Menschen sind, die mir durch ihre Güte und
Liebenswürdigkeit die unangenehmen Erfahrungen mit “A.T.” Lesern in Pittsburgh und
anderen Plätzen leicht vergessen ließen.
Der Genosse, von dem Bauer sprach, wohnte in einem Zimmer, in welchem sich sein
ganzes Eigenthum, Ehebett, Weib und Kind mit engeschlossen, befand. Die sog. bessere
Hälfte, eine aus der Hefe hervorgegangene Deutsch-Amerikanerin, die ich schon von
früher her als eine Zantyppe kannte, schien nicht sehr erbaut darüber zu sein, daß ihr
Mann mir seine Stelle im Bette abtreten sollte. Unter solchen Umständen war mein
Bleiben nicht sehr angenehm; aber ich war zu müde und abgespannt um erst lange
zu überlegen; ich war froh, mich endlich meiner nassen Kleider entledigen und in
ein warmes Nest krichen zu können, wo ich denn auch gleich in einen erquickenden
Schlaf fiel.
Während ich nun von einer herrlichen Zukunft und freien, edlen Menschen träumte,
brachte mich ein schrecklicher Lärm in die öde Wirklichkeit zurück. Ich war zu schlaf-
trunken, um im ersten Moment die Situation zu erfassen; dazu war es im Zimmer
dunkel. Endlich konnte ich am Fußboden zwei Menschen unterscheiden, die sich
gegenseitig mit Fäusten bearbeiteten und dazwischen die heisere, rauhe Stimme der
Frau hören, die ihren Gatten, den theuren, meinen Gastwirth, in der gemeinsten Weise
beschimpfte. Die ganze Situation war so horrend, dabei aber so komisch, daß ich
eigentlich nicht wußte, ob ich weinen oder lachen sollte. Ich zog mich rasch an und
stürzte in den peitschenden Regen hinaus um zu Bauer zu gehen, der in der Nähe
wohnte.
Der arme Kerl, der schon längst schnarchte, kroch schnell in seine Unaussprech-
lichen und ging mit mir in Nacht und Nebel hinaus, ein Hotel suchen. Die traurige Af-
färe trug sich in Allegheny City zu, wo keine Hotels zu finden sind. Eine Car nach Pitts-
burgh war um diese Zeit, 3 Uhr Morgens, auch nicht mehr zu haben; also hieß es laufen;
eine angenehme Sache bei dem Hundewetter.
Nach zwei Stunden kamen wir endlich an einen Platz, wo man auch für “Frauenz-
immer Zimmer” hat. Ich konnte lange Zeit nicht zur Ruhe kommen, denn die
Ereignisse des Abends und hauptsächlich die ekelhafte Familienscene, standen noch zu
klar vor mir. Eigentlich hätte mich eine derartige Affäre nicht alteriren sollen. Geht es

298 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

denn bei Eheleuten überhaupt anders zu? Wie ist es möglich, daß zwei Menschen, die
absolut nicht für einander passen, ihr elendes Dasein doch zusammen dahinschleppen.
Was hält sie denn vereint? Diese Fragen durchkreuzten mein müdes Gehirn. Die Liebe,
werden manche sagen. Lächerlich! Menschen, die so wenig gegenseitig Achtung haben,
und sich mit Schmutz und Koth bewerfen, die sich sogar soweit vergessen handreiflich
zu werden; solche Geschöpfe wissen nichts von der Liebe. Es ist nur die verfluchte
Gewohnheit und Feigheit des Mannes sowohl wie die der Frau, welches sie die größte
Schmach viel eher ertragen läßt, als aus einander zu gehen, oder lieber den Tod einem
solchen traurigen Leben vorzuziehen.
Ich war am nächsten Tage ganz zerschlagen und angeekelt von dem Schlamm, in
dem sich die Menschheit wälzt. In diesem Zustande reiste ich nach Monaca, wo es mir
in anderer Beziehung nicht viel besser erging.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 299

 Series in S T U R M V O G E L
15 December 1897 – 15 Februar y 1898

Letters from a Tour.

I.
There have been so many travel letters written lately, both in Europe as well as in this
country, that it is indeed the purest form of imitation to publish the experiences and ob-
servations that I collected during my 14 weeks of loafing about in the West.1 After all,
who doesn’t imitate these days? Speakers and journalists, authors and poets, singers and
actors. They all only repeat that which others have said, written, sung, and performed be-
fore them. The original is not created every day, and few original people are born every
day. There are indeed a lot of people who think of themselves as great minds, indeed as
geniuses; yet in reality these poor souls are like flies who sit comfortably on the horn of
an ox in the field and come into the city after a long day’s work with the cry, “We have
been plowing!” As I am not conceited, nor do I count myself among people of greatness
or indeed genius, may my friends forgive my imitation, that is, if they have anything at
all to forgive me for.
Traveling is certainly a wonderful thing if you have plenty of cash in your pocket and
are not dependent on friends or comrades. But traveling is indeed not especially pleas-
ant when you have just enough to reach the next city, when you get something to eat from
one person today (or perhaps not), and someone else tomorrow, when you have to sleep
on the floor or in the family bed (without the father of the house, of course), yet exactly
such difficulties and unpleasant circumstances lend a certain thrill to my travels. Perhaps
because I am, as my friend the Irish Dutchman says, a born vagabond.
I am often told, and I myself know best, how little I have in common with my race.
Not that this does me a particular justice, but it is simply so, and neither I nor the race
can be held responsible for it. The urge to wander, to move from place to place, and, like
the eternal Jew, never to find rest or peace, I have, however, inherited from the Jews. My
fellow Jews were indeed rarely able to put their own desires into practice, for they were
never asked whether they wanted to go or not. They were simply hounded from country
to country, from place to place, hated and shunned like lepers. Even in this century of
intelligence, knowledge, progress, and enlightenment, the Jews have only been tolerated,
and there are indeed very few Aryans who are completely free of prejudices in this
matter.

1. The five letters in which EG describes her Fall 1897 lecture tour of the Midwest were serialized in
Sturmvogel between December 1897 and February 1898; the series appears here under the date of the
first letter.

300 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

Masthead from the 15 November 1897 issue of Sturmvogel, the German-language anarchist communist monthly based
in New York, the first to publish Goldman’s detailed lecture tour reports—a featured column Goldman later incorpo-
rated into her own magazine, Mother Earth. (By permission of the Kate Sharpley Library)

My inclination to the vagabond’s life, pour la vie bohème, would therefore be enough
proof that I am not completely lacking in Semitic qualities. It is not the need to convince
people of my views or unhinge the world that leads me to move now and then from city
to city; it is rather, as I have said, my restless, unsettled spirit, the need to get to know
new faces, other people and their habits, customs and practices, strengths and weak-
nesses, that forces me out of my usual daily surroundings. Being obliged to stay in one
place for months, years, or perhaps an entire life, always having to spend time with the
same people, drink in the same beer dens—this disconsolately bleak monotony of every-
day life would fill me with horror. One of my friends, for whom the habit of ascribing un-
fair motivations to the behavior of others has developed into a sickness, claims that the
addiction to speaking to the masses and the satisfaction that the applause of the audience
gives me are the actual motivations that cause me to go away from time to time. False,
my dear. Neither do I believe for a moment that I can change people or turn them into
Anarchists with my speeches; not at all. In the first place, my talent for speaking is not
sufficient for that; and second, I long ago came to the conclusion that language is too
weak, too powerless to express what one feels. Does one of my well spoken, intelligent
friends want to prove to me that love, hate, pain, joy, the entire world of emotions can be
clothed in words? Emotions are expressed only through deeds, never through language.
After I voice my opinion to thousands from the platform with such warmth and spirit, I
do indeed sense something like a moral hangover; yet I know that in order to render what
is inside of me I would have to rip my heart out of my body and throw it at the feet of the
audience, certain that even then they would not understand. Then why do you speak at
all? many will ask. Truly not for the sake of speaking, the applause, or the notoriety.
Every person endowed with even a minimum of sensitivity and independence must
rebel against the meanness and narrow-mindedness surrounding him, against the lies

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 301

 and the restrictions to his individual freedom; and if he has no opportunity to show his
opposition to the present situation, then hatred, scorn, resentment and despair will build
up in his breast until they threaten to smother him. Then, like the drowning man who
grasps at straws, he must somehow shake off his overwhelming burden. For these rea-
sons I speak to vent my anger, to cry out like a wounded animal; for I imagine that one
single person out of all the thousands will indeed have to hear me, will understand me,
will comprehend my outrage, will feel with me, and will hate and struggle against cru-
elty, coercion, and subjugation. It has been and will continue to be for this single person
that I act, and I go to them precisely because among the many, one real, honorable and
great person can be found. And I have found really genuine, marvelous characters. I have
met them in Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo and other places:
hidden gems, who live and suffer anonymously yet give out so much light that they make
a person forget for a moment the vale of tears around us.
The above introduction to the report of my agitation tour is somewhat lengthy and
odd—I wanted to start the actual report, but the editor, the stormy petrel, the unlucky
fellow, the kingfisher, the monster, or whatever else he is called by his well-meaning
friends, came and told me categorically to stop.2 Completely against my custom I must
therefore give in (but not without protest), otherwise the opportunity to be allowed to
bring my continuation in the upcoming Sturmvogels will be taken away, and that would
be terrible.——

II.
On September 2nd I started my agitation tour with two dollars in my pocket. The first
stop was Providence, Rhode Island,3 a city of about 80,000 residents, mostly factory
workers. Rhode Island, although a puritanical state, allowed its citizens until recently
more freedom and privileges than Massachusetts or Connecticut. For example, parties
of every orientation were allowed to hold meetings in the parks or squares of Providence
without first getting the usual permission from the mayor, a privilege which no other city
in this “free land” can show.
I had already been in Providence several times, had spoken before well attended meet-
ings without ever being harassed by the police, but this time it was going to be different.
My comrades and friends, who were always very active, had arranged five meetings
after it was agreed that this time I should stay an entire week. On September 3rd, 4th,
and 5th, I spoke before three splendid meetings on street corners, in the afternoon of
September 5th in a hall which was filled to the last seat. The police were everywhere heav-
ily represented, naturally to “protect” me against the anger of the crowd. On the evening
of the 7th, the last street meeting was supposed to take place. With a few friends I went
to the square designated for that purpose, but when we arrived we found it occupied by

2. Claus Timmerman was the editor of Sturmvogel from 1897 to 1899.

3. EG spoke in Providence from the 3rd through the 8th of September.

302 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

a speaker of the S.L.P. 4 who tried to convince the audience from a wagon how wonderful
everything in the world would be if De Lyon,5 Sanial,6 or Mcguire 7 were president of the
United States.—So as not to disturb the vote catching, we went to another square. A
comrade with a booming voice stood on a box and started to attract the public,8 a job
which only one who has to address those kinds of meetings knows to appreciate. Within
15 minutes, he gathered about 300 people. My herald left the box to me from where I be-
gan to work on the assembled troops. I had hardly started to speak when a 280 pound
guardian of order tugged roughly on my sleeve and screamed with a drunken voice, “You
have to stop immediately, you are not allowed to speak here.” “What right do you have to
interrupt me?” I asked the hippopotamus. “I am the law,” screamed the lard-dripping
monster. “And I have the right to speak here,” and I proceeded leisurely with my talk. The
crowd was extremely upset with the interference of the police and shouts like “damn the
police, to hell with them” were heard from all sides. It would certainly have come to quite
a clash between police and people had not four uniformed bulldogs packed me with
brute force into a patrol wagon and made off with this “big criminal.” Having arrived at
the police station, I asked the captain why I was arrested in the first place. “You were ar-
rested because you are Emma Goldman.” Naturally I had not expected such an answer;
how should I know that in this country things have gotten so bad that one arrests a per-
son because of his name? To make an American policeman understand that a name
could not possibly constitute a crime or an offense seemed to me superfluous in this sit-
uation, and with stoic calm I let them take me to the night quarters, a dirty cell whose
furniture consisted of a wooden bench and a certain pot. I was very tired and already used
to such hotels and would certainly soon have fallen into a deep sleep had a woman in the
adjacent cell not constantly cried and wailed. The poor woman paced back and forth and
cried and sobbed, “My six children, my little baby, who will nurse you; my poor, sick hus-
band; let me go to my children; give me my beloved baby!” That’s how it went all night.
I tried to calm the woman down and started a conversation with her. It turned out that
her husband had been sick and out of work for ten months, that she had six children of
whom the oldest was fourteen, the youngest one year, and that she, in desperation, took
a loaf of bread and a can of condensed milk from the table of a grocer whose laundry she

4. The initials “S.L.P.” stand for the Socialist Labor Party, founded in 1876.
5. Daniel De Leon was a prominent and longtime leader in the Socialist Labor Party.
6. Lucien Sanial (1836 –1927) was a French-born journalist and Socialist Labor Party leader. Sanial
helped draft the SLP platform in 1889. He edited the Workmen’s Advocate (1889 –91) and The People
(1891), both SLP propaganda organs. Sanial unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York on the SLP
ticket in 1894. He left the SLP and joined the Socialist Party of America soon after it was founded
in 1901.
7. Peter J. McGuire was general secretary of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of Amer-
ica and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor in 1886.
8. Probably John H. Cook (see description of his opening speech in “Anarchy,” Article in the Providence
Evening Bulletin, 4 September 1897, above).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 303

 used to do and was caught in the act . . . What an impression this sad story made on me
can be easily imagined.
It is indeed nothing new that the person who takes a loaf of bread is locked up while
those who steal millions go about freely as respected citizens, pious Christians, and good
statesmen. It also is nothing new that thousands are hungry and walk around in rags and
are desperate and do not know where to rest their heads. One becomes hardened if one
has been dealing with the labor question for years, has gotten to know human misery in
all its phases. One reads the daily reports about poverty, suicide, and crime and calmly
drinks one’s coffee, happy that for the time being one is not among these unfortunate
people (because sooner or later, the same fate will overcome us). But the lament, the de-
spair of that woman, the begging, pleading of the mother for her little ones could have
melted a stone. Yet how much does empathy help if one is powerless, helpless and ex-
posed to the arbitrariness and violence,—I did not dare to comfort the woman because,
under the circumstances, it would have sounded like mockery.
The following morning, together with other involuntary inmates of this cozy house, I
was brought before the judge who, after the usual questions, whether guilty or not guilty,
placed me under bail, and because it could not be posted immediately, I, poor sinner, was
taken away again.
At one o’clock I was led to the mayor at City Hall, who received me with the question
whether I wanted to swear or promise not to speak in Providence for the next three
months, and if so, he would let me go. I made it clear to him that I could neither swear
nor promise anything; but to reassure him, I could tell him that I was on a tour to the
West which would prevent me from honoring Providence with a visit in the near future
anyway. After that, the local pasha let me go. Actually, he was glad to get rid of me, be-
cause my arrest evoked a lot of resentment and protest and because nothing emerged to
allow pressing charges against me.
If the newspapers had already brought column-length reports about the meetings ear-
lier, the day after my arrest they were full of sensational stories. The result of the comedy
was that many people joined the anarchist groups that exist in Providence; the meetings
are now well attended, and, in all circles, anarchism and Emma Goldman are discussed,
a propaganda victory thanks to the police of Providence. I was not harmed by the few
hours of arrest, to the contrary I am one experience richer.
Arrests and jail cells may under certain circumstances be considered pleasant shelters
as one is protected against the inclemency of the weather in them. How it is with the state
food is a different question. In the Providence police station, for example, the prisoners
cannot complain about bad food because they simply do not get any. If someone is ar-
rested in the afternoon or evening, he is brought only the next morning before the judge
who either releases the accused on bail or imposes on him a monetary or prison penalty.
If the prisoner does not have the necessary money to buy himself free from “justice,” he
has to wait until late afternoon before he will be brought to prison. During this time, he
has not received a single bite to eat. Most of them arrive in any case with an empty stom-

304 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

ach, and here they have the best opportunity to experience how caring the state is in
terms of food.
After my so-called deportation from Providence, I spent a few hours in the merry
company of friends there, and in the evening I drove to Boston, where a meeting had
been arranged for September 12th, which I will report about in the next issue.

III.
In Boston I spoke before two well-attended meetings; from there I went to New Haven
where I also addressed a large meeting. From New Haven I went to New York, and from
there to Philadelphia. In N.Y., I spoke before a protest meeting against the murder of
21 Hazleton strikers.9 Oh, this protesting with words only, it is the purest irony! I always
want to slap myself when, after a downright bestial act of violence like the one commit-
ted by Sheriff Martin,10 I only speak against it while every nerve in me twitches to stran-
gle such a bloodhound, even if only to offer proof to the ruling class that it cannot always
murder defenseless workers with impunity . . .
Very well attended English-language meetings took place in Philadelphia, arranged
for me by the Ladies Liberal League,11 Single Taxers 12 and Friendship Liberal League.13
From there I went via Washington to Pittsburgh.
No meetings took place in Washington, but I stopped there in order to get to know
various friends of Der arme Teufe.14 I was only able to meet a few of these brothers, and I
must admit that I did not regret the detour to Wash., for I got to know a few excellent
people there.
Unfortunately in this world we are not spared from meeting, in addition to decent
people, such fellows by whose conception an inexcusable error was committed. Such
people should have been born as four-legged creatures, for as two-legged ones they are
neither humans nor animals.
Among others there was an architect, an old subscriber to AT, a government slave, a

9. Though there are conflicting reports on how many were killed, at least nineteen strikers died at
Hazleton.
10. EG refers to Sheriff James L. Martin.
11. Influenced by Voltairine de Cleyre and Natasha Notkin, the Ladies’ Liberal League sponsored lec-
tures on a wide variety of subjects and was an important forum for radical and feminist activity in
Philadelphia. Prior to EG’s visit, lecturers included Charles Mowbray, who was arrested after ad-
dressing the League in 1894, and Harry Kelly, who spoke to the group in 1896.
12. The Single Tax Society of Philadelphia included anarchist sympathizers G. Frank Stephens and
A. Stevenson, and anarchists George Seldes and Arthur Pleydell.
13. The Friendship Liberal League was a freethought organization which sponsored lectures primarily
on secularism, although several of its members, especially Voltairine de Cleyre and James B. Elliott,
successfully lobbied to broaden the discussions to include anarchism. Charles Mowbray lectured in
1894, as did John Turner in 1896. EG would address the League five months later and again in 1901.
See Letter to Solidarity, 15 March, 1898, below; and EG to James B. Elliott, 15 March 1901, EGP, reel 1.
14. EG abbreviates the journal name Der arme Teufel as AT in subsequent references.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 305

 man with an “Ohrfeigengesicht,” 15 as our friend Reitzel puts it,16 who could not under-
stand that I, as an Anarchist, would like to awaken in people an appreciation for all that
is beautiful and good. What a crime against the state—to want to make the masses aware
that they too have a right to live! . . . This fellow could not get it into his skull that an An-
archist leaves the preaching of privation, sacrifice, patience, and resignation to the clergy
in order to speak out in favor of the highest pleasures of all kinds. Of course not for the
pleasure of the individual at the expense of others, but for the well-being of the individ-
ual as well as of the whole. What does such a governmental soul know about pleasure
anyway?
The second of this ilk was a fat beer brewer from Cincinnati, also an old reader of AT,
who happened to be in Washington and was staying in the Hotel Fritz Reuter, where I
too was staying. This man seemed indeed to have some notion of pleasure—his heavily
reddened nose caused me to draw such a conclusion. A huge man with a belly at the sight
of which I became aware of my shortcomings in mathematics; for in order to calculate
the amount of beer that this barrel held, one would need the mathematical skills of a
Kowalewska.17 His greasy face simply glistened when he heard that I was the E.G., and
he immediately treated the entire party; I, poor soul, had to listen to all of his family sto-
ries, and as he was already a grandfather, one can imagine how long they turned out to
be. He even confided his room number to me and casually asked me which room I had.
In the heat of the action, or carousing, to tell the truth, I did not think much of this ques-
tion, and I gave him my number.
After much back-and-forth discussion about every possible question of the day it had
reached two in the morning and the time had come to cut things off. I was in bed for not
quite half an hour when someone knocked very lightly on my door. “Who is there?” I
called out; no answer. “Who is there?” [in English], I asked again, believing that the per-
son knocking didn’t understand German. Right, it was my fat beer brewer from Cincin-
nati. In my indignation I snarled at him not badly at all, then listened as the old sinner
stammered: “Not so loud, somebody may hear us; excuse me. I was only looking for the
chambermaid.” This brazen, dishonest answer irritated me even more, and I do not need
to emphasize that I hurled such a huge bag of insults at the fellow that he quickly re-
treated. I hardly would have considered this episode worth writing down if it had not
evoked in me observations of a sad nature.

15. Ohrfeigengesicht is a colloquial German expression, roughly translated as “a face begging to be

slapped.”
16. EG refers to Robert Reitzel, editor of Der arme Teufel.
17. Sofia Kovalevskaia (1850 –1891) was a prominent Russian mathematician, author, and pioneer of
the early feminist movement. She fled to Germany in 1869 to escape the rigid gender norms of Rus-
sia that impaired her ability to direct the course of both her career and her relationships. Ko-
valevskaia was appointed professor of mathematics at Göttingen University in 1894. Her major
works include A Russian Childhood (1890), and Vera Branantzova (1895; A Nihilist Girl, 2001).
EG also refers to Kovalevskaia in her March 1906 essay in Mother Earth entitled “The Tragedy of
Women’s Emancipation” (see vol. 2).

306 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 For years this “order-loving” citizen (he told me with pride that he was a Republican
and his idol was Carl Schurz 18 ) had been reading AT, pardon, I mean to say that he re-
ceived AT. For if he had read its contents all those years, at least a little sense of liberty
would have had to stick; he would then understand that a woman has just as much right
to travel alone as he does without being exposed to insults. Clearly the notions of justice
held by this drunken, stodgy oaf did not extend that far.——
Pittsburgh—this sad, sooty nest with its modern fortresses of labor and its prison, al-
ways evokes the saddest memories in me; inside the latter is one of my dearest friends,
Alex. Berkman, who was condemned by a bourgeois jury after a failed act of retaliation
against a monster, a scourge of working people, to spend his young years behind gray
walls.19
In P. no meetings were arranged for me this time because the matter of friend Berk-
man was about to be brought before the Board of Pardon, and the comrades there feared
that my appearance in public would compromise the situation. But since I was supposed
to speak in Monaca, 27 miles from P., and as I also wanted to see my friends Nold and
Bauer, who had just recently been released from prison,20 I decided to stay in P. for a
few days.
It rained incessantly during my entire trip from Washington to Pittsburgh, and when
I arrived at my destination it poured as if a second flood was being sent down upon hu-
manity. That would truly not be such a shame, for only through such an event could the
world be freed from all kinds of vermin. Our Nold, the budding poet (oh, if he only re-
frained from writing poetry), and the big farm boy with the heart of gold were waiting for
me at the train station. “Take me immediately to my old quarters at Gordon’s,” 21 I asked
the brothers, “because I’m dead tired.” “Yes, yes, but first we must stop off for a drink!”
I was so delighted by the reunion with my dear jailbirds that I could not say no; fur-
thermore, my throat was rather dry, and so we went with bag and baggage in terrible rain
to an inn whose owner belonged to the AT family.22 In spite of this his heart sinks when-
ever an Anarchist enters his place, as my friend N. told me; with a female Anarchist one
could indeed make an exception, I thought. The good man seemed pleased with my visit
and served food and drink. He was in very good spirits, moving closer and closer to me
and winking, while at the same time casting fearful glances over at the door facing us.
“Why are you always looking over at the door?” I asked him. “Well, you know, I would
like to stay with you only too well, but my wife and a few other gossipy women are sitting

18. Carl Schurz immigrated to the United States from Germany after the 1848 revolution; a radical Re-
publican, he served as a Missouri senator.
19. At this time, AB had been in prison for five years for his attack on Henry C. Frick, general manager
of Carnegie’s steel company at Homestead, Pa.
20. Carl Nold and Henry Bauer, who had been imprisoned for their alleged involvement in AB’s assas-
sination attempt, were released from prison on 25 May 1897.
21. EG had stayed at the home of Harry Gordon in November 1896.
22. EG is identifying the pub owner as a reader of Der arme Teufel.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 307

 in the next room, and if they find out who you are I’ll be lost. For God’s sake, don’t speak
so loudly.” Although the man was very hospitable, I could not help but punish him for
his cowardice; I talked and recounted with a loud voice until the poor fellow could not
stand to remain in his seat any longer.
So we had eaten and drunk, and it had not cost us a thing and, moreover, we had our
malicious joy. The caravan could now cheerfully shove off.
“Now we can’t take you to G. anymore, it is too late,” puffed Bauer, who was still shak-
ing with laughter about the incident. “Let’s go to a nearby boardinghouse whose owner
is also an AT reader.” “Well, hopefully not one like our innkeeper.” “Oh no, he is one of
the radicals,” my companions said in unison. So we took off. Having arrived there we
again wetted our whistle while little Bauer negotiated with the innkeeper about a room.
Finally, after a long wait, I could go upstairs. While I was saying goodbye to my com-
panions I heard a shrieking voice next to me. “We don’t have any rooms for hussies!”
What could be done? I could not stay there against the will of the chaste housewife.
So with baggage and companions packed, we shoved off. The innkeeper, to whom my
friends gave a piece of their minds, was inconsolable when he heard who this hussy ac-
tually was and begged me with many apologies to stay; but I did not feel like causing a
fight between spouses and so I did not. Where to now? “You know,” said Bauer, who had
not yet lost courage, while poor soft-hearted Nold was totally desperate—“Now we’ll take
you to a comrade, there you’ll be able to spend the night.” “As far as I’m concerned you
can take me to hell, as long as I have a place to stay.” On the way to this comrade’s, I re-
membered my sick friend Robert Reitzel with his AT. How he would roll his eyes if he
could see some of his subscribers up close; if he knew what typical Germans they were,
what little influence his efforts had on these people. Of course, up to then I only knew a
few readers of his paper, otherwise I could not have made such a judgment. During the
remaining part of my trip I have become convinced that the greatest number of its
friends are truly dear and free people who through their kindness and hospitality caused
me to forget the unpleasant experiences with AT readers in Pittsburgh and other places.
The comrade of whom Bauer had spoken lived in a room that contained his entire
property, marriage bed, wife, and child included. The so-called better half, a German
American from the dregs whom I already knew to be a Xanthippe,23 did not seem very
pleased that her husband should give up his place in the bed to me. Under such cir-
cumstances my stay was not very pleasant, but I was too tired and worn out to think about
it for long; I was glad to finally get rid of my wet clothes and crawl into a warm nest where
I immediately fell into a refreshing sleep.
While I dreamt of a wonderful future and noble human beings, a terrible noise
brought me back into bleak reality. I was too drowsy to grasp the situation at first, and it

23. The name of Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, is used here in its colloquial sense to describe a shrewish
wife.

308 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

was also dark in the room. Finally I could distinguish two human beings on the floor who
were working each other over with their fists, and between blows heard the husky voice
of the woman, who cursed her husband, my dear host, in the meanest manner. The
whole situation was so horrendous, but at the same time so comical, that I did not know
whether I should laugh or cry.24 I quickly got dressed and ran out in the pounding rain
to go to Bauer, who lived nearby.
The poor fellow, who was already snoring, quickly jumped into his unmentionables
and went with me out into the darkness to find a hotel. This sad affair happened in Al-
legheny City, where no hotels were to be found. A car to Pittsburgh was at that time, three
o’clock in the morning, also not available; that meant we had to walk, a pleasant thing in
the wretched weather.
After two hours, we finally arrived at a place where there were “rooms for hussies.” I
could not calm down for a long time because of the events of the evening; in particular
the disgusting family scene still stood before me all too clearly. Actually the whole affair
should not have annoyed me. Isn’t it always that way with married people? How is it pos-
sible that two human beings who absolutely do not match drag on their miserable exis-
tence together anyway? What keeps them united? These questions crossed my tired
mind. Love, many will say. Ridiculous! Human beings who have so little mutual respect
and throw dirt and muck at each other, who even forget themselves and become violent,
such creatures do not know anything about love. It is only the cursed habit and cowardice
of the man as well as the woman that lets them bear the greatest ignominy rather than
separate or prefer death to such a sad life.
The next day I was totally shattered and disgusted with the mud in which humankind
wallows. In this condition, I traveled to Monaca where in a different way I did not fare
much better.

IV.
Encouraged by the AT, probably, I was invited by the gymnastic society in Monaca, Pa.,
to speak there on the topic “Woman, Marriage, and Prostitution,” which led me to the
belief that the gymnasts of Monaca were exceptionally progressive fellows.25 Unfortu-
nately, my assumption was premature. A day before the meeting, I was notified that it
was canceled because half of the members had fled from the terrible, immoral hussy

24. In Living My Life, EG recalls this scuffle as having taken place at the home of Carl Nold, between him
and his wife, Nellie (LML, pp. 199 –200).
25. Gymnastic clubs (also known as Turnvereine or Turner societies) began in the early nineteenth cen-
tury as nationalist organizations, incorporating both middle-class and working-class members. The
first club was founded in Berlin in 1811 by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Gymnastic clubs were formed in
the United States by German immigrants fleeing after the collapse of the 1848 revolution, during
which the clubs had backed the antimonarchical factions. By the 1890s, Turner societies in the
United States were almost exclusively middle-class with a factionalized split between socialists and
conservatives. EG refers below to members of the fraternal clubs as “Jahn brothers.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 309

 E.G. Under different circumstances, I would have enjoyed such a case. However, as I had
made a detour at the invitation of the Monaca gymnastic society, the news of the cow-
ardice of the Jahn brothers did not exactly put me in a rosy mood. Despite these heroes,
I went to Monaca and with the help of an old comrade and member of the club, the meet-
ing was brought about all the same. The audience was comprised of 50 men and so in-
stead of treating the topic: Woman, Marriage, and Prostitution, I talked about the idiocy
of the gymnasts. That I did not spare the gentlemen is proven by the circumstance that
the gymnasts convened a meeting to decide whom I had labeled an idiot. As the old com-
rade informed me, they dropped this matter from the agenda so as not to look even more
ridiculous.
After my unpleasant experiences with the Monaca Turnverein, I drove to Chicago to
participate in the workers’ convention that took place there.26
Chicago is undoubtedly London in reduced scale; in no other city in America does
gray misery stare you so glaringly in the face as here. As far as I have traveled through-
out the country, I had not yet seen as many tattered creatures, crippled human beings,
gaunt faces with sunken eyes, and indifferent countenances as in this so-called garden
city. I don’t know whether it was the dirt of the streets, the terrible smell of the Chicago
River, the smoke of the factories, the human market on Clark Street where poor girls of
all nationalities sell their sick, tired bodies for 25 and 50 cents, or whether it was the
memory of the brutal murder of November 11, 1887, that made me see Chicago in such
a dreary light,27—I only know that a longer stay in this city would awaken suicidal
thoughts in me.
The friends and comrades will probably still remember what great success the work-
ers everywhere hoped for from this convention. It was convened on the one side by Debs
who so radically and energetically appeared in the St. Louis convention,28 and on the
other side by the representatives of the starving, desperate, striking coal miners.29 I too
ascribed importance to the convention, and since I had to speak at various meetings ar-

26. The three-day convention, which began 27 September 1897 and was held in Orpheus Hall of the
Schiller Theater Building in Chicago, brought together reformers and trade unionists. EG’s seating
at the convention was challenged on the first day but finally allowed, since, it was argued, she did not
represent a particular organization. EG was listed among the delegates to the convention as an affili-
ate of the New York Debating Club (an anarchist communist group that met regularly on Sunday
evenings in Manhattan). See newspaper account of her address, “Emma Goldman Has Her Say,” Ar-
ticle in the Chicago Tribune, 30 September 1897, above.
27. A reference to the Haymarket affair.
28. At the two-day labor conference in St. Louis, which began 30 August 1897, Eugene Debs outraged
some trade unionists by urging them to halt their efforts to unseat AFL president Samuel Gompers.
A full transcript of Debs’s speech appeared in the Social Democrat (Chicago) on 2 September 1897.
29. EG refers to the three-month strike by the United Mine Workers of America, which resulted in the
union’s first national victory. The union won important gains for workers in the country’s major coal
regions (except West Virginia), including wage increases and eight-hour-day regulations. The con-
frontation, which began on 4 July 1897, was particularly violent in many regions, culminating in the
massacre of strikers at Hazleton (Lattimer), and subsequent rioting.

310 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

ranged by the comrades, I went to Chicago several weeks earlier to participate in it. I can
give my friends the reassurance that I was not delegated there at the expense of a group
nor as representative. I had a mandate from a N.Y. workers’ association merely for the
purpose of being admitted to the negotiations.
To describe the convention in detail would take up too much space; I will therefore
limit myself to say that all my life I had not participated in such a ridiculous, insignifi-
cant, meaningless affair. The convention opened with Gompers,30 the great mogul of the
American Federation of Labor, out of sheer envy and jealousy of Debs’s notoriety, giving
orders to the various organizations not to send any delegates there; and Eugene Debs,
the new “Messiah,” showed on that occasion that he was absolutely not master of the sit-
uation. He was frightened out of his wits by Gompers and he too called off all delegates
of the social democracy; 31 consequently, the convention, with the exception of a few,
rested in the hands of politicians and vote catchers of all shades. This rabble spent the
time accusing each other and proposing the most absurd motions. Most of them arrived
in the morning already drunk, (on their 5 dollars per day, which is how much every dele-
gate received as a representative of his union, one can certainly afford quite a bit), and
the screaming and yelling throughout the day was hair raising. Two days were wasted
with the examination of the mandates and the rest of the time with proposals of the fol-
lowing nature: “To have free coinage of silver, to establish the Single Tax, to reform our
government, to induce the legislature to pass such and such a law” etc. Not a word about
the coal miners’ strike, the brutal treatment of the workers by the mine owners. Not the
slightest protest against the murder of defenseless workers in Hazleton, nothing at all
about that. Just as someone would demand to be recognized, another person would
jump up and cry out: “Mr. Chairman, I move that this man sit down, he is a fool, a god-
damn fool, he is not a bona-fide delegate!” and other similar things. At the end of the sec-
ond day, I got sick and tired of this spectacle. I wanted to get away from that atmosphere
but first I had to make clear my point of view to these brutish, dirty fellows. I succeeded
in taking the floor and the result of my half-hour long speech was that the better ele-
ments left the hall with me.
After all that, I believe nonetheless that my presence at the convention was not alto-
gether futile. First, I had the opportunity to present my view on the coal miners’ strike
and the labor movement in general to people who otherwise never go to an anarchist
meeting, as there were a number of guests from all sections of the population. Second,
I could see for myself more than ever before how the workers are duped and exploited
and cheated by their representatives. Third, I had the opportunity to get to know Debs

30. Samuel Gompers argued that with most of the miners back at work, the AFL’s money would be bet-
ter spent to aid miners and their families than to send delegates to the convention. He further ar-
gued that the organization of workers in trade unions, and not political conventions, would most
help the working class.
31. By “delegates of the social democracy,” EG is referring to supporters of Debs’s organization, Social
Democracy of America.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 311

 who promised a lot to the workers and kept very little. I am convinced that the woman
who in a meeting said about Debs that he has a big heart but an empty skull was right.
He is not the man of his time; he lacks energy and will and he collapses like a fly in the
slightest gust of wind. Although he privately professes anarchism,32 he believes all the
same in having to use the ballot box as a means to attract the masses. There is no doubt
that in his way he is honest and has good intentions, but what good does it do when a hu-
man being does not have the strength to stand up publicly, to show a bold front to the en-
tire world, to break down all the barriers and to follow his own way?
The comrades in Chicago not only had not arranged a single meeting, although they
had written to me that half a dozen of them were waiting for my arrival, but had not even
arranged for a place for me to stay. Fortunately, I met an old dear friend in Chicago who
occupied two rooms and immediately agreed to let one to me. To the horror of many
philistines, old spinsters, and moralists, I accepted the hospitality of my friend and
would have stayed with him during my stop in Chicago if his landlady, totally appalled at
the indecency of her tenant putting up a woman in his room, had not objected to my stay-
ing any longer. Thus, I rented a room on my own where I could dwell undisturbed.
I stayed almost two weeks in Chicago. During that time, I spoke in six meetings which
left much desired in regard to attendance. At one event, a celebration by the gymnastic
society, where I spoke about the matter of friend Berkman, $35.50 was collected in his
favor.
From Chicago I drove to Milwaukee, where I had three meetings; from there back
again to Chicago to speak in a meeting that was convened in favor of the imprisoned
“Firebrandians.” 33 The success of the meeting was unfortunately weakened by Lucy Par-
sons who, instead of condemning the unjustified, vile arrest of the three comrades in
Portland and the ever increasing censorship by Comstock and associates, took a stand
against the editor of the Firebrand, H. Addis, because he tolerated articles about free love

32. In Living My Life, EG recalls speaking privately with Debs around this time: “Hearing his views, I
could not help exclaiming, ‘Why Mr. Debs, you’re an anarchist!’ ‘Not Mister, but comrade,’ he cor-
rected me; ‘won’t you call me that?’ ” (LML, p. 220).
33. In September 1897, Abe Isaak, Henry Addis, and Abner J. Pope, editors of the Portland-based Fire-
brand, were jailed, charged under the Comstock Act with sending obscene literature through the
mails, and the paper was banned. The materials deemed obscene included Walt Whitman’s poem
“A Woman Waits for Me” (long available in Leaves of Grass), and three articles on the subject of free
love. The jury convicted them on one count only, based on back issues requested by and sent to the
postal inspector under an assumed name and containing a letter entitled “It Depends on the
Woman” (25 April 1897, p. 7) and the Whitman poem (14 March 1897, p. 1). On 1 March 1898, Pope,
who had refused counsel and appeal, received a four-month sentence. The case against Isaak and
Addis was dismissed on appeal on 20 June 1898, after the paper (renamed Free Society) had moved
to San Francisco. The meeting EG attended to discuss the case was held on 13 October 1897, in
Zepf’s Hall, Chicago. In addition to EG, Lucy Parsons, Max Baginski, and Moses Harman spoke.
The meeting sparked debate, when Parsons, while speaking at the meeting, made clear her distaste
for free love and disapproval of the editorial policy of the Firebrand. Similar meetings were called
around the country, including a rare meeting that combined English- and non-English-speaking an-
archists in New York, as part of the widespread agitation on behalf of a free press generated by the
Firebrand case. See Lucifer, 20 October 1897, p. 332.

312 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

in the columns of the Firebrand.34 Apart from the fact that anarchism not only teaches
freedom in economic and political areas, but also in social and sexual life, L. Parsons has
the least cause to object to treatises on free love and in addition at a time when it is im-
portant to liberate comrades from the claws of the moral zealots. I spoke after Parsons
and had a hard time changing the unpleasant mood that her remarks elicited, and I also
succeeded in gaining the sympathy and the material support of the people present for the
Portland trio.
I again came to Chicago after a few weeks in order to speak at the November 11th cele-
bration and there too, as in the other meetings, I had the sad experience of seeing how
impassive and indifferent most of the comrades are. The memory of the terrible mur-
der of 1887, the sight of the shameful memorial 35 at the Haymarket and the repeated
brutalities by the Chicago police should have left some enthusiasm and fire in the chest
of the workers there. Nothing like that! On November 11 at least, a few thousand people
will gather but not because they feel the need to remember the dead, not because they
empathize with the strangling of our friends, but out of habit. That is why the previous
Nov. 11th anniversary also turned out to be so tame and lame, and I believe that every
Nov. 11th anniversary has had the same character since the workers quietly bowed to the
order not to go en masse that day to Waldheim instead of fighting for the right to do so.36
One imagines such a celebration, beginning with the playing of hymns and songs like
“The Star Spangled Banner” and “Tomorrow I will have to leave from here”; followed by
a crow-, pardon me, a ladies’ choir, cawing a song, “such a song that melts stone,” etc;
and after that a long-winded speech by the English-speaking speaker who for the ump-
teenth time dwelled on the story of the process and needlessly regaled those present with
the recitation of one of his own, endless poems. On top of that the sight of the yawning,
indifferent crowd— one can hardly imagine what impression such an affair must make
on a sensitive and enthusiastically disposed human being. In order to keep awake the in-
terest of the workers of this country, the Linggs 37 and others would have to die for their

34. Ironically it was Lucy Parsons, in a letter published in the 14 February 1897 issue, who sparked the
debate in the Firebrand that led to the publication of articles deemed obscene by the Oregon postal
inspector. Parsons’s views on the “sex question” led to her decisive break at this time with a new gen-
eration of anarchists, including EG. Deeply rooted working-class values, the primacy of economic
struggle in a revolutionary program, and apprehension about the effects of free love on the health
of the family were the basis of Parson’s hostility to those who attacked marriage, and the reason for
her distancing herself from the label “anarchist” in association with “varietism.” See Free Society,
21 November 1897, p. 1.
35. The bronze statue, depicting a single patrolman gesturing for order in the name of peace, was placed
in Haymarket Square in 1889 by a group of Chicago businessmen to honor the policemen slain in
the 4 May riot. The statue was moved many times and vandalized in protest over the years; twice re-
built, it is now protected within the walls of the headquarters of the Chicago police department.
36. Chicago mayor John A. Roche had established strict conditions for the funeral procession to Wald-
heim Cemetery on 13 November 1887: no banners, no placards, no arms, no music except dirges,
no revolutionary songs, no speeches, and no demonstrations were allowed. However, the number
of mourners was not restricted and numbered more than twenty thousand.
37. A reference to Haymarket anarchist Louis Lingg.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 313

 conviction every day because in this country only that which is new counts; the old no
longer has any appeal.

V.
My stay in St. Louis was already described in detail in No. 3 of “St.” 38 I will only add that
the newspapers stirred up the excitement which arose there so much that the common
folk were shaking their knees and chattering their teeth in horror that the social revolu-
tion could break out at any moment. Unfortunately it does not lie in the power of a single
person to bring about such a result, for I would certainly not have lacked the good will to
make the fear of the philistines come true.
After St. Louis, I turned toward Caplinger Mills, a little farming town in the south-
western part of Missouri where an English comrade and her husband have lived for six
years and have settled as farmers.39 They sent me an invitation to speak there at several
meetings that the two of them would arrange. After a twenty-hour trip by train and four
hours of pain in a wagon drawn by two half-starved horses along a road where one is con-
stantly close to breaking one’s neck and legs, I finally arrived at my destination.
But it was worth the trouble because I have never met a more appreciative audience.
All four meetings were attended very well for the circumstances there and so great was
the interest of the people that many of them were not afraid to travel four to six miles in
order to be present at the meeting.
During the day several farmers came to me to complain about their sorrow, the sor-
row that distinguishes itself little from that of the factory worker and yet is unique in
its kind.
Even with hard work they cannot scrape together enough to pay off their little piece of
land so that they are in debt up to their necks; in addition, the quality of the soil there is
poor and yields poor harvests. Fresh meat is considered the greatest luxury by farmers
but they only seldom may enjoy it. The huts that were built before the Civil War are in
such bad condition that they hardly protect the people from the inclemency of the
weather. In addition, the state exploits these most destitute with regulation and high
taxes. Under these miserable conditions human beings actually toil and drudge their en-
tire lives for the landed proprietors. Small wonder if they start to rebel, if they revolt, if
they welcome every means that could free them from their miserable situation. Always
amid Nature, not surrounded by the corrupting influence of city life, the farmers have
more courage than the factory workers, they are not as meek and content as the latter,
and for that reason they would be the first to take up arms in a revolution. In view of such
good material it is regrettable that, from the anarchist side, very little has been done up
to now for the enlightenment of the American agrarian workers.
Accompanied by many good wishes and words of gratitude by the brave farmers, I

38. See Sturmvogel (1 December 1897), p. 3, for EG’s report on a Haymarket commemoration on 11 No-
vember in Chicago and on 13 November in St. Louis, at which Lucy Parsons also spoke.
39. Kate Austin was born in Illinois and living in Missouri with her husband, Sam. Neither were English.

314 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

drove back to St. Louis. I spoke there at the November 11th celebration, which left much
to be desired, and the following day at the Trades and Labor Council, a corporate body
consisting of representatives of various unions.
Nevertheless, I very thoroughly exposed the cancer of trade unionism and the cor-
ruption of its leaders, and my speech seemed not to have been entirely without effect; be-
cause of it, I have since heard from a comrade in St. Louis, the gentlemen of these cor-
porations now show more tolerance toward anarchists. They must have finally come to
the realization that nowadays one cannot secure economic and political freedom for
workers only by propagating strikes, eight-hour work days, May 1st celebrations, etc.——
A wish I have cherished for years has come true and I am finally in Detroit—. I have
a lot of things to report about Detroit and the friends there; but as I would have to take
up a lot of space in order to do justice to all and as I intend to close the reports from my
journey with this issue (praised be God, many will exclaim), I will try to keep it as brief
as possible. On my whole tour, this time as well as on earlier vagabond journeys, no-
where was so much hospitality, goodness, and kindness shown to me as in Detroit;—not
only by my special friends of whom I had only a few when I arrived, but also by corpo-
rate bodies, among them the gymnasts, the Central Labor Union, etc., was I treated in
the most attentive and courteous manner. The most loving and active support of all I re-
ceived from friend Robert Reitzel of Der arme Teufel.
The great, blessed influence that this newspaper exerts for the propagation of liberal
ideas and endeavors is noticeable not only in Detroit. Although the AT does not pretend
to be an organ of the German anarchist tongue (it has its own and a damn sharp one at
that), it works everywhere for individualism, free thinking, and the anarchist world view
more than any newspaper which displays any bombastic motto.
The November 11th celebration which took place on Nov. 16th in the gymnastic hall
there reminded me of the first huge meetings in the Cooper Union in N.Y., which were
held after the murder of our Chicago comrades. There was fire and enthusiasm and
everyone seemed, even if only for one evening, to remember the dead in a dignified man-
ner. The second meeting, which was arranged the same day, was also very well attended,
and the third and last, which took place in a church, topped them all. Hardly has there
ever been a meeting that produced as much general attention as this one. That a priest
should have the tolerance to offer his pulpit to a proponent of free ideas must be consid-
ered in itself a miracle; but that he made this offer even to an anarchist was simply un-
heard of; it goes without saying that I took the opportunity to proclaim from the pulpit
not God’s word, but anarchism. Wait till you hear this, the church, in which among oth-
ers the sheep in Christ also attentively listened, still stands in the same place: neither
brimstone nor pitch rained on the “desecrated house of God,” nor did the devil take it
with all the sinful brood that was in it.40

40. On Friday 19 November, EG spoke at the People’s Tabernacle (Congregational) in Detroit, under the
auspices of its pastor, Rev. H. S. McCowan, who was active in Detroit labor and reform circles, and
whose congregation was predominantly working-class. EG lectured on the definition of anarchy, and

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 315

 It was not the successes of the meetings in Detroit alone which gave me so much sat-
isfaction. I remember also the pleasure which discussion with many dear human beings
gave me and the pleasant, joyful hours I experienced in their company.
Saying good-bye was difficult, but since one has to part, I sailed by boat to Cleveland
on Nov. 20th.
In Cleveland four meetings took place of which three were attended very well and the
fourth only sparsely. There too I got to know a few superb human beings who showered
me with goodness and kindness.
From Cleveland I went to Buffalo where despite all the obstacles that were put up by
the other side a few friends managed to organize two English and one German meeting.
One of the meetings held for me took place in the Spiritualist Temple, an honor that was
given only, according to the spiritualists, to Comrade John Turner 41 besides me.
In Rochester, the last stop of my tour, I also spoke at three meetings.42 And as R. is,
so to speak, my native city, it is no surprise that all of “Jerusalem” was on its feet. But
Americans and Germans also came in droves to view the strange animal that approxi-
mately nine years earlier had eked out a living for $2.50 per week as a factory worker.
One of my ex-exploiters, a multiple millionaire and factory owner who squeezed his
entire fortune from the bones of workers, felt induced to pay me a visit. The old sinner
probably feared that I would have an influence on his workers that would be personally
disadvantageous for him. He was nervously eager to explain to me how humanely and
justly he was treating his workers and how he showered them with benefits. I gave my
opinion in an unequivocal manner to this deplorable creature, this German Jewish par-
venu, after which he quickly toddled off like a wet poodle.

then fielded questions from a restless audience on more controversial subjects like free love and po-
litical assassination. The event spurred controversy, heightened by exaggerated early press reports
about backlash in the form of mass resignation of the congregants. Later reports confirmed EG’s
claim that following her talk church attendance went up rather than down. According to Joseph
Labadie, a Detroit labor activist and individualist anarchist, who introduced EG to McCowan and at-
tended the lecture, the rumor of the formal demand for the pastor’s resignation was untrue. Some
local labor leaders and even the prominent freethinker Robert Ingersoll (in Detroit to lecture that
week), joined with the city’s conservative elite in condemning the event. Ingersoll objected to the ad-
dress on the grounds that all anarchists are “insane” and “it is not commendable for a crazy man or
woman to be invited to talk before any public assemblage.” The Detroit correspondent for the New
York American Craftsman criticized the EG spectacle for impugning the “dignity of labor” and giv-
ing ammunition to opponents who charge that the labor movement is led by irresponsible trouble-
makers. Detroit Free Press, 24 November 1897, p. 7; Detroit Sentinel, 27 November 1897, p. 2; Detroit
Sentinel, 11 December 1897, p. 2; Free Society, 2 January 1898, p. 2.
41. John Turner spent two weeks lecturing in Buffalo in June 1896.
42. Local newspapers reported on at least two of these meetings. On 4 December, EG lectured on “An-
archy” in Germania Hall. She spoke the next day before the socialist Labor Lyceum on “The Aim of
Humanity,” after which she clarified her opposition to women’s suffrage, standing armies, Chris-
tianity, and the vision of a socialist state. Both meetings drew crowds too large for the hall. See
Rochester Union and Advertiser, 3 December 1897, p. 7; Rochester Herald, 6 December 1897, p. 6.
While in Rochester EG visited her family for the first time since 1894.

316 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 On Dec. 14th, after an absence of fourteen weeks, I finally arrived again in New York.
On the whole, I can be satisfied with the success of my journey. I visited eighteen cities
and spoke at forty meetings, gained very many good and dear friends and had the op-
portunity to see for myself that the cries that America is no ground for anarchism were
ridiculous and wrong. Americans are by nature independent and more than any other
people capable of understanding the ideas of anarchism; it is therefore not their fault if
up to now they know very little about it, but the fault of those who conducted the “move-
ment” only in German and who have hindered however they could its explanation in En-
glish. To conduct the anarchist propaganda in the English language was and remains the
most important issue; because only if the English-speaking element adopts our views is
there hope for change in the situation in America.
Fortunately little has remained of a German movement; the elders now belong only
to choral societies and lodges and withdraw to their drinking-corners where they rail
against the immorality and disobedience of youth. The youth who have emancipated
themselves from the anarchist-communist-autonomist dogmas and club fanaticism go
their own way and independently spread the ideas of freedom.
Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and comrades as well the radical papers
for their support, moral and otherwise.
See you soon!

Sturmvogel: letter no. 1—15 December 1897, pp. 1–3; letter no. 2 —1 January 1898, p. 3; letter no. 3 —
15 January 1898, pp. 2 –3; letter no. 4 —1 February 1898, pp. 2 –3; letter no. 5 —15 February 1898,
pp. 2 –3. Nos. 1– 5 reprinted in Der arme Konrad (Berlin), 5 February, 5 March, 12 March, 26 March, and
2 April 1898. Translated from German.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 317

 Ar ticle in L E P È R E P E I N A R D
Paris, 19 – 26 December 1897

American Post-Bag

Mon Vieux Peinard,

Anarchist ideas are making headway in the United States and if they have not spread
more quickly it is because English-language propagandists have so far been too few and
far between.
We would need lots of comrades of the calibre of Emma Goldmann who is presently
making blessed propaganda wheresoever she goes.
This comrade does not know the meaning of tired! Scarcely has she been released
from Blackwell Island prison in New York, after serving two years,1 than she throws her-
self back into propaganda. She had been sentenced for letting her tongue run away with
her unduly: at a workers’ rally she had spoken too violently . . . and just to prove that free-
dom of speech no more exists in “America the free” than in the slick monarchies and re-
publics in Europe, she was scooped.
Emma Goldman is of Russian extraction and Jewish parentage but she has long since
renounced all religion and declared herself an atheist.
Tall, well-made, something like thirty five years old, she cuts a fine figure on the ros-
trum: she has a ringing voice, is given to gesticulation and speaks English and German
alike with ease and eloquence. Also, she has enjoyed swelling success in the propaganda
tour she has just made around the cities of the American continent.
Emma Goldmann’s immediate objective is to whip up widespread agitation on behalf
of comrade Bergmann who is serving twenty-five years’ hard labour for having at-
tempted in 1892 to blow the brains out of the martinet Frick, the manager of Carnegie’s
steelworks.
The exploiter Carnegie, the seventy-fold millionaire demon-crat who poses as a phi-
lanthropist was trying at the time to tighten the screws on the proles in his Homestead
convict colonies, in Pennsylvania state. Since these good fellows would have none of it,
this swine Carnegie mustered a gang of Pinkertons, volunteer police in the hire of their
capitalist pay-master and unleashed them on Homestead. The moment they arrived,
these Pinkertons worked wonders: they shot down the unarmed strikers and felled lots
of them.

1. In fact, EG was arrested in 1893 at a demonstration of the unemployed for inciting to riot, found
guilty, and sentenced to a year in prison, of which she served ten months.

318 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

 Signaling her growing international stature, Goldman’s activities were
reported favorably in Le Père Peinard (shown here, 1897 almanac
cover), a French anarchist scandal sheet edited by Émile Pouget. (By
permission of the Kate Sharpley Library)

At which point, exasperated by the crimes of Carnegie and Frick, Bergmann tried to
blow the brains out of one of the instigators of these craven actions.
Since when the poor fellow has been banged up!
And Emma Goldmann has rolled up her sleeves to secure his release.
Not that this means that in her talks Bergmann is all she has to talk about. In her most
recent tour—which was also designed to revive memories of the execution of the Chi-
cago anarchists—she spoke along general propaganda lines. Lucy Parsons, wife of Al-
bert Parsons, one of the Chicago murder victims, accompanied her. She too is a belter of
a propagandist! Since her husband’s death she has not let up in her railing against the
capitalist and government camp and reminding these nincompoops that they murdered
an innocent man.
In addition to her clear and brilliant presentation of our ideas, Emma Goldmann
never misses a chance to bait the police and there is not a meeting where she does not

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 319

 lay into the scum—which has the advantage of leaving the plain-clothed cops, plentiful
at her meetings, to laugh on the other side of their faces.
Moreover, mon vieux Peinard, so that comrades may get some idea of the oratory of
Emma Goldmann, let me offer you as best I can a summary of one of the talks 2 she gave
in Saint-Louis to a packed hall and to frenzied applause from the public:
“In their utter ignorance, the masses have no knowledge of the reason for their
existence.
“What is mankind’s raison d’etre if not to enjoy the beauties and splendours of
nature?
“But do human beings know such enjoyment? If the answer is yes, they ought to be
satisfied and happy—and if it is no, they have been robbed of their legitimate inheritance
and are entitled to reclaim it.
“The latter is the true state of affairs: so, are men making their claim?
“Few of them dare! Only a few have the audacity—the anarchists! And these are de-
spised, hounded, mown down, cast into prison or hanged . . . All as punishment for their
effrontery.
“As for the rest, the timorous slaves of the monopolies who bow and scrape, they do
not possess the manly courage to make their minds known and demand that to which
they are justly entitled.
“Religion, regardless of whatever it may go under, has always been the unfailing ally
of the monopolists in oppressing the workers: it drums it into the poor ignorant slave
that he should carry out the capitalist’s instructions, obey the laws . . . and go in terror of
the flames of Hell.
“To the devil with Religion! If the howlers the priests tell were true, I should rather go
to Hell with my anarchist comrades than to Heaven with the cowards.
“The law is not made against the rich man, only against the long-suffering pauper.
The rich man makes the laws and, of necessity, he looks to his own interests by legislat-
ing against the people.
“If a mother steals bread to save her children who are perishing of hunger, she com-
mits a crime, an outrage against Society, and Society must come down hard on that! If,
on the other hand, a lady bedecked in diamonds and living in luxury steals from a shop,
although she is not really in need, she is a kleptomaniac, her plight is to be pitied and she
gets away with it.”
Then, looking at all of the mechanics of society, Emma Goldmann shows that the ob-
ject of existing institutions is always to protect the rich and grind down the poor!
Then, turning to the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886 and to Homestead in 1892
and Hazleton just last month, she said:
“It is crimes like these that brought the people to a healthy appreciation of the task

2. The Le Père Peinard correspondent reports on EG’s talk in St. Louis on 16 October 1897 in Harugari
Hall, on “Anarchy.”

320 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897

facing it. These capitalist massacres have had the result of stirring the dormant manly
feelings in the hearts of men.
“The Hazleton sheriff, Martin, who gunned down the miners, does he think that he
will only ever be confronted by bleating sheep?
“And those of his ilk, do they think that things will always be this way?
“It is not, rather, evident that the massacres carried out by the capitalists and their
henchmen will inspire the workers to arm themselves in order to resist by at least an
equal, if not superior, force of arms . . . ?”
As for the likelihood of the Hazleton butcher, Sheriff Martin, being brought to trial,
Emma Goldmann holds this as a mockery and she pokes fun at proles who imagine that
the law, which he scrupulously observed, by ordering the massacre, will turn on him.
“Only a madman,” she said, “could believe that! And anyway, why should we look to
the law? . . . The law! We want no part of it! Each and every one of us is a living law and
we claim for ourselves the right to right the wrongs and injustices foisted upon us. . . .”
“Furthermore,” she added, “were X-rays able to delve into the recesses of the human
mind, we should all be astonished at the numbers of anarchists in existence but un-
known to one another, and who have simply not had a chance to break through the layer
of prejudices by which they are cocooned. And the social system stifling us would not
long survive!”
In conclusion, Emma Goldman points out that society will not be transformed
through the ballot box but rather by force:
“And that may well come to pass before long,” she cries, “for the warning tremors
have already rattled capitalist society!”
Ah, mon vieux, you should have heard the stamping feet and frenzied applause once
this comrade had finished!
It warmed the cockles of my heart, b’God!
Ah, if only she were right; what a blessing if the squall were to come soon. I cannot
wait! It cannot come soon enough . . . , for me!

Un vieux de la Commode 3

Le Père Peinard, 19 –26 December 1897, pp. 4 –5. The paper’s American correspondent wrote from St. Louis.
Translated from French.

3. The signature of the letter, “Un Vieux de la Commode,” translates as “an old hand from the furniture
removal trade.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1897 321

 Transcript of Lecture in F R E E S O C I E T Y
Providence, R.I., 13 Februar y 1898

The New Woman.

An Address by Emma Goldman Before the

Liberal Progressive Society, of Providence, R.I.

The bible story of woman’s inequality and inferiority is based on the declaration of her
being created from the rib of man. Woman cannot without equal opportunity ever rise to
equality with him, and hence women are slaves to society as a consequence, and in-
tensified under the marriage code. Despotic rule causes people to revolt, and they will do
so as a necessity. Woman is bred to be seen and for outside show, and hence the sham in
society. Her only mission is to marry and to be a wife and mother, and to cater to a hus-
band who for this will support her. She thus degrades herself. The present mothers are
not so much to be blamed for this condition, this comes about by copying their mothers.
The mother who is thus raised cannot have any conception of the true knowledge of the
rearing of the children, i.e., of raising children as a profession, and she never can bring
up the child as she ought to under this system. Mothers are conquered by the child, the
exception being a good mother.
The duty of a wife is considered as an impure subject for consideration to the young,
unmarried woman, and thus the ignorant girl is forced in the battle unprepared for life
consequences. Another great error in the ideal new woman, and one that is to be con-
demned, is that of aping the male, seeking to become masculine, considering that man
is superior to woman. No decent woman can emulate them. We must first have the New
Man. In all things women are the equal of men, even in the productive field. Even radi-
cals do not differ from the christians; they do not wish their wives to become radical; even
they deem themselves necessary to her protection. So long as she needs protection she
is not on equal footing, we need only to protect weaklings. One of the invasive points in
the character of man is, that he is too authoritative for the forced progress in woman, and
while he has evolved slowly he is making the fatal mistake of securing more liberty for
woman through the very thing that was his own enslavement, i.e., authority. Opposition
to this will correct this evil.
Contemptible marriage laws and the adherence to them tend to still farther increase
the degradation. To assert that freedom of the sex relations is the natural law is inter-
preted to mean free lust. The law of love governs this as in all matters, love being the
fulfillment of the law. Motherhood and its beauty, of which poets have sung and written,
is a farce, and cannot be otherwise until we have freedom— economically.

322 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

Masthead from 30 March 1902 issue of Free Society, an anarchist communist newspaper, for which Goldman fre-
quently wrote essays and political commentaries. She raised funds for the paper and rushed to aid its editors upon
their arrest and false implication in the McKinley assassination of September 1901. (The Bancroft Library, University
of California)

Men are all heroes at home, but cowards abroad. Women, too, would be as unjust at
the ballot box as are the men. They are tyrants as well as are the men. Woman , to be free,
must be the mutual friend and mate of man. The individual is the ideal liberty. We owe
no duty to anyone, save ourselves. When universal woman once comprehends this ideal,
then all protective laws, intended for protection, which is indeed her weakness, will dis-
appear, and this adulterous system goes, and with it charity and all its attendant ills. In
short, the new woman movement demands an equal advancement by the modern man.

Free Society, 13 February 1898, p. 2. Although there is no extant record of this lecture being delivered before
any group (whether known by the name Liberal Progressive Society or by any other name), in Providence dur-
ing her stay in that city, between 21 and 23 January 1898, the press reported that EG lectured on the topic
“New Woman” before the Brooklyn Social Science Club on 15 January 1898 and before the Ladies’ Liberal
League in Philadelphia on 15 February 1898.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 323

 Inter view in the P I T T S B U R G L E A D E R
Pittsburgh, 23 Februar y 1898

What Emma Says.

Anarchist Goldman on Maine Disaster and Dreyfus Case.

De Lome Letter and Blowing up of the Ship Should Not Cause War.
Scheming Politicians Trying to Cover the Real Grievances of the People—
Where France and the United States Are Alike.

The prominent woman Anarchist, Emma Goldman, is booked to deliver a number of lec-
tures in Pittsburg and its vicinity, beginning to-morrow evening in Odd Fellows’ hall,
Eighteenth street, South Side.
She arrived in Pittsburg from New York yesterday. Since her last visit to this city
Emma has lost none of her anarchistic tendencies, and if anything they have increased.
In conversation with a Leader reporter, she discussed most of the leading events of the
day, embracing the Maine disaster 1 and the Dreyfus case.2 Of the former she said:
“In the event of war between Spain and the United States the position of the Anar-
chists will be a passive one. We do not believe in war between nations, but rather in a con-
test that will remove the causes that are responsible for misery and poverty as well as
those questions that bring nations into bloody conflict. If the people of this country were
to go to war it would mean that they would have to neglect home issues, which are of far
more importance to their future welfare than a battle with Spain or any other power.
There are enough issues at home that should be fought out. To my mind the present ten-

1. On 15 February 1898 the USS Maine exploded and sunk in the Havana harbor, killing over 260 men.
The ship had been sent to protect American interests in Cuba during an insurrection against the
Spanish government by Cuban rebels. Initial investigations claimed that the explosion had been
caused by a mine placed under the ship. The sinking of the USS Maine led to a declaration of war by
the United States against Spain on 25 April 1898, dated retroactively to 21 April (in response to Spain’s
declaration of war on 24 April); the Spanish-American War ended 12 August 1898. Later investiga-
tions questioned the assumption that a mine had caused the explosion.
2. French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested on 15 October 1894 for espionage and sentenced to
life imprisonment on the penal colony at Devil’s Island, French Guiana. In 1896 the anarchist
Bernard Lazare became interested in the case, regarding it as an outgrowth of anti-Semitism at the
highest levels of the French state, and began to campaign for an appeal and reversal of Dreyfus’s sen-
tence, not only among anarchists but also among leading intellectuals convinced of Dreyfus’s inno-
cence. On 13 January 1898, L’Aurore printed “J’Accuse,” Émile Zola’s condemnation of the French
government’s conduct in the Dreyfus Affair. After another trial and guilty verdict in 1899 Dreyfus was
pardoned by the French president later that year, and ultimately rehabilitated in July 1906.

324 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

sion has been caused by the designing tactics of politicians of both countries, who wish
to detract from the people the real questions that confront them and that they should take
up and pass upon. The real grievances of the people are buried under this war scare.
“The De Lome 3 letter,” continued Emma, “was by no means a cause for war. While
discussing it I might say that I agree with De Lome in classing McKinley as a low politi-
cian.4 Neither can the blowing up of the Maine be regarded as a casus belli. It was the act
of an individual or a subject, and the nation cannot be held responsible. Spain should be
no more called to account for the act of an unauthorized person any more than that the
United States should be held responsible for the killing of a king by one of its citizens.”
Referring to the Dreyfus case Miss Goldman said:
“The French government is making a spectacle of justice and equality. There is no
doubt of the innocence of Dreyfus. Still in this respect France is no worse than the
United States or any other country as at present governed. Did not the United States
hang the alleged rioters in the Haymarket square affair? They were put to death on the
gallows without the shadow of evidence that they figured in the throwing of the bomb
that caused the death of so many policemen. The only difference between France and the
United States is that while Dreyfus still lives, alleged Haymarket rioters are dead.”
Miss Goldman denies that she ever applied to Prison Inspector George A. Kelly for a
permit to see Anarchist Berkmann, who is in the Western Penitentiary, nor is it her in-
tention to ask for permission to see him at this time. She says the Anarchists now have
a fund of $12,000 5 which will be used in an effort to secure his pardon.
As before stated, the woman Anarchist will lecture to-morrow night at Odd Fellows’
hall, Eighteenth street and Larkins alley, South Side. It will be in English. She will speak
in German Friday night at Vorwaerts’ Saenger hall, Holmes street, Lawrenceville, and
Saturday, at the Imperial Dancing academy. Sunday the lecture will be at Marion hall,
Fifth avenue and Marion street, at 2 P.M., in English. Wednesday evening, March 2, she
will speak at the North Side Turner hall, East street, Allegheny, and Sunday, March 6,
again at the Imperial Dancing academy. The last two will be German. All but Saturday’s
lecture will be free.
Superintendent Leslie was asked to-day if his department would offer any objections
to the lectures. “Not at all,” was the response. “Mrs. Goldman has a perfect right to lec-
ture, and certainly will not be interfered with, unless she commits a breach of the peace.

3. On 9 February 1898, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal published a letter by Enrique
Depuy de Lôme, Spanish minister to the United States, writing to a friend in Havana. The letter,
printed under the headline “The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History,” immediately in-
creased public pressure for war with Spain. Stolen by Cuban insurgents and passed on to the news-
paper, the letter unmasked the hypocrisy of Spanish promises for Cuban autonomy, and described
McKinley in unfavorable terms.
4. In his letter, de Lôme wrote of McKinley, “McKinley is: weak and catering to the rabble, and besides,
a low politician, who desires to leave a door open to me and to stand well with the jingoes of his party.”
5. According to the statement published by the Berkman Defense Association in Free Society in Febru-
ary 1898, only $1,015.83 had been raised and the fund had $394.35 on hand.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 325

 If she does that, of course, she will be looked after just as anybody else would be.” Asked
if he would have any officers present to see that inflammable language and disorder was
not indulged in, Superintendent Leslie answered that it was customary to have officers
present to preserve order at all such entertainments, and that Mrs. Goldman’s lecture
would not be made an exception.

Pittsburg (Pa.) Leader, 23 February 1898, p. 1.

326 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 Ar ticle in the P I T T S B U R G P O S T
Pittsburgh, 25 Februar y 1898

What Emma Goldman Thinks of Patriotism.

Female Anarchist Says the Meaning

of Word is Not Known in This Country.

Patriot is One Who Slays.

Shoots Down His Fellow-Man Under Law’s Protection.

Series of Meetings Which Will Be Held in This Vicinity Opened

Last Night on the Southside.

Emma Goldman, anarchist, agitated in Odd Fellows’ hall, South Eighteenth and Sarah
streets, last night. It was the opening of a series of meetings which she contemplates
holding in this vicinity during the next few weeks. She was brought here by the agitation
committee of Western Pennsylvania, working under the direction of the International
Workingmen’s Association. Her subject last night was “Patriotism,” and a large crowd
was present to hear the fiery utterances as they fell, laden with molten metal, from the
speaker’s lips. Judging from the infrequency of any demonstration, however, the great
majority of those present were there through curiosity more than sympathy with the
cause which Miss Goldman represents.
“Patriotism,” Miss Goldman thinks, is a word the meaning of which the vast major-
ity of the people of the United States takes in entirely the contrary sense. “To be a pa-
triot,” she said, “one must wade ankle-deep in the blood of his fellow men. He must kill,
slay, destroy in every conceivable manner and form, else he is not living up to the sacred
meaning of that sacred word. The sheriff and deputies who ruthlessly shot down the
miners at Hazleton were patriots in the strictest American sense. And as such, you may
rest assured, they will be acquitted of the crime.1
“In Chicago, some years ago, someone threw a bomb into a crowd around the Hay-
market. For this supposed crime the lives of five men paid the forfeit. And yet who knows
who threw that bomb? Was it ever clearly proved? No, but the voice of capital cried aloud
for the blood of the accused, and in this country the voice of capital is always heeded. The

1. On 10 September 1897, Sheriff Martin and his deputies shot and killed striking workers in Lattimer,
Pennsylvania, near Hazleton. The sheriff and his deputies were arrested and charged with murder.
The trial began in February 1898, lasted five weeks, and all were acquitted.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 327

 tragedy in Hazleton is not hidden by any cloaks of mystery. Men among those deputies
have been heard to say, ‘I killed five of them, and could have killed nine,’ making no se-
cret of the crime, and yet he will go unpunished, for the voice and influence and wealth
of the mine owners is whispering insidiously into the ears of justice that these men who
did the shooting did so in preservation of the law, and in so doing acted solely as patri-
ots, and should be protected rather than condemned for a crime so brutal.
“What constitutes a good citizen in this beloved free country of America? I can tell
you. If a man has the ability to rob his neighbor under the guise of a legitimate specula-
tion. If by slipping stealthily up behind him and inserting the knife into his back he robs
him of his life under the pretext that the crime was committed to preserve the integrity
of the Nation, men in office, and, alas, even many of you here to-night, place a crown of
laurel and roses on his brow, and he is at once crowned a public-spirited citizen and a pa-
triot of the first water. Is it so with the man whose daily existence and the lives of his fam-
ily depends on a crust? Hardly. Let him but purloin one loaf from the bakery of his neigh-
bor and a cell yawns before him.
“There is talk of a war between America and Spain. I am not allied with either coun-
try, but I tell you it is unsafe, even dangerous, for America to war with any nation. Her
own governmental props need bolstering; they totter and are likely to fall at any moment,
and it is my candid belief that if war would ensue an uprising of thousands upon whom
the country is now depending for support would follow.”
At the conclusion Miss Goldman was asked how she expected to bring about the re-
forms in the labor question which she agitates. She replied that there was only one way
in which it could be done: that was by a popular uprising of the people. A revolution such
as that of more than a century ago was surely fomenting, and in time, a short time at that,
the clouds were bound to break. That, she said, is the only solution, and that was a day to
which she is confidently looking forward.

Pittsburg (Pa.) Post, 25 February 1898, p. 2. Copyright 2001 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission. The Post ran two subsequent, though shorter, reports of EG’s Pittsburgh lectures.
See “Emma Goldman Again” and “Again Emma Goldman,” 26 February 1898 and 28 February 1898, EGP,
reel 47.

328 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 To S O L I D A R I T Y
Pittsburgh, 15 March 1898

Dear Comrades —

Hurrah for the new paper! Though I don’t care for the name “Solidarity” (we have had
experience with it before),1 yet I hail its appearance, knowing how sadly a paper is needed
in New York. After all, what’s in a name? The principles and tendencies of a paper are all-
important, and knowing the comrades who are to conduct Solidarity,2 I am satisfied that
our ideas will be ably set forth in its columns. I cannot tell you how many people are now
interested in the philosophy of Anarchy. Even the most conservative clubs and organiza-
tions, that only a few years ago would have refused to listen to a professed Anarchist, are
now inviting Anarchist lecturers. They have learned that conservatism is fast losing
ground, and that nothing but advanced and radical ideas meet with popular approval.
The Friendship Liberal League, of Philadelphia, for instance, has heretofore been con-
trolled by its older members, who for twenty-five years have been killing God one night
and reviving him the next; who have ceased to believe in a heavenly Lord, and yet have
stood by without protest while earthly lords were robbing the people. Even these “pillars
of society” have been taught the lesson that the old order changes and gives way to the
new. The comrades of Philadelphia, who arranged five meetings for me in the city of
Brotherly Love, had a hard battle with these gentlemen, who had decided that no Anar-
chist should speak from the platform of the League. The younger members, however, to-
gether with our energetic comrades, won the victory.3 In spite of the strenuous opposi-
tion of the “respectable element,” we had two glorious meetings at the League, in the
afternoon and evening of Sunday, Feb. 20th. I lectured on “Patriotism” and on “Charity.”
The comrades have sent reports to Free Society 4 and other liberal papers, so I will refrain
from telling you the details.

1. Solidarity, the first English-language anarchist communist paper in New York, had had many stops
and starts since its founding in June 1892 by Italian anarchist Saverio Merlino and John H. Edel-
mann. When Merlino left for London at the beginning of 1893, Edelmann assumed most editorial re-
sponsibilities, keeping the journal going through August when it suspended publication. He revived
it in January 1895, but within the year lack of funds once again forced it to close. Peter Kropotkin do-
nated part of the proceeds from his 1897 U.S. lecture tour and Edelmann revived the paper once more
in 1898, with the assistance of William C. Owen and Charles B. Cooper.
2. John H. Edelmann, William C. Owen, and Charles B. Cooper, among others.
3. EG spoke before the Friendship Liberal League during her Fall 1897 lecture tour. Although the Friend-
ship Liberal League was a freethought organization that sponsored lectures primarily on secularism,
Voltairine de Cleyre, James B. Elliott, and other members successfully influenced the group to
broaden its topics to include anarchism.
4. See “Emma Goldman in Philadelphia,” Free Society, 13 March 1898, pp. 2 –3; and “A Short Campaign
in Philadelphia,” Lucifer, the Lightbearer, 16 March 1898, pp. 85– 86.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 329

 In Pittsburg the comrades have arranged meetings for almost every night of the three
weeks I expect to stay here, to try my endurance they say, but you know how much it takes
to tire a woman of talking.
Here, too, I have had proof that our ideas are marching on. The Glass Blowers’ Union,
No. 36, of Monaca, Pa., the largest and most conservative labor organization of the coun-
try, had me down to speak on “Majority Rule,” Saturday, Feb. 26th, at a meeting specially
arranged for me. I must say that I was treated with unusual politeness by the committee,
who showed me every attention. Of course, I care little for such formalities, but I think
we have cause to be satisfied with the progress of the propaganda, when we, who have
until recently been treated like criminals, or who, according to the “Christ of the Free
Thinkers,” Bob Ingersoll, ought to be treated like lunatics,5 are invited to expound our
doctrines, and are listened to with enthusiasm by people who a few years ago joined in
the plutocratic cry “Hang the Anarchists!”
I will be able to give you a better report of my tour when I return home, which will be
in the latter part of April. So far, meetings have been arranged until March 12th in this
city. After that in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago for two weeks; in Cincinnati by the Liberal
League of Ohio,6 another free thought society that has never invited an Anarchist speaker
before; in St. Louis and other cities. In fact I think of extending my present tour as far as
San Francisco, Cal.7
I need not assure you of my hearty co-operation; it is a matter of course that I will do
my best for Solidarity. Please send me several hundred copies of the first number.

With heartiest wishes for the success

of your undertaking, fraternally,
Emma Goldman.

Solidarity, 15 March 1898, p. 3. EG’s original is dated “March, 1898”; therefore, she must have written this
letter between 1 March and 15 March, the date it was published.

5. EG lectured at the People’s Tabernacle in Detroit on 19 November, under the auspices of its pastor,
Rev. H. S. McCowan, on the definition of anarchy, and then fielded questions on more controversial
subjects like free love and political assassination. Local labor leaders joined the city’s conservative elite
in condemning the event. The prominent freethinker Robert Ingersoll (visiting Detroit to lecture that
week) objected to the address on the grounds that all anarchists are “insane” and “it is not com-
mendable for a crazy man or woman to be invited to talk before any public assemblage.”
6. EG spoke to the Ohio Liberal Society on 27 March 1898 on “The Aim of Humanity.”
7. EG did travel to California, arriving in San Francisco in late April. She lectured throughout May in
San Francisco and Los Angeles, before traveling to Portland where she lectured for three nights in
early June.

330 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 Inter view in the S A N F R A N C I S C O C A L L
San Francisco, 27 April 1898

Emma Goldman, Anarchist.

A little woman—she can’t be five feet tall—her round, slender figure neatly dressed in
black, a bunch of carnations at her belt and one glowing vividly in her brown hair, a white
collar at her fair throat and white lace falling over her tiny hands. Her eyes are beautifully
clear and gray, her forehead is fine and low, though the head itself seems narrow, the
small nose is a bit blunt and the thin lips have an habitual disdainful curl that is far from
pleasing.
This is Emma Goldman, the anarchist, who suffered a year’s imprisonment in New
York for “inciting to riot.” 1
“I didn’t incite to riot,” she said to me after last night’s meeting was over. “I merely
quoted Cardinal Manning’s words: ‘Necessity knows no law’.” 2
“But there was an implication, wasn’t there? You meant them to riot?” I asked her.
Incite to riot?
Why this five feet of feminine anarchy is the most dangerous enemy society has. Had
she lived a century ago she’d have been beheaded. Two centuries ago Emma Goldman,
anarchist, would have been given over to the loving embrace of the jungfrau; 3 while in
the sixteenth century she would have been nicely boiled in oil or beheaded and then
neatly broken on the wheel.
But this little Russian woman, with her thickened speech, her good rolling r’s, her dis-
dain of rhetorical rules, her vehemence of expression, her potent, unstudied postures, is
the most interesting woman I ever met. She has life, she has courage, she has brains. She
is fiercely consistent, unwaveringly true and, though I can’t agree with her, I believe her
to be absolutely sincere.
You should hear her talk. It doesn’t matter whether you’re socialist or anarchist or are
endowed with a blessed indifference of isms in general. You can better afford to miss
hearing Melba or even Bernhardt than listening to this genuine creature.4 She is San

1. EG was sentenced to a year in prison in 1893 for inciting to riot at a demonstration of the unemployed.
She was released after ten months for good behavior.
2. EG often attributed her statement to Cardinal Henry Edward Manning. See note 3 in “Hailed Emma
Goldman,” New York World, 20 August 1894, above.
3. The torture device known in English as the “iron maiden” (in German, jungfrau) was a metal casket,
the inside of which was covered in sharpened metal pegs such that, when it closed around a body, the
person was pierced by the pegs and slowly killed.
4. Reporter refers to Nellie Melba (1861–1931; née Helen Porter Mitchell), the world-renowned Aus-
tralian opera singer; and to Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923; née Rosine Bernard), the famous French
actress, known for her strong female roles.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 331

 Francisco’s sensation, as she was that of New York and Chicago; and next to the depar-
ture of the soldiers who marched off to Cuba, there is nothing so thrilling as listening to
Emma Goldman. For nothing cows this woman, who alludes, in her full, strong con-
tralto, to the Deity as “the old gentleman who employs full-stomached idlers, priests, rab-
bis and ministers to mind his business”; who attacks the Press, and charges it with the
responsibility of the war with Spain; who speaks mockingly of President McKinley as “a
low politician,” and says that it was honesty among thieves that made De Lome so ex-
press himself; 5 and who then turns upon the people themselves present and taunts them
with their ignorance, their helplessness, their gullibility.
“You—you—you fools,” she cried, “you slaves, who prate of humanity! Did you in-
terfere in humanity’s name when Sheriff Martin and the other murderers, his deputies,
shot the strikers down? 6 O, no, you did nothing of the kind! You believe what you’re told
to believe, you do what you’re told to do. You stand like cattle before the bulletin boards
with the war news. What for, my friends, what for? That the ruling classes may rejoice;
that the yoke may press tighter upon you; that your blood and your body and your purse
may suffer. And then you talk of freedom, of liberty!”
O, the contempt in this woman’s voice! O, the power she has over this large audience
that shouts bravos and stamps and roars in response to her fiery words!
“As if a workingman could ever be free! Why, you are slaves, slaves. And ‘the brave
boys, the brave boys,’” she went on, quoting sarcastically. “I say ‘the brave boy’ who goes
to offer himself in battle while his father slaves and sweats at home and his sister sells
herself in the streets deserves the lash—and I hope he gets it.”
I asked Miss Goldman later whether she didn’t fear to address men in such terms
as this.
“Never,” she answered. “I have talked to workingmen at the mines, in Chicago, dur-
ing strikes and never once was molested.”
She doesn’t mince words, this fierce, scornful woman. She denounces the present
war—all wars—as a relic of a barbarous time. She declares that the men we honor—
Washington, Jefferson, and Wendell Phillips 7—were not patriots, but rebels. She de-
plores love of country because it makes one intolerant.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she demands, one little hand outstretched and the other
braced upon her hip; “do you mean to tell me that it is wise and noble to throw yourselves
like wild beasts upon the Spaniards, and that you’ll believe it perfectly wise and perfectly
legal and noble simply because you’re told so by the press and the pulpit—the pulpit,”

5. EG refers to the letter written by Enrique Depuy de Lôme, Spanish minister to the United States, that
revealed Spain’s hypocrisy with regard to autonomy for Cuba. The New York Journal printed a pirated
copy of the letter on 9 February 1898, inflaming war fever against Spain.
6. EG refers to the deaths of striking miners at Lattimer, near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, on 10 September
1897.
7. For a discussion of allusions by EG and preceding anarchists to presumed anti-statist sensibilities of
founders of the United States, see note 6 in “Badly Advised,” Article in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung,
22 August 1893.

332 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

she sneered, “for war!—and the monopolists and the Government that is not by the
people and for the people? They tell you you’d tear yourselves to pieces if you had no lead-
ers. Who does the lynching in the South—the white or the black?”
Miss Goldman’s speech is epigrammatic; it is highly quotable. “The world is my coun-
try,” she declares. “To do good is my only religion.” 8 Freedom, freedom, is her cry. Ac-
cording to her creed every barrier is tyranny; every Government, all laws, an imposition.
And the remedy?
“I may be a fool; I am not a prophet,” she answered a question from the gallery, with
a swagger, the only betrayal of self-consciousness she was guilty of last night.
This small fire-brand will suggest no remedy save this:
“Truth is a dangerous weapon in the hands of working men and women. Your enemy
is not in Spain, but in Washington; not in Madrid, but here in San Francisco, in New
York, in Chicago. I believe in holding up a looking glass before you, so that you can see
and know yourselves. When you are educated, when you realize your power, you’ll need
no bombs, and no dynamite or militia will hold you.”

San Francisco Call, 27 April 1898, p. 16. The San Francisco Examiner reprinted an excerpt from this article on
28 September 1901 (with the headline “You Should Hear Her Talk”), in the wake of the McKinley assassina-
tion and extreme anti-anarchist sentiment, charging the Call with treating anarchism sympathetically. The
two-paragraph excerpt began with “But this little Russian woman” and ended with “there is nothing so
thrilling as listening to Emma Goldman.” The Call responded by reprinting the entire article and accusing the
Examiner of quoting it out of context.

8. The first half of EG’s statement reiterates the words of Albert Parsons in his address to the jury in Oc-
tober 1886, reproduced in The Accused, the Accusers . . . (Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Society,
[1886?]). In his discussion of the exploitation of workers by capitalism and governments in both in-
dustry and war, Parsons stated, “The world is my country, all mankind my countrymen.” EG’s state-
ment also echoes Thomas Paine’s in his 1792 Rights of Man (part 2, chap. 5): “My country is the world,
and my religion is to do good.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 333

 To F R E E S O C I E T Y
New York, 10 July 1898

“Ideas and Men.”

Have just read Comrade Addis’ article “Ideas and Men” and also A.I.’s comment.1 The
latter expressed my ideas on the subject so thoroughly that I would not have troubled to
write the following, were it not for the fact that I am the cause of this discussion, or rather
my criticism, during my last visit in Portland, of Anarchists taking part in politics.
He says among other things: “I have been told it is not best for me to make a lectur-
ing trip to New York and the East, because of the highly colored and largely untrue re-
ports of my private acts that have been assiduously circulated there.” Why Comrade Ad-
dis has not stated who the person was that told him so, I do not know; but since he has
failed to do so, I will tell the readers of Free Society that I spoke to Comrade Addis about
it, therefore I will remind him that I did not say “it is not best for him to make a trip East,”
for none of the comrades whom I know paid any attention to the circulated reports about
Addis and the rest of the Firebrand group. What I did say, was that many comrades in the
East have, on learning that Addis stood in with the political gang, lost confidence in him
and would not aid him to make his tour a success. Comrade Addis does not deny that he
took money from some politicians for services rendered them; neither can he deny that
while I was in Portland he again did work for some politicians, although, as he said, “only
to give them pointers and advices.” I am sure that very few of the Eastern comrades care
much for Addis’ private actions. For myself I can only say that I have suffered too much
through Mrs. Grundy 2 in pants, in our own ranks, as to pay any attention to reports. I

1. See 26 June 1898 issue of Free Society (pp. 2, 4); Henry Addis had said, in part:
I understand that Comrade Merlino and myself have greatly detracted from our usefulness by “dabbling in politics.”
That may be so, but, if it is it only shows how professed thinkers allow themselves to be influenced by prejudice,
and by the sentiment that an advocate of a grand ideal should be above reproach personally. . . . [T]his asserting that
it is wrong for an advocate to do so and so, or that propagandists destroy their influence by doing this or that, is an
attempt to mould the action of the advocate or propagandist. It is connecting the theory to the man, and actions as
though the theory was made good or bad by the personal acts of its advocate. Let’s try to rid our minds of this false
sentiment, and look at ideas as such, regardless of who advocates them.

Abe Isaak’s (EG refers to him by his initials, A.I.) comment in the 26 June 1898 issue of Free Society
(p. 4) began: “It appears to me that Comrade Addis’ contention that the actions of the individual
‘should play no part in the acceptance or rejection of the theories advanced by him or her,’ is synony-
mous with the vindication of a catholic priest requesting his flock to judge him not by his deeds but
by his words, when it becomes known that he has been in the company of gay women in the back of
a saloon.” Isaak’s comment ended with “If criticism of our actions is not admissible we might as well
quit the propaganda of our ideal.”
2. The character “Mrs. Grundy” in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough came to personify prudish
censorship.

334 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

have been slandered and attacked in the most contemptible manner: and even now can
be found all sorts of untrue denunciations of Emma Goldman in a German weekly.3
Why? Because I have for years tried to destroy the impression of Anarchy in the heads
of many people, that Anarchy means whisky and bombs, an impression produced by
these very denunciators. I have never put myself up as judge or guardian over the acts of
others.
But if an Anarchist enters the political field, this act is no longer private—it concerns
me and all those interested in the success of our movement, for such inconsistency he
or she does more harm to the movement than can be undone in years. Here we use all
our energies to demonstrate that political action is a folly, that it corrupts the people and
will never set them free; and the next moment this or the other comrade enters the po-
litical arena, helps nominating candidates—in one word, does all the political tricks nec-
essary. Comrade Addis says “he never advised to vote.” Of course he has not, but his ac-
tions remain the same. Just like the Jew calling a christian to light the candle on Saturday
or kindle the fire, because some religious notions forbid him to do it himself. Now if it
is right for the Jew to give to the christian girl the order to do the work, it must be right
for him to do it himself. As prejudice and superstition knows no logic we may excuse the
Jewish people, but there is no excuse for H. Addis entering the political field. Whether
he advised people to vote or not, is not important: he helped the politicians and they
finished the rest of the dirty job. Comrade Addis refers to Merlino. Ah, but there is a vast
difference between Merlino’s act in regard to politics and his.4

3. Most had reported on the Pacific Coast portion of EG’s tour in the 18 June 1898 issue of Freiheit (p. 8;
translated from German):
Several long-winded reports have reached us on the meetings held there by Emma Goldman. In general, they more
or less sounded the same. From none of them can we gather anything about the content of the speeches held (the
only thing that could interest larger circles), all are concerned almost exclusively with an exaggerated cult of person-
ality, of which more than enough has been made already and which is not very suitable for anarchists. That is why
we will condense.
In San Francisco, E. Goldmann spoke in several well-attended meetings, mostly in English. Comrade Rieger
thinks she masters this language “better” than the German one, “although one immediately recognizes the for-
eigner in her hard accent.” He also remarked that he tried to find out what impression these lectures made on out-
siders and that he had to hear often: “What in the world is this woman getting at?” At a celebration of Reitzel, he
says, Goldmann gave a speech “which didn’t lack in inaccuracies or tactlessness.” She said, for example: “If there
were five men like Reitzel the world would be liberated in a short time from the bonds of slavery[.] . . .”
Comrade Doering from Portland, who compared Goldmann’s agitation with a “tornado,” which was suitable “to
awaken in us the sense of guilt for having been asleep in recent times,” informs us that the three meetings that took
place there were only poorly attended because “the time to organize them was too short and the moment was poorly
chosen.” Finally he remarks that the speaker “was regretfully allowed to leave bedecked with flowers and accompa-
nied by the best wishes.”
Comrade Frenzel reports from San Jose that E. Goldmann had to speak on the street because the social democrats
there, after having originally promised her their hall, took back their word.
Comrade Fäßler, from Los Angeles, is less delighted by the whole agitation that Goldmann engaged in there. He
states that one had repeatedly written from the start not to come, but nevertheless was “honored” by her visit. Then
he writes: “She can really boast to have spoken here for she left here unconcerned by the fact that she intensified the
hatred against our ideas and the persecutional rage against our comrades.”

4. In January 1896, Saverio Merlino advocated a strategic alliance with leftist forces in Italy, including
participation in the 1896 election, as a necessary step in deposing the reactionary regime of Prime
Minister Crispi.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 335

 Merlino openly and intelligently advocates the use of the ballot and political action.
Now, whether I agree with him or not, I must at least admit that with Merlino it is a con-
viction, a principle; with H. Addis it is nothing of the kind, in fact he always has been op-
posing politics in the Firebrand. Why, then, did he assist the politicians? Because, he said
himself, “there was money in it.” And that is just the reason why I, and with me many
others, deplore Comrade Addis’ act. He says further, “I might be one of the vilest men,
and yet be able to clearly and forcibly advocate the purest and most lofty ideas.” Oh no,
you cannot, Comrade Addis. The very fact of you being vile would never allow you to
grasp the noble ideas.
It is time that we understand once for all that a rascal, a liar, a contemptible man or
woman, never can be an Anarchist; and unless we do that we will make no headway in
the future, as we have made but little in the past; and this only because we have had
drunkards, liars, biggots and despots in our ranks, who delivered splendid speeches,
talked about liberty, equality and other grand things, while as soon as they left the plat-
form, they were cruel, mean, coarse and vile, ready to destroy everybody who dared to
oppose them. Unless we reform ourselves, we have no right to reform others; unless
we bring our acts in conformity with our ideas, we will never progress, never change
conditions.
Of course Comrade Addis has a perfect right to do what he pleases, but if he so much
insists on his right, he will kindly allow me the right to criticise his acts pertaining to the
movement.
Comrade Addis has assisted me very much during my short stay in Portland. We have
parted as friends, and he will therefore, I hope, not take these lines with ill feelings, for
they have not been written in such a spirit. I have replied to his article because I wish the
readers of Free Society to know what and whom he was aiming at, also state my position
in regard to “men and ideas.” 5

E. Goldman.

Free Society, 10 July 1898, pp. 4 –5. EG dated her letter June 1898, but her reference later in this letter to
“denunciations of Emma Goldman in a German weekly” implies that she wrote it on or after 18 June, the
date of the Freiheit article.

5. Addis responded to EG in the next issue of Free Society, denying her allegations against him, claiming
he neither wrote his original article with her in mind, nor had he taken work for politicians. He took
offense at the personal nature of her attack: “Emma did not reply to my article, but tried to defend her-
self before she was attacked, and in so doing made a personal attack on me. I did not have her in mind
when I wrote, in fact had no person in mind, only ideas. I have no more to say. When my theories will
be criticised instead of my personality I will again enter the forum, but I positively refuse to mix in
personal disputes” (Free Society, 24 July 1898, p. 2).

336 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 To S O L I D A R I T Y
New York, 15 July 1898

A Short Account of My Late Tour.

I had promised friends and comrades to give a detailed account of my tour through the
States in the form of traveling notes, either in Free Society or in Solidarity. But on think-
ing the matter over, I concluded that this would be impossible, for if I should give a full
history of all my experiences, all I encountered, and the many incidents which I recall,
the people I met and their characteristics, during eighteen weeks on the road, it would
fill a book of considerable size. As time and space will not permit me to do this now, I
must beg my friends to accept a short account.
I left New York with $2 in my purse and a ticket to Philadelphia, my first stopping
place. Through the kind assistance of various comrades I traveled to the Pacific Coast,
South as far as Los Angeles, and North to Portland. I have visited in all eighteen cities,
among them Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and in the Western Pennsylvania mining districts,
McKeesport, Roscoe, Newton, Monaca, and Homestead, where six years ago the slaves
of Carnegie’s iron and steel mills fought like men to protect their lives and liberty for a
time, only to return to greater hardships and humiliations than ever. I was in Cleveland,
Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Fran-
cisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Portland, but was compelled to cancel engagements
in Tacoma and Seattle and other places on account of misunderstandings. I addressed
66 meetings and conducted a debate with a leading Socialist in San Francisco.1 On look-
ing back over my tour I can say without flattering myself too much, that I have done good
work. I have made friends for the cause of liberty, have done away with a good deal of
prejudice formerly entertained by different people against Anarchy and Anarchists, and
have won a number of personal friends. In fact I was received with open arms wherever
I went, and the comrades did their utmost to make my visit pleasant in every respect. Of
course I also made enemies. I do not understand why some people assert that America
is a poor place for the spread of radical ideas. My experience in my last two trips has been
that this country is an excellent field for them. I believe that if we only had a few able, en-

1. EG refers to Emil Liess, who was a German American socialist in San Francisco and editor of the la-
bor daily San Francisco Tageblatt from 1894 to 1899. He debated EG in San Francisco on 4 May 1898,
at Vorwärts Turner Hall. Later Liess assumed the editorship of the weekly organ of the San Francisco
Socialist Party, Vorwärts der Pacific Küste (1911). A member of the German Free Thought Society in
San Francisco, he shared the podium with James F. Morton, Jr., during an 11 November 1900 me-
morial meeting in San Francisco for the executed Haymarket anarchists.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 337

 ergetic workers going constantly back and forth between the Atlantic and Pacific we
would have a strong movement in a short time.
It will surprise many of the comrades to learn that very little is known of Anarchy in
the West. “Yet much money and time have been spent in literature, papers, pamphlets,
etc.,” some will exclaim. That is true, but unfortunately the papers, pamphlets and
leaflets have only reached the few—not the many. It is only of late that a Western paper
has been doing good work in propaganda, and that is Free Society. The Western people
are ready to accept radical ideas, and Free Society is now paving the way for anarchy very
rapidly.
The condition of the workers is, of course, much the same everywhere—poverty, lack
of work, want of the necessaries of life, misery and starvation are at home in each large
city; still, the West is not so much in the grip of politicians, bigots and hypocrites as the
East. Sunday laws, moral laws, laws prohibiting speech in the open air, etc., are little
known in the far West, and I hardly think ever will be. This alone makes life pleasanter
on the Pacific than here, where every bluecoat exercises the power of a Czar.
Therefore, if the time, energy and money used in propaganda in the East had been de-
voted to the Pacific Slope we would have had a very different movement. However, bet-
ter late than never. Philosophic Anarchy is still new to the American tongue. Let us con-
tinue our efforts, carry on an energetic propaganda, and we will soon see that intelligent
Americans will join hands with the intelligent people of all countries in the battle for
liberty.
I have often heard reformers say that the working class does not revolt because it is
not yet wretched and starving enough, and that the sooner economic conditions get
worse the sooner they will revolt. This is another wrong conception of men and condi-
tions. Take the coal miners, the most ill paid and ill treated wage workers in existence.
To try to describe the condition of the miners of Western Pennsylvania is to attempt the
impossible. In many places grown men, with families, have not been able to earn more
than $1.50 a week. They are herded together in miserable, filthy hovels, 12 or 15 people
occupying one room; for how else can they pay rent? Yet these men do not revolt, and
never will. They have not the strength. They are like animals— dumb, stupid, indiffer-
ent, ready to lick the hand that lashes them. But when I reached the districts where they
earned $5 and $6 a week (a fortune (?) as they work), I found men carrying themselves
with some pride and self respect, and open to ideas. It is therefore an unpardonable mis-
take to sit with folded hands awaiting the development of things to such a state that it will
be too late to act. Men with empty stomachs do not fight for freedom. They fight for
bread, and as soon as they get the crust, gnawing on it they forget their good intentions
to fight for more. I have not spent 18 weeks in missionary work without learning that
it is useless to appeal to the overfed, but still of less use to appeal to the underfed. To
be successful we must reach that class whose brains have not yet been destroyed by
starvation.
The convention of the Social Democracy, held in Chicago June 7th, which I attended

338 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

as a visitor, was a fiasco, as many such have been. For the credit of the colonization side,
however, be it said, that it was their intention to develop a sound, healthy, economic
movement, leaving all politics to the politicians.2 The will was strong, but the flesh was
weak; not strong enough to maintain their position to the last, they compromised, that
is, they dropped one, politics, but accepted the other, the colonization propaganda. I have
no faith in either, for I know that nothing short of the propaganda against political con-
trol and against economic dependence will satisfy.
I will write no more of my tour, as most of the meetings have been reported in Free
Society and in Solidarity. I will add that some of my lectures are to appear in Free Society
shortly. Let me also add that before long I will start on another tour. Therefore, not good-
by, but au revoir.

Fraternally,
Emma Goldman.

Solidarity, 15 July 1898, p. 2. EG dated this travel letter “New York, July 1898.”

2. The Social Democracy of America was formed by Eugene Debs in 1897. By the time of the 1898 con-
vention, the organization was on the verge of collapse, internally divided over a colonization plan to
settle workers in a western state where they would put their communitarian principles into practice.
Their numbers, it was believed by some, would transform the state into a cooperative commonwealth,
providing political leverage for a national transformation. Debs had adopted the project from the
Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, a communitarian socialist organization founded in
1896, and had made it the cornerstone of his Social Democracy movement. Leaders of an anti-colo-
nization faction, however, turned Debs away from this idea. Headed by Milwaukee socialist Victor
Berger, they opposed the plan as a distraction from the task of union building and political pursuit of
immediate worker demands. Outvoted on the issue, these “political actionists” walked out of the 1898
convention and, with Debs in tow, immediately founded the Social Democratic Party, in effect spelling
the end of the Social Democracy of America. Many anarchists were involved in the Social Democracy
of America, especially in Chicago, where the anarchist Branch 2 had been thrown out of the Social
Democracy for its radical rhetoric (see note 2, “Emma Goldman Has Her Say,” Article in the Chicago
Tribune, 30 September 1897, above).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 339

 To the D E T R O I T S E N T I N E L
New York, 25 July 1898

Miss Emma Goldman

Replies to Questions Asked by Mr. F. B. Livezey.

She Does Not Favor Compulsory Education or Force as

Anarchistic Propaganda—Interesting Letter.

To the Editor of the Sentinel:

In your paper of July 2d I notice an item headed “Emma Goldman Wanted,” in which
Mr. F. B. Livesey,1 of Sykesville, Md., sends me his compliments and inquires whether I
am in favor of “compulsory education,” and whether I advocate “force” in the propa-
ganda of anarchy. He also states that he is in sympathy with my antagonism to marriage
and the clergy, and with my appreciation of Jesus Christ.2
May I ask that you be kind enough to publish this reply to Mr. Livesey’s queries:

1. Francis Buck Livesey (1845–1925) was a reformer and correspondent ubiquitous in the pages of vari-
ous radical and reform publications, including Free Society and Lucifer, the Lightbearer. Livesey was au-
thor of Practical Religion (West Friendship, Md., 1875) and was also active in the Press Writers Asso-
ciation, an organization dedicated to monitoring and corresponding with mainstream newspapers in
an effort to gain fairer and more accurate coverage of radical philosophies and events. Other mem-
bers included Kate Austin and James F. Morton, both anarchists, freethinkers, and advocates of free
love. Livesey’s later works, self-published in Sykesville, Maryland, include several broadsides attack-
ing compulsory vaccination, compulsory education, prohibition, and child labor laws: National Ruin
and Vaccination, Virginia and Mississippi Legislators, the Great Gov. Vardaman (1905); Public Schools, Jack
London, National Problems and Revolutions (1905); Schools, Socialism, Lynchings, Ministers, Catholics,
Negroes, Revolution, England (1906); and Save the Country: Child Labor Laws, Compulsory Education,
Prohibition . . . Will All Go Down As the People Rouse From the Slavery and Impoverishment These Things
Have Brought Upon Them (1908).
2. Livesey’s request read (Detroit Sentinel, 2 July 1898, p. 1):
I want somebody who knows where Emma Goldman is to send her my compliments and ask her if she has lectured
favoring “compulsory education,” and if she advocates “force” for the propaganda of anarchy. I want her to answer
me these points publicly or privately, that I may in return answer her publicly. If she believes in compulsory educa-
tion she is not a consistent anarchist, and if she believes in force she greatly hinders the spread of anarchy. I have
all my life been a fighting boy or man in one way or another, but that anarchy’s best weapon at the present is the pen
I am ready to prove.
Every reformer wants the changed opinion and not the forced man, even were force sufficient at hand to compel.
From a description of Emma Goldman recently given in Free Society, of San Francisco, I have a high appreciation of
her, and if she is in error in some of her points and methods I want to reason with her concerning them. I appreci-
ate her antagonism to marriage and the clergy and her appreciation of Jesus Christ.

340 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 I do not favor compulsory education; nor have I ever lectured in favor of it. Not only
do I not believe in it, but I am entirely opposed to our present school system, consider-
ing it injurious to the natural faculties of the child. I know by my own experience that in-
structors and teachers can seldom regard the individual abilities and inclinations of their
pupils; they must follow the lines laid down by the board of education and stuff the chil-
dren’s heads with a lot of rubbish, which only burdens the little minds and which is of
no benefit to the children. Until instructors will make it a special study to understand the
nature of their pupils, their physical and mental wants, their trials and worries, their
pleasures and sorrows, children will leave their schools automatic machines and not
thinking and reasoning young men and women.
I have never advocated “force” for the propaganda of anarchy, nor do I know of any an-
archist who has done so.
Every student of anarchist philosophy knows that anarchy has nothing to do with
force and violence; that it denotes peace, safety and liberty, and does not recognize the
right of one to rule, injure or coerce the others.
But every anarchist is also a student of history, and as such he or she must recognize
that the ruling classes have never granted privileges to the oppressed until forced to do
so by the latter.
Judging from the events of the past and present, there is no doubt in my mind that
the struggling masses of the present century can expect nothing from their masters, and
if they want to change their conditions and bring about a state of society in which no one
shall enjoy the toil of his fellow man they will only succeed through the social revolution,
never through peaceful methods.
As to individuals using force: well, whether we agree with them or not, whether we
like them or not, such cases will occur from time to time, as a natural result of the causes
existing in society. Let me give you an example. You will no doubt remember the shoot-
ing of Prime Minister del Castillo, of Spain, by the young student Angiolillo.
If Cánovas had not re-established the inquisition in Spain, if he had not caused
300 innocent workingmen to be tortured in the most barbarous and inhuman way in the
prison of Montjuich,3 the world had never heard of Angiolillo. He, whose heart was filled
with love and sympathy for his fellow men, would not have thought of shooting Cánovas,
as he was too gentle, refined and noble even to hurt a fly. But Cánovas del Castillo, with
his murderous genius, has produced a Golli, just as Caesar produced a Brutus.4
We might as well fight against cyclones, earthquakes, tornadoes, lightning and other

3. The Corpus Christi Day bombing in Barcelona on 7 June 1896 led to the arrest and imprisonment of
radicals, socialists, and anarchists at Montjuich.
4. After AB’s attentat on Henry Clay Frick, EG also referred to AB as Brutus, a term later used by some
anarchists to describe Leon Czolgosz. The reference stresses an interpretation of Brutus as the de-
stroyer of a despotic power.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 341

 phenomena, as to fight against individual acts of violence. They have been and will be as
long as we retain the causes which produce them; and I look upon such occurrences as
warnings of the coming danger to the tyrants of the world.5
Of course I understand that violent acts do not change conditions unless a change has
taken place in the minds of the people. Yet individual acts often set men to thinking and
then books, papers, lectures and other methods of propaganda develop the first thought,
which deeds like Angiolillo’s, Sante Caserio’s,6 Alexander Berkman’s 7 and others have
first stimulated.
I hardly think Mr. Livesey will succeed in proving to me that the pen is anarchy’s best
weapon at present. It might have been so were it not for Boss Comstock.8 Certainly
Mr. Livesey must know by this time that free press and free speech are things of the past;
that Comstockism is fast spreading in this country, destroying the liberty of each victim
it reaches. True, Comstock has not succeeded in crushing the right of expressing one’s
opinion entirely, but the pen can no longer be used as openly as at the time when such
biggots as Comstock were not known.
Every liberty-loving man or woman must be antagonistic to the clergy and our mar-
riage institutions, and oppose them as obstacles in the way of freedom and as imperti-
nent meddlers in private affairs.
I do not recollect ever having expressed my appreciation of Jesus Christ, and therefore
I do not consider myself deserving of Mr. F. B. Livesey’s compliments.
If Christ existed, of which I am not quite positive about, as there are so many pros
and contras, he undoubtedly was a reformer; but unfortunately he advanced ideas based
on sentiment and not on reason. I suppose this is the reason why priests, parsons and
preachers have been able to use his teachings for their own benefit, causing humanity so
much suffering. I prefer modern reformers, who base their philosophy both on senti-
ment and reason, knowing full well when people will learn to reason there will be no
room for gods, devils or their emissaries, priests, Comstock and other parasites.
In conclusion I would like to thank Mr. Livesey for his high appreciation of me, but

5. EG’s assertion that individual acts of violence are as inevitable as natural phenomena echoes August
Spies’s discussion of revolution in his address to the jury of 6 October 1886, reproduced in The Ac-
cused, the Accusers . . . (Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Society, [1886?]). In his speech Spies stated,
“Revolutions are no more made than earthquakes and cyclones. Revolutions are the effect of certain
causes and conditions.” EG reiterates this idea in 1901 in regard to Leon Czolgosz. See “The Tragedy
at Buffalo,” Article in Free Society, 6 October 1901, below.
6. Sante Caserio assassinated French president Sadi Carnot on 24 June 1894, in retaliation for the exe-
cution of Auguste Vaillant.
7. AB attempted to assassinate Carnegie steel company manager Henry Clay Frick in 1892 in retaliation
for Frick’s ordering Pinkerton guards to shoot at striking workers during the strike and lockout at the
Homestead plant.
8. In 1873 Anthony Comstock successfully lobbied Congress to pass a law, later known as the “Comstock
Act,” which gave the post office the power to exclude from the mails any material deemed obscene.

342 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

as he has gained this only from a description in Free Society, he may yet change in opin-
ion should he ever meet the original of that description.

Emma Goldman.

Detroit (Mich.) Sentinel, 30 July 1898, p. 1. Robert Ingersoll’s disparaging response to EG’s lecture in a De-
troit church in 1897 led to an exchange between Francis B. Livesey and individualist anarchist Joseph A.
Labadie on the position of anarchist communists with respect to violence, citing EG in particular (see Detroit
Sentinel, 7 May 1898, p. 1). In his 2 July letter to the Detroit Sentinel, Livesey invited EG to make her posi-
tion clear, provoking this letter.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 343

 To F R E E S O C I E T Y
New York, 31 July 1898

Gives Her Side.

T. P. Quinn in his article “Reflections on Debs,” in Free Society of July 2, makes a state-
ment concerning Debs and myself which I must correct.1 Debs did not promise me the
floor; he could not have done so as I had not applied for it. Now, whether Eugene V. Debs
is guilty of all T. P. Quinn says or not I do not know (I personally have always believed,
and still believe, him to be honest, though have always maintained that he lacks moral
courage and energy),2 I do not wish Debs to be accused of something he is not guilty of.
The truth of the whole thing is that I was requested by several Chicago delegates,
R. Goodwin 3 and others, to stop over the convention, as they wanted me to speak there.
Being on my way to New York and having nothing of greater importance to do I con-
sented, but after attending the convention for two days I knew that I would not be able to
speak before that body, as those in favor of political action would resist with all their
power. In fact my very presence at the proceedings excited the political gang to a frenzy
and they employed all the dirty tricks possible to exclude me from the convention, but
they did not succeed of course.
On the third day of the convention I was informed by J. L. Lloyd, J. B. Ashorn and sev-
eral others, that an entertainment was arranged for the evening and that I was expected
to speak there, and that Debs had announced this from the platform. Before the close of
the day’s session Debs came over to me and asked whether I knew that I was expected to
speak in the evening. I said yes. Debs promised to be present.

1. T. Putnam Quinn was an Irish American anarchist based first in New York and then in Chicago.
A member of Chicago Branch 2 of the Social Democracy of America (SDA) in 1897, Quinn had at-
tended an earlier St. Louis labor conference and was present at the September 1897 Chicago labor
conference. The 3 July 1898 issue of Free Society included a report by Quinn on the 7–10 June SDA
convention in Chicago: “Emma Goldman attended the recent convention and Debs promised her the
floor, but the Socialists pressed from all sides and protested. It was then decided to have an enter-
tainment on the evening of June 9, at which Miss Goldman could speak. When the evening came,
Mr. Lloyd was deputed by the powers to announce that the committees were all in session, and thus
excused the small attendance; but the bold Goldman arose and told the real reason for the non-
attendance of the law-abiders to the audience in the straightest possible language” (p. 7).
2. In one of her “Letters from a Tour” (no. 4; Sturmvogel, 1 February 1898), EG comments on Debs’s per-
sonality: “He is not the man of his time; he lacks energy and will and he collapses like a fly in the
slightest gust of wind. . . . There is no doubt that in his way he is honest and has good intentions. . . .”
3. Roy M. Goodwin was an American anarchist and trade unionist and one of the directors of the Amer-
ican Railway Union along with Eugene Debs. Goodwin served a three-month prison term for his part
in the 1894 Pullman strike. He was on the national board of directors of the Social Democracy of
America, favored the colonization efforts, and was a member of the anarchist Branch 2 of the Social
Democracy in Chicago.

344 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 When I arrived in the evening I found about two dozen people in the hall, among
them but three delegates, the rest comrades and personal friends from Chicago. J. L.
Lloyd tried hard to excuse his fellow colleagues, but he only made things worse,4 and so
when he called on me to speak I did not hesitate to express my opinion concerning the
whole farce.5

E. Goldman.

Free Society, 31 July 1898, p. 2.

4. According to Quinn’s report, Lloyd announced that the missing delegates were all in committee
sessions.
5. EG was one of a number of anarchists present among the seventy delegates at the 7 June 1898 SDA
convention in Chicago; others included Lucy Parsons and T. P. Quinn. Shortly after the 1898 conven-
tion, EG wrote in Solidarity that she had no faith in the SDA: “I know that nothing short of the prop-
aganda against political control and against economic dependence will satisfy.” For more information
on EG’s involvement in the 1898 convention, see “A Short Account of My Late Tour,” Letter to Soli-
darity, 15 July 1898, above.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 345

 To the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
New York, 18 September 1898

New York Anarchist Leaders Denounce the

Murder of Austria’s Empress.

They Say that Lucchesi Is the Natural Result of Prevailing

Conditions but They Do Not Excuse His Crime.

The New York Anarchists denounce and repudiate Luccheni,1 the assassin of the Em-
press of Austria.2 He had no “justification” according to their code for slaying a woman
who was harmless, unhappy and not unkind.
No distinct nationality is recognized by the Anarchists; they call each other comrades.
The story current of a distinct band of Italian Anarchists located in Zurich who plotted
against the life of Humbert,3 the Duke of Orleans 4 and the Austrian Empress 5 is dis-
credited by the Swiss police, and also by well-known Anarchists here.
The name of Luccheni is not known by them, and while he may have called himself
an Anarchist he did not, so far as New York members know, belong to a “group.” Indeed,
anarchy does not recognize a united assembly. With its votaries everything rests in the
individual [. . . .]

1. The New York World headline misspells Luccheni’s last name.

2. On 10 September 1898, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was stabbed to death in Geneva by Italian
anarchist Luigi Luccheni. Luccheni’s act was prompted by the violent repression of demonstrations
in Milan in the Fatti di Magio (Events of May) earlier that year. The assassination led to an interna-
tional clampdown on anarchist activity by police authorities, and culminated in the International
Conference for the Defense of Society against the Anarchists, convened in Rome on 24 November
and attended by all twenty-one European powers. The conference marked the beginning of interna-
tional cooperation in the surveillance of anarchists. On 11 September the New York World claimed the
assassination of Empress Elizabeth was part of a world-wide anarchist conspiracy. This is presumably
the charge to which EG and other New York anarchists felt obliged to respond (see “Assassins Plotted
to Kill the European Sovereigns,” New York World, 11 September 1898, p. 1). Accordingly, this letter
was written between 11 September and the publication of EG’s letter of 18 September.
3. The newspaper is referring to King Umberto of Italy.
4. Prince Henri d’Orleans was a French pretender to the throne.
5. Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1837–1898), the daughter of a Bavarian duke, became Empress Con-
sort upon marrying Francis Joseph I, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary and Bohemia, in 1854.
Her first daughter, Sophie, died unexpectedly in 1857. Her son, Prince Rudolph, the heir to the
throne, killed himself with his lover in 1889. The Empress was assassinated by Italian anarchist Luigi
Luccheni in Geneva on 10 September 1898, when, although she was intending to travel incognito, her
presence was announced by the local newspapers.

346 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

BY EMMA GOLDMAN.

To the Editor of the World:

Even if this man Luccheni declared himself an Anarchist, I would be the first one to say
he is not one.
Any man who understands the philosophy of anarchy could never commit such folly.
The philosophy of anarchy forbids the destruction of human life, particularly in a use-
less manner.
Had this man chosen Francis Joseph 6 for his victim I would have approved it, because
he in his fifty years’ reign has succeeded in bringing his empire nearly to dissolution.
While yet a young lad, in ’48, he was the first one to set an example of cruelty by en-
circling the captive fighters for freedom and, without giving them a chance to defend
themselves by arms or law, ordering them shot down like dogs.7
The most conservative people of his land opposed this act as unworthy of a monarch.
Had Luccheni immortalized his name by the dethronement of the Spanish Queen
Regent it would also be accepted by me. She did not utter one word to prevent the Bar-
celona horrors.8
It was there that, during a religious procession last year, a bomb was thrown by a man
whose identity remains hidden up to this day.

THE BARCELONA HORROR.

Yet for his crime more than three hundred radical workingmen, professional men and
artisans were arrested and subjected to tortures too horrible to relate, a very repetition of
the quondam Spanish inquisition.
All this was her work and the work of Cánovas del Castillo, who has since met retri-
bution at the hands of Angelillo.
In my opinion, Luccheni was an individual who saw that life had nothing in store for
him, and having nothing to lose he destroyed life.
Yet I would not consider him a crank nor insane. Rather say that he is a product of
present economic, political and social injustices.
I formed this opinion when I heard of the Empress’ death and before I learned any-
thing about the man, who, as I heard later, did not know father or mother.
Just as little as the moon can dim its splendor at the barking of a dog, just as little will
the philosophy of Anarchism lose of its grandeur because of acts committed by social
outcasts.

6. EG refers to the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary and Bohemia, who reigned from 1848 to
1916.
7. EG refers to the suppression of the 1848 Hungarian uprising and the resulting creation of a
short-lived independent state. Austria regained control of Hungary in 1849, executing fourteen rebel
leaders.
8. EG refers to the arrest and trial of anarchists and other radicals after the Corpus Christi Day bombing.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898 347

 Because so many Italians have figured as political assassins, it does not follow that An-
archists would select Italians as martyrs.
Every man acts individually and the Italians happen to be very zealous. We have many
Italian Anarchists in this country and none of them would approve of this murder.

Emma Goldman. [. . .]

New York World, 18 September 1898, p. 28; includes sketch of EG and other illustrations. For the excised por-
tions of this article, including letters from New York Italian anarchists Salvatore Pallavencini, N. Blotto,
C. Ferrara, and G. Imperato, see “New York Anarchist Leaders Denounce the Murder of Austria’s Empress,”
New York World, 18 September 1898, EGP, reel 47.

348 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1898

 Exchange of Let ters in L I B E R T Y
New York, Januar y 1899

An Undelivered Speech.

The following correspondence explains itself: 1

7 December 1898

Dear Mr. Tucker:

The Alexander Berkman Defence Association 2 is making an attempt and moving heaven
and earth to have our friend, Alexander Berkman, pardoned.
It becomes necessary to plead with Mr. Carnegie, and solicit his aid for that purpose.
Mr. Carnegie is reported to be in New York at present.
Will you kindly cooperate, select others you may choose, and act as spokesman?
If so, we will ever pray, etc.

Fraternally yours, for the committee,

Justus Schwab.
Ed. Brady.
Emma Goldman.

11 December 1898

To Justus Schwab, Ed. Brady, and Emma Goldman, representing the committee of the Alexan-
der Berkman Defence Association:

Friends,—

Answering your letter of December 7, honoring me with an invitation to act as your

spokesman on the occasion of a proposed visit to Mr. Andrew Carnegie to solicit his aid
in securing the release of Mr. Alexander Berkman, I hereby gratefully accept your trust,

1. Benjamin Tucker, editor and publisher of the leading journal of anarchist individualism, printed this
exchange of letters in his January 1899 issue of Liberty.
2. After determining that the only hope for a reduction in AB’s sentence was an appeal to the Pennsyl-
vania Board of Pardons, attorneys for the Berkman Defense Association recommended that the par-
don board’s decision would rest upon the attitude of Andrew Carnegie. The idea of enlisting Tucker’s
help was apparently Justus Schwab’s, who was close to Tucker.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 349

 Masthead from 1899 issue of Liberty, an anarchist individualist paper edited by Benjamin Tucker, which often printed
sharp critiques of Goldman’s activities. (By permission of the Kate Sharpley Library)

and I submit herewith a draft of the remarks which it is my intention to make to

Mr. Carnegie, should the plan be carried out in the manner proposed.
I beg to add that, should the tenor of these remarks prove unacceptable to you, a with-
drawal of your invitation would be received by me in perfect good part.
Awaiting your pleasure, I am

Yours sincerely,
Benj. R. Tucker.

Mr. Carnegie:

Mr. Alexander Berkman, who is now serving a sentence in a Pennsylvania prison for an
attempt to kill your business partner, Mr. Henry C. Frick, in 1892, and the Alexander
Berkman Defence Association, which is seeking to shorten that sentence, have asked
me to solicit, on their behalf, the exercise of your influence with the Pennsylvania par-
doning power, to the end that Mr. Berkman may go free. In compliance with their request
I come to you.
You, in considering this petition, will be largely influenced, and very properly, by the
attitude of your petitioners. In determining what that attitude is, you surely will take it
for granted, as I take it for granted, that they approach you as penitent sinners, asking
forgiveness and seeking remission of penalty. Their very appearance before you, in per-
son or by proxy, on such an errand, must be taken to indicate that what they once re-
garded as a wise act of heroism they now regard as a foolish act of barbarism; that the
method of reform by violence which they once thought efficacious they now think fu-
tile; that they keenly regret the attempt upon the life of Mr. Frick; that the six years of
Mr. Berkman’s imprisonment have convinced them of the error of their ways; and that
henceforth they will neither commit, counsel, or approve any acts of violence whatsoever.
Any other explanation of the prayer of these petitioners is inconsistent with their lofty

350 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

character. Certainly it is not to be supposed for a mo-
ment that men and women of their courage and dig-
nity, after shooting a man down deliberately and in cold
blood, would then descend to the abject and basely hu-
miliating course of begging their victim and his friends
to leave them the freedom to assault him again. It is ob-
vious, then, that they come here to-day in an attitude of
sincere repentance,—no longer as reformers, but as re-
formed, and asking for liberty as a reward of their ref-
ormation. Now, sir, you are too close a student of social
problems to need any argument of mine to convince
you that punishment of the truly penitent is not politic
on the part of society. In thus establishing the reality of
their contrition, I am sure that I have commanded your
assent to their petition.
But I cannot close without saying another word, no
longer as their spokesman, but for myself. My own at-
titude in asking you to favor mercy for Alexander Berk-
man is not that of these petitioners. I do not appear
here to-day as a repentant sinner. In my record on this
matter there is nothing for which I have occasion to
apologize. I reserve all my rights. In the past, in the ex-
ercise of my liberty, I have refused to commit, counsel, Anarchist individualist Benjamin Tucker, ca. 1887. (Labadie
or sanction violence, but, since circumstances may Collection, University of Michigan)
arise when a policy of violence will seem advisable, I de-
cline to surrender my liberty of choice. I have never so
much favored force as to attempt assassination, and I
have never so much opposed force as to be willing to
pledge myself never to resort to it. If I, then, ask your intercession in favor of Mr. Berk-
man, I do so without occasion for penitence or promise, and less in his interest (although
I shall be glad to see him free again) than in your own and that of good order, hoping that
such a concession on the part of those who now have him in their power will lessen the
temptation to a renewal of the policy of violence, and will induce a state of public feeling
that will insure enlarged opportunity for that peaceful evolution of opinion which alone
can avert social upheaval and all its attendant terrors. And, each in his respective way,
your petitioners will ever pray.3

3. Tucker’s original annotation reads: “It should be stated that my representation of the attitude of the
petitioners does not justly apply to such of them as have steadily discountenanced propaganda by deed
from a day ante-dating Berkman’s act of violence. Justus Schwab certainly is one of these exceptions;
perhaps Edward Brady also.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 351

 13 December 1898

Mr. Benj. Tucker:

Dear Sir,—

Prompted by humane feelings, we may perhaps have gone too far to invite you to so ex-
cite the sympathy of Mr. Carnegie in an act of justice,—viz., the pardon of Mr. Alexander
Berkman.
We will by no means enlist the aid of Mr. Carnegie, the author of “Triumphant De-
mocracy,” 4 from your point of view, and therefore respectfully beg to withdraw the invi-
tation sent you.5

Sincerely yours, for the committee,

Justus H. Schwab.
Edward Brady.
Emma Goldman.

Liberty 13 (January 1899): 8, EGP, reel 47.

4. Andrew Carnegie was the author of Triumphant Democracy; or Fifty Years’ March of the Republic (New
York: Scribner, 1886).
5. After withdrawing their offer to Tucker, EG, Brady, and Schwab next approached Ernest Crosby with
the same request. “The matter finally ended with our decision not to apply to Carnegie at all. Sasha’s
case was not even brought before the Board of Pardons at the time intended. Its members were found
to be too prejudiced against him, and it was hoped that the new Board, which was to take office in the
following year, might prove more impartial.” (LML, pp. 233–34).

352 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

 Transcript of Lecture in F R E E S O C I E T Y
Bar re, Vt., 5 March 1899

Free Speech Suppressed in Barre, Vt.

We append here an extract from the undelivered speech 1 entitled “Authority vs. Liberty”:
Have you ever, my friends, thought about the meaning of authority and about its in-
jurious effects upon liberty? I doubt that you did, for else how could you continue to wor-
ship it, to kneel before its altars and offer such awful sacrifices to this insatiable monster.
Let me show you what authority has done, look what it is doing today, be it exercised
under the cloak of religion, government, paternal rights or public gossip. Let me impress
you with the disastrous results it has produced, and some of you—those who think,
those who love liberty—will agree that authority must be replaced by liberty.
There was a time, when to doubt the powers of God and his representatives meant
death, horrible torture, agonizing persecution. Hideous and countless crimes were com-
mitted in the name of God, and his self-appointed earthly representatives perpetuated
their existence by compelling implicit obedience to their authority. No one is able to tell
all the struggles, all the sufferings, through which the rebellious minds went on account
of the tyrannical absurdities of Church authority. Thousands, yea, millions of lives were
sacrificed, the earth was deluged with the blood of heretics before the authority of gods
and devils lost its hold upon the thinking men and women. Thousands refuse allegiance
to religion today, they know that it is rooted in ignorance, fraud and humbug; and they
combine their efforts to pull down the relics of Church authority. The growth of freedom
from Church authority, Church despotism would be very encouraging indeed—but for
the fact that a large number of unbelievers, freethinkers, atheists and infidels have not
yet advanced far enough in freedom to benefit the world at large. Unfortunately they have
only changed the form of authority; they have done away with the authority of the Bible
and have replaced it with that of the statute book. They are ready to persecute and to con-
demn all those who refuse to acknowledge the right of the State to dictate to society just
as quickly as the religious monomaniacs were to burn heretics and witches.
What is the statute book? Nothing else but the commands of earthly gods, monarchs,
despots, czars, kings or presidents. True, to disregard heavenly authority meant perse-

1. In January 1899, EG delivered three lectures in Barre, Vermont, a center of Italian immigrant anar-
chism. Initially, she spoke unimpeded by the local authorities. At least two lectures were held at
Tomasi’s Hall, on “The New Woman” (26 January) and on “The Corrupting Influence of Politics on
Man” (28 January). There is no extant record of the third meeting. On 31 January, Mayor Gordon,
urged on by a committee of “leading citizens,” ordered local police to prevent EG from delivering a
fourth talk, on “Authority vs. Liberty.” Free Society responded by printing a portion of EG’s undeliv-
ered address, 5,000 copies of which were printed by local anarchists.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 353

 cution and death, yet it is still more dangerous to rebel against earthly authorities. They
are so much more numerous, they have so much more power to back them, they can en-
force their will in so many ways, that it sometimes seems as if there were no salvation for
mankind. It is easy to convince a man nowadays that a supernatural being is an absur-
dity, that the story of creating the world out of nothing is ridiculous; science has demol-
ished these fables; intelligent men and women do no longer spend their time in killing
dead gods, nor are subject to Church authority.
Much more difficult it is to convince men that the authority of government, of the
State, is injurious, and that man made laws are the worst foes of society. Abolish all laws?
Do away with the State? You destroy society, people say when one enters into the discus-
sion of the fallacy of belief in authority. No intelligent man or woman wants to destroy
society, for society and State are not identical. Hear what Thomas Paine says: “Society
has grown as necessity of man, but government out of folly of mankind.” 2 He said it a
hundred years ago, and we have learned that the State is really of recent date, while soci-
ety exists since the world exists. I do not distinguish between monarchy and democracy,
whether one man or a dozen of men backed by force represent authority; it has the same
aim; the results are the same. They exercise their power at all cost and check every inde-
pendent tendency. The statute book forbids theft, robbery and murder as crimes against
the law, but those who worship these new gods profit by it. Thou shalt not kill, steal rob
and cheat, says the law; at the same time under its very wing wars are carried on, whole
nations are destroyed, prisons are crowded, armies enlarged, battleships built, thou-
sands beheaded, garrotted, hung and sent to the electric chair, while a few are getting
richer and richer, monopolizing half the earth, and the great mass of producers hunger,
the army of the unemployed is on the increase and uncounted thousands of children die
for lack of food and want of air.
And why all this misery? Because the State authority has taught you so long the
sacred rights of property that you have learned to take it as truth. You do not recognize
that it is the statute book by which capitalism is maintained; you do not understand that
there is a new trinity: God, Capitalism—God, the State and God, the Church. So long
have you submitted to this “worthy” trinity that you believe that authority is absolutely
necessary—and that if it be abolished men would cut each other’s throats. How little you
know of human nature, how little you know its history. Says Kropotkin, the scientist:
“You fail to recognize that the most glorious epochs in humanity were those, in which
the liberties were not destroyed by the State and when masses of men lived in free com-
munes and free federations.” 3 Only those who do not think, who do not reason, who ac-

2. Compare Thomas Paine at the beginning of his Common Sense: “Society is produced by our wants,
and government by our wickedness.”
3. Quote is from Kropotkin’s The State: Its Historic Role; originally, L’État: Son Rôle Historique, serialized
in Les Temps Nouveaux beginning 19 December 1896. The first English-language version appeared in
the London Freedom between May 1897 and June 1898, and was issued shortly thereafter as Freedom
Pamphlet No. 11 (September 1898).

354 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

cept everything that is because they do not investigate still cling to authority. Intelligent
people see clearly that authority in any form is but a check to development and growth,
that it is but a chain tied to a man from cradle to grave which hinders the free use of his
limbs. It has terrorized the mass of mankind into submission and slavery, it maintains
itself by force only, producing cunning, shrewdness and violence.
Some I hear ask: “Do you not acknowledge authority in science, art and literature?”
Most certainly I do. But that authority has no force to back it, it cannot compel my
acception nor can it prevent my rejection of it. If, for example, I refuse to accept Spen-
cer 4 as an authority on Communism, he cannot punish me, he cannot imprison me, he
cannot hang me. He represents his thoughts only, and probably does not care one bit
whether men accept his theories or not.5 But should I refuse to recognize the order of the
chief of police in Barre, which prevents my speaking to you,6 I should find myself in your
prison in short order. There lies the difference. Behind Spencer there is no force, behind
your chief of police are the clubs and pistols of your policemen; and it is this brutal force
that makes authority a curse to humanity.
Let us see, on the other hand, what liberty has brought us, and then choose together
whether you prefer to bow your neck before authority or walk erect under the banner of
liberty.
We have precious little of it and we are rapidly losing it; but even under the curse of
government, side by side with despotism, the actions of individual free efforts are legion.
Schools adopt free methods of instruction, they develop the liberal tendencies in their
pupils; hundreds of societies spring up for self-improvement and the benefit of man-
kind. Societies for scientific research are founded without the aid of government and
they produce the best works. Poets, artists, scientists and others have worked upon indi-
vidual effort and not by dictation of government. Everything that is good and noble,
grand and beautiful, wise and useful, has been done by the spirit of liberty, from the love
of freedom, in spite and in the teeth of government and authority. When man will have
recovered from the effects of authority, when he will understand that freedom is the most
precious thing, when he will be free to live, to work, to act, to develop, to enter into social
relations with whom he is in sympathy, then warfare, conquests, robbery, theft, corrup-
tion, poverty and all the ornaments of the State, all the burden of authority will be looked
upon as relics of barbarism.

4. EG refers to English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose work was influential among
individualist anarchists.
5. EG’s discussion of her recognition of authority in matters of art, science, and literature echoes
Michael Bakunin in God and the State, who also stated that he recognized authority when it was
founded on knowledge and not propped by force, and when subscribing to such authority was an in-
dividual choice.
6. According to the May 1899 London Freedom, local anarchists immediately printed 5,000 copies of a
four-page manifesto protesting the suppression of EG’s lecture, along with a lengthy extract from “Au-
thority vs. Liberty.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 355

 This, my friends, is a rough sketch of Anarchism, of the ideal you hate and persecute,
the ideal of thousands of men and women in all spheres of life, who are proud of being
called Anarchists. You are shocked when you hear that word, you shiver at its very sound.
Your fear is but the result of authority, which has instilled into you the hatred for those
who wish you well, who at the risk of their own lives and comforts try to free you from
the clutches of your masters. You do not see our work in this light, you join in the cry of
fools and knaves “Hang the Anarchists!” but I see the time coming when you’ll under-
stand that all efforts to check the growth of Anarchism are in vain. For its teachings are
based upon the power of the individual within himself and not without. Its philosophy
is based on that stern, undisputable logic that liberty is just as necessary for man as air,
light and food.
Do not waste your time in trying to stop the waves of the ocean with a broom; it is use-
less. Already the elements are growing into immensity, tearing down every obstacle in
the way; after the storm has passed the air will be calm and pure, and the world will be
filled with the sweet odor of liberty.

Free Society, 5 March 1899, pp. 1, 3.

356 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

 Inter view in the D E T R O I T E V E N I N G N E W S
Detroit, 14 March 1899

An Interrupted Interview . . . .

Emma Goldman, the High Priestess of Anarchism, Tries to Tell the

Future of Her Cult, but is Interrupted by Songs of Her Companions.

It was a jovial, heart-and-soul little crowd that sat around two companionably-close tables
in a rear room of the Hotel Randolph late last night. A few choice spirits had gathered
to celebrate the visit of their guest of honor—their doctrinal saint—Emma Goldman.
The incense of cigarettes were burned before her shrine. Long-necked, dark bottles gave
forth pale Rhine wine, and white-aproned waiters carried in flagons of foaming beer.
These people were Bohemians in all the sense conveys. Their simple, unrestrained en-
joyment shamed the artificial apings of their American cousins. They lived in the land of
Lotus, where carping care is left on the border, and all within is sunshine and happiness.
In the center of the circle sat the strange little woman who was born out of the social
conditions of the period. About her were grouped a dozen of her Detroit disciples, and
a contingent from the German dramatic company which is playing “Capt. Dreyfus”
in town.
“Ich liebe dich,” 1 sang the merry-makers, as they clinked their glasses and added a
hearty “Prost!” 2
It was in this cheery circle that a News reporter came for the prosaic purpose of in-
terviewing. But he was not treated as an intruder. He was greeted as a friend, and given
a place and a glass. He could catch above the disturbing yet delightful revelry but few of
the words to which the self-confessed anarchist gave ready utterance.
“Do I consider that anarchy has a future in this country?” she repeated. “Yes, indeed.
It has a future, not only in this country but in the world. You will find in all classes people
who are anarchists. When I say ‘anarchist’ I mean a person of higher independence—
not the commonly mistaken enemy of law and order. The latter is not an anarchist. He
is more often a ‘bum.’ The higher the education of a class, the more——”

Dreiunddreissig Jahre
Waehrt die Knechtschaft schon,
Nieder mit den Hunden
Von der Reaktion.3

1. “I love you.”
2. “To your health!”
3. “Thirty-three years / The servitude has already lasted, / Down with the dogs / Of reaction.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 357

 In 1899, during her second lecture tour in England, Goldman joined a
host of prominent anarchist activists at a meeting to commemorate the
November 1887 execution of the Haymarket anarchists. (By permission
of the Kate Sharpley Library)

The chafing reins of restraint could be endured no longer. The others had broken into
spontaneous song. Emma smiled indulgence for a moment, and even found herself join-
ing in the chorus. Then she raised her magic hand. “Sh-sh!” she said, and the song
stopped.
“As I was saying,” she continued, “the higher the education of a class, the more anar-
chists it contains. Doctors, lawyers, professors, newspaper men, many of these are anar-

358 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

chists, but they dare not, perhaps, declare themselves. Even the freest man is tied to his
surroundings. We are dependent upon one another, therefore we must make conces-
sions. Yes, personally, I believe we should all have the courage of our convictions, but I
would not condemn as cowards those who do not have that courage. Education——”

Haerme dich, wenn ich mich haerme,

Und sei wieder froh mit mir.4

“Education is the greatest promoter of anarchism. By education I do not mean the

mere learning that comes from books—the simple training of the brain—I mean——”

Und sollte ich auch dereinst noch in der Hoelle wimmern. So hat sich doch kein Mensch
darum zu kuemmern.5

The crowd was becoming more boisterous. The singers this time laughed at the re-
proachful finger. A fine fellow, with a splendid voice, took advantage of the semi-silence
to sing a tender love song:

Bei einem Bach, der rauschend floss——6

When the last tremulous note had died away, two ladies and one gentleman of the Otis
Skinner company,7 who sat at an opposite table, clapped their hands and said “Bravo!”
“I mean,” went on the nimble-witted little woman, turning once more to her task, “a
healthy, natural education. The development of the mind by natural means. No, I cer-
tainly do not approve of violence——”
But violence was committed at this point. A waiter brought a cup of coffee, and with
sugar and cream, placed it before the speaker. Her look of amazement was reflected
in every face about the table. “Why, what did you bring this for?” cried the astonished
missionary.
“He ordered it,” said the waiter, indicating a German editor,8 who sat next Miss Gold-
man and was holding her hand.
The disgraced journalist was loudly called upon to explain.
He raised his hands in piteous protest. Then he told what had caused the unseemly
incident. In most uncertain English he had ordered a postal card, and had been misun-
derstood. A roar went up at his expense. Then Emma raised the cup to her lips, and swal-
lowed the joke.
It was some time before she could resume.

4. “Grieve if I grieve, / And with me be happy again.”

5. “And should I even someday yet whimper in hell. About that no one need worry.”
6. “By a brook, which murmured along—”
7. The celebrated American stage actor and his company were performing Rosemary at the Detroit Opera
House.
8. Max Baginski, a new friend, comrade, and, briefly, EG’s lover.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 359

 “No, I do not approve of violence, but I never blame the one who commits it. There is
always a cause—and it is the cause, not the person, we should blame. What is the con-
dition which I hope to see anarchy bring about? A reform of systems that will drive mis-
ery out of and bring happiness into the world. A perfection? No. There is no such thing
as perfection, and there never will be. It is contrast of sorrow and gladness that makes it
possible——”

Wo frohe Lieder sind, da lass dich ruhig nieder.

Boese Menschen haben keine Lieder.9

“That makes it possible for us to know happiness. Peace and happiness in another
life? No; there is no other life. When we leave this life, we leave life forever. It is the end
of all. You know, I am an atheist. Would I rob those who never can know happiness
here— of the peace, the comfort of their cherished religion? No; they can find the reli-
gion, the joy they crave, in the cathedral of the sky; in the music of the birds, in the poem
of the brook, in the sermon of the forest, in the incense of the flowers.”
Earlier in the evening Miss Goldman had appeared before a small audience in the hall
at 224 Randolph street and discussed “The power of the idea.” In the absence of a chair-
man, Miss Goldman introduced herself and sailed into her subject without hesitation.
Religion, the church and the civil authorities came in for her special condemnation.
“You know nothing of freedom,” she told her auditors, “when around the corner is a
260-pound policeman ready to club you if you resist the authority of government.”
“I am not a Jesus, and I refuse to be one— consequently what I say is not given as
gospel truth.”
“The catholic church represents the greatest system of fellowship in the world, but it
has a whole lot of bishops and other officials who live on the sweat of the toiler.”
“Heaven is too lonesome a place for me to go to, because there everybody will think
the same.”
“When you lay down law you at the same time lay down the desire to do the thing pro-
hibited.”
“It is not peace but violence that needs a guardian.”
“You are as ignorant as the politician and as bigoted as the minister and the priest.”
“The down-trodden workingmen of this country are worse off than the Russian
peasant.”
“If another man have an idea different from mine and his motive is good, then the
idea is good.”
After an hour’s talk she invited the audience to catechise her and sat down.
Geo. J. Eastman, the socialistic labor party’s candidate for supreme court judge, ob-
jected to having socialism classed as “reform.”

9. “Where there are happy songs, settle down calmly, / Wicked people have no songs.”

360 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

 “We do not propose reform, but revolution,” said he. “Again, you say something can-
not be created out of nothing. How about hypnotism?”
“On healthy minds there is no such force as hypnotism,” replied Emma.
Tonight Miss Goldman speaks on “Criticism of ethics” in Trades Council hall.10

Detroit (Mich.) Evening News, 14 March 1899, p. 2.

10. In fact, Goldman spoke on “Trade Unionism: What It Is and What It Should Be.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 361

 Ar ticle in the O A K L A N D E N Q U I R E R
Oakland, 15 July 1899

An Anarchist Propagandist.

Emma Goldman Upon the Aim of Humanity.

Says It is For the Greatest Satisfaction at Smallest Exertion.

Declares That Absolute Freedom is Necessary

to the Development of Individuality.

The announcement that Emma Goldman, a real live anarchist, would lecture at Grand
Army hall last evening, attracted an audience of 210 people, some of whom were in sym-
pathy with the sentiments of the speaker, and others attracted through curiosity or in a
desire to hear of this social philosophy from one of the cult. Before the speaker of the eve-
ning was introduced, the singing section of the Verein Eintracht 1 of Oakland rendered a
chorus with fine effect. Miss Goldman, who has attained some prominence as a propa-
gandist of the doctrines of the anarchist communists of the country, is a young woman
who might be taken for a college student or an exponent of suffrage. She is of medium
height, with hair tending toward the Titian, with strong features and wears eyeglasses.
She speaks with a considerable vehemence and a foreign German accent. The topic of
the speaker was The Aim of Humanity. She said that there are many people who think
that life is fashioned by fate or shaped by divinity and not subject to human will. “We live
in an age of doubt,” she contended; “men actually have the audacity not to accept any po-
litical theory or religious doctrine upon authority. I myself have the audacity to differ
from generally accepted political principles and think for myself. I believe that most hu-
man beings are striving for some purpose; have some end to attain. If men did not have
some ideal or end human society could not exist. What, then, is the chief end of life? I
have considered and investigated the subject and while I may not be infallible I think it
is to reach the highest amount of happiness or satisfaction that most men strive to attain
the greatest amount of happiness with the least expense of time and energy is the com-
mon end of human life. Men’s conception of what real happiness is differ radically. Some
are happy at the mere satisfaction of physical wants; some desire higher intellectual sat-
isfaction; others have their highest delight in fighting for a cause or an ideal. Even to die

1. The Verein Eintracht was a German social group founded in San Francisco in 1868, and later ex-
panded to Oakland, to foster musical and dramatic arts, offering social and literary entertainment to
the community, and assisting its members in sickness and times of need.

362 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

 This 1899 handbill from Goldman’s European tour represents a
shift in her focus, away from the more narrowly anarchist and
labor topics of her earlier lectures. (By permission of the Kate
Sharpley Library)

for an ideal is happiness to some. For the realization of one’s ideal of happiness there
must be individual liberty. Our forefathers had a certain conception of liberty; they be-
lieved that the remedy for oppression was to get away from the conditions which created
it, and they established what they called religious liberty in this country. But while theo-
retically religious liberty prevails, the church practically controls the education, the
morals and the ethics of the country, and while persons who may differ from accepted
beliefs are not subjected to the rack and thumbscrew they are often subjected to
ostracism.”

POPUL AR UNREST.
“Why the great unrest of the people? Why the continual strife, battle and discontent?
This is an evidence that there is life and growth. Stagnation follows the vegative exis-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 363

 tence. Content with more food and clothing develop conditions favorable for despotism.
To whom shall those who desire a better condition of things look for direction and lead-
ership if they do not inform themselves? Your Harvards and your Yales are not filled with
the sons of the working classes, they are the show places of the sons of aristocrats. The
rich send their sons to college simply because they desire the name of having a univer-
sity education. These young men care little for the cause of the common people. They
care little for the economics or the politics of the country.
“In the German universities during the stirring times from 1848 to 1880 the leaders
of radical thought were the students. The same is true to-day of the universities of Rus-
sia and it is among the students that most of the reforms originate. This is because in
these countries many of the poor people work nights that their children may be educated
and many of the students come from the ranks of the common people and are in sym-
pathy with them. To some extent conditions have changed in Germany, where at the pres-
ent time the highest conception of liberty with many of the students is that of drinking
beer and bowing to the monarch, the present representative of absolutism.
“We find the church under the domination of the capitalistic class and anxious to
maintain its dominance over the thought of the people, but it will not permit liberty of
thought.
“The newspapers are the least suitable sources of instruction for the people. They will
give you full accounts of the Jeffries-Sharkey prize fight 2 and of the latest purchase of a
European prince by an American millionaire’s daughter, or the social doings of the aris-
tocrats, but do the newspapers report the proceedings of labor meetings or speeches of
those who are trying to better the conditions of the working classes. They are simply
jumping jacks in the hands of capitalists who own them.”

IDEALS OF LIBERTY.
“The average young man of the rising generation in this country has no real conception
of what liberty means. If the American people realized what real liberty is, would they
submit to the existing conditions for an instant? There can be no real equality without
equality of opportunity. If you had no laws you would have equality: If you have laws you
will not have equality. Only public freedom will permit the development of personality.
Now position and importance attaches to a person not for what he is but for what he pos-
sesses. Society rests upon the basis of the almighty dollar. Wealth gives power and cre-
ates inequality before the law. The aspiration for wealth began when one man fenced in
a piece of ground and said to the rest: ‘This is mine; keep off the grass.’ 3 There are those

2. World heavyweight boxing champion James J. Jeffries was in Oakland for an exhibition the same night
as EG’s lecture, drawing a large crowd. His opponent was not, however, contender Tom Sharkey, but
Jeffries’s brother Jack. The fight with Sharkey occurred 3 November at Coney Island.
3. From Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality: “The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought
of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil
society.”

364 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

among the working classes who are so dense that they think if the masters did not give
them work they would have to lay down and die. It is a false idea that the beauties of na-
ture were bestowed for the benefit of a few. The true conception of society is one of the
interdependence of solidarity. That the happiness of each is based upon the happiness of
all and that if your fellow man suffers you must suffer and if you suffer your fellow man
must suffer. Let us try to become useful men and women and give what we have of abil-
ity and talent to educate and to help others. It is only through this that we will realize the
true aim of life.”
The lecture was followed by a number of questions which the speaker answered from
her standpoint. During the evening there were distributed copies of Free Society, a publi-
cation issued in San Francisco, which is now in its fifth volume and is avowedly an ex-
ponent of anarchist communism.

Oakland (Calif.) Enquirer, 15 July 1899, p. 5.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 365

 Inter view in the P I T T S B U R G L E A D E R
Pittsburgh, 24 September 1899

The Red Queen Is Here.

Emma Goldman Says There Is No Prosperity

in Pittsburg Except for the Employer.

She Is Going to Study Medicine Abroad.

“Prosperity! There’s no prosperity here except for the employers. I find the miners just
as poor as they were when I was here last. Prosperity and work are two different things;
there is work, but not prosperity.”
There was the sting of poignant sarcasm in the words as they came from the lips of
Emma Goldman, the “Red Queen” of anarchism, as she made reply to the question of a
representative of the Sunday Leader, “Why do you come to Pittsburg to speak when there
is so much prosperity?”
Miss Goldman arrived in the city yesterday and is staying with friends, fellow-
communists. She is just returning from an eight months’ tour through the west and
southwest, having spoken in the principal cities of California, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois
and various other states. She is here now not so much to spread the propaganda as to
“awaken the sleeping Anarchists.” Last night she spoke in West Newton to a crowd of
sympathizing workmen. This morning she is to be heard at Collinsburg, near West New-
ton; on Tuesday at Hope Church on Thursday at Columbia Turner hall in Lawrenceville;
on Friday at Moorhead’s hall, Grant street and Second avenue, under the auspices of
the Molders’ union; at Turner hall, Lawrenceville, on Saturday; Odd Fellows’ hall, South
Side, on October 1; McDonald on October 3 and 4; at 510 Wylie avenue, Pittsburg, on
October 7; the following night at Fayette City; on the 9th at Roscoe; 10th at K. of L. hall,
432 Wood street. After a day or two of rest among her friends she will go to New York,
whence on October 25 she will sail for Europe.1 She expects to spend at least three years
abroad, during which time she says she “will give America a rest.” The first year abroad
will be spent in spreading the red propaganda in England, Scotland and France, and the
two remaining years in Switzerland, where Miss Goldman expects to pursue the study
of medicine for the purpose of “ministering to the physical sufferings as well as the men-
tal sufferings of humanity.” 2 She has already graduated as a trained nurse, but believes

1. EG left New York for Europe on 3 November 1899.

2. Two wealthy benefactors, Herman Miller and Carl Stone, friends of Robert Reitzel in Detroit, prom-
ised EG forty dollars a month for five years to enable her to study medicine in Switzerland. Accord-

366 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

 Goldman lectured regularly in Yiddish to Jewish audiences, al-
though she much preferred and was more proficient in German,
her mother tongue. This advertisement for Goldman’s 1899 lec-
ture “The Woman Question” appeared in the London Yiddish-
language anarchist newspaper Arbeter Freint, then edited by Ru-
dolf Rocker. (By permission of the Kate Sharpley Library)

she can be of better service to her fellows as a physician. She does not, however, enter-
tain any idea of abandoning anarchy for medicine.
An Anarchist congress is to be held in Paris in 1900 during the World’s fair, and to
this Miss Goldman is accredited as American secretary and delegate from the American
groups. The place of the meeting has not yet been designated, but the month of August

ing to Living My Life, when Stone learned that EG had been engaged in politics in Europe, he wrote
that he and Miller would not support her. “‘I am interested only in E. G. the woman—her ideas have
no meaning whatever to me. Please choose,’ ” he wrote. She replied, “‘E. G. the woman and her ideas
are inseparable. She does not exist for the amusement of upstarts, nor will she permit anybody to dic-
tate to her. Keep your money’ ” (LML, pp. 245– 46, 268). On the subject of EG’s decision to forgo stud-
ies in Switzerland, see Letter to Max Nettlau, 4 January 1900, below.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 367

 has been fixed upon as the time. This will be the first anarchistic congress held anywhere
since 1878.3 It is fathered by Dornelo Niewhenhas, editor of the Free Socialist, a German
publication; 4 Pouget, editor of a French socialistic paper,5 and Reclus,6 the distinguished
geographist of France. Speaking of the congress, Miss Goldman said:
“There may be trouble but if there is we are ready for it; we are prepared to fight to the
bitter end.”
She added that some effort may be made by France to prevent the assembly in Paris
of foreign Anarchists in which events the Reds will make a determined stand. As for her-
self she apprehends no trouble. “I am an American citizen,” she said seeming for the
moment to forget that anarchy recognizes no form of government or order, “and that
may carry me through all right.” Then she added, in response to a query, that she had
never had any trouble in Paris, although she had spent some time there at a period, how-
ever, when there were no disturbances.
Miss Goldman’s speeches here will be upon such topics as “Patriotism,” “Politics and
Its Corrupting Effect Upon Men,” “Trade Unionism” and “Why I Am an Anarchist-
Communist.” 7
“I am here not so much to make a propaganda,” she said to the Leader man, “as to
awaken the people. I do not believe Anarchists are made; I think they are born. There is
no prosperity for the workingman; there is work, ’tis true, but the toiler is not sharing in
the fruits of his labor. Prosperity! That is for the employer. Why the miners are no better
off to-day than they were when I was here before when there was so much talk of hard
times.”
An interrogatory as to what is being done in the case of Alexander Berkmann brought
forth this explanation: “In the first place I was always opposed to any legal efforts in be-
half of Berkmann because I knew in behalf of action was contrary to my views and prin-
ciples. Still what I did for him was done in the name of humanity; I would not retard any-
thing that others might think proper in his behalf.8 The pardon board, you understand,
has refused to hear the Berkmann case because Mr. Frick while he has not said ‘nay’ has
intimated to the pardon board that it would not be to the interest of his class to do any-
thing for the prisoner. So the Czar of Russia declares Berkmann shall not be pardoned.
Nothing further is being done for Berkmann now.”
Miss Goldman related her experience at Spring Valley, Ill., this month on the occasion
on which she was alleged to have wished to baptize some children with beer. “There was

3. In fact, several anarchist congresses were held between 1881 and 1900. The International Social Rev-
olutionary and Anarchist Congress was held in London 14–19 July 1881; a Social Revolutionary con-
gress was held in Chicago 21–23 October 1881; the Pittsburgh congress was held 14–16 October 1883;
and in New York City a Yiddish anarchist conference was held on 25 December 1890.
4. Domela Nieuwenhuis was actually the editor of the Dutch paper De Vrije Socialist (The Free Socialist,
1898 –1919).
5. Émile Pouget was the editor of Le Père Peinard.
6. Élisée Reclus was a renowned geographer and anarchist communist.
7. It was reported in Free Society that EG gave thirteen lectures while in Pittsburgh.
8. See “An Undelivered Speech,” Exchange of Letters in Liberty, 7–13 December 1898, above.

368 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

no truth whatever in the published reports,” she said emphatically. “The facts of the mat-
ter are these: Between the time of my former visit to Spring Valley in May and the last
one this month, 19 children had been born into Anarchist families. The women folks are
not very far advanced and the men wanted to get them out to our meetings so I could talk
to them on women’s questions, so we played a little trick by inviting them to bring their
children as a sort of reunion. I made a remark about the Christians baptizing with water
and said if wine was good enough for them I was opposed to any adulteration and pre-
ferred the pure beer or wine. There was no reference to baptizing the children in beer,
for in the first place we do not believe in baptism at all.9
“I had some trouble with the police in Spring Valley on September 6. We had ar-
ranged for a parade and meeting on the public square; I carried the red flag at the head
of the procession and it was just like waving a red flag in the face of a bull. The mayor
threatened to arrest me if I spoke, although he had already given permission for the
meeting. I then reminded him of his promise, but he still insisted that I should not ad-
dress the crowd and that they should disperse. I told him that the men were armed and
were determined to hold the meeting; that if I were disposed to do so I could not
influence them to leave, but that if he would not interfere with us I would guarantee that
there would be no trouble; if, on the other hand, he did interfere I would not be respon-
sible for what would happen. He finally said that I should be careful what I said. At all
events we held the meeting and the newspapers roundly roasted the mayor for showing
the white feather.” 10
Regarding the Dreyfus case, she said: “The Dreyfus case has done more for anarchy
than twenty-five years of active propaganda; it has done more to show the world how rot-
ten the government of France is than anything else in history. Of course, the Anarchists
are all for Dreyfus; they did a great deal of work in his behalf. Personally I do not believe
Dreyfus is a sympathetic character. What the Anarchists did, however, was from a hu-
manitarian point of view—a principle.”
Miss Goldman was with a group of fellow Anarchists when the writer talked to her,
among the party being Messrs. Bauer and Gordon, who were active in the movement for
Berkmann’s pardon.11 She looked remarkably well, and as she passed along Smithfield
street the casual observer would never have suspected that an Anarchist of international
notoriety was so close at hand. She wore a neat fitting black suit with tailor-made jacket
and a small toque.

Pittsburg (Pa.) Leader, 24 September 1899, p. 1.

9. The 24 September 1899 issue of Free Society carried the baptism story. According to Joseph Corna,
on 5 September the Italian, French, and German comrades had a picnic at which nineteen children
of anarchists were “baptized” by EG. At the picnic EG gave a talk on the “freedom of the women and
mothers and the necessity of the unhampered development of the child.” There was no mention in
the report of beer or anything else used ceremonially during the baptism.
10. From extant reports (Princeton, Ill., Bureau County Tribune, 14 and 15 September 1899; Free Society,
24 September 1899; and Freedom, November 1899), EG must have collapsed together several dis-
crete events in Spring Valley between the 4th and 7th of September in this recounting.
11. EG refers to Henry Bauer and Harry Gordon, both active in the Berkman Defense Association.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 369

 To A U G U S T I N H A M O N
Pittsburgh, 27 September 1899

Dear Friend Hamon.

It is a long time, since we have corresponded, I hardly know, now, who was the last to
write, at any rate I have not forgotten you. I am now, finishing an 8th months tour
through the states, having delivered 210 lectures, on economic, sociological, ethical and
sexual subjects, and am about to start for England & Scotland, at the latter part of Oct.1
where I am to lecture also. I hope to reach Paris, by next March, to stay there for some
times, and of course, I also hope to meet you, if you have not forgotten me. When I was
in San Francisco, at the publishers of F S.2 I saw the book, containing your lecture before
the Bruxelles, University, which you wrote me about some time ago, I should very much
like to have it, at least the english copy.3 Will you kindly send it to me, either to my N.Y.
address, 50 First street, if you will do it soon, or c/o H.M. Kelly 4

266. Amhurst Rd
London. N.
England.

also L’Humanité Nouvelle, and the price of subscribtion, and the book; I will than forward
the money; please send me the August number of L’Humanit[é] Nouvelle.—I would like
to ask you for the following information, if not to troublesome for you to reply; it is this.
A number of my friends, including, Artists musicians, journalists & other bohamians,
have decided to come to Paris, for the exhibi exposition, 1900.5 They send me as the
amissary to obtain quaters for them, so I would like to rent a house, furnished if possible,
somewhere’s in the Country whithin 1/2 houre from Paris, of about 12 –15 rooms. Can
you tell me, if such a house can be rented, and what the possible expence could be? You
would oblige me greatly, as I know no one in Paris except you, who could give me satis-
factory information

1. EG did not sail for Europe until 3 November 1899.

2. The initials “F S” stand for the journal Free Society.
3. These lectures at the New University of Brussels appeared in English as The Universal Illusion of Free
Will and Criminal Responsibility (London: University Press, 1899). Élisée Reclus taught geography at
this university from 1895 until he died in 1905.
4. EG provides the London address for Harry Kelly, co-editor of the Boston anarchist monthly Rebel, who
had returned to England in 1898.
5. The Paris Exposition Universelle opened 14 April 1900. The International Revolutionary Congress of
the Working People was to be held in Paris in September 1900 to coincide with the world fair.

370 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

This program from the 9 December 1899 London “Grand Meeting and Concert” displays the
integration of music into political events and showcases Goldman’s ascendance as a major
anarchist figure, sharing the stage with, among others, the French anarchist Louise Michel
and the Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin. (By permission of the Kate Sharpley
Library)
 Hoping not to have asked too much, and that you would reply soon.6

Sincerly.
E Goldman

ALS, Augustin Hamon Archive, IISH.

6. Hamon replied to EG in London on 2 November, explaining he did not have a copy of his book on hand,
directing her instead to the publisher, and requesting the subscription price of L’Humanité Nouvelle in
advance. He also sent information on a house to rent, adding, “it is impossible to find cheaper princi-
pally during the exposition.” The cost was too high for EG, who wrote back on 13 November thanking
him for his trouble but declining the rooms. She added: “I have seen Tscherkessow [Cherkesov], yes-
terday, and he tells me, that I can get Flats, much cheaper, he has promised to write to friends in Paris,
about the particulars.” Concerning the book, EG responded she was “only too glad to pay for it, al-
though I should have appreciated it a greater favor, if you had sent me the book complementary, and
to tell the truth, I really hoped you would.” She closed her letter with the comment, “I have been in-
formed, that you too, are infected by the disease of Anti.-Semitism. Is it really true? I can hardly be-
lieve it—” (see Hamon to EG, 2 November 1899; and EG to Hamon, 13 November 1899, EGP, reel 1).

372 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899

 To M A X M E T Z K O W
New York, 18 October 1899

Dear Comrade Metzkow.

You were very angry in your letter as far as I could tell. Why? I don’t know how N 1 learned
what I wrote to you in the first letter, but he wrote to me that you had told him. The news
concerning B’s escape attempt you probably also know already. I don’t think that he made
an attempt to escape.2 It is more likely that he exchanged words with the guard and that
the latter shot at B. One can only find out if one goes to the prison personally. It is im-
possible for me to go now, as much as I would like to. How would it be if you went? You
wouldn’t be allowed to see B, but if you claim to be an uncle or other relative you will have
the right to ask about his condition. If his injury is a dangerous one, then I will come
even if I have to sell all I have to pay for my journey. Otherwise, if I am still in America
at the end of November, I will go to P 3 then. I have written to N that I will not be able to
go for the time being. I hope that you will be so kind as to make inquiries at the prison.
Let me know immediately if you find out anything there.

With rev. greetings

EG

ALI, Joseph Ishill Collection, MH-H. Translated from German. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Li-
brary, Harvard University.

1. EG uses the initial “N” to refer to Carl Nold.

2. EG would not have believed such a rumor, since she was privy to AB’s true plans for escape and was
involved in arranging for the construction of an escape tunnel. Neither Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
nor Living My Life make any public reference to AB’s attempting an escape or being shot during this
period. However, AB was put in solitary confinement on 25 December 1899 for attacking a fellow
prisoner who kicked and killed his pet bird, Dick.
3. Pittsburgh, where AB was in prison.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1899 373

 To M A X N E T T L A U
London, 4 Januar y 1900

Dear Netlow. 1

Undoubtedly you already consider me an ungrateful person and have wondered if any-
thing better can be expected from one of the “third” sex.2 You were so kind as to send me
catalogs and all kinds of conceivably useful information concerning universities,3 even
going to the trouble of indicating the cost of the various subjects, and I, the ungrateful
one, haven’t sent you words of either appreciation or gratitude. Indeed, I dare say, I have
thanked you all the more in my mind, yet I could not write because I was ill.—
I developed a severe cold on my trip to Leeds; instead of staying in bed, I had to ad-
dress the previously arranged meetings. I only stayed there for a week and came back to
London with pleuritis which kept me confined to bed for two weeks and from which I
have not yet recovered. Other than that, I am out of danger and rid of the inflammation,
but a terrible cough still causes me great pain. Still, no rest for the wicked,4 in spite of it
all I had to speak Friday Saturday and Sunday and have to go to a meeting today too. Well,
ill weeds grow apace, don’t they? Following what you sent to me from the University of
Berne, Berne is out of the question for me because I can hardly learn in one year every-
thing necessary to fulfill the matriculation requirements. Especially Latin. Assuming I
began work right away I still would not be finished by September; besides, I cannot con-
cern myself with the preparations now. I must finish my agitation tour which has already
started and which will take me till the end of Feb.5 When I come to Paris, I want and will
have to dedicate myself to the study of the French language and, because I want to learn

1. Nettlau went by the name Netlow in England. EG met him for the first time during this visit to
London.
2. EG and Nettlau used the term “third sex” in an ongoing private joke to refer to a feminist or advocate
of women’s independence, not a homosexual. Nettlau, in his memoirs, elaborated on the significance
of this ongoing reference to EG’s feminist nature: “We talked often and much, but arrived most of the
time at a point where we differed sharply. I said then, as a compliment, that after all she had a female
logic, different from male logic, and that was something she didn’t want to hear. We said that to each
other up to the last time I saw her” (Nettlau, Erinnerungen und Eindrücke, 8: 144).
3. That is, universities at which she might study medicine.
4. This first part of the sentence was written in English.
5. EG had arrived in London on 13 November 1899, where she lectured in English and German through-
out December and January. She traveled to Leeds on 10 December, then back to London before con-
tinuing on to Scotland in January and finally leaving England after a farewell concert and ball on
26 February 1900. From England EG traveled to Paris.

374 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

it thoroughly, I cannot study Latin on the side. Furthermore, I
will have to take care of the American correspondence regard-
ing the congress 6 if the people over there should be induced to
send a delegate. To be frank, Berne doesn’t appeal to me be-
cause the contrast between my previous life and the tranquil-
ity in Berne would be too great and would produce in me
a mental and emotional depression. Either Paris, Geneva, or
back to Uncle “Sam.” 7 In any case, from here I will first go
back to Switzerland via Munich as I have already told you.
Apropos, is it also so difficult to find a room in M.? You of
course wouldn’t know of anyone with whom I could stay undis-
turbed for a week?—I underline undisturbed because here I
wasn’t free for a minute. Miss Davies 8 wrote to me that I will
get a copy of your essay,9 I’m already very anxiously awaiting
this.—She also said that you suggested I should make clear my
position on the economic question. Unfortunately I can’t do
anything in my present gloomy mood but pace back and forth
in my room; I enjoyed doing that in the cell, only my present
cell is bigger; it’s a comfort, isn’t it? Max Nettlau (ca. 1890s), the anarchist historian,
writer, and lifelong Goldman correspondent. (IISH)

6. EG had been accredited as secretary and delegate from the American

groups to the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working
People in Paris, scheduled for September 1900.
7. On EG’s decision not to study in Switzerland, Nettlau recounted in his memoirs that “Emma Gold-
man . . . spoke to me and wrote me about the possibility for her studying medicine in Vienna. She
would have liked to become a doctor. I had to enquire for her about terms of admission, examinations,
deadlines, costs, etc., . . . . It turned out with respect to Vienna, as was to be expected, that her educa-
tion was not sufficient and that everything would have taken much longer than she thought. If she
had earnestly wanted to study, Switzerland would have been suitable. But she wanted, because of her
prospective clients, a degree from Vienna and she could not expect to achieve that without longer
studies” (Erinnerungen und Eindrücke, 8: 143).
8. EG refers to Ann A. Davies, who was then living in London and working with the paper Freedom.
9. Nettlau’s essay “Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle: Their Present Limits and Their
Possible Extension” was based on an article he contributed to the November 1897 number of the Lon-
don Freedom, entitled “New Tactics for Trade Unionists.” The essay was originally read before the
Freedom Discussion Group on 5 December 1899; first published in two installments in Freedom 14
(January–February 1900): 5– 6 and (March–April 1900): 12 –13; and issued in pamphlet form the
same year, together with a second essay originally entitled “German Social Democracy and Edward
Bernstein,” and also published in Freedom 14 (January–February 1900): 2 –3. See Max Nettlau, Re-
sponsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle, Also a Review of the Policy Lately Discussed by the German
Social Democracy and Edward Bernstein (London: Freedom Pamphlets, No. 12, May 1900). The pam-
phlet was also translated into Italian, La Responsebilita’ e las Solidariera nella Lotta Operaia (Barre, Vt.:
Cosa Editrice L’Azione, 1913) and was submitted by the Freedom Group to the International Revolu-
tionary Congress of the Working People in Paris in 1900.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 375

 The concert to benefit the Socialist 10 was very beautiful, indeed extremely beauti-
ful, Tschaikovsky 11 and Kahan 12 said. Also very well attended, but I don’t think that there
will be more than 3 pounds profit. We didn’t take over the bar ourselves and that way lost
at least 2 pounds. The main thing, however, is that the affair went better than is usually
the case at workers’ celebrations. I will travel to Scotland on the 18th, can hardly await
the day.
Farewell and enjoy the good beer and good coffee, and think least of all of one who
has been knitting a stocking for 2 years and hasn’t finished yet, and who only every now
and then thinks “too logically.”

Greetings and a handshake.

EG.
Happy New Year ——

ALI, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Translated from German.

10. Probably a fund-raising event for the German anarchist journal Der Sozialist, edited by Gustav Lan-
dauer, which had ceased publication in 1899. The paper was never revived. Its publishers soon
launched Der arme Teufel (a literary journal named after Robert Reitzel’s Detroit-based paper), but
this time without Landauer, who remained critical of the venture.
11. EG refers to the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chaikovsky, living in exile in London, where EG
met him.
12. Possibly Zelda Kahan, a Russian Jewish socialist in London.

376 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Glasgow, 24 Januar y 1900

Dear Comrade.

Ihr Schreiben erhalten; besten Dank für Ihre Bereitwilligkeit, mir die Benützung der 3
Zimmer mit den fest verschlossenen Thüren, in Ihrer Wohnung, während des Tages zu
überlassen. Ich wagte es gar nicht daran zu denken, daß Sie, der Frauen gegenüber so
korrekt sind, wirklich so weit gehen werden, einer dieses Geschlechtes die Benützung
einen Teil Ihrer Junggesellen Wohnung anzutragen. Freilich, gehöre ich zum Dritten
Geschlecht u dann handelt es sich ja um den Aufenthalt am Tage, was ja schließlich den
Anstand nicht verletzt. Nun, wen ich nach München komme, werde ich Ihre Güte schon
in Anspruch nehmen, aber nur unter einer Bedingung, wen die Thüren fest ver-
schlossen sind, recht fest verschlossen hören Sie, dear Comrade?—Ich sagte wenn ich
nach München komme, bis vor Kurzem glaubte ich noch bestimmt daran, aber jetzt
kommt so allerlei dazwischen. Ich habe nämlich erfahren, daß es von Zürich nach Genf
u dann nach Paris, beinahe so viel kostet, als von hier nach Zürich über München, wenn
dem so ist, dann freilich muß ich den Wunsch, nach München zu reisen aufgeben da
meine Verhältnisse es nicht erlauben, solch riesige Summen auszugeben. In diesem
Falle würde ich die Reise nach die Schweiz bis auf den Herbst verschieben, im Sep,
gedenke ich Paris ja ohnedies zu verlassen, (d. h. wen ich dort die Kurse nicht besuchen
kann) dann kann ich nach die Schweiz, u wenn ich in Genf auch nichts ausrichten kann,
dann werde ich über Deutschland nach America reisen. Jedenfalls, würde ich Ihnen sehr
dankbar sein, wenn Sie mir Auskunft geben würden könnten, was die Reise nach Z von
Zürich nach Genf u von da nach Paris kostet, aber recht bald, bitte, ja?—
Sie täuschen sich, wenn Sie annehmen, daß ich die Ruhe verwerfe, oder unter-
schätze, gerade weil ich mich nach Ruhe sehne, will ich die Agitation eine zeitlang
aufgeben u mich einem bestimmten Studium widmen. Freilich, bin ich der Ansicht,
daß alle äußere Ruhe der Welt, einem die innere Ruhe nicht schaffen kann, außer man
ist von der Natur mit einem Ihrem Temperament, gesegnet. Die Unruhe liegt mir im
Blut, die habe ich von meinem Volke geerbt, u die wird auch mit mir selbst aufhören,
aber jedenfalls weiß ich, daß nur die äußere Umgebung mir [illegible word] kann. Sie
haben Recht. London muß auf jeden deprimierend wirken, u mich hat es vollständig
gelähmt, vielleicht kommt es daher, daß ich gerade aus Californien hierherkam, u den
Kontrast eben umso furchtbarer empfinde. Ich bin leider nicht in der Lage, Ihren Gruß
an den Franzosen G. in Edinburgh, auszurichten, da ich nicht dahin komme. Meine
Tour nach Schottland, ist ein ebensogroßer Fiasko, als die nach England. Überhaupt,
scheint es mir als wenn ein Fluch auf dem ganzen ruhen würde, oder sagen wir, das
ganze ist der Dummheit u Unfähigkeit derjenigen Genossen, die die Arrangements

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 377

 meiner Versamml. in Händen hatten. Ja, ja lieber N. the moral responcibility among the
Anarchists, is even more lacking den among the workers at large, they would think twice,
before they drag a persone from place to place, who’s only misfortune is to be a speaker,
or propagandist—Ja K. hat seinen Platz verloren, u vorläufig wenig Aussicht auf Be-
schäftigung, dazu kommt noch, daß er phisisch ziemlich auf den Grund ist.
Daß in Ihrer Wohnung nichts zur Bequemlichkeit fehlen wird, konnte ich mir schon
denken, ebenso, daß Strick u Häkelnadeln vorhanden sein werden. Das alles, gehört
sozusagen zu Ihnen, denn Sie, ein so großer Verfechter des Strickstrumpfes, u der bes-
timmten weiblichen Sphäre sind— die gütige Fee, die Ihnen 3 paar Strümpfe zu Weih-
nachten geschenkt hat, weiß vielleicht gar nicht, wie sehr sie Ihren sehnlichsten Wun-
sch erfüllt hat, was? Nein, ich kann jetzt nichts schreiben, am allerwenigstens etwas über
die ökonomische Frage, die viel zu trocken u monoton für meine Stimmung ist. Endlich
ist es mir gelungen, einen Abzug Ihres Artikels von Cantwell, zu erlangen, den ich
gestern “FS.” schickte, leider erscheint die Fortsetzung erst im Feb. “Freedom”, somit
wird auch “FS.” warten müssen. Die einliegende Adresse habe ich Miss Davies über-
mittelt, sie wird Ihnen F. senden. Marie Isaak ist glücklich in [illegible word] angelangt u
fühlt sich dort wohl. Gewiß nimmt sie ein Strickzeug zur Hand, denn sie ist eine sehr
gediegene Hausfrau, das verhindert sie aber nicht sich auch anderweitig zu betätigen,
eben weil sie nicht einseitig ist, die wie Menge, die das Weibe auf eine gewisse einseitige
Sphäre, bestimmen wollen—

Sie herzlich grüßend

EG.
Adresse dieselbe

378 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Glasgow, 24 Januar y 1900

Dear Comrade.

Received your letter; many thanks for your willingness to grant me the use of the three
rooms with firmly shut doors in your apartment during the day. I did not dare to think
that you, who are so proper toward women, would really go so far as to propose the use
of a part of your bachelor apartment for someone of this gender. Of course, I belong to
the third sex,1 and furthermore this has to do with my presence during the day, which re-
ally will not offend a sense of decency. Now if I come to Munich I will certainly make a
claim on your goodness, but only under one condition, that the doors are firmly closed,
really firmly closed do you hear, dear Comrade?—I said if I come to Munich, until re-
cently I was certain of it, but now all kind of things are getting in the way. Namely I have
discovered that to go from Zurich to Geneva and then to Paris costs nearly as much as it
does from here to Zurich via Munich, if that is the case then I must obviously give up on
my desire to travel to Munich as my circumstances do not permit me to spend such huge
sums. In this case I would have to postpone the trip to Switzerland until the fall, in Sep.
I plan to leave Paris in any case (that is if I can’t attend the courses there) and then I can
go to Switzerland, and if I can’t accomplish anything in Geneva either, then I will travel
to America via Germany. In any event, I would be very grateful to you if you would could
provide me with information as to what the trip to Z from Zurich to Geneva and from
there to Paris costs, and really soon yes?—
You are mistaken if you believe that I reject or undervalue tranquility, exactly because
I yearn for tranquility I want to give up agitation for a time and devote myself to a par-
ticular study. Of course I am of the view that all the external calm in the world cannot cre-
ate inner calm in a person, unless one is by his nature blessed with a your temperament.
Restlessness is in my blood, I inherited it from my people, and it will die along with me,
but in any event I know that the outside world can only [illegible word]. You are right. Lon-
don must make everyone depressed, and it completely paralyzed me, perhaps it is be-
cause I came here straight from California, and indeed felt the contrast to be all the more
terrible. I am unfortunately not in a position to pass on your regards to the Frenchman
G 2 in Edinburgh, as I am not going to get there. My tour to Scotland is as great a fiasco

1. For explanation of EG and Nettlau’s private joke with the term “third sex,” see note 2 to Letter to Max
Nettlau, 4 January 1900, above.
2. Possibly Lucien Louis Guérineau (1857–1940), a French cabinetmaker and anarchist militant. In
1884 Guérineau was a member of the Black Flag group and wrote for Terre et Liberté, published be-
tween October 1884 and February 1885. He was sentenced to two months in prison in August 1884
for fighting a police officer. In 1895, in the wake of a number of anarchist bombings, he was accused

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 379

 as the one to England. Indeed, it seems to me as if the whole undertaking were cursed,
or shall we say, the whole mess is due to the stupidity and incompetence of the com-
rades who held the arrangements of my meetings in their hands. Yes, yes dear N. the
moral responsibility among the Anarchists, is even more lacking than among the work-
ers at large, they would think twice, before they drag a person from place to place, whose
only misfortune is to be a speaker, or propagandist 3—Yes K.4 has lost his position, and
for the time being has little chance for employment, and on top of that comes the fact
that he is physically rather run down.
I am certain that no comfort will be lacking in your apartment, and that knitting and
crochet needles will also be available. All this is to be expected of you, so to speak, for you
are such a great champion of knitted stockings and the specifically female sphere—per-
haps the kind fairy who gave you three pair of stockings for Christmas had no idea how
much they fulfilled your most ardent wish, could that be? No, I cannot write anything
now, least of all something about the economic question, which is much too dry and
monotone for my mood. I have finally succeeded in getting a copy of your article from
Cantwell 5 which I sent yesterday to FS, unfortunately the continuation will appear first
in the Feb. Freedom, and so FS will also have to wait. I transmitted the accompanying ad-
dress to Miss Davies, she will send you F.6 Marie Isaak 7 has arrived happily in [illegible
word] and feels comfortable there. Of course she took knitting things, for she is a very de-
voted housewife, which however does not keep her from being active elsewhere, indeed
because she is not one sided, like the crowd who want to assign women to a particular,
one-sided sphere.

With warm regards to you

EG.
Same Address

ALI, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Translated from German.

of “criminal conspiracy” but acquitted; soon after he left for London. While in London, he corre-
sponded with Jean Grave and contributed reports to Les Temps Nouveaux. He returned to Paris and in
1899 was among the contributors to the Journal du Peuple launched by Sébastien Faure during the
Dreyfus Affair.
3. This sentence was written in English.
4. EG refers to Harry Kelly.
5. The article EG requested from Nettlau was his “Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle,”
which she obtained from the English anarchist and compositor Thomas Cantwell and which she sent
on to the journal Free Society (abbreviated FS).
6. EG uses the abbreviation “F” for the periodical Freedom.
7. Anarchist Mary Isaak was publisher with her husband, Abe Isaak, of both Firebrand and Free Society
and traveled to England with EG.

380 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 To M A X N E T T L A U
London, 19 Februar y 1900

Dear Comrade.

Endlich komme ich dazu Ihr Schreiben vom 20 Jan zu beantworten

Ich komme nicht nach München, da ich direckt nach Paris reise u zwar am 27ten d.
M. Bis dahin habe ich viel zu thun. Große V. im Workingmens Club & Institute gegen
den Krieg, morgen Abend wobei wir uns “a hot time” versprechen zwei sozialistische
Versammlungen, wo Hyndman. sprechen sollte, waren von den Jingos gestört. Sam-
stag Nachmittag die letzte Versammlung in White Chapel Sonntag Nachmittag letzte
deutsche Versammlung in Atheneum Hall, u Montag Abschiedsfest, denn Dienstag
nach Paris. Ich kann es kaum glauben daß ich bald von London von dem trüben
schmutzigen grauenhaften London dort sein werde. Ich war bei Trunk Samstag, u er
sagte mir, daß Sie seine Adresse für Briefe Packete u dengleichen angegeben haben, ich
werde also Seaflote, Handbills, posters u was ich von Biller heißt der Mann, der Lydow
ähnlich sieht, für Sie bekommen werde zu Trunk senden soll ich? Ich habe in den sozial-
istischen Monats-Hefte, die zwei Engelschen Article gelesen, die Sie ausgegraben ha-
ben. Sie sind eigentlich wunderbar im Wählen. Es wurde weder in Edinburgh noch
Aberdeen etwas arrangiert ja nicht einmal in Glasgow fand ein englische Versammlung
statt. Alles schläft im lieben England, nur die Dummheit nicht. Haben Sie ja von Claus
Timmerman Antwort erhalten? Meine Adresse in Paris ist Vorläufig Mrs E Brady c/o
P. McCabe 25 rue de Poliveau Paris France
E.G. wird jetzt einer zeitlang von der Oberfläche verschwinden—Wenn Sie nach
Paris kommen werden Sie mich hoffentlich besuchen, nicht? Die Engländer sind mit
Americaner gar nicht zu vergleichen. Der Patriotismus während des Spanish-American
Krieges war gewiß groß, und doch wagte es niemand irgend einer Aussprache gegen
den Krieg zu verhindern, denn, ob man mit dem Krieg einverstanden war oder nicht,
Thatsache ist doch, daß das Motiv desselben schön war, zum mindestens seitens des
amerikanischen Volkes, das wirklich aus Sympathy mit Cuba, Spanien bekämpfte. Aber
in diesem Kriege, ist das Motiv Raub und Mord, und eine solche Brutalität, deren eben
nur Engländer fähig sind. Einfach wahnsinnig sind die Menschen hier, und wenn je-
mand auch nur die leiseste Sympathy für die Boeren zeigt, oder ausspricht, denn hat er
zu gewärtigen, daß er in der schmählichsten Weise molestiert wird! Die Boeren sind
doch Prachtkerle, so eine Handvoll Menschen, und wie sie den Ball schütteln, grosßrtig
einfach herrlich. Ich habe für morgen einen Vortrag ausgearbeitet, der den Stier gehörig
wild machen wird, aber ich muß meine Empörung aussprechen ganz gleich, welches die
Folgen sein sollten. Schreiben Sie bald wieder.

Gruß
E.G.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 381

 To M A X N E T T L A U
London, 19 Februar y 1900

Dear Comrade.

I am finally getting around to answering your letter of 20 Jan.

I am not coming to Munich, as I am traveling directly to Paris on the 27th of this
month. I have much to do before then. Big m[eeting] in the Workingmens Club & Insti-
tute against the war tomorrow evening 1 where we are promising “a hot time.” Two so-
cialist meetings where Hyndman 2 was supposed to speak were disrupted by the Jingos.
Saturday afternoon the last meeting in White Chapel, Sunday afternoon the last German
meeting in Athenaeum Hall, and on Monday the farewell party,3 then Tuesday to Paris.
I can hardly believe that I will soon be away from London, from dreary, dirty, horrible
London. I was at Trunk’s 4 on Saturday, and he told me that you gave his address for let-
ters, parcels and the like, so I will send the leaflets, handbills, posters and whatever I re-
ceive from Biller, the man who resembles Lydow, to Trunk, is that right? I read in the

1. EG spoke on 20 February at the Workingmen’s Club and Institute Hall, Clerkenwell Road, before a
meeting of the Freedom Discussion Group on “The Effect of War on the Workers,” later published in
Freedom (March–April 1900) Other speakers included Tom Mann, Lothrop Withington, Sam Main-
waring, and Harry Kelly.
2. The English socialist Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842 –1921) started his career as a journalist writing
for the Pall Mall Gazette, but he was influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and in 1881 left journal-
ism to form Britain’s first socialist political organization, the Democratic Federation, later the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF). Because of his earlier sympathies with the British Tory party and Brit-
ish imperialism, many were suspicious of Hyndman’s dedication to socialism, a problem heightened
by his autocratic leadership style. It was this which led to a schism in the SDF where the majority left
the organization to form the Socialist League in 1884. Hyndman was criticized by other members for
SDF involvement with the Tory party in the 1885 election. In 1900 the SDF, Fabian Society, and the
Independent Labor Party met to form the Labor Representation Committee—the forerunner of the
Labor Party. Hyndman was also a prolific author of political tracts, including The Historical Basis of So-
cialism in England (London: K. Paul, Tranch, 1883), Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century (Lon-
don: S. Sonnenschein, 1892), and The Future of Democracy (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1915).
3. On Sunday, 25 February, EG spoke at London’s Athenaeum Hall on “Die Grundlagen Der Moral” (The
Basis of Morality). On Monday, 26 February, there was a farewell concert and ball for EG also at
Athenaeum Hall, which included addresses by EG, Peter Kropotkin, and Louise Michel.
4. Johann Sebastian Trunk was a German anarchist, cabinetmaker, editor, and advocate of propaganda
of the deed who worked with Johann Most, Johann Neve, G. C. Uhly, F. J. Ehrhart, A. Benek, and oth-
ers on Freiheit in London. Trunk edited the paper from 20 May to 3 June 1882 while Most was in
prison for treason. Neve was also unavailable, being on the run for publishing the article “Der Re-
bellen Antwort” in the 13 May issue of Freiheit praising the murder of Lord Cavendish in Dublin by
Irish nationalists. Trunk was a member of a group dedicated to propaganda by the deed organized by
Victor Dave, which included Gustav Knauerhase, Otto Rinke, and Joseph Peukert. He also partici-
pated in the 14–19 July 1881 London Social Revolutionary Congress as a representative of the Kom-
munistischer Arbeiterbildsungsverein, a German-speaking workers’ association that included social-

382 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

Sozialistische Monatshefte the two articles by Engels that you dug up.5 They were indeed
wonderful choices. Nothing was arranged either in Edinburgh or Aberdeen, and even in
Glasgow there were no English meetings. Everything is slumbering in dear old England
except stupidity. Have you received an answer from Claus Timmerman? My address in
Paris is

For the time being, Mrs E Brady 6

c/o P. Mc Cabe
25 rue de Poliveau
Paris. France

E.G. will now disappear from the surface for a while—If you come to Paris, hopefully
you will visit me, won’t you? The English are simply not at all comparable to the Ameri-
cans. The patriotism during the Spanish-American War was certainly great and yet no
one dared prevent any talk against the war since, whether one agreed with the war or not,
the fact is that intentions were good, at least on the part of the American people, who
fought Spain truly out of sympathy with Cuba. But in this war 7 the motive is plunder and
murder, and of such brutality as only the English are capable. The people here are sim-
ply insane, and if anyone shows even the slightest sympathy for the Boers, or speaks out,
then he has to know that he will be handled in the most humiliating manner! The Boers
are great people, such a wonderful group, and the way in which they are rocking the boat
is fantastic, simply marvelous. I have prepared a lecture for tomorrow that may drive the
beast thoroughly wild,8 but I must express my anger regardless of the consequences.
Write again soon.

Greetings
E.G.

ALS, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Translated from German.

ists, anarchists, and other revolutionaries. Trunk played a secondary role in the Bruderkrieg (Brothers
War) that plagued the German anarchist movement; eventually Trunk moved to an alignment with
the anarchist communists around Joseph Peukert and Otto Rinke.
5. Nettlau had discovered two forgotten articles by Friedrich Engels in the paper Das Volk, published in
London in 1859, and had edited them for re-publication, adding an introduction. See Nettlau, “Frie-
drich Engels über Karl Marx. Zwei Aufsätze aus dem Jahre 1859” (Friedrich Engels on Karl Marx. Two
essays from the year 1859), Sozialistische Monatshefte (Berlin) 4 (January 1900): 38 – 46.
6. EG was traveling under the name of her former companion Edward Brady.
7. In the Anglo-Boer War (1899 –1902), the British government fought two Boer republics for control
of South Africa.
8. See “The Effect of War on the Workers,” Transcript of Address in Freedom, 20 February 1900, im-
mediately following.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 383

 Transcript of Address in F R E E D O M
London, 20 Februar y 1900

The Effect of War on the Workers.

(Address by Emma Goldman on February 20, in London.)

Fellow Workers.—Let me begin my address with a quotation from one of England’s
greatest men; not the England of to day, the invading, murderous, crushing England, but
the England of a time when Liberty and Hospitality were her main virtues—the England
that has given the world the profoundest thinkers, the most brilliant writers, the most
touching poets, from among whom Carlyle stands out like a shining star upon the firma-
ment. It was he who said, when asked “What is the net purport of War?”:
“There dwell and toil, in the English village of Dumdrudge, some five hundred souls.
From these, by certain ‘Natural Enemies’ of the French, there are successively selected,
during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has
suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to
manhood, and even trained them to crafts so that one can weave, another build, another
hammer, and the weakest stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid
much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at
the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed
there till wanted. And now to that same spot . . . are thirty similar French artisans, from
a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two
parties come into actual juxtaposition: and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun
in his hand. Straightway the word ‘Fire!’ is given: and they blow the souls out of one an-
other; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses,
which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the
Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay,
in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual help-
fulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, in-
stead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.” 1
In these few pithy words of Carlyle, lies the whole secret of War and Militarism. Only
a short while ago in what is called the greatest and freest land in the world (I mean Amer-
ica), from each Dumdrudge, thirty, nay, more, men were selected, dressed in uniform
and shipped to a strange country; and the same was done in many Dumdrudges of

1. EG quotes from the eminent Scottish historian and writer Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: The Life
and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (bk. 2, chap. 8). In LML (p. 256), Goldman describes a noticeably
different version of this speech.

384 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

Spain. Both Spain and America had nursed and suckled their sons into strong and sturdy
craftsmen. These same sons had children and wives to care for— often a mother and sis-
ter to support; but no amount of tears or prayers could keep them at home; they were told
to go, and so they went to blow each other’s brains out. Had they any quarrel? None what-
ever; they, too, lived far enough apart, and in this wide world there was rather a bond of
helpfulness between them. What then? In the case of the American man, we were told
that a beautiful sentiment, a deep moral, was the motive power; and so it was to some ex-
tent—at least, the American people thought so. It was the deep sympathy with the suf-
fering Cubans, tortured and starved by the butcher Weyler 2 under the regime of the
Spanish clergy and government; it was the just indignation of the American people over
the atrocities committed in Cuba—I say: of the American people; I should say, of the
American worker—and this noble sentiment, these humanitarian feelings, served the
American governors as a good pretext for fighting Spain in order to get Cuba into their
clutches.
Do you wish to know how the American-Spanish war affected the workers? I will tell
you. First of all, America lost thousands of her sons—who either died of fever, lack of
proper nourishment, or were killed by Spanish guns, or (as a reward for their patriotism
and devotion to their country) by embalmed beef furnished by American capitalists.3 In-
stead of those strong, able-bodied men who left their shores for the battlefield, we have
today thousands of broken-hearted mothers, hungry widows and orphans, who swell the
number of the unemployed and reduce the wages of the workers. Then we have the War
Tax of Two Cents 4— only a penny, you know; for the Government was kind to us—a
penny War Tax that still, like the sword of Damocles, hangs over the workers’ heads, that
has increased the price of meat from 4d. to 6d., bread from 2d. to 21/2 d. per loaf, coals
from 17s. to 25s., per ton, rent from 24s. to 30s. a month, beer, clothing and other ne-
cessities of life to still higher prices; it has ruined hundreds of small tradesmen, in-
creased the ranks of the unemployed and reduced wages.
Still, all this suffering could be patiently borne if only one knew that the Cubans had

2. For more than a year, from February 1896 until he was recalled in 1897, Spanish general Valeriano
Weyler y Nicolau served as governor of Cuba and attempted to deny local support for the insurgent
Cuban Liberation Army by relocating peasants into loosely organized and poorly supplied concentra-
tion camps. Ultimately hundreds of thousands of people died from disease and malnutrition. In the
United States, popular indignation at Weyler’s methods encouraged support for the 1898 Spanish-
American War.
3. EG refers to the canned beef rations served to soldiers in the war, often called “embalmed beef.” The
Armour meatpacking firm of Chicago sold the army 500,000 pounds of canned beef, much of which
was tainted and rotting. The tainted beef is thought to have led to sickness and death among the sol-
diers. The overwhelming majority of casualties in the Spanish-American War were the result of dis-
eases such as yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, and dysentery.
4. The War Revenue Act of 13 June 1898, enacted to “meet war expenditures,” and repealed in 1902, im-
posed or increased taxes on a broad range of goods and services, including medicines, tobacco, beer,
tea, mixed flours, telephone and telegraph service, inheritances (over $10,000), banking and other
financial activities, and places of entertainment.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 385

 been helped. Were they helped? I deny it. I say that all the blood spilt, all the lives lost, all
the money spent has been in vain; the Cubans have been freed from the atrocious gov-
ernment of Spain but only to fall into the hands of another almost as unscrupulous.5 We
have but to think of Homestead and its strike where eleven men were killed and some
30 wounded; of the coal strike in the Coeur d’Alene mines in Idaho, where 200 men
were thrown to rot in the Bull Pen and confessions extorted at the point of the bayonet; 6
when we think of the atrocities rampant in the South, of the negroes lynched, tortured
and burned by infuriated crowds without a hand being raised or a word said for their pro-
tection—when we think of all these things, then I say that the American Government is
hardly an improvement upon that of the Spanish, signs of which can already be seen in
Cuba, where, 12,000 workers being out on strike, the army was threatened to be called
out.7 We have saved the Cubans from the bullets of Spaniards, only, it seems to me, to ex-
pose them to the brutality of the bloodhounds of American capitalism. But as if this were
not sufficient, there is a still more degrading, humiliating and brutal result of the late
American-Spanish war—I allude to the invasion of the Philippine Islands and the crush-
ing of the Filipinos, those noble rebels who are still defending their independence,
though slaughtered by hundreds, their homes burned, their wealth destroyed, and their
women ill-used by the very men who went to free the Cubans in the name of Liberty.8 Co-

5. Cuba gained independence at the end of the war. However, U.S. troops occupied the country for the
next five years, and in 1901, the Platt Amendment, which became part of Cuba’s constitution in 1902,
essentially made Cuba a U.S. protectorate.
6. In the spring of 1899 coal miners in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, demanded a wage increase from the
Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mining Company. The company agreed to raise wages but refused to rec-
ognize the union, the Western Federation of Miners. The WFM went on strike 23 April 1899. Then
on 29 April a group of strikers and supporters, many armed, commandeered a train and attacked the
mine, blowing it up and burning down the company offices. Governor Frank Steunenberg called for
federal troops to intervene. As a result 700 miners were arrested and imprisoned in makeshift “bull-
pen” prisons. The mine owners then forced miners who wanted to work to sign an oath renouncing
the union. Federal troops remained in the area until 1901, and union leaders who had been in prison
since 1899 were not released and pardoned until then. When Governor Steunenberg was murdered
in a bomb explosion in 1905, authorities tried unsuccessfully to blame Western Federation of Miners
leaders Charles Moyer, William Haywood, and George Pettibone. For further information, and EG’s
comments on these events, see “As to ‘Crammers of Furnaces,’ ” Essay in Mother Earth, 20 Novem-
ber 1906, in vol. 2.
7. EG refers to the general strike in Havana in September 1899, which was called in support of the
stonemasons’ demand for an eight-hour day. Alarmed by local support for the strike, General William
Ludlow, commander of U.S. occupation forces in the city, urged vigorous action by the police and ar-
rested strike leaders, ultimately killing the strike.
8. At the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States bought the Philippines from Spain. How-
ever, the Filipino government had been fighting for independence from Spain since 1896, and soon
fighting broke out between the United States and the Philippines. Though the war was declared over
on 4 July 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was reacting to growing opposition to the war
at home, fighting continued sporadically until 1913 when the United States established stable colonial
control over the Philippines.

386 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

lumbia! cover your face under the shame of it; for you have become but a prostitute to
the vice and greed of your sons!
Again we can say with Carlyle, out of every British and Irish Dumdrudge, men have
been selected, dressed in khaki and sent to the Transvaal to blow out the souls of the
Boers. Have these Englishmen quarrelled with the Boers? Why, no; on the contrary they
were friends until a short time back. What then? In this case we cannot even say their
Governors have fallen out, for the Governor of the Transvaal has certainly done more
than any self-respecting man could or ought to do in the effort to prevent war, by yield-
ing to the demands of Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner.9 No, it is not the
Governors who have fallen out, but a few greedy and insatiable monsters, who have gone
mad at the sight of the red Gold in the Transvaal like the proverbial bull at the sight of
a red rag, and Britannia must sacrifice her sons at the demand of her sanguine traders.
No fight so justifiable, no more righteous a defence, no nobler struggle for liberty, than
that we see today on the side of the Boers, a handful of farmers who have known little of
military drill or modern warfare, who, a peace-loving people, have taken to their guns
only from sheer necessity and are showing the world that when a people fights for Lib-
erty and independence it needs neither God nor King on its side. I see a report in one of
your dailies, that a number of ministers have called upon you to repent; God because of
your sins, having been against you no little in this war. Now I always believed the English
were the most pious people on the earth; at least, they have always pretended to be such
yet God has punished you; might it not be because you obeyed the call of your Governors
to invade and slay a peaceful people? But no, your ministers call you to repent because
God for once in their crude imagination is on the side of the righteous— otherwise he is
too often on the side of the rascal. I hardly, however, think it necessary to go into details
regarding the English-Boer War; enough has already been said from different sides as to
the results likely to obtain on the workers; blind indeed are those who do not see them
already. Aside of the increase of the cost of the coal and food, aside of your 50,000 chil-
dren going to school without breakfast, you have sold your birthright for a mess of pot-
tage; you stand before the world as willing slaves to the whims of robbers and thieves,
and you have shown yourselves incapable (in spite of the gifts of chocolate from her gra-
cious Majesty and plum-puddings from your aristocrats) of meeting and beating a hand-
ful of farmers!
Do not tell me Mr. Chamberlain is responsible for this war; it is you who are respon-
sible. With Ruskin I can say: “There are two kinds of slaves— one are scourged to their
work by the whip; others by their ignorance; some are bought with money, others with

9. EG refers to Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary from 1895 to 1903, who was respon-
sible for British foreign policy during the Boer War. Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate, had been
prime minister of Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. Alfred Milner was the governor of Cape Colony
and the British high commissioner of South Africa from 1897 to 1905.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 387

 praise (or promises of chocolate?) Again, it matters not what kind of work slaves do;
some are set to digging fields, others graves; some press the juice out of vines, some
the blood of men, but it is slavery just the same, because you do things at the bidding of
others.” 10
Yes, fellow-workers, this is your curse— doing things at the bidding of others. When,
oh when, will you learn to be yourselves, to think for yourselves, to act for yourselves?
Not until you have learnt to understand the wrongs of War, of bloodshed, of legal mur-
der and robbery; that all class and racial hatred is but the result of your ignorance, and
that while you wilfully choose this ignorance you become the easy tools of your Gover-
nors, who are too cowardly to go out and fight themselves.

Freedom 14 (March–April 1900): 10 –11.

10. EG paraphrases English writer, art historian, and social critic John Ruskin’s discussion on “War” in
The Crown of Wild Olives: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (London, 1866).

388 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 Communiqué from R O YA L P R U S S I A N P O L I C E
to F R E N C H I N T E R I O R M I N I S T R Y
Berlin, 12 March 1900

I have the honor of informing you that the anarchist Emma Goldmann must have left
London a few days ago for Paris, accompanied by the anarchist Havel. 1
Emma Goldmann, whose somewhat old photograph I enclose, is of Russian nation-
ality; she is approximately 32 or 33 years of age. She was in the United States of America
a few years ago, where she worked very energetically at building up the anarchist move-
ment; she was arrested and imprisoned several times because of the violence of her rev-
olutionary speeches; 2 she has, by the way, succeeded on several occasions in recruiting
comrades determined to carry out propaganda by the deed. In fact, I remember an attack
with a revolver, which her lover, Mr. Alexander Berkman, committed in 1892 in Pittsburg
against the Director of the Carnegie mines.3 Another lover of Goldmann,4 on her in-
structions, came from America to Germany via London; he was sentenced to 8 years in
prison in 1893 in Duisburg for having violated the dynamite law.
Last spring, she reappeared in London, where she quietly made anarchist propa-
ganda; there she got acquainted with an Austrian, Mr. Joseph-Hyp Havel, a waiter, born
in Thabor (Austria) on August 13, 1871,5 with whom she has lived with for some time.
Havel, of whom I am sending you a photograph taken in 1896, is an anarchist mili-
tant who has already been sentenced for attempts against property. He was interned in
Austria in a mental hospital because of his extravagant behavior. In 1894, he was sen-
tenced in Vienna to 18 months in prison for disturbing the peace.6
He is seen again in 1898 in Berlin, where he speaks at an anarchist meeting, then he
goes to London where he starts to play a certain role in anarchist circles.
Until now, I have not been able to learn anything precise about the aim of this trip.

1. Hippolyte Havel, a Czech anarchist communist, met EG in London in 1899 and traveled with her to
Paris.
2. She was arrested and imprisoned once in 1893 for a speech before the unemployed in New York City.
Charged with “inciting to riot” she spent ten months in prison. This communiqué repeats much of
the misinformation in the September 1895 report from the German Ministry of the Interior (see
Official Circular of the German Government, 25 September 1895, above).
3. AB’s attentat on Henry Clay Frick.
4. The reference is to Joseph Oerter, a German anarchist communist and, for a short time, companion
of EG.
5. Havel was actually born in 1869.
6. According to Havel, he was imprisoned for eighteen months for making an inflammatory speech and
then deported from Vienna.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 389

The 26 February 1900 farewell concert for Goldman, staged upon her departure
from London to Paris for the planned anarchist conference, signaled her growing
stature in the radical movement in Great Britain. (By permission of the Kate Sharp-
ley Library)
But since Havel is to represent a group of London anarchists this year at the International
Anarchist Congress, due to take place in Paris,7 it is not unreasonable to think that this
trip has to do with the organization of this congress. Given the character of these two in-
dividuals, and in particular that of the Goldman woman, it is not to be discounted that
there may be a dangerous purpose behind this trip. This is why I thought it necessary to
draw your attention to these two dangerous persons, and I would be very much obliged
if you would keep me informed of their actions and movements, should you manage to
find them.

Von Windheim

ALS, Dossier Emma Goldmann, Numéro 124786, Cote B/A 305, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris.
Marked “Confidential.” Translated from French.

7. The International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People in Paris was scheduled for Septem-
ber 1900. EG later states that Havel has a mandate to “represent the Bohemian comrades from Amer-
ica at the congress” (see Letter to Max Nettlau,” 15 May 1900 below).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 391

 Transcript of Address in F R E E S O C I E T Y
Paris, 8 April 1900

The Propaganda and the Congress.

(Read before the organizing committee of the Anarchist Congress, Paris.)

Comrades and friends —

I have learned that the assistance received from the comrades in America and England
in behalf of our congress, has not been very encouraging. I hope this has not led you to
lose faith in the American or English Anarchistic movement, or that you have concluded
the comrades in those countries are inactive or indifferent.
I have just finished an eight months’ propaganda tour in America, having delivered
210 lectures, visited 60 cities, and addressed from 50,000 to 60,000 people, and a four
months’ tour in England and Scotland, which, although not as successful as the former,
yet enables me to give you the assurance that the comrades, at least the English speak-
ing of America and England, are heart and soul with you in your undertaking for the
coming congress, and that they will assist you both materially and morally. The reason
why you have heard so little from them so far is due to the various difficulties we have to
deal with in the United States and Great Britain.
I shall try to give you an idea of how we stand in both countries just now, so that you
may better understand our hard struggle. To begin with America, let me say: I am quite
sure that many of you know more or less about the movement, I mean the Anarchist
movement of the American people, not the foreigners, (for although the Italian, Span-
ish, French, Bohemian and Jewish Anarchists are larger and stronger in numbers, yet
they are of no importance inasmuch as we must have the Americans interested in our
philosophy, if we wish to succeed in the establishment of a free society in the United
States), still you only know about it through our papers, and because of that you may not
be aware of the fact that the American movement is yet in its infancy, not older than five
or six years. Up to that period the movement was in the hands of the foreign speaking el-
ement, who themselves were either mostly Revolutionists only, or Anarchists by name,
and Social Democrats in their tendencies. Only since the first issue of the Firebrand,1 in
Oregon, seized by the authorities, and now published under the name of Free Society, in
San Francisco,2 have we begun to make headway among the American people.

1. The first issue of Firebrand appeared 27 January 1895, in Portland, Ore.

2. In September 1897, Abe Isaak, Henry Addis, and Abner J. Pope, editors of the Portland-based Fire-
brand, were arrested and charged under the Comstock Act with sending obscene literature through

392 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 The best proof of my statement you will find in the fact that American trades unions,
social and literary clubs, ethical and philosophical societies, no longer look upon us as
bomb-throwers, wild beasts, drunkards, or uncombed and unwashed tramps, (this idea
having been manufactured by our enemies, and their tool, the daily press), but meet us
friendly, invite our lecturers and listen with interest to the exposition of the philosophy
of Anarchist-Communism.
However, the American Anarchists not being numerous, and living in the far west,
such as Colorado, Texas, and California,3 it will be extremely difficult for them to raise
1500 francs ($300) to send a delegate to the congress, (it may even cost more than 1500
francs). But we have not abandoned the idea of sending one yet. Comrade Peter Kropot-
kin has recently sent an article to Free Society,4 explaining the importance of the congress
(this being absolutely necessary, as some of the German Anarchists in America have
opened a crusade against the sending of a delegate, and have denounced the congress as
parliamentarian),5 and I shall soon have an article in the same journal proposing some
of our ablest comrades as delegates,6 at the same time opening up a subscription to raise
the necessary sum, and with the assistance of the foreign speaking comrades, especially
the Jewish Anarchists, who are the strongest and most active, we hope to send a delegate
from America, if, however, we fail in our aim, we have decided to send reports about our
propaganda, and the general outlook for our ideas at large. Comrade William Holmes,7
James Morton,8 Carl Nold,9 and others, have begun to work out reports for California,
Colorado, Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, etc.
In England, the comrades have formed what is called a Congress Group, consisting
of members of Freedom Group, including Comrade Kropotkin, Tscherkesoff,10 Tschai-

the mails; the paper was banned. The materials deemed obscene included a Walt Whitman poem
long available in Leaves of Grass and three articles on the subject of free love (for further details, see
note 32 to “Letters from a Tour,” Series in Sturmvogel, 15 December 1897, above). In November 1897,
Isaak relocated to San Francisco and again began to publish his newspaper under the new name,
Free Society, the first issue of which appeared on 14 November 1897.
3. EG most likely refers to anarchists William and Lizzie Holmes, who lived in Denver; Ross Winn,
who lived in Texas; and James F. Morton, Jr. and the Isaaks, who were living in San Francisco.
4. See Peter Kropotkin, “The Revolutionary International Labor Congress,” Free Society, 25 March
1900, p. 1.
5. EG refers to a series of remarks by Johann Most in Freiheit, criticizing congresses in general and the
proposed anarchist congress in Paris in particular as a waste of time and resources. In a 21 April
1900 item in Freiheit, Most responds to EG’s critique of his position with a personal attack on her
political integrity. See note 3 in Letter to Max Nettlau, 15 May 1900, below.
6. The article, “Observations and Suggestions” (Free Society, 22 April 1900), appears immediately
following.
7. William Holmes, previously of Chicago, was at this time living in Denver, Colorado.
8. James F. Morton, Jr. undertook a cross-country speaking tour from New York (where he had been
based) to San Francisco during 1899 –1900.
9. Carl Nold was, perhaps, writing the reports of Missouri, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all places he
had lived.
10. EG refers to Varlaam Cherkesov.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 393

 koffsky 11 and others. This group, with Comrade Charles, recently liberated from nine
years hell in an English prison,12 as secretary, is in communication with groups of a sim-
ilar nature in Leeds, Glasgow, and other cities for the purpose of raising funds for the
congress, and working out reports. Leeds has already raised 300 francs, and the group
has prospects of raising more. In all, you may expect at least six delegates from England.
At present, the comrades in England must pay all their attention to getting up meet-
ings, demonstrations, and manifestoes against the most cruel, brutal, inhuman, unjust
and dastardly war, brought about by a gang of large thieves and money-mongers, and
sanctioned by the insatiable monster—government, against a handful of brave, coura-
geous farmers, who are fighting like lions for their independence and liberty. The first
large protest meeting was held February 20, and I can assure you that a London meet-
ing has not seen as much enthusiasm and honest indignation for a long time.13
As Anarchists it is our main aim to oppose and fight every form of injustice and op-
pression, and because of that, I hope you will join with me and the English comrades in
the most vigorous protest against the cold blooded murder of the admirable Boer fighters
by the English army, backed by robbers like Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, Milner, and
other English capitalists who are anxious to get the gold mines in the Transvaal, over the
bleeding and quivering bodies of the Boers and their families.
Down with all form of injustice; long live our love of independence and Anarchy!

Emma Goldman.

Free Society, 8 April 1900, p. 1. Reprinted in French, with the reports of other delegates, in Les Temps Nou-
veaux (Paris) Supplément Littéraire, 20 September 1900, pp. 189 –90; and in German (translation by Hip-
polyte Havel) in supplement to Neues Leben (Berlin), 21 April 1900, pp. 67– 68.

11. EG refers to Nikolai Chaikovsky.

12. Walsall anarchist Fred Charles, who was convicted and imprisoned on 4 April 1892, actually served
seven and a half years of his ten-year sentence.
13. EG’s address at this meeting was entitled “The Effect of War on the Workers” (see Transcript of Ad-
dress in Freedom, 20 February 1900, above).

394 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 To F R E E S O C I E T Y
Paris, 22 April 1900

Observations and Suggestions.

Dear comrades, friends and sympathizers of Free Society,—

Little has been heard of me in the columns of Free Society, and this may have led some of
you to believe that I am inactive or out of the movement entirely; but I have been neither.
True, I cannot boast of having been as active as I was during my tour through America,
but I have done some propaganda after all, at the same time not leaving the progress of
our American movement out of sight, especially devoting my attention to the health and
growth of our brave little rebel, Free Society.
My tour has been reported in a previous number of Free Society,1 so I will say little
about it, only adding that while it did not turn out as successful as the one in the States,
I do not think my trip fruitless.
I had occasion to join in a monster protest meeting against the brutal attempt of a few
big thieves—Cecil Rhodes, Milner and Chamberlain—to rob the brave and marvelously
courageous heroes of the Transvaal and the Free State of their independence and liberty.
Every Briton boasts of his freedom of speech, and in fact I myself with most radicals
believed, up to my arrival in England, that freedom of speech was a reality in Britain.
During my four months’ touring in England and Scotland, however, I had ample oppor-
tunity to convince myself that freedom of speech is as much a farce there as elsewhere.
The worst of it is that this sacred right is not suppressed by the government, like in our
“blessed land,” but by the people themselves. By the “people” I do not only mean the ig-
norant, whisky-saturated, patriotism-maddened workers, but also the mental wage
slaves: clerks, bookkeepers, cashiers, typewriters, commercial travelers, and other flun-
kies to money and titles. We, too, have had to deal with a patriotic craze, but it was at least
tinctured with humanitarian sentiments, and I cannot recollect one single instance of
having been disturbed in any of my meetings against the Spanish-American war. The
only disturbance came from the police and not the people; whereas in England, where
patriotism in the present war is based upon nothing but commercialism, the brutality of
the people is simply beyond any comprehension and rather discouraging. Yet the plea-
sure of an instructive association of comrades like Kropotkin, Tschaikoffsky, Tscherke-
soff,2 and others, together with the study of the lights and shadows of the English Anar-
chistic movement, overbalance the disagreeable features one meets with on a tour
hampered by obstacles of all kinds.

1. See “The Propaganda and the Congress,” Transcript of Address in Free Society, 8 April 1900, above.
2. Peter Kropotkin, Varlaam Cherkesov, and Nikolai Chaikovsky were all Russian exiles living in London.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 395

 I cannot close my short review of my tour with-
out mentioning the kind and energetic assistance ren-
dered me by comrades H. M. Kelly and A. Davies, both
known to the comrades in America through Solidarity,
the Rebel, Free Society and Freedom.3 These two, them-
selves “foreigners” in England, like a faithful mate of a
shipwrecked crew, are in a quiet and unassuming man-
ner keeping the movement alive in London.4
It is a rather singular feature that both in England
and America the energetic workers are foreigners, yet
such is the case. Not that our ideas have failed to gain
ground among the natives of either country, nay, on
the contrary: the number of English Anarchists in Lon-
don, for instance, is very large: but it seems the Anglo-
Saxon character lacks that power of devotion and en-
thusiasm which forces one on and on, almost against
oneself, to break the chains and to fearlessly climb over
all obstacles; because of that one cannot but appreciate
such workers as Kelly and Davies, and a few others, so
much more.
Exceptional conditions produce exceptional charac-
ters, so I have not yet lost hopes that some day England
Peter Kropotkin in 1890s. The Russian revolutionary, geogra- and America may furnish us with a Kropotkin, Tschai-
pher, and principal theorist of anarchist communism was koffsky, Tscherkesoff, Perovskaya, Angelilio, Caserio 5
Goldman’s ideological mentor and friend, in spite of their dif- and other such wonderful men and women; indeed the
fering perspectives on personal relationships and sexuality. beginning has been made in America by the appear-
Their correspondence was launched in 1895. (Labadie Col-
ance of a Parsons.6
lection, University of Michigan)
The comrades in Paris and elsewhere are busily en-
gaged in preparing for our congress; but why has so
very little been heard from the comrades in America?
Is it because the congress, when first proposed, was
lightly treated by a few Anarchists, who either for personal reasons or because of lack of
knowledge about the movement, have expressed themselves against the congress, and
have denounced it as useless? If this be the case, I advise you to read Comrade Kropot-

3. Solidarity, The Rebel, Free Society, and Freedom were all English-language anarchist papers.
4. Both Harry Kelly and A. A. Davies (who was Irish) objected to EG’s assertion that they alone were
keeping alive the movement in London, noting that Thomas Cantwell, Ted Leggatt, Alfred Marsh, and
David Nicoll, among others, were more deserving of such credit. See Free Society, 10 June 1900, p. 4;
and 24 June 1900, p. 4.
5. EG refers to Sophia Perovskaya, Michele Angiolillo, and Sante Caserio.
6. EG refers to Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket anarchists.

396 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

kin’s article carefully, and I am sure any prejudices you may have hitherto entertained on
the subject, will vanish.7
Of course, neither the organizers of the congress, Comrade Kropotkin, nor I believe
that it will bring about a reconstruction in society, or a revolution in the methods of prop-
aganda; but we do believe that there is not a better opportunity to let the world see that
the Anarchists are very much alive, than the congress to be held during the Exhibition
in Paris,8 at a time when organized thieves, robbers, and legal and illegal prostitutes,
will squander the sweat and blood-stained products of millions of workers. Or can you
tell me of a more opportune occasion to send out a joint cry of protest against Church-
sanctioned and State-legalized murder and exploitation? A protest against all forms of
tyranny, not only in the ranks of the enemy, but even in those of so-called reformers, So-
cialists, nay, even Anarchists? I hardly think you can name one. And here I must not for-
get to mention the main object of importance of the congress, namely, that the last tie of
relations between parliamentarian Socialism was broken at the congress in London in
1896,9 and that from now on we must as much fight the narrowness, discipline and in-
tolerance of parliamentarian Socialists as any other form of invasion and despotism, and
show the workers that those who even without blushing rejoice over the success of one
of their men as comrade of the murderer of 30,000 Communards,—Galliffet—have no
claim to be the representatives of the workers’ cause.10
It is an undisputable fact that our movement in America and Europe is not what it
ought to and could be, but for the lack of co-operation and solidarity, and our enemies,
including the leaders of the Socialist parties, have ever made use of this fact in attempt-
ing to show that “Anarchy is dead,” and those Anarchists who are alive “work in obscu-
rity.” While they have willfully misrepresented us, it remains true that the majority of
comrades in England, America and Germany seldom come to the front. I only refer you
to a number of German groups, composed of Anarchists, wasting their time in singing
and beer drinking, (I have no objection to either, if coupled with serious work), and dis-
cussing their next door neighbor; or some of our American parlor meetings, frequented
by a number of middle-class people who have not the courage to be known as Anarchists;

7. In a letter to Free Society, Kropotkin called for anarchists everywhere to participate in the planned
Paris congress, via printed essay if they could not attend in person. See “The Revolutionary Inter-
national Labor Congress,” Free Society, 25 March 1900, p. 1.
8. Announced in 1892, the Exposition Universelle, held in Paris between April and November 1900,
was the largest of the world exhibitions to that time.
9. The London congress of the socialist Second International met 27 July through 3 August 1896. The
anarchist delegates were expelled from the congress on 28 July. They then convened their own meet-
ing that night. Delegates included Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Pietro Gori, Louise Michel,
Élisée Reclus, Jean Grave, Harry Kelly, and Charles Mowbray.
10. The “comrade” of General Gallifet was the socialist Etiennne-Alexandre Millerand (1859 –1943), the
first socialist to serve in French bourgeois government. He was minister of commerce from 1899
to 1902, under Rene Waldeck-Rousseau, and president of France from 1920 to 1924. EG also casti-
gates Millerand in her 25 September report on the anarchist congress; see “The Paris Congress,” To
Free Society, 25 September 1900, below.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 397

 or some comrades who waste the precious space of our papers with the discussion of
spooks and ghosts, Anarchist judges and jurors, or the consistency of prostituting one-
self in politics,11 which only tends to harm the movement instead of helping to lift the
veil of ignorance from the eyes of the worker.
You may contend that we can protest against existing evils through our papers and pub-
lic meetings; so we can, and do, but of what importance is it compared with an opportu-
nity like that offered us in Paris? In the first place, our papers are read mostly by the com-
rades themselves, and our lectures reach only those who happen to attend meetings, the
daily press either reporting nothing, or misrepresenting our speakers in the most shame-
less manner. I do not undervalue such methods of propaganda; yet I claim that by these
methods we reach but the few and not the many, whereas bodies of men and women as-
sembled in a congress have always been recognized by the press. It will be so with the
coming Anarchist congress. The very fact that this is to be the first Anarchist congress
since 1872; 12 that for the first time since then, men and women from different parts of the
world bring tidings of international solidarity, deep love of liberty and hatred of tyranny,
openly and fearlessly discuss the philosophy of Anarchy, and ways and means of a speedy
spread of their ideas, and all this almost next door to the arena where international para-
sites celebrate one of their last orgies and dance a cancan upon the decayed pillars of a rot-
ten society, would be of such grandeur, such importance that it could not pass unnoticed.
But there is still another reason why the comrades in America should take part in the
congress. Since I have been in Europe, and especially in Paris, I have been dismayed to find
how little is known of, or how little interest is shown here regarding the movement in
America. This is due to the fact that very few French people know any language beside
their own, and that very little is written about America in the French papers; unfortunately
this is also the case in Italy, Austria, Germany and Holland. Now, in the face of the growth
of imperialism, militarism and despotism, can we stand such lack of solidarity and unity?
Can we hope to accomplish more in the future than we have in the past, unless we really
become international, not only in theory, but also in practice? The congress is to serve as
a medium of putting the comrades into communication with each other, and of suggest-
ing ways and means of carrying on propaganda work co-operatively, and last but not least,
to acquaint the comrades of all countries with the movements of each respective country.
The comrades in England and elsewhere have already formed groups for the purpose
of raising funds to send delegates, and prepare reports and suggestions for the congress.

11. A reference to a debate sparked by an article by Henry Addis; see EG’s letter to Free Society entitled
“Ideas and Men,” 10 July 1898, above.
12. After the schism between what the anarchists considered to be the authoritarians led by Karl Marx
and the anarchists and mutualists grouped around Michael Bakunin in the Hague congress of the
First International in 1872, the anarchist majority met at Saint-Imier to establish their own Inter-
national. Comprising the majority of the rank-and-file membership of the First International, the
Bakuninists of the Saint-Imier International considered theirs the true heir of the organization es-
tablished in 1864. Besides the 1872 congress, a congress of the Anti-Authoritarian International
took place 6 – 8 September 1877 in Verviers, Belgium, and an International Social Revolutionary
Congress took place in London, 14–19 July 1881.

398 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

What are the comrades in America about? Surely they are not going to be silent and in-
active in such a grave and important matter?
Permit me to make a few suggestions; first of all, a subscription should be opened to
help make the congress a success, amounts temporarily to be sent to Free Society. I hereby
contribute $5 to the same to make a start. With a little effort and the assistance of our
Jewish comrades, we can raise enough to send an American delegate. The Bohemian and
Italian comrades will also send delegates. We have a few able and competent Americans
who could represent our cause, (I say cause and not comrades, because I wish to avoid
misunderstanding). There is, for instance, Borland,13 who has not been heard of much
of late, yet who understands the movement and Anarchist-Communism thoroughly.
There is Comrade Edelman, known as an able worker for years, who may be well enough
to go to Paris.14 There is Comrade Cooper,15 certainly one of our most intellectual writ-
ers, and there is Voltairine de Cleyre, a fearless and brilliant exponent of Anarchism. Of
course, Addis objects to her as a lecturer, claiming that she opposes Communism, yet
that is a mistake; she does not oppose Communism “because she favors Individualism,”
but rather because she wants to be known as an Anarchist without a tag.16 That ought not
to influence any one. She may not be so well posted on Communism as Addis, but she
has the advantage of having a clean past—I mean in regard to her devotion and faith-
fulness to the cause, and her hatred for politics and politicians. I venture to say that she
would rather do scrubbing than make common cause with politicians, a quality which
Addis seems to value very little. She may not know as much of economics as some of our
other workers, but, as she says herself, she is all right in the philosophy of Anarchy, and
certainly perfectly competent to represent the Anarchistic movement of America.
Of course I have suggested these comrades merely because I think them the fittest as
delegates. I have done so without their consent, leaving it for you to ascertain whether
they would like to accept a delegation or not, or to suggest others, if you know. At any rate,
I hope the congress will be discussed and reports prepared. Should it be absolutely im-
possible to raise enough money to send a delegate, Comrade Kelly and myself will gladly
submit any of your suggestions or wishes to the congress, but the groups should send us
credentials for that purpose. I should like to recommend Harry Kelly to your attention as
he is an American. I shall be there at all events. But I beg you to leave nothing undone to
raise the necessary means for a delegate directly to be sent from America, as Harry Kelly
has been away for two years.

Emma Goldman.

Free Society, 22 April 1900, pp. 1–3. The return address on EG’s letter was “140 rue Mouffetard, care of Les
Temps Nouveau.” The French anarchist communist paper was published from the attic of editor Jean Grave’s
apartment; Grave was dubbed the “pope of Mouffetard.”

13. EG refers to American anarchist and trade unionist Wilfred P. Borland, who lectured frequently in
Chicago.
14. John H. Edelmann died 12 July 1900.
15. EG refers to British-born anarchist Charles B. Cooper, who was an active lecturer in New York City.
16. Voltairine de Cleyre called herself an anarchist without a hyphen.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 399

 To F R E E S O C I E T Y
Paris, 29 April 1900

Some More Observations.

I welcome the readiness of our comrades to raise a fund for the purpose of importing a
speaker from England, for it is a sign of revived energy, although I am convinced that
naught will come of it. I need not assure the comrades that my whole heart is in the
American movement and that I would give much to see it prosper, yet I must take issue
with the proposed importation of a speaker from England; and this not because of a lack
of international feeling, but because of a preponderance of it. For that reason I would not
like the movement of one country to grow at the expense of another; and that would cer-
tainly be the case should you succeed in getting Comrade Turner over.1 He is the only
able speaker in England at the present time, and even he cannot do much straight Anar-
chist propaganda, because his whole time is taken up with the Trades-Union movement.
Mark you, I do not undervalue the good he is doing in his present position, but I only
wish to show that England is even more in need of speakers than America and that to
take away John Turner would in my opinion be a very uncomradely act, to say the least.
Besides, it is idle to talk about importing Comrade Turner: he cannot nor will he go to
America, and if he ever does go, it will be in an independent way. This I can say with full
authority. Since there are no other comrades in England capable of carrying on effective
work in America (for we must not forget that to make a successful tour, one must not
only be a good speaker, but also have a reputation as well, otherwise one may be an
Antony and yet not draw a crowd in our “blessed land”), why not turn to domestic goods?
Comrade Morton is struggling hard to reach ’Frisco, and were it not for liberal assis-
tance of a few individuals, and James’ wonderful ability to feast on the “luxury” of a dish
of Boston baked beans and two slices of bread a day, he might never have gotten as far as
he did.2 Were our comrades so eager to have paid speakers in the field, why did they not
help him? There is Voltairine de Cleyre who was ready to make a tour last spring, urged

1. John Turner would not return to the United States until 1903. EG’s opinion about Turner’s prospec-
tive visit was published along with comments by others; the question of the effectiveness of propa-
ganda tours by anarchists from outside the United States was debated for several months in Free
Society.
2. James F. Morton, Jr.’s national speaking tour (1899 –1900) concluded in San Francisco, where for a
time he edited Free Society. Reports of his tour in Free Society, after little initial coverage, began ap-
pearing on 4 February. Morton’s chronicle was serially published in 1900 from 25 March through
24 June.

400 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

by Comrades Nold and Burmin 3 who did their utmost to raise money for the purpose,
and being unsuccessful in their efforts, the idea of her tour abandoned. Where were
these comrades then? Comrade Southworth,4 a newly acquired power in our movement,
an intellectual, highly cultured and brilliant speaker, who told me he would start out on
the route at once, if he could but have $6 per week. Why not invite him to tour? Are we
Anarchists going to adopt the old and foolish notion that “prophets are seldom recog-
nized in their own land,” a notion that has driven many able men and women from the
cradle of their birth to struggle and starve in the cold of strange lands, until they made a
fame for themselves? Let me call your attention to Heine, Boerne,5 and scores of others
who hated their people because of the cruel indifference they met with from their side.
Let us Anarchists not be guilty of gross neglect of those in our own midst, because we
can only appreciate the talents of comrades in other countries when we have helped to
develop the abilities of those in our own ranks. In fact, how can those who are so anxious
to import a speaker, expect that one would trust their promises, seeing how little they
have done in aid of those who are right at their next door.
As to the idea of employing a speaker and paying him a fixed salary, I think this a thing
for each one to decide for himself. I for one would never consent to make a business of
lecturing. It seems to me that the work of a true propagandist cannot be paid; that the
very thought of being paid for what one says, must rob one of the enthusiasm and devo-
tion for our cause. I claim that one can only give the best of one’s self when actuated by
love to the thing one gives, out of one’s innermost desire to be useful, to oppose that
which one considers wrong, and such a product of one’s thoughts, nerves, blood, and the
whole make-up, is above any remuneration. I am aware that a propagandist cannot live
on ideals, yet if the comrades would only extend more of the precious articles, so rarely
found, hospitality and solidarity, and through voluntary contributions pay railway fares,
one could easily tour from five to six months in the year, and that is more than any one
ought to do, if he really is desirous to serve the cause.
And then, too, no comrade with individuality and sensitiveness would consent to be-
come a wage slave of one’s own kind. It is bad enough to have the enemy as a boss, tyrant
and dictator, but I shudder when I think of having comrades as such; and I am sorry to
say that we have already too many among us who perform the job of bosses and invaders
to perfection.
What has happened to my friend Willie Holmes? He of all the people in the world to
advocate Anarchistic judges and lawyers,—he whose whole nature would shrink from

3. EG refers to Carl Nold and Nahum H. Berman.

4. Victor E. Southworth was an anarchist and poet based in Alcott, Colorado. A former Unitarian min-
ister, he organized regular Sunday anarchist discussion groups in Alcott in 1899 and 1900, and fre-
quently contributed to Free Society.
5. Heinrich Heine’s (1797–1856) and Ludwig Boerne’s (1786 –1837) works were suppressed in Germany
because of their political content. Little public support was offered to these writers when this happened.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 401

 the thought of being employed as such himself to go so far as to cite a case of a man re-
maining an Anarchist, although he had become a proprietor of a house of prostitution! 6
What is up? Has Willie’s logic forsaken him? If, as an Anarchist, one may be a judge, ju-
ror and lawyer, why not a policeman, sheriff, hangman, spy, prostitute, politician, in fact,
anything? And if so, why combat the capitalist regime, why oppose Vanderbilt, Spreckles,
Rockefeller, Cecil Rhodes? 7 What an absurd thing to say that if an Anarchist cannot con-
sistently be a judge, he cannot be a wage slave! Holmes seems to forget that in one case
no choice is left, in the other one can either remain true to himself or get a comfortable
life at the expense of his fellow men and his real self, which is even worse.
I understand Anarchy to mean the negation of all forms of authority, invasion and
robbery; an Anarchist, therefore, to be one who abhors all existing wrongs, because un-
der no circumstances would he voluntarily consent to do the same. If I was mistaken,
then I never knew the meaning of Anarchism. But I claim to understand Anarchy, and I
am sure Holmes does, yet it seems his logic failed him and so leaped from the sublime
to the ridiculous, which is but one step. Let us hope he will soon come back to the old
heights. Really, I cannot understand the arguments of Holmes, unless he means the so-
called Individualists when he speaks of Anarchist judges. If this is the case, I fully agree
with him. Since they believe in private property, they must also believe in a force to pro-
tect their property; thus they are perfectly justified in becoming judges, lawyers and po-
licemen. And outside of their opposition to compulsion, it must be borne in mind that
the Individualists believe in a voluntary police. (Who laughs??) I for one could never see
the logic of their claim to the term “Anarchists.” I mean from a theoretical standpoint;
for their practices differ as much from their theory as a blizzard from a warm summer
breeze. Their actions are humane, warm-blooded, kind, noble, very sympathetic and con-

6. William T. Holmes, himself a lawyer, had asserted: “Why a person cannot be a good Anarchist be-
cause he practices law is beyond my comprehension” (Free Society, 14 January 1900, p. 3), sparking a
debate in the pages of Free Society on tactics and doctrinal “consistency” that lasted half a year, and in
which Abe Isaak, Henry Addis, Kate Austin, Lucy Parsons, and Philadelphia anarchist Susan Patton
(ca. 1866 –1901; she corresponded with AB while he was in prison), in addition to EG and others, par-
ticipated. EG’s reference to an anarchist brothel-keeper was rooted in Holmes’s claim to have known
an Illinois anarchist “who afterward went to Wisconsin and became the keeper of a public house of
prostitution, and I never heard that he was any the less an Anarchist for doing so” (Free Society, 25 Feb-
ruary 1900, p. 2). Complaining that “every criticism of my position has been dictated by prejudice,”
Holmes attempted to end the discussion in the 10 June number, claiming that no argument had been
advanced “to show why a lawyer cannot be a good Anarchist or why a good Anarchist cannot be a
lawyer or serve on a jury, or why certain tactics . . . are not proper to use under special conditions”;
adding that the “ability to make rabid speeches, in which wholesale denunciation plays the chief part,
is no longer the test of devotion to Anarchism” (Free Society, 10 June 1900, p. 3).
7. EG refers to the American industrialists Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Claus Spreck-
les. Spreckles (1828 –1908) was a California sugar magnate and railroad operator, who emigrated to
the United States from Germany in 1848 and made his fortune in the sugar business by building lu-
crative trade alliances in Hawaii. In 1907, Spreckles began construction on the San Diego and Ari-
zona Railroad to facilitate cheap distribution of his products.

402 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

siderate; but no sooner do they leave the realm of life and wander into their theory than
they become cold, calculating, bloodless, mere automatic machines. Such beings can be
“Anarchistic judges,” or anything you please, but never one whose heart throbs for man-
kind, and who is so full of the sentiment of solidarity that the very idea of pain or sorrow
reflects upon his whole being.

Emma Goldman.

Free Society, 29 April 1900, p. 1.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 403

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Paris, 15 May 1900

Lieber Netlau

Wollte Ihnen schon längst schreiben, aber kam nicht dazu, dafür habe ich oft an Sie
gedacht, hauptsächlich als ich durch den Louvre ging u schrecklich viel Zeit verlor, weil
mir ein solch guter Führer wie sie fehlte. Nein, Paris hat mich nicht absorbiert, obgleich
das Leben hier sehr flott ist und einem keine Zeit läßt sich mit der Vergangenheit oder
Zukunft zu beschäftigen. Leider bin ich zu deutsch, um von einem Pariser Leben ver-
schlungen zu werden oder gar dadurch meine alten Freunde u Genossen zu vergessen.
Ich sage leider, denn glücklich sind sie doch, die Pariser Kinder, die leicht u oberfläch-
lich das Leben genießen, während solche Menschen, die über Alles grübeln logisch sein
wollen, die, die Vergangenheit nicht vergessen können u sich mit Problemen der
Zukunft befassen, am Leben vorbeigehen oder für das Vergnügen teuer bezahlen
müssen.
Ich habe Gesellschaft aus America bekommen, bin somit nicht mehr so isoliert wie
früher, französische Genossen kenne ich wenige, u habe auch kein Bedürfnis sie zu ken-
nen, da sie mir mit wenigen Ausnahmen sehr oberflächlich scheinen. Die glücklichsten
Momente in Paris habe in Gesellschaft Daves verlebt. Welch ein herrlicher Mensch, so
kindlich gut so teilnahmsvoll vielseitig u dieser Mann wurde so furchtbar verleumdet?
Es ist einfach gräßlich wen daß gerade die besten Menschen, verleumdet u bekämpft
werden. Ich habe hier weder Bücher noch Zeitschriften gekauft einfach weil ich kein
Geld habe. Meine Luftschlösser mit Schriftstellern etwas verdienen zu können sind zer-
fallen. Die hiesigen Blätter nehmen von Fremden keine Artikel an, u die Amerikanis-
chen haben ihre eigenen Verträter in Paris. Somit blieb mir kein anderer Weg, als mich
mit Stunden-Geben zu beschäftigen, u wenn ich Ihnen sage, daß jeder zweite Student
in P. Stunden giebt, so können Sie sich vorstellen, wie glänzend mein Einkommen ist.
Jedoch würde ich noch mit Wenigerem eher zufrieden sein als irgend einer der
Genossen in Anspruch nehmen. Ach, diese Genossen nur graut vor ihnen: Solidarität,
Freiheit, Gegenseitigkeit, Moralische-Verantwortung, alles sehr schön in Theorie, aber
weh wenn man im praktischen Leben davon abhängig wäre. Unter Kirchenanfänger,
oder den unwissendsten Bauern herrscht mehr menschliches Empfinden, als unter den
Genossen, ganz gleich, ob sie Franzosen oder weiß ich was waren. Jedoch glaube ich,
daß gerade die Franzosen am allerwenigsten Begriff von Solidarität oder Genossen-
schafts-Gefühl haben, noch nirgends habe ich solch eine Oberflächlichkeit u Gleich-
gültigkeit gefunden, als gerade hier, es ist einfach schrecklich—Wie gesagt, ich habe
außer Dave keinen einzigen Genossen getroffen, der auch nur einen Funken von Men-
schlichkeit hätte.

404 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 Ja, ich habe viel mit Dave über längst Vergangene Zeiten gesprochen, vergangene
Zeiten? Als wenn sie jetzt nicht ebenso wären; der Süffel-Hannes schimpft immer
weiter, nennt mich eine politische Hochstaplerin u noch andere schöne Namen, u hat es
soweit gebracht, daß die deutsch-sozialdemokratische Presse in America über mich
hergefallen sind, wie die wilden Hunde. Ein wahres Glück, daß ich nicht eingebildet bin,
hätte sonst mit Recht annehmen können daß ich viel wert bin, sonst würden sich die
Wolfe nicht so um mich reißen. Na, ich sende Ihnen nächstens einige Ausschnitte aus
der “F.” u verschiedenen sozialistischen Zeitungen, die man mir neulich aus America
zugeschickt hat.
Der Congress findet in der ersten Hälfte des Sep. statt, wenn Sie ohnedies nach P.
kommen wollen, kommen Sie doch recht bald, erstlich möchte ich Sie schon gerne
wiedersehen, u dann würde mir Ihre Anwesenheit Gelegenheit geben Französisch zu
sprechen, was ich jetzt leider nicht kann, da ich mit äußerst wenig Franzosen verkehre.
Ob ich überhaupt nach die Schweiz komme ist jetzt sehr fraglich. Studieren werde ich
in Europa nicht u nur zur Erholung oder zum Vergnügen hinzureisen fehlen mir leider
die Mittel.
Der junge Czeche von dem Ihnen D schrieb ist Havel, derselbe der Ihnen Ihren Ar-
tikel im S. nicht verzeihen konnte. Es ging ihm furchtbar schlecht in London u da er
noch dazu eine schrecklich traurige Vergangenheit hat, so ersuchte ich ihn mit nach
Paris zu kommen, leider hat sich seine Lage nur in so fern verbessert, als das Hungern
zu zweit, leichter ist, als wenn man es allein besorgen muß——
Er wird die böhmischen Genossen von America zum Congress verträten, hat auch
schon das Mandat. Grave ist schon hier, habe ihn nur einmal flüchtig gesehen. Es ist
jetzt wunderschön hier, die Sonne spendet ihre Wärme allen gleich, u doch können viele
sich nicht erwärmen. Warum? Ja wer das ergründen könnte.
Frau Ruedebusch, die Frau des Verfassers vom Old & New Ideal!! ist jetzt hier u die
auch schon fröhlicher scheinen.

Herzlichen Gruß
E.G.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 405

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Paris, 15 May 1900

Dear Netlau

Wanted to write you for a long time but didn’t come to it, so I have been thinking about
you a lot, especially as I was going through the Louvre and lost a terribly great amount of
time because I was missing a guide as good as you. No, Paris has not absorbed me al-
though life here is very gay and doesn’t leave one any time to concern oneself with the
past or the future. Unfortunately I am too German to be consumed by a Parisian life or
forget my old friends and comrades. I say unfortunately, for happy are they indeed, the
Parisian children, who enjoy life in an easy and superficial way, while such people who
can’t forget the past and concern themselves with the problems of the future pass life by
or must pay dearly for pleasure.
I received visitors from America,1 and am therefore no longer as isolated as before, I
know few French comrades and have no desire to know them since to me they seem,
with few exceptions, very superficial. My happiest moments in Paris have been spent in
the company of Dave. What a wonderful person, of such childlike goodness and solici-
tous versatility, and this man has been so horribly slandered? 2 It is simply disgusting that
the best people are always the ones being slandered and attacked. I have bought neither
books nor journals simply because I have no money. My castle in the air, being able to
earn money by writing, has disintegrated. The local papers don’t accept articles by for-
eigners, and the Americans have their own representatives in Paris. Thus I was left with
no other choice than to devote myself to tutoring, and when I tell you that every other
student in P. gives lessons, you can imagine how splendid my income is. However I
would sooner be satisfied with less than demand anything of one of the comrades. Oh, I
shudder at these comrades: solidarity, freedom, mutual aid, moral responsibility, all very
nice in theory, but woe to anyone who would be dependent on those things in practical
life. More human feeling exists among church novices or the most ignorant farmer than
among the comrades, regardless of whether they are French or whatever else. However
I believe that it is really the French who have the least idea of solidarity or sense of ca-
maraderie, nowhere else have I come across such superficiality and indifference as right
here, it is simply horrible—As I said, except for Dave I have met not one comrade who
possesses even a spark of humanity.
Yes, I have spoken a lot with Dave over times long past, times past? As if the times
were any different now; the tippler Hannes continues to be abusive, calling me a politi-

1. EG refers to German-born sex reformer Emil Ruedebusch and his wife, Julie, who lived in Mayville,
Wisconsin.
2. EG met Victor Dave, anarchist and close associate of Johann Most, in Paris. For further discussion of
Dave and his affairs, see Augustin Hamon to EG, 27 November 1901, EGP, reel 1.

406 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

cal swindler 3 and other beautiful names, and has taken things so far that the German so-
cial democratic press in America has fallen on me like wild dogs. It is truly fortunate that
I am not educated, as in that case I could rightly assume that I am worth a lot, for other-
wise the wolves would not be scrambling for me so much. Well, I will soon send you a
few clippings from the F 4 and various socialist newspapers that were sent to me from
America.
The congress takes place in the first half of Sep., if you want to come to P. in any case
you should indeed come very soon, firstly I would very much like to see you again, and
then your presence would give me the opportunity to speak French, which I unfortu-
nately can’t do now as I associate with very few Frenchmen. Whether I will come to
Switzerland at all is now very questionable. I will not study in Europe and I unfortunately
don’t have the means to travel there simply for relaxation or pleasure.5
The young Czech about whom D wrote you is Havel, the same man who could not
forgive you for your article in S.6 He was doing terribly badly in London and, as he also
has a terribly sad past, I entreated him to come to Paris with me, unfortunately his situ-
ation has improved only insofar as having to go without food with someone else is eas-
ier than having to care for oneself all alone——
He will represent the Bohemian comrades from America at the congress, he already
has a mandate. Grave 7 is here already, saw him fleetingly only once. It is beautiful here
now, the sun bestows its warmth equally to all, and yet many can’t warm themselves.
Why? Indeed who could get to the bottom of that. Frau Ruedebusch, the wife of the au-
thor of the Old & New Ideal!! is here now, and they already seem happier as well.8

Very sincerely yours,

E.G.

ALI, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Translated from German.

3. Johann Most, nicknamed “Pope Hannes,” had announced his opposition to sending an American del-
egate to the proposed anarchist congress in Paris, in a series of remarks in Freiheit criticizing such con-
gresses. In a short notice in the “Letter Box” column in Freiheit, Most continues his personal attack on
EG: “For the time being we protest here against the fact that you take as the truth the misrepresentation
of the anarchist movement of America by a political imposter and circulate it further. By letter we will
inform you further about the swindle” (Freiheit, 21 April 1900, in German Police File, EGP, reel 67).
4. EG refers to the journal Freiheit.
5. EG had originally planned to study medicine in Europe.
6. EG abbreviates Victor Dave’s name as “D” and the journal Der Sozialist as “S”; Hippolyte Havel is the
Czech anarchist who met EG in London in 1899 and accompanied EG to Paris. Nettlau had published
an article in an 1897 issue of Der Sozialist attacking Count Badeni and the role played by minorities
(including Czechs) in Austro-Hungarian politics.
7. EG refers to Jean Grave, French anarchist and editor of La Révolte until the government shut it down
in 1894; after his release from prison a year later, Grave resumed the publication with a new title, Les
Temps Nouveaux.
8. Julie Ruedebusch (neé Shernberger) was a German American daughter of a German “48er” who em-
igrated to Wisconsin after the failed revolution of 1848. Her husband, Emil Ruedebusch, was the au-
thor of The Old and New Ideal, a defense of sexual varietism, which was published in both German
and English versions in 1895 and 1896; two thousand copies were sold before a Wisconsin court
banned the book in 1898.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 407

 French Intelligence Repor t
Paris, 22 May 1900

In keeping with my report dated May 18, which indicated that the anarchist Goldman
Emma dwelled, under the name Brady 1 and with her lover Havel,2 in the furnished ac-
commodation located 50 Avenue des Gobelins, I have ordered an investigation about the
above named.
The named Goldman (a.k.a. Brady) resides at this address since March 2 of this year,
with a monthly rent of Fr. 25.
She lives alone in her room, although she has relations with the named Havel whom
she presented as one of her relatives when she rented.
She is seen as very intelligent.
She entertains a friendship with a Protestant minister from the rue des Sts-Pères, and
receives quite a few visitors during the day, notably foreigners.
She gets much foreign mail, some letters being registered.
She usually goes out around 6:00 p.m.
Her landlord does not have the knowledge that she is involved in anarchist propa-
ganda, however he believes she has very progressive ideas, because she very much
reveres Karl Marx.
She attends the meetings accompanied by the named Havel and the named Ruede-
busch,3 who is the subject of a special report.
On May 17 of this year, she gave a lecture at the libertarian library, 26 rue Titon, where
I had her followed.
On May 19, she gave another lecture at the Harmonie Hall, 94 rue d’Angoulême,
about woman’s emancipation.
Herewith enclosed is the notification for this latter meeting, printed in German, with
its translation.
The named Havel John, 29 years old, is not employed; he seems to live at the expense
of his mistress.
The landlord, who seems very well disposed toward the Authorities, gave the enclosed
list of the newspapers received by the above named as well as the notification to attend
the meeting rue d’Angoulême.

1. EG was traveling under the name of her former companion, anarchist Edward Brady.
2. The document later refers to Hippolyte Havel as “Havel John.”
3. Most likely this is Julie Ruedebusch, since the French adjective is in the feminine form. She and her
husband had recently arrived in Paris.

408 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 In summary, the named Goldman seems to be dangerous as far as theoretical propa-
ganda is concerned.

The Chief of Police,

E. André.

ADS, Dossier Emma Goldmann, Numéro 124786, Cote B/A 305, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris.
The address line on this report read “From the Police Chief, 3rd Brigade, to the Chief Executive Officer of In-
vestigations.” Translated from French.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 409

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Paris, 31 June 1900

Lieber Netlau.

Ihr Schreiben habe ich natürlich erhalten, u wenn ich bis jetzt nicht geantwortet habe,
so ist es, weil ich nichts vom Interesse mitzutheilen hatte. Nicht daß ich in Paris, nicht
schon viel erlebt hätte, aber da meine Erlebnisse, in traurigen Erfahrungen über den
Kampf ums Dasein u sonstigen persönlichen Widerwärtigkeiten waren, so wollte ich Sie
nicht damit belästigen, u Dinge von allgemeinem Interesse habe ich leider nicht erlebt.
Sie sind doch ein glücklicher Mensch mit Ihrer Fähigkeit sich in eine Arbeit vertiefen zu
können, wie die, die Sie jetzt in Händen haben, dazu gehört eine Ausdauer u Zähigkeit
deren ich mich leider nicht rühmen kann. Ich bin viel zu viel Zigeunerin um überhaupt,
etwas, was der Geduld bedarf, ausführen zu können, wenn ich es doch fertig bringe, so
geschieht es nur weil ich mich zwinge, gehe aber dabei innerlich zu Grunde wie alles,
was sich nicht frei u ungezwungen gestalten kann. Das Nachforschen, woher auf einmal
all die grünen Blätter kommen, ist freilich eine angenehmere Beschäftigung, als 347
Seiten zu schreiben, das würde auch meinem unruhigen Geist entsprechen, leider kon-
nte ich so etwa nie thun, weil ich in den Großstadt leben, u das zum Leben Notwendige
verdienen mußte.—Ich kann mir schon denken, daß das Material über Bakunins Wir-
ken u Schaffen, noch lange nicht zu Ende ist, giebt es doch Wenige, die ein solch reiches
Leben geführt, so unendlich viel geleistet haben für das allgemeine Wohl u dabei in so
ganz eigener individueller Art. Ich bin kein neidische Natur, aber ein bißchen beneide
ich Sie doch, um die vielen Reisen, die die Sammlung von Material über B.s Leben, mit
sich brachten, hauptsächlich aber weil Sie vielleicht nach Rußland kommen werden,
wohin ich so gerne wieder hin möchte, aber nicht kann. Sie sagen Sie wären zu schwach,
um am Umsturz der Gegenwarth zu helfen; das ist doch aber nicht ganz wahr; d. h.
wenn wir annehmen, daß nur die am Umsturz der Gegenwarth helfen, die Reden hal-
ten, dann dürfen Sie ja vielleicht Recht haben, aber ich finde, daß gerade durch das Re-
den leistet man am allerwenigsten, u diese Thatsache ist es auch, die mich so furchtbar
elend macht, fühle ich doch, daß ich mit meiner Agitation in 14 Jahren wenig geleistet
habe, u jetzt noch viel weniger leiste, denn durch Vorträge ist noch kein Mensch Anar-
chist oder Revolutionär geworden, während das durch literarisches Werken schon eher
der Fall ist, u im Letzteren gerade, habe Sie doch gewiß viel gethan. Auch ich habe ge-
funden, daß jeder Mensch von Natur aus Communist ist, das Traurige aber ist, daß die
Natur des Menschen verkrüppelt wird, ehe sie überhaupt zur Geltung kommt, daher
kommt es auch, daß viele den Communismus verstehen, aber viel zu wenig innere
Größe haben, um ihn auszuüben. Und, wenn die, die denselben verstehen, ihn nicht

410 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

üben, wie sollten, diejenigen die ihn nicht verstehen jemals überzeugt werden, daß der
Communismus realisierbar ist?—
Daß ich im Louvre an Sie gedacht habe, wenn auch an der langweiligsten Stelle, wie
Sie sagen, dürfte Ihnen nur als Beweis dienen, daß ich Ihre Führerfähigkeiten sehr
schätze, denn [wären?] Sie mit mir, dann wäre es im Louvre überhaupt gar nicht lang-
weilig. Ich bin auch seitdem nicht mehr im Louvre gewesen, den im Palais de beaux Arts
auf der Ausstellung, giebt es so unendlich viel Schönes u Herrliches, u da dann ich auch
ohne Führer auskommen. Zwar sind die Gemälde u Statuen im Palais de beaux Arts
moderne Leistungen, aber umso werthvoller für mich, denn ich habe für das Dagewe-
sene wenig Sinn. Ich will das Leben, das Reale, u nicht, das was einst war. Das kleine
Venus-Zimmer ist entschieden großartig, aber wenn ich die Venus betrachte u an meine
armen [ver]krüppelten Schwestern [denke] dann wird mir das kleine Zimmer zu klein,
ich [muß] dann in die frische Luft [hinaus] u wieder etwas athmen können. Daß ich
unter den Genossen in Paris nicht die Richtigen getroffen habe, [kann] ja sein, u ich
würde micht gewiß freuen, wenn dem so wäre, aber wo sind die Richtigen zu treffen?
Sie nennen Gerineau, das ist aber gerade einer von denen, die sich mir gegenüber sehr
unsolidarisch benommen haben. Ich kann Ihnen die Geschichte hier nicht auseinan-
dersetzen, aber ich bin überzeugt, daß Sie mir beipflichten würden, wenn Sie wüßten
wie sich Gerineau benommen hat: Grave, habe ich nur einmal gesehen, aber er ist krank
u viel beschäftigt u ich liebe es nicht zu stören. Ich bin sicher, daß die Bewegung in Paris
einstens groß war u vielleicht auch später [groß] sein wird aber jedenfalls nur quanti-
tative, niemals qualitative, denn ich kann mir nicht denken, daß die Franzosen tief
empfinden, oder sich in etwas vertiefen können sie sind zu oberflächlich und zu ge-
nußsüchtig. Die Genossen die ich getroffen habe sind für mich ein Greuel weil sie
gräßliche Fanatiker sind und darum engherzig, intollerant u blind in ihrem Urtheil,
dazu sind sie furchtbar vulgär, ich meine weniger moralisch, als aestetisch, u was am
Schlimmsten ist, sie haben auch kein Fünkschen von Menschlichkeit, u vermuthen in
jeden einen Spitzel, von dem man sich fern halten muß. Unter diesen Umständen, wer-
den Sie begreifen, wie einsam ich mich hier fühlen muß, u [w]as das für eine active
Natur wie die Meinige bedeutet. Ich habe es zwar versucht [hier] unter den jüdischen Ar-
beit zu agitieren, aber erstlich ist das Material sehr [arm]selig, weil die Juden für nicht
anderem als den Zionismus zu haben sind, u dann ließ man mir sagen, daß ich mich
ruhig verhalten muß sonst werde ich ausgewiesen. Da es nun definitiv ist, daß kein Del-
egat von America zum Congress kommt so ist es für mich wichtig hier bleiben zu kön-
nen, u darum [. . . .]

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 411

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Paris, 31 June 1900

Dear Netlau.

I received your letter of course, and if I haven’t responded until now it is only because I
had nothing interesting to report. Not that I haven’t had many experiences in Paris al-
ready, but I didn’t want to burden you since my experiences had to do with the sad reali-
ties of the struggle for existence and other personal troubles, and I have unfortunately not
experienced anything of general interest. You are certainly a lucky man with your ability
to become absorbed in work such as that which you currently have in your hands; that re-
quires a level of perseverance and tenacity of which I unfortunately cannot boast. I am
much too much of a gypsy to carry out anything that requires patience; even when I do
complete something it is only because I force myself, yet as a consequence I collapse in-
ternally as does everything that was not formed freely and without pressure. The hunting
around for what suddenly all the green leaves grow from is most certainly a more pleas-
ant activity than writing 347 pages; that would also suit my restless spirit, yet I could never
do anything like it because I live in the big city and must earn what is necessary to sur-
vive.—I can certainly imagine that the material about Bakunin’s 1 life and work still has a
long way to go; there are few people who have led such a rich life and have contributed so
unendingly to the general good in such a unique, individual manner. I do not have a jeal-
ous nature, yet in a small way I do envy your many trips connected to collecting material
about B’s life, mainly because you might go to Russia, where I would so much like to go
but can’t. You say you would be too weak to help with the overthrow of the status quo; yet
that indeed is not entirely true; that is, if we assume that only those who give speeches are
contributing to the overthrow of the status quo, then perhaps you would be correct. But I
think that speeches are actually the least effective route, and the fact is, much as it makes
me so completely miserable, I feel as if I have contributed very little with my fourteen
years of agitating thus far, and currently am contributing even less, as not one person has
become an Anarchist or a revolutionary through lectures, while such is more likely to be
the case through literary works, and in the latter you have certainly accomplished a great
deal. I have found that every person is a communist by nature; the sad thing is, however,
that the nature of man is stunted before it ever can be expressed. Thus it is the case that
many understand communism, yet far too few have the inner greatness to practice it.
And, if those who understand it do not practice it, how should those who don’t under-
stand it ever be convinced that communism is attainable?—

1. Nettlau was working on a biography of Michael Bakunin. Between 1896 and 1900 he produced by
hand 50 copies of this huge work.

412 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 The fact that I thought of you in the Louvre, albeit in the most boring place, as you say,
should only serve as proof that I treasure your abilities as a guide, for if you [had been]
with me, it wouldn’t have been boring at all in the Louvre. Since then I have not been back
to the Louvre because in the exhibit in the Palais des Beaux Arts 2 there is an endless
amount of beautiful and glorious works, and I can manage there without a guide. Indeed
the paintings and statues in the Palais des Beaux Arts are modern creations, but this is
all the more valuable to me as I have little interest in things of the past. I want life, the
real, and not what once was. The little Venus room is certainly wonderful, but as I looked
upon the Venus and thought of my poor crippled sisters the small room became too
small, and I had to go out into the fresh air in order to catch my breath. It could well be
that I have not met the right people among the comrades in Paris, and I would certainly
be glad if that were the case, yet where does one run into the right people? You mention
Gerineau,3 but he is precisely one of those who have demonstrated a lack of solidarity to-
ward me. I can’t get into that story here, but I am convinced that you would agree with
me if you knew how Gerineau behaved. I have only seen Grave 4 once, but he is sick and
very busy and I don’t want to disturb him. I am sure that the movement in Paris was once
very big and perhaps will be big in the future, but only in a quantitative, never in a qual-
itative sense. I can’t imagine that the French could ever feel deeply or become absorbed
in something, they are too superficial and pleasure-seeking. The comrades I have met
have been for me an abomination, as they are disgusting fanatics and therefore petty, in-
tolerant, and blind in their judgments. In addition they are horribly vulgar, not so much
in a moral as in an aesthetic sense, and worst of all they possess not an ounce of hu-
manity and consider everyone to be a spy from whom they must keep their distance. Un-
der these circumstances you should understand how lonely I must feel here, and what
that means for such an active nature as mine. Indeed I have tried to agitate among the
Jews here, but first of all the material is extremely paltry since the Jews have no time for
anything other than Zionism, and then I’ve been told that I have to keep quiet or other-
wise I would be deported.5 Since it is now certain that no other delegate from America is
coming to the congress, it is important for me to be able to stay here, and therefore [. . . .]

ALf, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Translated from German.

2. The Grand Palais, designed by affiliates of the École des Beaux-Arts, was a major and lasting ar-
chitectural contribution of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. It housed a retrospective of
nineteenth-century French paintings, and an almost equally conservative international exhibition of
fin-de-siècle art that excluded impressionist and postimpressionist works, but did incorporate foreign
entries by Gustav Klimt and James Ensor, among other modernists.
3. EG refers to Lucien Guérineau, who she may also mention in a previous letter to Nettlau (see note 3,
Letter to Max Nettlau, 24 January 1900, above).
4. EG refers to Jean Grave, editor of Les Temps Nouveaux.
5. The French Interior Ministry ordered EG’s expulsion in March 1901, four months after her departure.
See Extradition Order from the French Government, 26 March 1901, below.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 413

 To M A X N E T T L A U
Paris, 15 July 1900

Yours of the 2 & 14th inst to hand, thanks for your readyness offer of your quaters. The
date you gave me July 20th until August 10th would suit me nicely were I to know
difinitely whether I am going at all, and this I can not possibly tell until I receive the
news, I am waiting for. All I know at present is, that the party I must and will have to
meet is expected in Munich either the latter part of this, or the begining of next month,1
and as soon, as that party arrives I will be notyfied by wire and leave on the same day. It
is only because of this that I intend to go to M at all, other wise, I could not do it owing
to my limitted means. I do not wish to inconvience you in the least and I beg of you to
dispose of your time and arrange your plans to suit yourself. When I know difinitely if
you can expect me I will write, and should my coming give you any trouble I will stop at
a cheep Hotel. I know from my own experience, the trouble of having a house and fur-
niture on one s back and I therefore rejoice with you, that you are soon to be a free man.
Next to freeing ones self from a the burden of a husband or wife, this is really the hard-
est.2 Why do you hate the russian writing, is it because you do not know the language, as
well as other languages or because B 3 had a poor handwriting. Now, I do not know of an-
other language I like so well, as the russian, as for diciphern handwritings, I have to ad-
mit, that I am no good at all. For instance, I have great difficulty to get through with your
letters,4 although I think, that yours is really not a difficult one.
Die Ausstellung wird im Ock jedenfals noch offen sein, bestimmt weiß ich es freilich
nicht, aber wollen Sie es doch nicht noch möglich machen bis zum 19ten Sep. (anfang
des Congresses) hier zu sein? Ich sehe erst, daß ich angefangen habe Deutsch zu
schreiben (das kommt aber daran, wen man während des Schreiben, an Kartoffel-

1. EG is referring to AB, who, in 1899, planned an escape via a tunnel dug under the prison wall. With
funds raised by an advertisement calling for financial support for new legal moves on AB’s behalf, in
Freie Arbeiter Stimme and other papers, work began in the fall from a rented house opposite the West-
ern Penitentiary and was directed by AB’s former prison mate, a German anarchist, identified only as
“Tony” in AB’s Prison Memoirs, who communicated with AB through smuggled notes written in code.
Norwegian-born anarchist Eric B. Morton, code-named “Ibsen,” dug the tunnel with the help of an-
other anarchist code-named “Yankee,” and Chicago anarchist Vella Kinsella, who sang and played the
piano to cover the noise of the digging. As the digging proceeded, EG toured Europe, planning to
meet AB in Munich as soon as he was free. The tunnel was discovered on 26 July 1900. Prison offi-
cials suspected AB and placed him in solitary confinement. Both he and EG later blamed the plan’s
failure on Tony’s stubborn refusal to heed AB’s instructions about the tunnel’s direction. See Prison
Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 355– 62.
2. Nettlau inserted three question marks at this point.
3. EG refers to Michael Bakunin, the subject of Nettlau’s voluminous biography.
4. Above this line Nettlau wrote: “& I with yours.”

414 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

Fliesen denkt, die ich heute noch braten u essen will, 2 Freunde sind gerade daran die
Kartoffel zu schählen u reiben, verzeihen Sie die Prose).5 Firstly, because it is really of
the greatest importance to have as many people as possible, participate in the Congress.
Secondly, you can be of great service, because of the number of languge you know, and
thirdly, you I will not be able to see you in Oct, and unless I should go to M, will have to
leave Europe without seeing you again, which I should not like at all.
The art exhibits, at the exhibition is gloreous, I greater and finer collection never was
placed in one house. I too like some of the old painters, but the modern school repre-
sented at the Exhibition appeals to me more, because it represents life in every phase. So
you too are getting pessimistic with our inner circle, I am glad to hear it, as sad as it is,
at least, I am not the only one, who has lost faith 6 in our so called Com. Yes, men like B,
are born but once in a century, and such women, maybe never yet theire is no hope for
the future, unless such men will turn up. I had again an opportunity to see, how in-
significant we are, at the Fete Nationale and the military display; how can we ever hope
to accomplish anything, with such a drilled disciplinised mack of soldiers and with a
hand full of confused, disharmonious set, who take big mouth, but lack of the necessary
intergrety for action? Nothing at all; I feel very, very dispondent, more so, since I have
lived on European grounds.

Au revoir —
I will write again, when as soon as I know when you may expect me.
E.G.

ALI, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Accompanying envelope addressed to Vienna.

5. EG switches to German, which may be translated as follows: “The exhibition will in any case still be
open in Oct, of course I don’t know that for certain, but would it be possible for you to be here by the
19th of Sep. (beginning of the Congress)? I see only now that I have begun to write in German (this
happens when, while writing, one is thinking of potatoes which I want to bake and eat today, 2 friends
are at this moment at work peeling and grating the potatoes, excuse the prose).”
6. Nettlau bracketed “lost faith” with several question marks.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 415

 To F R E E S O C I E T Y
Paris, 25 September 1900

The Paris Congress.

Comrades and Friends:—

The greatest enemies of improvement and progress will agree with me that the modern
means of communication have done the world a lot of good; of course we must also take
into the bargain the evil that some improvements carry with them. This is especially true
of the cable system, which carries news as quick as lightning from one part of the globe
to the other. It was already on the 19th inst. that the comrades of America were startled
by the news of the suppression of our Congress; 1 and only weeks later will they find out
how and by whom it was done, as well as all other details. However, I hardly think that
the suppression was much of a surprise to many people; rather would it have been sur-
prising, if our Congress were not interfered with. A German proverb says: “It is unwise
to mention rope in the home of one just hanged.” So we may well say about all in any way
connected with the system of robbery and despotism. Just mention the word Anarchy;
and terror seizes everyone, from the throne to the commonest policeman, from the mul-
timillionaire down to the lowest shopkeeper living on the sweat of the people. Is it be-
cause they really think that every Anarchist is a bombthrower, or necessarily carries a
dagger in his belt? Oh, no, they know better; they know too well that the majority of An-
archists by temperament detest bloodshed in every form. The real reason for the dread
of all organized tyranny toward Anarchy, lies in the fact that Anarchism undermines the
system of power maintained by each and every means, no matter at what cost; and there-
fore it must not be allowed to spread. “What fools these mortals be!” Here the champi-
ons of authority go on suppressing the growth of Anarchy, persecuting Anarchists, and
in all their glorious idiocy failing to see that thereby they are doing more to provoke in-
terest in the ideas they are so anxious to kill, than the ablest man in our movement.
That an Anarchist Congress was called at all, is really due to our naivete, to our child-
like belief that some governments are better than others; that if our gatherings are sup-
pressed in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia, they surely must be permitted in France,
the country of which every wall reechoed with the cry “à la Bastille,” “à bas le roi,” “vive
la Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” “ni Dieu, ni Maitre,” etc; that it would be allowed in Paris,
the city of revolution, the history of which has been written with the blood of its people,
the sons and daughters of which have stood on the barricades, days, nights, weeks, fight-

1. The Paris congress was suppressed on 18 September 1900.

416 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

ing and dying for Liberty; the city which holds out a warning to all crowned heads, in the
Place de la Concorde, upon which Louis XVI and the beautiful Marie Antoinette were be-
headed; the city which has built a monument on the site of the once hideous Bastille, to
the memory of Camille Desmoulins,2 and the innumerable unknown who threw down
the black walls in which France’s grandest men lay buried for life; Paris, that can boast of
a Montmartre, upon which the sons of the Commune bathed in the light of the setting
sun, that is nowhere seen so beautiful as here, in all their grand and noble zeal, fought
the last battle for Liberty; 3 Paris, with its Père la Chaise and the wall of the federals killed
there by the whiskey and absinthe brutalized soldiers of Thiers and Galliffet,4 buried in
one hole, and even now after thirty years kept alive by wreaths of flowers, ribbons and
inscriptions of all those whose hearts throb for Freedom; 5 Paris, whose boys and girls
from fifteen to sixteen years up to snowhaired men and women, vibrate with the mem-
ory of the past and the hope of the future; Paris, whose children have given the world all
that human skill, ability, and genius can produce, gathered in the Exhibition; and last
but not least, Paris, the only city that is ruled by a “radical” government and a Socialistic
minister.6
Surely in this city, in which thousands of people from all over the world hold counsel
with each other, we, the Anarchists, could come together and peacefully discuss. That
must have been the thought of the comrades who signed the first call for the Congress,
and all those who helped to organize and make it a success. Poor naive Pouget,7 you who
know, like no one else, how to reach the common people in their own tongue, and you
Pelloutier,8 young genius that you are, with your success in organizing 300,000 men in
a body to hold together and stand up for the principle of human independence, and you
Domela Nieuwenhuis,9 with the Christ-like head, and the temperament of a child, loved
and honored by all who know you, you who have raised your children as workingmen, al-
though you have devoted your wealth to our cause, and all of you, who have worked for a
year to make the Congress a success, you were wise enough to choose the Paris of the

2. Camille Desmoulins (1760 –1794) was a French revolutionary, whose 12 July 1789 speech contributed
to the storming of the Bastille two days later. He was executed on 3 April 1794.
3. A reference to the Paris Commune, 18 March to 28 May 1871.
4. The Paris Commune was suppressed by Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), chief executive of the National
Assembly, and by Gaston Gallifet (1830 –1909), the general who carried out Thiers’s orders in Paris.
Gallifet’s army was responsible for the deaths of over 25,000 Communards.
5. The Mur des Fédérés in the Père Lachaise Cemetery marks the site where 147 Communards were ex-
ecuted by the Versailles forces under the command of Adolphe Thiers on 28 May 1871.
6. EG refers to the Radical Republicans and to Alexandre Millerand (1859 –1943), who was the first so-
cialist to serve in French bourgeois government and was minister of commerce from 1899 to 1902,
under Rene Waldeck-Rousseau. Millerand served as president of France from 1920 to 1924.
7. Émile Pouget was one of the organizers of the Paris congress.
8. Fernand Pelloutier was general secretary of the Fédération Nationale des Bourse du Travail (National
Federation of Labor Exchange).
9. Domela Nieuwenhuis was a Dutch freethinker who began his career as a Lutheran pastor, moved into
parliamentary politics as a socialist, and edited two pacifist journals between 1898 and 1919.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 417

 revolutionary spirit; but you were very unwise to forget the Socialistic ministry. There-
fore you and I and all of us must stand the consequences.
The fact of the matter is, that no consequences of an unpleasant character have arisen.
True, the Congress was prohibited; but what are prohibitions for, if not to be broken?
And so the Congress took place, in spite of all and every order; on a smaller scale, that is
true, but by no means less important. This will be seen by the results, of which some are
already in print, and the others to follow.
The difference between a Socialistic and any other government is the hypocritical lib-
eralism of the former, and the open despotism of the latter. Any other government would
have suppressed our Congress in its embryo, or at least given some sign of its intent to
suppress it; but the Socialistic ministry with “Comrade” Millerand at its head, who, in
order to gain and keep his post, not only showed that he is just like his colleagues, but
even worse than they, the same Millerand who has broken his promise as a Socialist by
the very acceptance of the ministry, and who has proven a traitor to the cause of “class
consciousness,” at the shooting of the strikers at Martinique and Chalons-sur-Saône,10
and on many other occasions. Millerand and his ministry went the ordinary government
one better. They let us go for a whole year; did not even watch over the arrangements car-
ried on for seven months by the committee; waited until reports were sent from all parts
of the world, all delegates were in Paris, and the last finishing touch given to the Con-
gress, and the social arranged for the evening previous; and then came down with an or-
der suppressing the Congress, and all meetings protesting against such infamy.
One must be blind not to see that the intention of Galliffet’s partner was not so much
to hurt Anarchism; for he is really too insignificant a figure to succeed in something in
which the united despots have failed; but to prove to the French bourgeois, that they are
really safer with a Socialistic ministry, than with one of their own.
As I have already said, no other government would have waited until the last moment,
the more so, as it is absolutely against the French law to suppress a peaceful meeting
openly held; but Millerand knew how to get over this difficulty. He simply searched out
the “lois scélérates,” 11 issued in 1894, during the number of acts of violence committed;
against all Anarchistic meetings and publications, setting them down as criminal. At that

10. On 9 February 1900, in Martinique, French soldiers killed ten strikers during a demonstration; for
examples of the commentary in the French anarchist press, see Le Père Peinard, 5 March 1900, p. 4,
and 12 March 1900, p. 1. On 2 June 1900, French local police fired on strikers at Chalon-sur-Saône,
killing three.
11. The lois scélérates, or “villainous laws,” were a series of acts passed by the French parliament in re-
sponse to a rash of violent protest in France (1891–1892 and 1893–1894) instigated by the actions
of Ravachol (pseudonym of François-Claudius Koenigstein), Auguste Vaillant, Émile Henry, and oth-
ers. The first, an amendment to the press law of 1881, was passed on 12 December 1893; the second,
concerning associations de malfaiteurs (associations of wrongdoers), on 18 December; and the third,
pour réprimer les menées anarchistes (to quell anarchist schemes), on 28 July 1894. As a result of the
laws, hundreds of workers, mainly anarchists, were given long prison terms and deportation orders,
forcing many radicals into exile. Rigorously applied for less than a year, the laws remained a per-
manent threat.

418 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

time, Jaurès 12 was deputy; and he was among the most vigorous opponents of such an
infernal law. He since then helped Millerand to the ministry; and Millerand uses the
same outrageous law his comrade and bosom friend opposed, as an excuse to suppress
our Congress. Such are the ironies of life.
Tuesday morning the 18th inst. our secretary, Comrade Rémy,13 was called to the pre-
fecture de police, police headquarters; and there he was told, that neither the social nor
the Congress could take place, by order of the ministry. (By the way, here it is not like in
our own “free land,” where every captain or policeman can stop a meeting; the police
here do not enjoy such power, they only act upon the order of the ministry.)
Comrade Rémy immediately notified all those comrades he could reach; and the oth-
ers, unaware of the ukase, went to the social; and found the doors of the hall locked and
the street blocked by police. We called a secret meeting for Wednesday afternoon, at
which only a few could be present owing to the danger involved, and more to the lack of
space, as we were to meet outside of Paris in a small room. Here, then, huddled together
in a stuffy room, in danger of being surprised by government hirelings, but with a zeal
which knows no fear, were a few men and women, who have given the best years of their
life for the cause, some having undergone years of privation, imprisonment, persecution
and want, old in years and experience, but young in heart and spirit, ever ready to con-
tinue the fight for final human emancipation. Here we decided to hold several secret
meetings, in order to discuss a few subjects of the many on the program for the Con-
gress. But one of the first decisions was to protest most vigorously against the suppres-
sion of our Congress. In accordance with this, several French comrades arranged two
meetings for Thursday afternoon and evening, in a hall called Maison du Peuple; but
when we got there, the street was blocked by police, and one comrade, Libertas,14 ar-
rested and brutally taken to the station. In the evening, the same spectacle of force and
brutality, an increased force of police and detectives, with hidden cameras behind the
windows of the hall, to photograph all those who came to protest.
Here I cannot help giving you a funny incident. M. Sully-Prudhomme,15 a member of
the Academy, the house of the forty immortals, into which a Zola 16 is refused admission,
a reactionary and hater of all progress, was driven to the Maison du Peuple by curiosity,
and photographed. Now his glorious image hangs in the rogues’ gallery at the prefecture

12. Jean Jaurés (1859 –1914) was a French left-wing socialist politician.
13. EG refers to Léon Rémy, the French anarchist who edited the reports in Les Temps Nouveaux on the
1900 Paris congress. Rémy later moved to socialism and syndicalism.
14. EG refers to A. A. Davies.
15. M. Sully-Prudhomme (1839 –1907), French poet, philosopher, and essayist, a member of the
Académie Française (elected 1881) and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1901). His publi-
cations include Le Bonheur (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1888) and A. Alfred de Vigny (Paris: Pelletan,
1898).
16. The Académie Française was the national arbiter of French language and literature. Often accused
of literary conservatism, it refused to admit the authors Émile Zola, Molière, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, among others.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 419

 de police, along with the pictures of the bravest and noblest men of France. Undoubtedly
M. Sully-Prudhomme never dreamed of such an honor; and in the future he will surely
take care not to give way to curiosity, which is rather out of place for a man, especially a
member of the Academy de France.
While we had our secret meeting outside of Paris, one of the trade unions of our Con-
gress, the Bronze Workers, called a meeting of their own to protest against the suppres-
sion; but their meeting, too, was stopped, and the crowd dispersed by force. They have
since manifested their protest through large posters posted all through Paris, denounc-
ing the government, and declaring their intention of continuing the work of education
and enlightenment, until the last vestige of tyranny is gone.
Another manifesto, of which I send you a copy for translation, and signed by the best
known comrades of Paris, was issued on Friday, September 21, and spread all over town.
As I already said, the public Congress of the International Revolutionary Workers was
suppressed. Instead of that, four sessions were held secrectly, to the peace of mind of all
governmental cowards. However, be it said that no dynamite was fabricated, nor dagger
sharpened at those meetings. The Revolutionists gathered from all over the world had
really more important work to do, and higher aims to achieve than the removal of the
heads of a few rotten kings.
At the meetings, we discussed and organized a Bureau of International Correspon-
dence, or International Federation, based upon national federation, for the purpose of
better acquainting each other with the economic, political and ethical state of the move-
ment in each country, and the practice of the principle of solidarity. To accomplish the
former, each country is to issue a quarterly bulletin, to be sent to all countries, and those
to do the same. In this way, it is hoped, the comrades will keep in touch with each other,
which has so far not been the case. As to the latter, it certainly has been sadly neglected
so far. Comrades came to a strange land, the language of which they did not know; and
without means or friends, they often have been near starvation. This is to be done away
with through the International Bureau. So when a comrade comes to Paris, London,
Madrid, or Constantinople, he will know where to find friends. I cannot dwell upon this
matter elaborately in this report; but I can promise the comrades, they will learn more
about it soon.
The second matter discussed and decided upon, was the publication of all the re-
ports sent to the Congress in book form; but as we have not enough money to do it right
now, the reports will be published in the supplement of Les Temps Nouveaux,17 the plates
set aside and a book made out of all the plates when ready. For this, money is needed;
and I herewith appeal to all the comrades in America, to put their hands into their pock-
ets, and send on their mite to the secretary, whose name and address will be given in a
week or so.

17. The report of the Paris congress appeared in Les Temps Nouveaux Supplément Littéraire, vol. 3, nos.
23 and 31, in November 1900.

420 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 We have received ninety reports on all possible subjects; and although only twenty or
twenty-five are in the form of an essay; yet the others are not less interesting, and will be
published in a resume.
The third and last thing decided was to issue a manifesto, together with all the sub-
jects on the program for the Congress, the names of all reports and the nationalities of
those who have taken part, to be published in L’Aurore,18 a radical daily in Paris, Les Temps
Nouveaux and Le Libertaire. These are to be sent to all the trades unions, that were to par-
ticipate, with a request to send on the papers to the trades unions of the world, asking
them to protest with us against the suppression of the Congress of the International Rev-
olutionary Workers of the World.
To give you an idea of the vast amount of work done for the Congress, a list of sub-
jects for discussion and reports sent in will be given next week.

E. Goldman.

Free Society, 21 October 1900, pp. 1, 3.

18. L’Aurore was a major French daily paper founded in 1897 by leading Radical politician and journal-
ist Georges Clemenceau. L’Aurore in its 13 January 1898 issue printed “J’Accuse,” Émile Zola’s con-
demnation of the French state’s conduct in the Dreyfus Affair. An extended report on the Paris con-
gress was not published in L’Aurore.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900 421

 Ar ticle in the N E W Y O R K T I M E S
New York, 12 December 1900

Rented by Emma Goldman.

Proprietor of Everett Hall Warned Social Science

Meeting Against Anarchy.

At the Social Science mass meeting in Everett Hall, 31 East Fourth Street, last night, the
proprietor of the hall, Harry Bimberg, threatened to turn out the lights should the meet-
ing develop into one of Anarchistic tendencies.1 He said that Emma Goldman had rented
the hall from him by concealing her identity. The hall was crowded and the announce-
ment of the proprietor was received with a howl of protest.
Emma Goldman said Bimberg was influenced by fear of the police.2 She stated that
this only went to prove her contention that there was no liberty, personal or otherwise, in
America, and that under “your Platts, your Crokers, and your Hannas 3 there can be no
such thing as liberty, any more than there is in the Republic of France to-day.” 4
“King Humbert,” she said, “was justly put to death by a brave man,5 who dared to act
for the good of his fellow-men, among whom he considered himself but a unit in a uni-
verse.” She said she should hate to be in the shoes of a monarch or of President McKin-
ley, owing to the “fickleness of the masses.”

New York Times, 12 December 1900, p. 2.

1. EG, who had returned to New York from Paris in early December, spoke at this meeting, as did Span-
ish anarchist Pedro Esteve.
2. According to the New York Tribune of 12 December 1900, the police were present at this meeting, in-
cluding Captain Thompson of the Mercer St. Station and seven plainclothes detectives.
3. Thomas Collier Platt, Richard Crocker, and Mark Hanna were all Republican party members. Thomas
Collier Platt (1833–1910) was a U.S. senator and Republican political boss in New York State, U.S. rep-
resentative from New York (from 1873 to 1877), and U.S. senator from New York (1881 and 1897 to
1909). Also the president of the Tioga County National Bank, Platt possessed considerable commer-
cial interests (including in the lumbering business in Michigan), and was the president of the United
States Express Company from 1880 to 1901. In 1881 he resigned his senatorial seat after only three
months in office over a disagreement with President James Garfield about federal appointments in
New York. He regained his senate seat in 1896, remaining there until shortly before his death. Rich-
ard Crocker (1843–1922) was a New York City political boss; an Irish American, he was associated
with Tammany Hall for four decades and was for sixteen years its “chief.” Mark Hanna was a Cleve-
land industrialist and politician who managed William McKinley’s rise to the presidency.
4. A reference to the suppression of the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People in
Paris.
5. Gaetano Bresci, an Italian American anarchist, assassinated King Umberto of Italy on 29 July 1900.
The 12 December 1900 account in the New York Tribune of the anarchist meeting in Everett Hall
quotes EG as follows: “The King of Italy was justly sent to his account by a brave man. We have other
brave men left for a New York tyrant.”

422 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1900

 Inter view in the N E W Y O R K S U N
New York, 6 Januar y 1901

Talk with Emma Goldman

Woman Anarchist Declares She Opposes Violence.

She Tells a Sun Reporter the Stages by Which She Reached Her Present Way
of Thinking—Declares Anarchists Are Greatly Misunderstood and Maligned,
and That the Hope of the World Lies in Adherence to Their Social and
Moral Doctrines—She Thinks American Women Will Greatly
Advance the Propaganda of Anarchy.

“I was born a revolutionist.” Emma Goldman leaned her elbows on the little table in the
back room of Justus Schwab’s saloon and looked calmly at the Sun reporter,1 across a
glass of Rhine wine and seltzer. At first glance there was so little of the revolutionary in
her appearance that her statement seemed a trifle absurd. A second glance changed the
impression. A short sturdy figure, a pale face whose cheeks flush warmly under the in-
fluence of excitement, a determined chin and firm mouth, brown hair brushed smoothly,
from a low, broad forehead, earnest dilating gray eyes under straight, heavily marked
brows. There is Emma Goldman, the Anarchist. She has the mouth of a worker and the
eyes of an enthusiast. Her face is quiet, but it is the face of a Slav, and the quiet means
self-control, not indifference. No one would think of calling the woman handsome. She
would pass unnoticed in a crowd, but no one who had talked with her and studied her
would forget her. One sees many such faces among the girl students of Russia. Intelli-
gent, desperately earnest, lighted from within by an ideal and a purpose, yet calm as a
mask, save for the eyes.
When Emma Goldman was upon trial for inciting to riot, in 1897, Assistant District
Attorney McIntyre besought the jury not to be deceived by the innocent face of the pris-
oner, who would make the streets of New York run with blood, were she turned loose
upon the community.2 One must allow some rhetorical license to a public prosecutor, but
brooding innocence calculated to mislead twelve good men and true seems as inappro-

1. The interview generated criticism of EG from within the anarchist movement because in it she
seemed to renounce propaganda by deed. As Abe Isaak commented, “It is hardly credible that Com-
rade E.G. should have made the statements which now circulate in the daily press; but I suppose we
shall soon hear from herself.” Indeed, soon afterward EG clarified her position on violence. See Let-
ter to Free Society, 17 February 1901; and Letter to Marie Goldsmith, 8 February 1901, below.
2. In fact, 1893. There is no corroboration of Attorney McIntyre having said these words at the trial.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 423

 priate to a description of Miss Goldman, as seas of gore seem foreign to her native ele-
ment. She looks like what she is, a forceful woman of brains and experience, under the
influence of a great enthusiasm. The fact that she is unpopular with a large element of
her own party, is due to her disbelief in bloody streets as a pathway to the millennium.
But then, as the woman for whom the Assistant District Attorney’s eloquence won a year
in prison says: “One must say something imposing, when one wishes to send a woman
to prison for quoting Cardinal Manning.” 3
“You are Russian?” asked the reporter, although the answer was a foregone conclu-
sion. The gray eyes lighted suddenly. One thing besides anarchy is sure to bring the illu-
mination. It is the mention of Russia.
“Yes, I am Russian, Russian through and through, although very little of my life was
spent there. I was born in Russia, but brought up in Germany and graduated in a Ger-
man school. All that didn’t make a German of me. My ideas, my feelings, my sympathies,
my tastes remained Russian, and when we went back to St. Petersburg the year I was 15
it was going home for me.4 My family was orthodox. None of my revolutionary tenden-
cies was inherited. At least my parents were not responsible for them and were horrified
by them. I did have an uncle, my mother’s brother, who was mixed up with the revolu-
tionary party at one time. He was a very distinguished lawyer and though he did not do
any active work for the nihilists he had advanced ideas and talked them. He was hurried
off to Siberia, but after awhile it was proved that he wasn’t guilty of the offence for which
he was condemned, so he was allowed to return.5 Perhaps I inherited some of my ideas
from him. At any rate it is true. I was born a revolutionist. In Germany I did not think
much about such things. German women do not take naturally to anarchy. But then I
went back to St. Petersburg. Russia changed my whole attitude toward life and I went
into radicalism with all my heart and soul.
“You see things are different in Russia from what they are here or anywhere else. One
breathes in revolutionary thought with the air, without being at all definitely interested
in anarchy one learns its principles. There were reading circles among the young stu-
dents. There was discussion and thought and enthusiasm all around me, and something
in me responded to it all. There is no other place in the world where woman has what

3. EG often attributed her words to Cardinal Manning; see note 3 to “Hailed Emma Goldman,” Article
in New York World, 20 August 1894, above.
4. EG also elaborated on this Russian revolutionary influence in an 1899 interview in the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer. Elsewhere EG recalled her return to St. Petersburg as having occurred shortly after the
assassination of Alexander II on 13 March 1881, when she would have been twelve or thirteen. Com-
pare this account with the one she gave to Frank Harris in 1923: “I was too young to understand and
grasp the theories that carried Russia’s youth onward. But my soul became imbued with the human-
itarian ideas everywhere in the air.” See Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 28 May 1899, EGP, reel 67, and Frank
Harris, “Emma Goldman,” Contemporary Portraits (New York, 1923); reprinted as “Biographical
Sketch,” in EG, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York, 1925), pp. xvii–xviii.
5. According to Living My Life, Yegor Bienowitch was arrested, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress,
and sent to Siberia until EG’s mother successfully pleaded with the governor-general of St. Petersburg
on his behalf. See LML, pp. 27–28.

424 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

she has in Russia. American women have great freedom. The American men bow down
to them, but there is no such equality between sexes here as there is in Russia. There the
women have not only the same rights in law as the men, they have the same liberties, the
same social and intellectual freedom.
“The man respects woman, looks upon her as his equal, is her good chum—yes, that
is the word. Nowhere are men and women chums as they are in Russia. This isn’t so true
in the aristocracy, where French influence has corrupted conditions, though even in that
class the women have great freedom, but it is absolutely true in the middle class, in the
student world, the intellectual world of Russia. A woman student in Russia may receive
visitors all day and most of the night, discuss all vital subjects with them, go with men
when and where she pleases, and yet she will not be criticised and no landlady would
dream of insinuating that there was anything wrong with her morals. What is more there
wouldn’t be anything wrong with them. The standard of morals in that class is phenom-
enally high and the average intelligent Russian woman’s mind is as pure as it is broad.
There is great help for her in the camaraderie with thinking men. The feminine mind
needs rubbing against masculine mind. The Russian woman student is met with respect
and honor by the men, and she studies hard to deserve the granted equality. The relation
between the sexes in Russia is the most ideal of any I know about. That is why young
Russian women learn to think. And because they think they become Anarchists.
“I was an Anarchist when I left Russia to come to America, but I had hardly formu-
lated my belief. The final influence that crystallized my views was the hanging of the Chi-
cago Anarchists in 1887.6 I followed that case carefully and it made me an active Anar-
chist. I was living with my family in Rochester then, and the nearest thing to a radical
society the town had was a social Democratic society, tame as a house cat. I came away to
New York and went to work in a factory. That showed me a new side of life. My family
had been well-to-do, and I hadn’t come in actual contact with the want and suffering of
the world until I joined the wage earners.
“Of course the experience strengthened my revolutionary ideas. When the Waist and
Shirtmaker Girls’ Union went out in 1888 I led the strike.7 That is, in a way I led it. I have
never been an Anarchist leader. I cannot afford it. A leader must be a diplomat. I am not
a diplomat. A leader of a party makes concessions to his party, for the sake of holding his
power. He must give way to his followers in order to be sure they will sustain him. I can’t
do all that. I am an Anarchist because I love individual freedom, and I will not surrender
that freedom. A leader must sooner or later be the victim of the masses he thinks he
controls.

6. EG refers to the Haymarket anarchists, who were executed in 1887.

7. Possibly a reference to EG’s involvement in the 1890 strike of the Dress and Cloakmaker’s Union
organized by Joseph Barondess. In 1888 EG was working in garment factories, first in New Haven
and then in Rochester. No record of her involvement in a strike in either city has been found. EG
mentioned the same incident in an 1899 interview (see Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 28 May 1899, EGP,
reel 67).

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 425

 “When I went into the work I was an enthusiast. I felt more than I thought. I was an
Anarchist from sentiment, not from reason. I thought that man ought not to suffer and
I saw suffering. So I was an Anarchist. But when I definitely entered the work I gave my-
self a solemn pledge that I would study, that I would make passion bow to wisdom, that
I would not be carried away from the truth by sentiment. I soon saw that the safest and
wisest way to keep myself free was not to be a leader. That is why I am connected with
no party. I am a member of no group. I stand outside. I take no pay. I accept no favors.
What I do I do individually, for love of the cause. There is no party to back me, but there
is no party to say, ‘You must do this and you must not do that. You are paid. You owe it
to us. You must bow to the majority.’ I bow to nothing except my idea of right. I am free
and I will stay free. Individual freedom and responsibility—there is the basis for true
anarchy.”
The plain face was transfigured. The sturdy little figure seemed to expand and grow
imposing. Emma Goldman may be mistaken. The courts of New York have said that she
is, but she is in earnest, desperately in earnest, and she is an idealist such as only the Slav
race produces.
“But do you pay your own expenses when you go about the country settling strikes or
lecturing?” asked the reporter.
“I accept only my railway fare when I go on definite work, that is, in case of a strike or
other disturbance. When I am on a lecture tour an admission fee pays my expenses, or,
in some cases, my expenses have been paid by individual friends—wealthy people who
are interested in the cause and yet have not come out openly as Anarchists. I have a few
friends like that and they have occasionally helped me because they believe in me and in
my influence. I don’t approve of their attitude. I believe they would do infinitely more
good if they would come out and declare themselves Anarchists and be consistent. Per-
sonally I cannot understand compromise, but we are not all made alike, and it is en-
couraging to see that the wealthy and the educated class in America is at last getting a
glimmering idea that anarchy isn’t bomb throwing—that it is philosophy. The old anar-
chistic method, which was merely a kick against anything and everything, is giving way
to the true anarchy. Americans who insisted on believing that anarchy was foreign revo-
lution are finding out that it is universal philosophy, and that their own Emerson and
Thoreau 8 said more sensible anarchical things than any of our professed Anarchists.
“I have never propagated violence, in spite of Mr. McIntyre’s rivers of blood theory. I
don’t know of a single truly great Anarchist leader who ever did advocate violence. Where
violence comes with anarchy it is a result of the conditions, not of anarchy. The Russians
were not terrorists by nature—no people further from it. Gross abuses produced spo-
radic violence. The same thing is true in Italy. The biggest fallacy going is the idea that

8. EG often evoked figures such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson to bring attention
to a perceived undercurrent in the American political tradition that supported individual freedom and
cautioned against the power of the state, which echoed the sentiments and beliefs of anarchism.

426 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

Anarchists as a body band together and order violence, assassinations of rulers, and all
that. I ought to know something about anarchy, and I tell you that is false—absolutely
false. The gross misrepresentation in that regard makes my blood boil. There is igno-
rance, cruelty, starvation, poverty, suffering, and some victim grows tired of waiting. He
believes a decisive blow will call public attention to the wrongs of his country and may
hasten the remedy. He and perhaps one or two intimate friends or relatives make a plan.
They do not have orders. They do not consult other Anarchists. If a man came to me
and told me he was planning an assassination I would think him an utter fool and refuse
to pay any attention to him. The man who has such a plan, if he is earnest and honest,
knows no secret is safe when told. He does the deed himself; runs the risk himself; pays
the penalty himself. I honor him for the spirit that prompts him. It is no small thing for
a man to be willing to lay down his life for the cause of humanity. The act is noble, but it
is mistaken.
“No: I have never advocated violence, but neither do I condemn the Anarchist who re-
sorts to it. I look behind him for the conditions that made him possible, and my horror
is swallowed up in pity. Perhaps under the same conditions I would have done the same.
If I had been starving in Milan and had raised my starving baby in the air as an appeal
for justice, and had had that baby shot in my arms by a brutal soldiery, who knows what
I might have done.9 I might have changed from a philosophical Anarchist to a fighting
Anarchist. Even in the worst Russian times, before the death of Alexander II, there was
no commanded assassination in anarchy. The novels and plays and stories about that sort
of thing make me sick. The plot to kill the Czar was planned by a little individual group
of Anarchists, and they didn’t do the killing after all. Their bomb only killed a horse, and
then an unknown young man stepped up and threw a bomb between the Czar and him-
self, killing both. The Anarchists themselves, didn’t find out until long afterward who the
assassin was.10 Do you suppose if Santo Caserio had had Anarchist organization back
of him he would have tramped all the weary way to Paris, without money, in order to kill
Carnot? 11 If Bresci 12 had been sent out from us, would he have had to scrape together

9. A reference to the Fatti di Maggio, the events of 5– 8 May 1898, when public demonstrations in
Milan against economic hardship were suppressed by government troops; the incident was consid-
ered by anarchists to be the immediate precursor to Luigi Luccheni’s assassination of the Empress
of Austria.
10. Alexander II’s assassins were members of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), a clandestine revo-
lutionary group that emerged out of a split in the populist Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) and
focused its political strategy on assassination; it planned its 1881 attack for two years. The bomb
thrower was Ignaty Grinevetsky, who died in the explosion. Also involved were Sophia Perovskaya,
Alexander Mikhailov, Nikolai Kibalchich, and Andrei Zhelyabov, all of whom were executed. An-
other conspirator, Nikolai Sablin, committed suicide before he could be arrested; Gesia Gelfman
died in prison. After the tsar’s death, Narodnaya Volya issued manifestos claiming shared responsi-
bility for the assassination, in accordance with the organization’s philosophy.
11. French president Marie François-Sadi Carnot was assassinated by Sante Caserio on 24 June 1894.
12. EG refers to Gaetano Bresci, who assassinated King Umberto of Italy on 29 July 1900, and died in
prison the following year.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 427

 every cent he could, even forcing one of his Anarchist friends to pawn some of his clothes
in order to repay a loan Bresci had made him. The friend curses Bresci for a hard-hearted
creditor, but Bresci never told why he needed money so desperately.
“We in America, haven’t yet reached conditions— economic conditions I mean—that
necessarily breed violence. I am thankful for that; but we are nearer such conditions than
the old-time Americans ever dreamed we would be, and unless something is done to stop
it, the time will come. I have great faith in America. Anarchy’s best future lies in Amer-
ica. The people here have finer innate ideas of freedom. I have faith in Anglo-Saxon
blood, too. It takes a long time to make an Englishman or American think, but when he
gets started he will not stop. He isn’t fickle. When he gives his heart to a cause, he is ca-
pable of sticking to it. Then the American woman ought to help our cause. She has free-
dom and intelligence and opportunity for education, and influence. The trouble with the
American girls is that they are frivolous. That is particularly true of the girls of the work-
ing class. The ordinary American working girl doesn’t care for any serious ideas or study.
She only wants to amuse herself. It is a pity, but it is true. I realize that more and more.
“In our American work—I mean our English propaganda here, as opposed to the
propaganda carried on in foreign languages—there are very few young girls. Russian
girl Anarchists of 16 are common enough, but the American woman Anarchist under 35
years of age is most unusual. The moral education of the young working girl here is bad.
As I said she cares only for showy clothes and frivolity. Her one aim in life is matrimony.
It isn’t until she finds out that life isn’t all dancing and flirting, until she learns sorrow
and bitterness and pain, that she begins to think. We have a great many American
women in our ranks now, but they are almost all in the 30s or older.
“The able women Anarchists here do little speaking. Almost all of them confine
themselves to circulating literature, obtaining subscriptions and writing.13 Many of our
ablest writers are women. You see, when a woman becomes an Anarchist comparatively
late in life she has already contracted obligations and has entered into economic condi-
tions that hold her. She can do for the cause only what is consistent with the life she
seems compelled to lead. Some of the women do great work though.”
Miss Goldman’s English is the careful English of a well educated foreigner and save
for its burring would usually show no trace of her foreign origin save in its precision. So,
when she occasionally drops into American slang, the effect is a trifle odd.
“I know a woman Anarchist in Missouri who is a hustler,” she went on. “She lives on
a farm twenty-two miles from a railroad, and she has a husband and five sons who have
all gone over to her theories with heart and soul.14 What’s more, she has interested all the
farming population around her. I went there on my last tour and I found that one
woman’s individual influence had been simply wonderful. Voltairine de Cleyre and I are

13. Perhaps a reference to anarchists such as Natasha Notkin, who did not lecture but instead circulated
newspapers and literature in various languages from her pharmacy in Philadelphia.
14. Kate Austin, who in fact had two sons and three daughters.

428 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

the only professional women speakers of our party in this country. She is a wonderful
woman, musician, poetess, philosopher. She has great ability and great influence, but
she is tied down in Philadelphia so her field of work is not what it ought to be.
“The ordinary American woman is an obstacle to progress. The average working-
man’s wife in this country has little profound feeling. It isn’t her fault. It is the fault of
her training. What she spent on a showy, shoddy hat and paste jewelry as a girl, she
spends on baby’s clothes that will make the neighbors talk, as a woman. She is shallow
and a principle means nothing to her. Still I insist that the American woman will help on
the cause greatly. The movement will come from the middle class, but it will spread.
There are few women Anarchists in Germany, and those few are Anarchists because
their husbands are. Of course there are exceptions. In the ranks of the women doctors,
journalists and lawyers of Germany there are Anarchists, but not in the working class.
The Italian women are rebels by nature, but too ignorant for intelligent anarchy. The
French women are winning their freedom but it is an uphill fight. It is a matter of course
for the American woman to be free, but the French woman must tear herself free. And
then she works under one frightful disadvantage. The Frenchman sees the woman first
and the worker afterward. It is always so—among radicals as among all other French
classes. The French women workers themselves admit it and it is a frightful handicap.
The English women are slow to take up advanced thought. It is their awful English pru-
dence that holds them back. Modesty is a good thing in woman, but the English woman
has an overdose. Still she is taking a place in social work.
“But it is the American woman who has the opportunity for freedom—for anarchy.
She hasn’t so much idealism as the Russian, but the Russian woman is hampered by
despotism. The American woman has liberty—home, public, social, educational, reli-
gious. She is bound to forward our cause. A woman can do so much for anarchy, if she
goes at it right. I believe I owe my success to my being a woman. The audience, in this
country, will grant a woman a hearing because she is a woman. Then she must hold
them. She must not talk to them as a woman, but as a comrade. This is not France. I can
be a worker first, a woman afterward here, as I could in Russia. I have never been made
to feel before any American man, however rough, that my sex impressed him before my
argument. I do not make the mistake that most of your strong-minded women make. I
do not want to topple men off their pedestal in order to take it. I am contented to share
it. The woman’s suffragists get up and rave against man and exalt woman. That is non-
sense. I wish to be fair. I do not talk against man as a sex. I criticise my own sex quite as
freely as I criticise the other. The question of sex has no place in a great movement to-
ward truth, save as women accomplished certain forms of work better than men, and vice
versa. When men find a woman does not abuse them and howl for her rights and theirs
too; when she meets them on logical ground, is rational and fair, and able, they welcome
her generously. I have always found it so, and I have worked more among men than
among women, because there are more men to work among.
“I have been devoting my time to the English propaganda, because I speak good En-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 429

 glish and because I have made a close study of conditions purely American; and, as I told
you, there are as yet comparatively few American women Anarchists. Most of the girl An-
archists here have to be worked with in Yiddish, and I do not speak Yiddish. Still, I do
speak German and Russian, and since I came back from Europe last fall I’ve been get-
ting into touch with the girls’ organizations. I went to Europe after I came out of prison.
You know I am a professional nurse. It has always been the dream of my life to be a doc-
tor, but I could never manage it— could not get means for the study. My factory work un-
dermined my health, so I thought that if I couldn’t be a doctor I could at least be a little
part of the profession. I went through the training for a nurse, did the hospital work and
now nurse private cases. While I was in prison on Blackwell’s Island I had plenty of
chance to get experience. Except in extreme cases they don’t have a trained nurse there.
The sick prisoner is left to the ignorant mercies of other prisoners, except when the city
physician demands a trained nurse. Having me there was handy, and I was glad to be
useful, so the doctor worked me hard that year. I had all sorts of cases, but I used up my
strength and was a nervous wreck when I came out. I’m not usually nervous.”
The reporter looked at the firm, well-shaped hands that had been clasping and un-
clasping themselves all through the interview.
“Oh, yes; I suppose I am nervous in my temperament and involuntary motions, but
I can usually keep myself well in hand. I have been in many trying situations, and I do
not lose my nerve. The worse the ordeal, the cooler I become. But I was nervous when I
came out of prison. I decided to try a change and go to Europe for a year. I could lecture
for the cause and take a course in massage and in midwivery in Vienna. There is no good
training for either here, though we have the best training schools for nurses in the world.
Well, I went and did my studying and then went to Paris to study and wait for the Anar-
chists’ Congress.15 You know the Government prohibited the Congress. We had it all the
same, but the meetings were secret. It was tremendously interesting and of great value,
but it is a pity the meetings could not have been open and have reached more people.
Famous radicals from all over the world were there. I was surprised to meet so many. The
French authorities were in a terrible flutter. At another time they would never have al-
lowed us to stay, but they were determined to have the Exposition go off smoothly, with
no alarms or commotion, so they didn’t stir up trouble, but contented themselves with
watching us closely.16 I received the honor or dishonor of especially strict surveillance. I
was to give a series of lectures, but after the third the authorities warned me that if I gave
any more I must leave France, and as I wanted to attend the Congress I kept quiet. Fi-
nally detectives escorted me to the station and saw my luggage checked to the steamer,
and then notified the Government that the dangerous woman was on her way out of
France.”

15. EG traveled to Europe twice, once after her release from prison in 1895, when she went to England
and Scotland to lecture and to Vienna to study, and once in 1889 –1900, to London and then Paris
for the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People.
16. For more detail on the suppression of the Paris congress, see EG’s article in Free Society, 25 Septem-
ber 1900, above.

430 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 Miss Goldman smiled, and when she smiles her likeable, crooked little smile, one
can’t regard her as a dangerous and incendiary young person.
“It’s all too absurdly silly,” she said, with a quiet little laugh, “this talk about my being
dangerous. Half my fellow believers think me a fool because I am always talking against
violence and advocating individual work. I really work very little with the masses—not
that I am not in sympathy with concerted action, but I believe our ends are reached more
quickly by educating the individual. There is an entirely mistaken conception of the pur-
pose of anarchy, even among many Anarchists, so called. A great many people seem to
think that in order to be an Anarchist all one has to do is to kick against everything, pri-
vate property in particular, and hosts of the individuals opposed to the present system
would do the same thing the rich are doing now if a chance for wealth came their way.
The man who enters the Anarchist movement only because he has nothing is a menace
to the cause, though one understands his feelings. The men who consider economic con-
ditions the cause of all the evils in society are absolutely wrong. They say man is on a low
level because of oppressive conditions. Upset everything, set him free, and things will ad-
just themselves. They will do nothing of the kind. I don’t deny that economic conditions
are important, but they are not a cause. They are a result—a result of the lack of re-
sponsibility in the individual man. Man has given up his birthright because he didn’t un-
derstand himself, his responsibility, his powers.
“The individual man must develop until he is fit to be free. The individual must be
free morally, intellectually, spiritually, or no amount of turning social conditions topsy
turvy will better anything. That is my creed—and yet they call me a dangerous woman
and talk about my drowning New York in blood. I am no prophet, but I am no fool,
and I believe that the next ten years will see a wonderful spreading of the true prin-
ciples of anarchy in this country. The progress will come through the irresistible force of
truth, not through bomb throwing; but the part of the public that doesn’t know anything
about the real meaning of anarchy insists upon thinking we all carry bombs in our coat
pockets.”
A group of comrades were waiting for the little woman in the outer room of the sa-
loon—genial, mild-mannered men, with no hint of dynamite and infernal machines
about them. As Paul Verlaine 17 was “chez soi” in the Paris café, so Emma Goldman is at
home in the First street saloon. Her mail is sent there, and when Justus Schwab died re-
cently she lost one of her oldest and most loyal friends, as did many another East Side
advocates of Schwab’s way of thinking.18

New York Sun, 6 January 1901, p. 5.

17. The French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) took part in the Paris Commune. After pub-
lication of his Poèmes saturniens (1866) and Fêtes galantes (1869), Verlaine became an important
figure in the Paris bohemian literary scene. Imprisoned for wounding fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud,
his return to his Catholic faith was reflected in his poetry published in Sagesse (1881).
18. Justus Schwab, whose Lower East Side saloon was a popular gathering place for radicals, died in
1900.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 431

 To M A R I E G O L D S M I T H
New York, 8 Februar y 1901

My dear Comrade Goldschmidt.

You will be surprised, to hear from me after so long a time,1 I intended writing to you on
my arrival in America, but many events prevented me from do so, but as I believing that
it is better to be late, than never, I write, hoping, you will not receive my letter unkindly.
First of all, I have a little business to transact, I took some literature of you, but not know-
ing how much I owe for it, I inclose 2D.10.P. of which, pleace take out the amount I owe,
and the rest can go as a payment on the lot, which, I am now going to order. Please send
me, as soon, as possible 50 copies of each of the russian pamphlates you have on, hand,
or you can get for me, make them up in small packages, so I will not have to pay duty on
them. I want you to send the literature to the above address, also the bill, and I will for-
ward the money on receipt of the pamphlates. You understand dear Comrade, I want
50 copies of each, but if you can not send as many, send all you can, only the russian lit-
erature for the present. The movement in America is slowly progressing, the best proof
for it is, that even the daily papers, are beginning to treat the Anarchists decently. I in-
close a report of an interview, I have had with a reporter from one of our “respectable”
capitalistic papers 2 you can judge for yourself, if it is not favorable, of course, the reporter
had to misrepresent some, that is in regard, to my being against force, I never said any-
thing of the sort, and the reporter has already corrected his mistake. I have been very
busy since I returned, as I told you, when I was in Paris, we have very few lecturers in
our ranks and since Comrade Edelman died,3 we have still less, so on my return I found
more work to do, than one individual can do, especially, when one work 12 hours daily,
as I do in my profession, as nurse. However, I have managed to address a numbre of
meetings in this and neighboring Cities, including Philadelphia, where the Comrades
are very active. In this City the jewish Anarchists are the most active, but we also hold
weekly english meetings, attended chiefly by Americans.4 Free Society has been removed

1. Though there is no record of their meeting, EG likely met Marie Goldsmith in Paris in 1900.
2. EG refers to interview entitled “Talk with Emma Goldman” in New York Sun, 6 January 1901.
3. John Edelmann died 12 July 1900.
4. According to a report published in the February 1901 Freedom, Voltairine de Cleyre had recently or-
ganized the Social Science Club in Philadelphia, which included among its members many who had
previously participated in the Ladies’ Liberal League. The club had been holding weekly open air
meetings, and when the weather changed the meetings continued indoors. Reporting about the ac-
tivities of young Jewish anarchists holding meetings in New York, Brooklyn, and Newark, including
lectures by EG and Hillel Solotaroff, Freedom also notes that the revival of meetings at the Social Sci-
ence Club in New York upon EG’s return marked a change in its constituency to mostly American-
born anarchists.

432 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

from San Francisco to Chicago, and appears 8 pages instead of four.5 I intended making
a propaganda tour extending to Calif, but owing to a numbre of things, I have prosponed
it for the present, I may start out in April or next Fall meanwhile I am working to pay my
debts and save money for my tour. I hear, that our jewish Comrades have raised 150 D.
750 Francs for the publication of the reports in English, which is to take place in London;
outside of that little has been done to accomplish the organisation of a Bureau of Corre-
spondence. Had I goen on a tour, I should have made this, my main work, but as it is
little interest is shown in that; I have not given up hopes, however, and I think that sooner
or later we will succeed in organising a National Bureau of Correspondence.6 How are
you and your mother? Well, I hope; and how are the new groups progressing? I know you
are very busy, but I would appriciate a long letter very much.
Give my regards to your mother, Remy and the Cornellissons.7 Hoping to hear from
you soon and to get the literature

Fraternally
Emma Goldman

ALS, GA RF fond 5969, opis’ 1, ed. khr. 77, listyl-4. On stationery of Emma Goldman, 50 First Street.

5. Free Society moved from San Francisco to Chicago in 1901, upon the invitation of Chicago anarchists,
who hoped the publication’s news and propaganda would reach all parts of the country faster from the
Midwest. The first Chicago issue was published on 3 February.
6. After the 1907 anarchist congress in Amsterdam the idea of a Bureau of Correspondence was con-
sidered again.
7. Marie Goldsmith lived in Paris with her mother, Sofia Goldsmith; the family had fled Russia in 1884.
EG also extends her regards to the French anarchist Léon Rémy, who had served as secretary to the
suppressed 1900 Paris congress, and to the Dutch anarchist Christianus Cornelissen, who had been
living in Paris since 1898.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 433

 To F R E E S O C I E T Y
New York, 17 Februar y 1901

An Open Letter.

I have of late received several postals and letters of inquiry respecting the reports in the
daily press, that I am against force, or propaganda by deed.1 I should have paid little at-
tention to these reports, for I thought that my personal friends would not believe any-
thing said in the newspapers about me; and those comrades who believe them, simply
show how little they know of the capitalistic press. But it was the reply Comrade Isaak
gave to someone in the last issue of Free Society, that induced me to make this statement.2
I have never opposed force or propaganda by deed, either publicly or privately. I de-
mand and acknowledge the right of an individual, or a number of individuals, to strike
back at organized power, and to defend themselves against invasion; and I have and al-
ways will stand on the side of the one who has been courageous enough to give his own
life in taking or attempting to take the life of a tyrant, whether industrial or political. I
am on the side of every rebel, whether his act has been beneficial or detrimental to
our cause; for I do not judge an act by its result, but by its cause; 3 and the cause of each
and every rebellious act has been organized despotism, robbery and exploitation on the
part of society, and the innate sense of justice and a rebellious spirit on the part of the
individual.
What I said, and shall repeat again and again, is that violence is not a phase of Anar-
chism. The philosophy of Anarchy is based on harmony, on peace; and it recognizes the
right of every individual to life, liberty and development, and opposes all forms of inva-
sion; 4 consequently the philosophy of Anarchy is an absolute foe to violence, therefore I

1. See EG’s disavowal of having ever advocated violence in “Talk with Emma Goldman, Interview in the
New York Sun, 6 January 1901, above.
2. Responding to “J.C.” of Marion, Indiana, editor Abe Isaak had stated: “It is hardly credible that Com-
rade E.G. should have made the statements which now circulate in the daily press; but I suppose we
shall soon hear from herself . . .” (Free Society, 3 February 1901, p. 8).
3. Note AB’s similar discussion of his attentat on Henry Clay Frick in his underground, prison-produced
publication Prison Blossoms : “[the meaning of ] a deed, such as mine . . . in no way depend[s] upon the
physical consequences (to the parties concerned) incidental to that act, but must have for its criterion
the purpose underlying the deed and should be estimated according to the moral effect.” For full
quote of AB’s motives for his attentat, see note 3, Letter from Alexander Berkman, 19 October 1892,
above.
4. EG’s use of the term “invasion” suggests that she was familiar with Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und Sein
Eigentum (The Ego and His Own), which was first published in German in 1844. A constant theme

434 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

do not advocate violence. An Anarchist who advocates violence as a part of the teachings
of Anarchy, has never properly understood its doctrines. If I stand on the side of the
rebel, or if I approve of an act of violence, it is only because I know that organized force—
government—leaves us no other method of propaganda—because we are the invaded,
and not the invaders.
The mass of mankind can remain indifferent in the face of every injustice; but fortu-
nately for humanity, there are men and women whose whole beings rebel against injus-
tice, whose social instincts are so strongly developed that they feel every blow which the
present economic and political system strikes at society. Such men and women can no
more stand quietly by and see workers shot, children starved, women outraged, and
thousands of the social family ruined, destroyed and killed, than one’s breathing func-
tions can work without pure air; but they are not necessarily Anarchists; they have existed
and rebelled as long as the world exists, long before Anarchists or Anarchism was
known; and it is well that they exist, otherwise despots would reign supreme, and life be
unbearable. Let us therefore understand that violence is a product of oppression, of need,
of suffering, and man’s innate sense of justice and social instinct—if not crushed by
commercialism— on one side, and greed on the other. Incidentally I want to say that it
is this sense of justice and social rebellion that have produced the philosophy of liberty,
of Anarchism, and not as some of my worthy comrades insist, that it is Anarchism that
makes or will make men good and just. The philosophy of Anarchy has no such meta-
physical power; it cannot make pure that which is impure, nor can it make anything just
which is essentially unjust. The teachings of Anarchy are a product of man’s sense of jus-
tice and craving for righteousness, based upon man’s recognition of the fact that justice
and righteousness are only possible in freedom, under non-invasion; and not under gov-
ernment, dictum, interference of man with man, either economically, politically, morally
or ethically, consequently only in an Anarchistic mode of living, which is not a child of
the future, but a life which each and every liberty-loving man must begin now, because
it is man who makes society, and not society that makes the man.
I think I need say no more about my position towards individual or collective revolt;
so I will only repeat that I am a revolutionist by nature and temperament, and as such
I claim the right for myself and all those who feel with me, to rebel and resist invasion
by all means, force included, consequently a destructionist. But I am also an Anarchist,
and as such a constructionist. In order to construct a new sanitary building, fit for hu-
man beings to live in, I must, if I do not find cleared ground, tear down the old, rotten
decayed obstacle which stands in the way of that beautiful and magnificent mansion
called Anarchy.

in the work, which was widely read in anarchist circles, addresses the right of the individual to pro-
tect the self from invasion by the state or any outside force.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 435

 In conclusion, I would also like to correct a statement which circulated in the daily
press shortly after I left for Europe. The mouthpieces of capitalism reported, after I had
been two weeks in England, that I had just sailed, and, on leaving, had told a reporter that
I was disgusted with the American workers; that I considered them a lot of fools and
blockheads, and a thankless crew; that I was dissatisfied with my own comrades, and that
I said there were not more than a dozen Anarchists in America.5
While I had not seen a single one of the press sharks, and hence could not have spo-
ken to them, the report contained some truth. I know the responsible party, in fact every
one in New York knows him; but as he is out of the movement, and has done a lot of mis-
chief, I do not think it necessary to disclose his name. However, while it was absolutely
false that I had expressed my views before I left, he often heard me say from the platform
that “if the American workers were not such fools and slaves, they could not quietly sub-
mit to the growth of imperialism; they could not and would not allow the decayed insti-
tutions of Europe to replace the liberal and independent principles laid down by their
fore-fathers.” This I maintain now; and add that the American worker is not only a fool,
but a conceited fool, which is still worse. He believes himself free, whereas the chains of
slavery make his limbs bleed; he thinks himself independent, while his back is bent with
the burden of dependency; he boasts of his right to choose his master, not knowing that
he thereby forefeits his right to be his own master; he claims to be charitable and ready
to help his neighbor, while his only help consists in helping himself to his neighbor’s
property, and then to take possession of his neighbor also, as has been done in Cuba, and
as is now being done in the Philippines.6
Well, but is he worse than the European worker? some one may ask. No, he is not; but
the European worker is the product of centuries of despotic rule; he is a born slave—he
had no choice in the matter. The American worker is born a “free man,” with the right
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but he makes no use of his freedom; he can-
not see that liberty is like a delicate plant, and needs proper care and attention, or it fades
away. Of course, all this refers to the average worker. The intelligent worker of America
is the intelligent worker of the world; he stands up for his rights, and works with those
whose aim in life is the establishment of equal liberty in all phases of life.
The reports said that I considered the workers “thankless.” This is absolutely false.
I could not consistently say so, because I do not believe in gratitude or obligation, since

5. See, for example, New York Times, 23 November 1899, p. 7; and New York World, 23 November 1899,
p. 4.
6. EG refers to the role of the United States in the occupation of Cuba and in the annexation of the
Philippines following the Spanish-American War. Although Cuba gained independence from Spain
in 1898, the United States occupied the country for the next five years, and the Platt Amendment of
1901 in effect made Cuba a U.S. protectorate. In late 1898 the United States bought the Philippines
as part of the Treaty of Paris, but the Philippine Revolution against Spain, begun in 1896, led to fight-
ing between the United States and the Philippines. Though the war was declared over on 4 July 1902
by President Theodore Roosevelt, fighting continued until 1913 when the United States established
stable colonial control over the Philippines.

436 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

I am only acting according to the dictum of my inner self. No one owes me anything for
my work in the movement.
Further: that I believe we have but a dozen Anarchists in America. Well, there is some
truth in that, although I have not said so to any newspaper representative. Theoretical
Anarchists—men and women who understand the teachings of our philosophy—we
have thousands of in America, and still a larger number of those who are Anarchists
without knowing it; but those who not only think, but act, who practice Anarchism in
their every day life, who are consistent, who defy the world, maintain their personal lib-
erty and consider the liberty of others, such Anarchists are indeed few, not only in Amer-
ica, but all over the world. Yet if liberty is ever to bless mankind, it is only when the ex-
ample set by the few will be followed by the many.
Now that I have explained my position, I hope the readers of Free Society will not mis-
understand me again; and will believe only that which has my signature.

Emma Goldman.

Free Society, 17 February 1901, p. 3.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 437

 From P E T E R K R O P O T K I N
Cambridge, Mass., ca. 24 March 1901

Dear friend

Just got your letter

As to the reporters. I must see the reporters of all the N. York Press, as was done last
time, or none. It seems to me an absolute condition. All the middle class papers are for
an elite, and this is the only way to show no preferences and to avoid being hunted af-
terwards by reporters of the excluded papers.
As to articles, I have much more demands than I could write, and such offers as no
daily paper will ever pay—but have no time to write.1
So let us have all reporters from all the dailies, as we had last time.2 That will guaran-
tee good reports of all the lectures,3 and save a lot of trouble. Even — 4 from the Journal
which, after all, rectified its nonsense, was mystified by an occasional reporter. Let all
come at noon on Friday—

Fraternally yours
P.K.

ALI, Emma Goldman Archive, IISH. On stationery of the Colonial Club. Letter is undated but most likely was
written between 24 and 29 March, when Kropotkin departed from Cambridge.

1. In a letter to Robert E. Ely, EG had arranged for an exclusive interview for Kropotkin with an unnamed
New York City newspaper. In exchange for the interivew, the newspaper agreed to pay for a subsequent
article to be written by Kropotkin. See EG to Robert Ely, 23 March 1901, EGP, reel 1.
2. Kropotkin toured the United States for the first time in 1897.
3. Kropotkin’s second tour of the United States began in February 1901 and ended in early May. Speak-
ing in both Russian and English, he lectured at Boston’s Lowell Institute, the Labor Lyceum in New
York, and Chicago’s Hull House, among other venues. Both anarchist and popular newspapers re-
ported on his tour, which ultimately raised hundreds of dollars for Freedom, Les Temps Nouveaux, Free
Society, and Discontent. His comments here refer to his forthcoming New York dates.
4. Kropotkin inserted a dash in place of the name at this point.

438 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 Extradition Order from the French Government
Paris, 26 March 1901

Whereas article 7 of the law of November 13–21 and December 3, 1849, states: The Min-
ister of the Interior can, by police measures, enjoin any foreigner traveling through or
residing in France to immediately leave the French territory and have him taken to the
border.
Whereas article 8 of the same law, states: Any stranger who would have absconded
from the execution of the measures set forth in the preceding article, or who, after hav-
ing exited France following these measures, would have re-entered without Govern-
ment permission, will be brought before the court and sentenced to one to six months
imprisonment.
After expiration of his punishment, he will be taken back to the border.
Considering that the presence on the territory of the Republic of the named Gold-
mann, Emma, of Russian nationality is of such nature as to compromise public security;
On the proposition of the Chief of Police, Orders:

Article One
It is enjoined to the named Goldmann, Emma, to exit the French territory.1
Article 2
The Chief of Police is assigned the execution of the present order.
Executed in Paris, March 26, 1901.

Signed: Waldeck-Rousseau 2

Certified copy
To the Chief Officer of General Security
The Chief of the 4th Bureau

ADS, Dossier Emma Golkmann, Numéro 124786, Cote B/A 305, Archives de la Préfecture de Police. Docu-
ment is addressed to “Minister of the Interior and of Religions” and is written in a different hand than that
of the signatory, Prime Minister Rene Waldeck-Rousseau. Translated from French.

1. EG was apparently never aware of this extradition order from the French government, having left
France before it was issued. Neither was she notified of such an order in subsequent visits to France.
Compare EG to Theodore Dreiser in 1929: “I was never driven from France. I lived in Paris from Feb,
1900 to the end of Nov. of the same year and then returned to the States. . . . No, it was left for Amer-
ica to drive me from pillar to poste and then kick me out” (EG to Dreiser, 20 January 1929, EGP,
reel 20). Compare, also, her account of her departure from France in “Talk with Emma Goldman,”
Interview in the New York Sun, 6 January 1901, above.
2. Rene Waldeck-Rousseau (1846 –1904) served twice as minister of the interior (1881, 1883–1885), and
was later appointed prime minister (1899 –1902). Although he signed the extradition order ejecting
EG from France in 1901, he was considered a member of the republican left.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 439

 Inter view in the P H I L A D E L P H I A N O R T H A M E R I C A N
Philadelphia, 11 April 1901

A Character Study of Emma Goldman

By Miriam Michelson

“I shall speak in Philadelphia.”

Emma Goldman said this to me yesterday.1 Her hands, a workingwoman’s hands,
were crossed on her knee. She was sitting in a rocking chair in an ordinary little Phila-
delphia parlor, but her voice, which becomes guttural and strongly accentuated in its Teu-
tonic quality when she speaks earnestly, had nothing of the commonplace in it.
Somehow, I believed her when she said it. There is so much force, as well as sincer-
ity, in this woman’s speech that one must find very good reason in one’s own mind for
differing with her. And when Emma Goldman says she will, a little matter like the “she
won’t” of the Mayor,2 the Director of Public Safety 3 and the police force of Philadelphia
seems hardly an obstacle worth considering.
“I shall speak in Philadelphia,” she repeated, the line between her eyebrows growing
more marked as her voice became firmer. “I may have to suffer the consequences, but
speak I will. Perhaps the Mayor and Director English will come to their senses. No one
would be gladder than I if they come to understand how foolish they have been. But
whether they do or not, I shall speak.”
“On what subject?”
“The methods of Russia in America,” she answered with a smile. “The methods of
Russia are of the tenth century; the intellectual development of America is of the twenti-
eth. They don’t go very well together, do they?”

1. Miriam Michelson (1870 –1942), who was given a byline for her interview of EG, was an American
novelist, playwright, drama critic, and contributor to mainstream newspapers in Philadelphia and
San Francisco. She would go on to become a well-known author. Her best-known works include In
the Bishop’s Carriage (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1904), The Madigans (New York: Century, 1904),
Anthony Overman (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906), and The Motherlode of Gold and Silver (Boston:
Stratford, 1934).
2. Samuel Howell Ashbridge (1849 –1906), mayor of Philadelphia from 1899 to 1903, was entrenched
in the Republican machine that controlled Philadelphia politics at the end of the nineteenth century.
His term of office was marked by allegations of graft, corruption, and intimidation of the press. In
April 1901, Ashbridge refused EG the right to speak in Philadelphia, a decision that generated pub-
licity and support that EG welcomed. Public opinion ultimately forced Ashbridge to lift the prohibi-
tion against her.
3. Abraham Lincoln English (1864–1913) was director of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Safety in
1901, under Mayor Samuel H. Ashbridge.

440 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

SHE IS A CREATURE OF MOODS.
The photograph of Miss Goldman which accompanies this article will not give you an al-
together truthful impression of this remarkable woman. To realize her personality you
must know that this awful Anarchist is a creature of moods.
When she speaks, when she is interested, when she is delivering an address, the face
which on the first page looks sad and rather weary and a bit heavy, is lighted up till it is
almost pretty. Miss Goldman would rather face Lieutenant Wood,4 of the Philadelphia
police force, than the camera.
“Newspaper sketches always make me look vulgar,” she said, when we were planning
her photographs. “I am not vain. I have no reason to be. But I cannot bear to be made to
appear vulgar.”
Vulgarity is the last characteristic one would think of in connection with Miss Gold-
man. You must imagine this strong face softened and femininized by its pretty coloring,
by a very fair skin, and cheeks and the tip of the chin pink with excitement.
The great, column-like throat is beautifully white. The hair is a fair brown, and, though
the eyebrows and lashes are darker, the small, deep-set eyes are a clear gray that looks
blue when Miss Goldman’s speech becomes emphatic. And this happens pretty often.
“It is my nature to be what I am,” she says. “As long as I live I must be a crusader.
What I think, what I feel, I must speak. Not for a hundred, not for five hundred years,
perhaps, will the principles of anarchy triumph. But what has that to do with it? ‘Is it
right?’ not ‘Is it hopeless?’ is the touchstone of courage and principle.”

“I AM NOT HOPELESS.”
“If all the world was at peace and happy, and in one small village there lived a man who
was a toiling slave, a woman who was suffering, a child condemned to degrading labor,
I could know no rest. It is my temperament to propagate opinions. As a matter of fact, I
am not hopeless.
“I see the world improving. I know that fifteen years ago no audience in America
would listen to the doctrines I advocate. I know that to-day in every town all over the
country there is a society formed to disseminate those ideas. I know that when Krapotkin
came to America there was but one college in all the country courageous enough, en-
lightened enough, to listen to him.5 And to-day he is besieged by offers for his lectures,
offers of $75 and $100 for each address from institutions of learning in every great city
of America.”

4. In fact, Wood was “Acting Lieutenant” (in the following article from the Philadelphia North American,
his name is spelled as Woods); dressed in plain clothes, he led a group of six officers from the police
station on Second and Christian streets to block EG’s passage into Standard Hall. See Philadelphia
North American, 10 April 1901, p. 1; and Philadelphia Public Ledger, 10 April 1901, p. 3.
5. In 1897 Kropotkin spoke at the Lowell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to the Prospect
Union, a group of Harvard students and local workers. At the time of this interview, Kropotkin was
on his second U.S. tour.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 441

 Miss Goldman was born in St. Petersburg, but was educated mainly in Germany. She
is a little body, this famous Anarchist, who has roused in the Mayor and the Director of
Public Safety and the whole police force a desperate desire to stifle free speech in Phila-
delphia. She is stout, though, and broad-hipped, a sturdy-looking, quick-moving, intense
woman.
“I very well understand,” she said with quiet scorn, “why your Mayor and your Direc-
tor English object to my speaking in Philadelphia. It is not because of my Anarchistic
opinions—what do they know of these? They do not know what an Anarchist is. Besides,
I have delivered speeches in Philadelphia two months ago,6 and often I have spoken here.
“But it occurs to your Mayor that he has a very nasty, a very black record.7 He will do
something to show the people that he is not so black as he is painted. He says to them:
‘See what it is I am doing for you. See how careful I am of Philadelphia’s pure morals.
Here comes a shocking woman, an Anarchist, a wretched creature, a bomb-thrower. See
how I stifle her. See how I forbid her speech. Philadelphia shall not be corrupted by her
anarchistic doctrines!’
“And as Anarchy is not understood, as it is a bogy to the ordinary so-called respectable
community, your Mayor gets the credit of being a very wise, very courageous man,
whereas he is only very foolish.”

FREE PRESS IS IN DANGER.

“For he cannot prevent my speaking. It is not Emma Goldman, it is not anarchy, he at-
tacks. It is liberty of speech. Let the newspapers take care. The next thing attacked will
be the freedom of the press. For me, I must press this case. I must see just how far the
enlightened public opinion of the independent city of Philadelphia will let its Mayor go.
“Do you realize that Lieutenant Wood, of your police force, came at me with his fist at
my breast? I have been treated by this man—an officer, a lieutenant of police—with such
brutality and vulgarity as Russia would be ashamed of. I am an impulsive woman. I
could control myself only by remembering that there were two young girl students with
me just ready for their diplomas. I would face arrest—though I assure you I know the
discomfort of prison life—but arrest for them in my company would have hurt their ca-
reers. But a brute like that Wood—”
She stretched out her hand, closing her fist and bringing it down upon her knee. We
went on talking about herself and her opinions, among other things her opposition to
prisons, and her contention that no human being, however degraded, is irredeemable.

6. EG tells Marie Goldsmith of speaking before “very active” comrades in Philadelphia (see particularly
note 3 in Letter to Marie Goldsmith, 8 February 1901, above).
7. The Ashbridge administration distinguished itself for lawlessness in a city already widely known as
the most corrupt in the nation. In addition to graft, the scandals during the Ashbridge administration
included intimidation of the press (specifically, threats against the Philadelphia North American), the
growth of prostitution and speakeasies, and gambling in Philadelphia schools.

442 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 “Even Wood— even Lieutenant Wood,” she said, hurried by her interest in her subject
past the point where her sense of humor usually stands guard, “there is hope even for
such a man as that. It is his position that holds him. Let him once break from the fear of
losing his little political job; let him cut loose from a corrupt municipal machine that cor-
rupts all who benefit by it, and he can again become a man who dares to think and dares
to feel.”
There is vigor in this woman’s speech. She is utterly fearless, utterly free from re-
straint. There is no “no thoroughfare” for her mind. She dares to follow wherever con-
viction leads.
No one who has not heard her deliver an address can conceive of the force there is in
this Russian free thinker. No care of the prettinesses of manner or speech can stay her.
Her voice may break, her knowledge of English may fail her; but she is more effective
than art could possibly make her, more eloquent than the completest elegance of speech
could give. She snarls, she sneers, she thunders at her audience, and she is as indiffer-
ent to their rage as to their approval.

HAS NO FAITH IN THE MOB.

“I know the mob,” she said, yesterday, “and I do not count upon it—no, not a bit. I looked
at the crowd that followed hurrahing for me the other night, and I said in my mind to
them, ‘You cheer for me, you follow me, but you’d hang me if your mood changed.’
“It is not in the laboring man, the lowest classes, that I find my hope. It is the middle
class and the professional people that are being educated to whom theories of life like
mine appeal. Just so long as there remain in the world men and women ready to die for
principle, there will be hope for mankind. It is from the minority that the strength to up-
lift the world has always come. In America we are becoming more and more imperialis-
tic. We shall become more like Russia before we become less like her.
“But so far as the spread of anarchy goes, let me tell you that a little political move
like this of your Mayor’s—yes, or one policeman like Lieutenant Wood—goes further to
make Anarchists than all the speeches I have ever delivered. It would have been differ-
ent if there had been some excuse, if there had been a strike or if the public mind was
heated and excited. But as it is, it is your Mayor who is inciting to riot; it is your Lieu-
tenant Wood who appeals to violence. For me, I do not admit that I ever incited men
to riot.” 8
But I’ll admit for you that what you say is enough to incite them to riot, Emma Gold-
man. If during a strike, when bitterness and poverty and excitement combine to upset
men’s reason, a fire brand like yourself were thrown among them the damage done
might be incalculable.

8. EG was convicted of inciting to riot in 1893, for which she spent ten months in prison. See her dis-
avowal of incendiary speech attributed to her by police witnesses in “The People vs. Emma Goldman,”
Excerpt from Trial Transcript, 4 October 1893, above.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 443

 If I were a guardian of the peace, I’d rather Johann Most 9 himself would tell the strik-
ers of their wrongs than that a woman like yourself, with your clear intelligence, your im-
petuous tongue, and your ardent heart, should heap contempt last arbitrament, or en-
courage them to battle for their rights.
I should fear your influence, Emma Goldman. I should fear your cleverness. I should
fear your courage. I should fear your capacity to rouse the sleeping devil in the mob that
stirs uneasily when your uncompromising voice rings out.
All of which has nothing to do with the case in point, of course.
Emma Goldman is not a fanatic; nor is she a cruel-hearted monster; nor is she a
dreamer.
“The man who joins a movement because his stomach is empty,” she says in rude epi-
gram, “will leave it as soon as he is better off. We Anarchists want people who think to
listen to us—not the people who only feel. Enlightened public opinion will come to
know us in time, not as bomb throwers, but as free men and women, who want the world
to be free, who hope to teach the people to govern themselves, not to be governed like
children by the rod of the law.”
“I wonder, Miss Goldman, whether you’d approve of Mrs. Nation?” I asked.10
“As a woman who is willing to sacrifice herself for a principle? Yes. As a one-idead re-
former, who foolishly expects to make men abstain from drink by smashing saloons—
no. And then—I am sorry—I have been unable to convince myself of her sincerity, for
she accepts money for what she does.”
“And you?”
“I? I am a trained nurse. I support myself by my work. I was to have come here some
time ago, but I had an important case which I could not leave.
“Do you suppose I would accept money for my work? Never. It would spoil it all. My
traveling expenses, yes; my hotel bill, if I do not stop with friends. But to speak, to work,
to propagate the truth I feel—I love that. I could not take money for that.”
Does it not occur to you that there’s something rather lofty about this point of view—
for an Anarchist? As a lecturer, this woman could make more money than half a dozen
trained nurses. Her work would be infinitely easier, and, as she says, she loves it. But she
loves it too well to make money out of it.
“I am not conceited,” she said, “but I am not blind to the fact that I can work, that I
can do things. I could make what goody-goody people call an honest living in other ways,
but there is no other life than just this for me.”
As a property Anarchist, to be used by the Mayor as a bogy, Emma Goldman is not a
success. She likes “women to be feminine,” she told me. She loves “flowers and pretty
things, although I cannot have them, for there are other uses I must put money to.”

9. Refers to German-born anarchist orator, editor, and publisher Johann Most.

10. Carry Amelia Moore Nation (1846 –1911) was the American temperance crusader and women’s
rights advocate known for her violent methods (including the use of a hatchet) in closing down sa-
loons across the country beginning in 1900.

444 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

WORKED IN A PRISON HOSPITAL.
In the car, as we came uptown together she glanced across to a pretty girl, stylishly
dressed, and told me how she enjoyed looking at her. As we walked along the street to-
gether she noticed the pretty things in the shop windows and commented upon them
impersonally as desirable things for the adornment of other women. When she was im-
prisoned for a year in New York she served all that time in the prison hospital, and you
could not have made the degraded women who learned to adore her believe that she was
an Anarchist. She went to Europe last year, because she wanted to study to become a phy-
sician. But she is back in America working still at the hardest profession a woman can
adopt, and her young brother is going through Columbia College at her expense.11
No, if even the Mayor and Director English and Lieutenant Wood were to go to call
upon Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, they would find her too human, too kindly, too tol-
erant, too straightforward and honest and altogether too clever for their purpose.
“Wait, and you will see that I shall speak. It is a small matter, of course, if Emma Gold-
man is denied the right of speech. But if I am denied that right other Anarchists in this
city will also be denied it. For this I must fight. And I will carry it through the courts, and
into the prison, if I must, but I will speak before I go back to New York. New York is more
cosmopolitan. One can breathe freer there. Philadelphia is narrow, of course. It is the cra-
dle of conventionality. Still, I shall speak here.” 12
I have engaged a seat for Miss Goldman’s lecture. I am sure that if the Mayor and the
Director of Public Safety and a certain lieutenant of police express a wish to hear it, they
can also be accommodated, and they might learn something from this Russian woman
of the difference between tenth and twentieth century methods of governing.

Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901, p. 2.

11. Morris Goldman (b. 1879) is EG’s younger brother, Moe, who is referred to in Living My Life as Yegor.
He moved to New York City in 1898, where he lived with EG, who helped finance his studies at Co-
lumbia University. He later became a doctor based in Iowa. EG had hoped to obtain a medical de-
gree in Europe but gave up her plan because of the time required to meet matriculation require-
ments, including learning Latin (see particularly note 7, Letter to Max Nettlau, 4 January 1900,
above). Five years earlier, she had apparently studied nursing and midwifery in Vienna for five
months.
12. EG did speak in Philadelphia on the same day as this interview, 11 April, at a secret meeting to the
Single Tax Society (see “Tyranny of Police Publicly Denounced,” Article in the Philadelphia North
American, 12 April 1901, below). Then on 14 April she spoke with Voltairine de Cleyre before a large
crowd at the Industrial Art Hall. The meeting was sponsored by the Social Science Club, whose par-
ticipants passed a resolution protesting the violation of EG’s right to free speech. Ending her Phila-
delphia tour on 17 April, EG spoke with de Cleyre at the Bricklayer’s Hall to a meeting sponsored by
the United Labor League.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 445

 Ar ticle in the P H I L A D E L P H I A N O R T H A M E R I C A N
Philadelphia, 12 April 1901

Tyranny of Police Publicly Denounced

Addresses Made at a Mass Meeting Under

the Auspices of the Single Tax Society.

Emma Goldman Carries Out Her Promise to Speak

in This City Despite the Police.

She Denounces Ashbridge and English and Says

Their Acts Would Shame the Czar.

Despite the orders, threats and warnings of Director English,1 Emma Goldman, Anar-
chist, made a public address last night in the very shadow of the City Hall, and the po-
lice authorities knew nothing about it until an hour or more after the meeting had ended.
She spoke to the Single Tax Society 2 of Philadelphia, in Mercantile Library Hall, Tenth
street, above Chestnut. About 200 persons heard her, for the hall was crowded to its ca-
pacity, and her every utterance was greeted with unanimous applause.
Although no public announcement of her coming had been made, it was generally
understood by those in attendance that she would be there, and at exactly 9.15 o’clock she
appeared.
Arthur Pleydell, editor of Justice, a Single Tax paper of Delaware,3 was discussing the
attempts of the local Administration to suppress free speech, when he was interrupted
by the demonstration which met Miss Goldman’s arrival. She took a seat in the front part
of the room, and Mr. Pleydell presently closed his address.4
Percy Marcellus, who was presiding, then announced that the “floor was open,” and
instantly there were calls for Miss Goldman from all over the hall. She stepped up to the
platform and began with composure and deliberation, but as she progressed in her bit-
ter denunciation of Director English and his men, she warmed almost to passion, and
the words fell from her lips in torrents.

1. Both the director of Philadelphia’s public safety, Abraham Lincoln English, and the mayor, Samuel
Howell Ashbridge, had prohibited EG from speaking in the city.
2. A number of prominent single-taxers in Philadelphia were anarchist sympathizers.
3. Arthur Pleydell (1872 –1932), was an anarchist, single-taxer, and editor of Justice, the Delaware single-
tax paper, until November 1901.
4. In addition to Pleydell, architect William L. Price and G. Frank Stephens, single-taxers, and anarchist
George Brown each addressed the meeting before EG’s arrival.

446 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

MISS GOLDMAN’S SPEECH.
“Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, when a second outburst of applause
had subsided, “I thank you for this kind reception. I did not at first intend to come here
to-night—not that I doubted that you would receive me as you have, but because I hesi-
tated to take advantage of your hospitality in the face of the action of the law and order
people of your city, who say they will not let me speak.
“I can think of no other word than absurd to characterize that action. It is enough to
set not only people like yourselves thinking, but every half-intelligent man or woman—
even the ‘dummies,’ as we call them, for these two gentlemen, your Mayor Ashbridge
and your Director English, are attempting in these free United States such a willful act
as, even if free speech were tolerated in Russia, the Czar would be ashamed of.
“These authorities of your government say that I shall not speak. As I do not be-
lieve in government, I shall ignore them. I have decided to take up the fight here and
to fight it out to the end. I do not want to go to prison. I want to walk under the sky,
under the stars—but not the Stars and Stripes—but prison or no prison I will not be
silenced.
“If you are willing to stand quietly by and permit the freedom of speech to be taken
from you, then you might as well go back forty years and restore slavery, for what good
can be accomplished for society if expression is denied, and if a man like English is to
dictate what you shall say and what not?
“He has gone further than that, though. He has taken to himself the potency of the
Pope of Rome to decide what is going to be said before it is spoken. This is not, as I first
thought, vanity. It is insanity! I certainly shall oppose it on every occasion and find out
how far they will go. It is Emma Goldman to-day, but it may be you to-morrow and some-
body else the next day.”

“AMERICA IS AROUSED.”
“I notice that all America is aroused and indignant over the outrages now being perpe-
trated in Russia, but when it happens in America, in your free America, you are all quiet.
If, on last Tuesday night, I had dared, not to use a bomb or a dagger, as they do in Rus-
sia, but if I had dared to touch with the tip of my finger a button on the precious person
of this Lieutenant Woods he would have lashed me as the serfs are lashed by the Cos-
sacks, because I could see that he is a brute, although he was drunk beyond his capacity
and perhaps did not know what he was doing.
“The trouble is that these men, Ashbridge, English and Woods, know that we are
telling the truth. Nothing is more dangerous than the truth, and that’s why they want to
silence us. But their action has done more for Anarchism than I and my comrades have
done in ten years. I am thankful to them, and I think I’ll take up a collection and send
them flowers or cigars or whisky, which they would rather have, perhaps.
“The authorities have seized upon this as a pretext. I know that your Mayor is a man
with a past, and he is trying to get the admiration of the so-called respectable people of

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 447

 the community by saying that he and English are always looking after their safety,5 and
that they know better what these people need than they know themselves.
“But what does it mean to be one of the ‘respectable’ people to-day? It means to be one
who never objects to anything, who pays his taxes, who submits to fraud and oppression,
who goes to church on Sunday and during the sermon thinks up a way to beat somebody
on Monday. To be a ‘respectable’ person nowadays is to place men in positions to guard
your safety who are least fitted to do so—it is to be an idiot. I am glad to say that I do not
belong to that ‘respectable’ community.
“In these times in America, as soon as a man commits a crime, no matter how black
or treacherous, if he is backed by the government everybody falls on his knees and they
erect arches to him or smother him with kisses. I am sure that English has received hun-
dreds of letters of congratulations from these old maids.”

ASHBRIDGE AND ENGLISH TOOLS.

“That is the root of it all. Ashbridge and English are only the tools in the hands of those
behind them. It is the community that keeps such men in office that is guilty of the
outrage.
“These men have made a mistake, and they have not the courage to admit it. In face
of the fact that a paper like The North American and all thinking people are opposing
their action, they say they will go right on and continue to stop free speech.
“To me it is a settled question that free speech does not exist in America unless it suits
the government. If the people of Philadelphia do not take immediate action to oppose the
outrages committed in their city this week, they will sacrifice their freedom on the altar
of greed, robbery, fraud and all that represents government.
“I repeat that I shall speak in Philadelphia. If I cannot get a hall I will speak never-
theless, if I have to do so from the City Hall tower. If this is to be a fight for my principles,
the Mayor will find that I am more courageous than he, and that I can die for them if
need be.” [. . .]

Philadelphia North American, 12 April 1901, pp. 1–2. Excised from this article, following the report on EG’s
address, is a description of the closing remarks of a workman, after which “nearly everybody there shook
hands with Miss Goldman, and the meeting ended.” The article also reports on the speeches preceding EG’s
by prominent Philadelphia anarchist George Brown and Arthur Pleydell, editor of the Delaware single-tax
paper Justice, who denounced the suppression of free speech and detailed the resolutions adopted by the
Single Tax Society deeming the action of the Philadelphia authorities “tyrannical” and “a gross usurpation
of power,” and calling “upon all who value their liberties to resist the attempts made to Russianize our city
government.” Reprinted in part, with editorial comment, in “Free Speech Strangled,” Free Society, 21 April
1901, pp. 1–2, EGP, reel 47.

5. Political scandals of the Ashbridge administration are detailed in note 7, “A Character Study of Emma
Goldman,” Interview in the Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901, above.

448 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 Ar ticle in the P I T T S B U R G P O S T
Pittsburgh, 5 May 1901

Body Cremated, Goldman Spoke.

Anarchists Wept in Taking Leave of Paita, the Italian Self Slayer.

Speech Defended Suicide.

Goldman Said the Dead Man Had Too Fine a Nature to Bear With Life.

Ashes Are to Be Preserved.

After a long address by Emma Goldman, in which she endeavored to show that an ide-
alist, who finds the world unbearable is justified in committing suicide, the body of
Joseph Paita, the Italian anarchist, who shot himself at 1221 Penn avenue on Friday, was
cremated at Samson’s mortuary yesterday afternoon. The function was attended by from
75 to 100 anarchists, most of whom saw the body shoved into the furnace at the conclu-
sion of Miss Goldman’s address. Some of them shed tears when invited to look for the
last time upon the face of the dead man. Miss Goldman herself, appeared to be deeply
affected, and admitted in her speech that notwithstanding all the reasons she had ad-
vanced in favor of suicide, affection was stronger than philosophy.
The body of Paita was taken to the undertaking establishment in the forenoon and lay
for some time in the little chapel before the assembling of the anarchist mourners. It had
been neatly dressed and placed in a plain wooden coffin upon the lid of which some
friends of the deceased placed a large bunch of red carnations, bound together with a
broad red ribbon, the flowers and the ribbon being the only touches of the symbolical an-
archist color anywhere in evidence,1 except the fire in the furnace. Slowly the anarchists
gathered, until nearly 3 o’clock, the hour set for the delivery of Miss Goldman’s address.
One of the last to come was Henry Bauer, of Allegheny. The audience consisted partly of
Italians, but there was probably a majority of Russian Hebrews, doubtless on account of
Miss Goldman being of that nationality. There was a fair sprinkling of women in the au-
dience. A few had children with them. Shortly after 3 o’clock Miss Goldman took a posi-
tion at the head of the coffin and began a speech which lasted nearly half an hour. It was
almost entirely devoted to a justification of the dead man’s act of self-destruction. She
said in part:

1. On the symbolism of the color red to the anarchist movement, see note 4 to “Badly Advised,” Article
in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 22 August 1893, above.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 449

 CHEAP MOTIVES ASSIGNED.
“When a man takes his life the world speculates upon the motive for his act. Generally
the motives assigned are small and cheap. I know that our friend, who lies here took his
life because he could not endure the sufferings of the world. His nature was high and
noble. He was intelligent and physically strong. He was able to make a good living for
himself, had he chosen to walk in the narrow paths that most men take. But he could not
live so. Society with its meanness set bounds to his activities which he could not endure.
He saw on all sides of him thousands carelessly laughing and dancing, rich, happy and
gay, while beside them other thousands were bleeding to death. With his sensitive nature
he felt the sufferings of the miserable in the world. He was not able to bear it and he
could do little to relieve it. He was too sensitive for the world and so he was justified in
taking his life. He is better off dead. The dead know nothing, feel nothing, while the liv-
ing who are endowed with a noble nature that pines for liberty of action amid an envi-
ronment of slavery must suffer as long as life lasts.
“Yet while reason and philosophy tell us he is better as he is, there is something
stronger. Affection will not in a long time cease to regret that he did not choose to live.
We shall miss him from our midst and regret the absence of the high ideal, by which he
was inspired. Let us then over his body resolve, not swearing as the Christians do, but
swearing by our own energy and our own honesty of purpose to carry forward his work
as he would wish it to be carried.”

SOME WEPT BIT TERLY.

Miss Goldman stated in conclusion that it had been expected to have an anarchist come
from New York to speak in Italian, but the time had been too short and the local Italians
were too much overcome by emotion to do any speaking. Her address would therefore
be the only one. She invited the friends of the deceased to look for a last time upon his
face, which most of them did, a few of the men and several of the women weeping bit-
terly as they took the last farewell. The undertaker then took charge of the body and
moved it to the basement to be placed in the retort. When it was ready the audience was
allowed to see it consigned to the flames. Wrapped from head to foot in heavy white
cloths, it was quickly shoved into the furnace before the gaze of all and the ceremonies
of the funeral were over. The furnace was heated to a temperature of 1,200 degrees. It
was stated that about four hours would be required for the body to be consumed, but that
it will not be taken from the furnace until this morning. The ashes will be turned over to
the personal friends of the dead man’s among the Italians.
Previous to the cremation yesterday Miss Goldman gave out for publication the letter
which Paita addressed to her before killing himself. It read as follows:
“I am tired of existing conditions, and for that reason I have decided to commit sui-
cide. My last request to you is to give my love to all friends and the comrades. While in
theory I believe the anarchist should live for the purpose of propagating the cause and
trying so far as possible to eliminate the iniquities that surround and permeate the so-

450 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

cial system, thus assisting toward the grand ideals when the oppressed shall be raised up
and liberty be known in its fullest and greatest sense, nevertheless I am compelled to
acknowledge my weakness and unfitness for the struggle, for I cannot stand the strain
of battling against the obstacles in life. Therefore, I relieve the comrades of the incubus
of my inutility. Love to friends and the camaraderie. Long live anarchy!”
Miss Goldman left at 5 o’clock yesterday evening for Cleveland, where she will give a
series of lectures, beginning this evening.2

Pittsburg (Pa.) Post, 5 May 1901, p. 2. Copyright 2001 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. All rights reserved. Reprinted
with permission.

2. EG lectured on 5 May 1901 in Cleveland on “The Modern Phase of Anarchy” before the Franklin Lib-
eral Club. She also spoke later that evening on “The Cause and Effect of Vice.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 451

 Ar ticle in the C L E V E L A N D P L A I N D E A L E R
Cleveland, 6 May 1901

Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers.

Woman Praises Motives Leading Up to Many Terrible Crimes.

Speaker Arraigns Police Who Attend an Anarchist Meeting.

Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist orator and propagandist, addressed a meeting at
Memorial hall yesterday afternoon.1 While the hall was not crowded, a good sized audi-
ence was in attendance and evidenced its approval of the speaker’s sentiments by fre-
quent and vigorous applause.
Officers Bernhart and Thorpe of the citizens’ squad formed a portion of the audience,
while Patrolman Gibbons lingered around on the sidewalk in front of the hall, just to be
handy in case of emergency. Nothing at all exciting happened, however, and the plain
clothes men up stairs never turned a hair as the orator entered upon a scathing arraign-
ment of policemen, and especially detectives. “Soldiers are bad enough,” she said, “but
policemen are worse, and a detective is the meanest and most despicable creature in the
universe.” It is said that Miss Goldman had been informed that the “plain clothes” men
were to be among her auditors, and she considerately intended to include them in the
class of “detectives.”
Miss Goldman is of small stature, but is a woman of wonderful vigor. She has a strong
and resonant voice, and her command of English is excellent, although she has a slight
German accent. She spoke entirely without reference to notes, and never for a moment
hesitated or stumbled in her delivery. She has a fine vocabulary and also shows evidence
of careful and systematic reading.
Miss Goldman outlined the principles of anarchism and detailed the methods by
which she hoped for their accomplishment. Her talk was full of forceful passages, in
some cases more notable for their strength than for their elegance.
“Men under the present state of society are mere products of circumstances,” she
said. “Under the galling yoke of government, ecclesiasticism and the bonds of custom
and prejudice it is impossible for the individual to work out his own career as he could

1. EG addressed the Franklin Club in Cleveland on 5 May, traveling there from Pittsburgh, where she
had delivered the eulogy at Joseph Paita’s funeral the day before (see “Body Cremated, Goldman
Spoke,” Article in the Pittsburgh Post, 5 May 1901, above). In attendance was Leon Czolgosz. EG later
recognized Czolgosz as the young man who approached her at intermission and asked her to suggest
something for him to read.

452 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

wish. Anarchism aims at a new and complete freedom. It strives to bring about a free-
dom which is not only a freedom from within but also a freedom from without, which
will prevent any man having the desire to interfere in any way with the liberty of his
neighbor. Vanderbilt says, ‘I am a free man within myself, but the others be damned.’ 2
This is not the freedom that we are striving for. We merely desire complete individual lib-
erty and this can never be obtained as long as there is an existing government.
“We do not favor the Socialist idea of converting men and women into mere produc-
ing machines under the eye of a paternal government. We go to the opposite extreme and
demand the fullest and most complete liberty for each and every person to work out his
own salvation upon any line that he pleases so long as he does not interfere with the hap-
piness of others. The degrading notion of men and women as breeding machines is far
from our ideals of life.
“Anarchism has nothing to do with future governments or economic arrange-
ments. We do not favor any particular settlement in this line, but merely seek to do away
with the present evils. The future will provide for these arrangements after our work has
been done. Anarchism deals merely with social relations and not with economic
arrangements.”
The speaker deprecated the idea that all Anarchists were in favor of violence and
bomb throwing. She declared that nothing was further from the principles which they
support. She then went on, however, into a detailed explanation of the different crimes
committed by Anarchists lately, declaring that the motive was good in each case, and that
these acts were merely a matter of temperament. Some men were so constituted, she
said, that they were unable to stand idly by and see the wrongs that were being endured
by their fellow mortals. She herself did not believe in these methods, but she did not
think that they should be too severely condemned in view of the high and noble mo-
tives which prompted their perpetration. “We must have education before we can have
power,” declared Miss Goldman. “Some believe that we should first obtain the force and
let the intelligence and education come afterwards. Nothing could be more fallacious. If
we get the education and intelligence first among the people the power will come to us
without a struggle.”
In the evening Miss Goldman spoke on “The Cause and Effect of Vice.” She dwelt in
detail upon the most revolting forms of social evil, and assigned to each their cause.
Some of the vices which are most abhorrent to the sense of modern civilization were up-
held by Miss Goldman.
She bitterly attacked the churches and the modern system of education as respon-
sible for most of the social evil. She did not hesitate to put forward a number of senti-

2. EG paraphrases railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt who in 1879 eliminated a popular but
unprofitable railroad line between New York and Chicago. When asked if he should not take a loss in
order to provide a public service, Vanderbilt replied, “The public be damned. I am working for my
stockholders.”

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 453

 ments far more radical and sensational than anything ever before publicly advanced in
Cleveland.
She was warmly applauded throughout her remarks by a crowd fully twice as big as
that of the afternoon. Patrolmen Wilmore, Martinec and Smith of the citizens’ dress
squad were present during the address, but did not deem it necessary to interfere.

Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 May 1901, p. 8. Copyright 1901 The Plain Dealer. All rights reserved. Reprinted with
permission.

454 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 Essay in F R E E S O C I E T Y
New York, 2 June 1901

Gaetano Bresci.

Gaetano Bresci, the Italian rebel and Anarchist, whose overflowing sympathy with hu-
man suffering prompted him to strike down one of the world’s tyrants, is dead (at least
such is the report circulated in the daily press).1 All tyrants, despots, rulers, parasites,
Pharisees, and hypocrites, can now breathe freely once more. What does it matter to
them that they have added another tear and blood-stained page to the history of crime
and misery; that they have tortured a man into insanity; that they have bought their safety
through the agony and despair of a man whose only sin consisted in rebelling against
wrong? He is dead; and tyranny reigns supreme.
“After all the man was only an Anarchist, an enemy to law and order, an outcast; why
care about him?” echoes the thoughtless multitude.
Fortunately the world is not inhabited by tyrants and slaves only; there are a vast num-
ber of men and women whose hearts, even as Bresci’s, throb with love for those whom
power and greed has condemned to everlasting ignorance and despair. Men and women,
in all stations of life, who see the injustice and cruelty around them; and who feel that
Bresci’s awful death is but another indictment against those institutions in society that
are being maintained at the cost of human lives.
A society which destroys myriads of its members, must give birth to men like Bresci.
It is violence and force upon which the whole system is based, and that begets force. How
could it be otherwise?
Bresci is the child of Italy, where the masses of the people toil and sweat, yet never en-
joy the beauties that mother nature has so abundantly bestowed upon that country; Italy,
whose strong, healthy, and stalwart men must leave their native soil to wander in strange
lands in search of bread; Italy, where women are wrecks at the age of twenty, and whose
children, dirty, filthy, ragged, and starved, are degraded to beggars. The few have robbed
the country to gain their accumulated wealth, and are now suppressing every sound of
protest, celebrating orgies to drown the voices of agony coming from the prisons, where
the daring spirits are confined to a life of hell. It was here where he first imbibed the
spirit of discontent and hatred against a society which endures such awful conditions; it

1. Sentenced to life imprisonment on 29 August 1900 for his assassination of King Umberto of Italy a
month earlier, Gaetano Bresci was held in the penitentiary on Santo Stefano Island, having received
the severest sentence allowable under Italian law. News of his apparent suicide reached the United
States on 24 May 1901. Most anarchists, including Bresci’s widow, suspected that he had been mur-
dered by his jailors.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 455

 was here where he learned to understand and to love the idea that is to bring the dawn
of the day, and establish human happiness.
Since man has dictated terms to his brother, the spirit of righteous indignation has
been afloat; and it is well that it should be so. Were it not for the spirit of discontent, of
indignation and protest against wrong, the spirit that feels every blow, pain, and sorrow
that suffering and starving humanity has to endure, progress would be impossible. It
was this spirit that moved man to become helpful, good, and generous; to tear down the
old institutions of darkness and ignorance, and build new ones. It was this spirit that has
given to past generations the power of endurance, determination, and enthusiasm in
their fight for man’s highest treasure—liberty.
Each age has had its John Browns, its Perovskayas, its Parsons, Spies, Angiolillos, and
its Brescis,2 who were misunderstood, persecuted, mobbed, tortured, and killed, by those
who could not reach the sublime heights attained by these men. Yet they have not lived
in vain, for it is to them that we owe all that is good and noble, grand and useful in the
world.
It is therefore useless to assert that the science of life, the philosophy of liberty and
human independence, are responsible for the acts of violence. This may satisfy sensa-
tional minds; but earnest men and women are beginning to understand that the philos-
ophy of Anarchism, which occupies the most intellectual minds of our time, which has
given to the world a Tolstoy, a Kropotkin, and many others, which permeates the litera-
ture, art, science, and every branch of human knowledge, which aims at the deliverance
of mankind from a life of tragedy and despair, which is based upon harmony, and the
recognition of the equal rights of every individual to all that his intelligence, skill, and in-
genuity can produce, certainly can have nothing to do with violence, nor have the repre-
sentatives of this idea ever advocated it.
Bresci has paid the penalty of his crime. And a crime indeed it was to have loved one’s
kind, to have felt the existing wrongs in the world, and to have dared to strike a blow at
organized authority. He has lived and died true to himself; and the world will have to
learn that while one Bresci is killed, hundreds are born ready to lay down their lives to
free mankind from tyranny, power, ignorance, and poverty.

Emma Goldman.

Free Society, 2 June 1901, p. 1.

2. In addition to the American rebel John Brown, EG refers to Russian revolutionary activist Sophia Per-
ovskaya, the Chicago Haymarket anarchists Albert Parsons and August Spies, and Italian anarchist
Michele Angiolillo.

456 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 10 July 1901

Dear Girl:

This is from the hospital, sub rosa. Just out of the strait-jacket, after eight days.
For over a year I was in the strictest solitary; for a long time mail and reading matter
were denied me. I have no words to describe the horror of the last months . . . . I have
passed through a great crisis. Two of my best friends died in a frightful manner. The death
of Russell,1 especially, affected me. He was very young, and my dearest and most devoted
friend, and he died a terrible death. The doctor charged the boy with shamming, but now
he says it was spinal meningitis. I cannot tell you the awful truth,—it was nothing short
of murder, and my poor friend rotted away by inches. When he died they found his back
one mass of bedsores. If you could read the pitiful letters he wrote, begging to see me, and
to be nursed by me! But the Warden wouldn’t permit it. In some manner his agony
seemed to affect me, and I began to experience the pains and symptoms that Russell de-
scribed in his notes. I knew it was my sick fancy; I strove against it, but presently my legs
showed signs of paralysis, and I suffered excruciating pain in the spinal column, just like
Russell. I was afraid that I would be done to death like my poor friend. I grew suspicious
of every guard, and would barely touch the food, for fear of its being poisoned. My “head
was workin’,” they said. And all the time I knew it was my diseased imagination, and I was
in terror of going mad . . . . I tried so hard to fight it, but it would always creep up, and get
hold of me stronger and stronger. Another week of solitary would have killed me.
I was on the verge of suicide. I demanded to be relieved from the cell, and the War-
den ordered me punished. I was put in the strait-jacket. They bound my body in canvas,
strapped my arms to the bed, and chained my feet to the posts. I was kept that way eight
days, unable to move, rotting in my own excrement. Released prisoners called the atten-
tion of our new Inspector to my case. He refused to believe that such things were being
done in the penitentiary. Reports spread that I was going blind and insane. Then the In-
spector visited the hospital and had me released from the jacket.
I am in pretty bad shape, but they put me in the general ward now, and I am glad of
the chance to send you this note.

Sasha.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 424 –25.

1. Russell Schroyer died on 25 April. A young man of nineteen years, Schroyer was portrayed by AB as
full of impractical plans to escape the Western Penitentiary. He took part in one abortive escape at-
tempt with AB and was privy to the escape tunnel being dug to free AB. He died as a result of appar-
ent medical malpractice. AB gave no details of Schroyer’s sentence, except that it was a short one and
he was about to be released when he died. See Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 368 –70.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 457

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 25 July 1901

Dear Sonya:

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be allowed to write to you again. My privileges have
been restored by our new Inspector, a very kindly man. He has relieved me from the cell,
and now I am again on the range. The Inspector requested me to deny to my friends the
reports which have recently appeared in the papers concerning my condition. I have not
been well of late, but now I hope to improve. My eyes are very poor. The Inspector has
given me permission to have a specialist examine them. Please arrange for it through our
local comrades.
There is another piece of very good news, dear friend. A new commutation law has
been passed,1 which reduces my sentence by 21/2 years. It still leaves me a long time, of
course; almost 4 years here, and another year to the workhouse. However, it is a consid-
erable gain, and if I should not get into solitary again, I may—I am almost afraid to ut-
ter the thought—I may live to come out. I feel as if I am being resurrected.
The new law benefits the short-timers proportionately much more than the men with
longer sentences. Only the poor lifers do not share in it. We were very anxious for a while,
as there were many rumors that the law would be declared unconstitutional. Fortunately,
the attempt to nullify its benefits proved ineffectual. Think of men who will see some-
thing unconstitutional in allowing the prisoners a little more good time than the com-
mutation statute of 40 years ago. As if a little kindness to the unfortunates—really jus-
tice—is incompatible with the spirit of Jefferson! We were greatly worried over the fate
of this statute, but at last the first batch has been released, and there is much rejoicing
over it.
There is a peculiar history about this new law, which may interest you; it sheds a
significant side light. It was especially designed for the benefit of a high Federal officer
who was recently convicted of aiding two wealthy Philadelphia tobacco manufacturers to
defraud the government of a few millions, by using counterfeit tax stamps. Their
influence secured the introduction of the commutation bill and its hasty passage. The
law would have cut their sentences almost in two, but certain newspapers seem to have

1. Pennsylvania’s Commutation Act of 1901 repealed an earlier act of 21 May 1869. The 1901 act allowed
for reducing a prison sentence for good behavior: shaving off two months for the first year, three
months for the second year, four months each for the third and fourth years, and five months for each
subsequent year. Upon intake, prisoners were informed of their right to the reduction of sentence
based upon good behavior. Monthly reports were issued by prison officials to the governor for reduc-
tion recommendations; if a prisoner was not recommended, the officials had to provide justification;
the governor, however, could override the recommendation.

458 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

taken offence at having been kept in ignorance of the “deal,” and protests began to be
voiced. The matter finally came up before the Attorney General of the United States,2
who decided that the men in whose special interest the law was engineered, could not
benefit by it, because a State law does not affect U.S. prisoners, the latter being subject
to the Federal commutation act.3 Imagine the discomfiture of the politicians! An attempt
was even made to suspend the operation of the statute. Fortunately it failed, and now the
“common” State prisoners, who were not at all meant to profit, are being released. The
legislature has unwittingly given some unfortunates here much happiness.
I was interrupted in this writing by being called out for a visit. I could hardly credit it:
the first comrade I have been allowed to see in nine years! It was Harry Gordon,4 and I
was so overcome by the sight of the dear friend, I could barely speak. He must have pre-
vailed upon the new Inspector to issue a permit. The latter is now Acting Warden, owing
to the serious illness of Captain Wright.5 Perhaps he will allow me to see my sister.6 Will
you kindly communicate with her at once? Meantime I shall try to secure a pass.

With renewed hope, and always with green memory of you,

Alex.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 410 –11.

2. In fact, AB is referring to the Pennsylvania state attorney general in 1901, John P. Elkin, who had run
unsuccessfully for governor of Indiana in 1896. He then served as president of the Pennsylvania State
Association of School Directors until 1901. He again ran unsuccessfully for governor, this time of
Pennsylvania in 1902, and was elected as a Pennsylvania state supreme court justice in 1905.
3. Attorney General Elkin noted that the 1901 act was constitutional in that every constitutional re-
quirement for granting of a pardon had been set out in the act; he declared that the act could be ap-
plied retroactively and did not fall within ex post facto considerations prohibited by the Constitution.
He clarified that as a state law, it applied only to prisoners convicted in state courts, not to federal pris-
oners incarcerated in state prisons.
4. A Lithuanian-born anarchist living in Pittsburgh, Harry Gordon had served as both secretary and
treasurer of the Berkman Defense Association.
5. According to a note in AB’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (p. 419), Warden E. S. Wright forced officer
Robert G. Hunter to testify against men who Hunter knew were innocent. Upon disclosure of this co-
erced testimony, Warden Wright had fallen ill. Hunter later committed suicide.
6. “Sister” was AB’s code for EG.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 459

 Ar ticle in the S A N F R A N C I S C O C H R O N I C L E
San Francisco, 8 September 1901

Assassin’s Trail of Crime

from Chicago to the Pacific Coast.

Assassin Tells of His Crime.

Czolgosz Declares Emma Goldman’s Words Drove Him to Murder.

Chicago, September 7—A special to the Daily News from Buffalo says: The statement of
Leon Czolgosz,1 made to the police, transcribed and signed by the prisoner, is as follows:
“I was born in Detroit nearly twenty-nine years ago. My parents were Russian Poles.
They came here forty-two years ago. I got my education in the public schools of Detroit,
and then went to Cleveland, where I got work. In Cleveland I read books on socialism
and met a great many Socialists. I was pretty well known as a Socialist in the West. After
being in Cleveland for several years I went to Chicago, where I remained seven months,
after which I went to Newburg, on the outskirts of Cleveland, and went to work in the
Newburg wire mills.
“During the last five years I have had as friends, anarchists in Chicago, Cleveland, De-
troit and other Western cities, and I suppose I became more or less bitter. Yes, I know I
was bitter. I never had much luck at anything and this preyed upon me. It made me mo-
rose and envious, but what started the craze to kill was a lecture I heard some time ago
by Emma Goldman.2 She was in Cleveland, and I and other anarchists went to hear her.
She set me on fire.
“Her doctrine that all rulers should be exterminated was what set me to thinking so
that my head nearly split with the pain. Miss Goldman’s words went right through me,

1. On 6 September 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposi-
tion in Buffalo, New York. McKinley died from complications of his wounds eight days later, and Czol-
gosz was sentenced to death on 26 September, barely three weeks later. A factory worker and son of
Polish immigrants, Czolgosz had been influenced by the Haymarket incident and the 1893 strike in
Cleveland, had attended socialist meetings in Cleveland, and been in contact with Cleveland anarchist
Emil Schilling, who had warned readers in Free Society, 1 September 1901, that Czolgosz had been
asking suspicious questions and may be an agent provocateur. Czolgosz had also attended a lecture
by EG in Cleveland on 5 May 1901. (For a report of this lecture, see “Defends Acts of Bomb Throw-
ers,” Article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 May 1901, above.)
2. EG lectured on 5 May 1901 at the Franklin Liberal Club in Cleveland on “Modern Phases of Anarchy,”
where Czolgosz asked for suggestions on reading material (see note 1, “Defends Acts of Bomb Throw-
ers,” Article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 May 1901, above).

460 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 In the wake of the assassination of President McKinley, this newspaper photo embel-
lished with drawing of flames demonized Goldman, both reinforcing and fostering the pub-
lic’s fear of anarchists. (Copyright 1901. Chicago Tribune Co. All rights reserved. Used with
permission.)

and when I left the lecture I had made up my mind that I would have to do something
heroic for the cause I loved.
“Eight days ago, while I was in Chicago, I read in a Chicago newspaper of President
McKinley’s visit to the Pan American Exposition at Buffalo. That day I bought a ticket for
Buffalo and got here with the determination to do something, but I did not know just
what. I thought of shooting the President, but I had not formed a plan.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 461

 “I went to live at 1078 Broadway, which is a saloon and hotel. John Nowak,3 a Pole, a
sort of politician, who has led his people here for years, owns it. I told Nowak that I came
to see the fair. He knew nothing about what was setting me crazy. I went to the exposi-
tion grounds a couple of times a day.
“Not until Tuesday morning did the resolution to shoot the President take hold of me.
It was in my heart; there was no escape for me. I could not have conquered it had my life
been at stake. There were thousands of people in town on Tuesday. I heard it was the
President’s day. All of these people seemed bowing to the great ruler. I made up my mind
to kill that ruler. I bought a 32-caliber revolver and loaded it. On Tuesday night I went to
the fair grounds and was near the railroad gate when the Presidential party arrived. I
tried to get near him, but the police forced me back. They forced everybody back so that
the great ruler could pass. I was close to the President when he got into the grounds, but
was afraid to attempt the assassination because there were so many men in the body-
guard that watched him. I was not afraid of them or that I should get hurt, but afraid I
might be seized and that my chance would be gone forever.
“Well, he went away that time and I went home. On Wednesday I went to the grounds
and stood right near the President, right under him, near the stand from which he spoke.
I thought half a dozen times of shooting while he was speaking, but I could not get close
enough. I was afraid I might miss, and then the great crowd was always jostling, and I
was afraid lest my aim fail. I waited Wednesday, and the President got into his carriage
again, and a lot of men were about him and formed a cordon that I could not get through.
I was tossed about by the crowd, and my spirits were getting pretty low. I was almost
hopeless that night as I went home.
“Yesterday morning I went again to the exposition grounds. Emma Goldman’s speech
was still burning me up. I waited near the central entrance for the President, who was to
board his special train from that gate, but the police allowed nobody but the President’s
party to pass where the train waited, so I stayed at the grounds all day waiting.
“During yesterday I first thought of hiding my pistol under my handkerchief. I was
afraid if I had to draw it from my pocket I would be seen and seized by the guards. I got
to the Temple of Music the first one, and waited at the spot where the reception was to
be held. Then he came—the President—the ruler, and I got in line and trembled until
I got right up to him, and then I shot him twice through my white handkerchief. I would
have fired more, but I was stunned by a blow in the face—a frightful blow that knocked
me down—and then everybody jumped on me. I thought I would be killed, and was sur-
prised the way they treated me.” 4

3. Walter Nowak went to the police to speak with Czolgosz following his act.
4. Czolgosz waited in a reception line on Friday, 6 September, at the Pan-American Exposition’s Temple
of Music, ostensibly to shake hands with McKinley. When he reached the front of the line, Czolgosz
shot McKinley, leaving the president severely wounded. Czolgosz was arrested immediately and later
that night signed a confession, in which he stated that the last person he heard speaking was EG, but
that she did not tell him to kill the president.

462 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 Czolgosz ended his story in utter exhaustion. When he had concluded, he was asked:
“Did you really mean to kill the President?”
“I did,” was the cold-blooded reply.
“What was your motive, what good could it do you?” he was asked.
“I am an anarchist. I am a disciple of Emma Goldman. Her words set me on fire,” he
replied, with not the slightest tremor. “I deny that I have had an accomplice at any time,”
Czolgosz told District Attorney Tenney. “I don’t regret my act, because I was doing what
I could for the great cause. I am not connected with the Patterson group, or with those
anarchists who sent Bresci to Italy to kill Humbert.5 I had no confidants; no one to help
me. I was alone absolutely.”

San Francisco Chronicle, 8 September 1901, p. 2.

5. Paterson, New Jersey, was a stronghold of Italian American anarchism. The Italian American Gaetano
Bresci, who traveled to Italy and assassinated King Umberto (styled “Humbert” in the American
press) on 29 July 1901, was a member of an anarchist group whose members were militant believers
in propaganda by the deed. On 9 September, Secret Service men searched the office of the Italian-
language anarchist paper, La Questione Social, in Paterson, questioning editor Pedro Esteve, in an ef-
fort to link Paterson anarchists to a plot to assassinate the president.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 463

 Inter view in the N E W Y O R K W O R L D
Chicago, 11 September 1901

Story of the Arrest of Anarchist Queen.

CHICAGO, Sept. 10 —Miss Goldman 1 arrived in Chicago Sunday morning, registered

in a downtown hotel under an assumed name, and yesterday engaged a room in the
Sheffield avenue flat.2
C. G. Norris,3 who owns the flat, was later taken into custody. An hour before the
woman’s arrest the Chief of Police received from a source outside the department news
regarding her whereabouts. Capt. Schuettler,4 a famous Anarchist-hunter of the Hay-
market days, was in the office. Schuettler and Detective Hertz were ordered to go to the
flat and bring in all persons found there.
The building is within the shadow of the Sheffield Avenue Police Station and contains
three flats. In the top flat, so ran the information, the queen of Anarchy was in hiding.

DENIED HER IDENTITY.

“Who are you and what do you want?” she asked.
“We are policemen and we want you, Miss Goldman,” replied Schuettler.
“I am not Miss Goldman, my name is Thorsen, and I am Swedish,” she said.
Schuettler, who had been examining the apartment, picked up a fountain pen and be-
gan spelling “Emma Goldman.”

1. After the 6 September assassination attempt on President McKinley, much of the press held EG and
anarchists responsible for Czolgosz’s act and initiated a widespread campaign for the arrest of EG,
and the punishment of anarchists in general.
2. EG first found out about Czolgosz’s act on Saturday, 7 September, while in St. Louis, through a local
newspaper. At the same time she was alerted to the arrest of local Chicago anarchists Abe and Mary
Isaak, their son and daughter, as well as Hippolyte Havel, Enrico Travaglio, Clemens Pfuetzner, Julia
Mechanic, Alfred Schneider, Jay Fox, Martin Rasnick, and Michael Roz, all of whom were connected,
in some way, with the journal Free Society; there was country-wide sentiment calling for EG’s own ar-
rest. In Living My Life she writes of her decision to go to Chicago and be arrested with her comrades:
“it became clear to me that I must immediately go to Chicago. The Isaak family, Hippolyte, our old
comrade Jay Fox, a most active man in the labor movement, and a number of others were being held
without bail until I should be found. It was plainly my duty to surrender myself. I knew there was nei-
ther reason nor the least proof to connect me with the shooting. I would go to Chicago” (LML, p. 296).
According to the New York World interview (datelined Wednesday, 10 September), EG arrived in Chi-
cago on Sunday morning, 8 September.
3. Charles Goldsmith Norris was a Canadian-born Chicago insurance agent.
4. Hermann Schuettler was a Chicago detective, known for his dramatic arrest of Louis Lingg; Schuet-
tler was later promoted to assistant chief of police.

464 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

Sensationalist reportage in the 11 September 1901 San Francisco Call typified negative representations of Gold-
man as Leon Czolgosz’s accomplice and as a force of evil.
 “You are a smart policeman,” she laughed. “Yes, I am Emma Goldman, and I was just
thinking of going down to police headquarters and give myself up. If you had come an
hour later I would have been gone. If you will excuse me while I change my waist I will
go with you.”
The suspicious policeman balked at Miss Goldman’s desire to close the door of her
bedroom during the toilet proceedings. A compromise was reached by leaving the door
half open. Finally she emerged carrying a book, Towards Democracy,5 and announced her-
self ready to go.
“Why, this is all nonsense and I am innocent as a babe, as far as conspiring to kill the
President or inspiring others to do it,” 6 she said to Schuettler.

TO HEADQUARTERS IN STREET CAR.

The trip to headquarters was made in a street car. Miss Goldman read her book, and once
looked up to the two men sitting beside her and said:
“Do I look like the woman they paint me?”
In a jaunty white sailor hat, white waist, blue skirt, belt and necktie she looked any-
thing but bloodthirsty. She was calm and good humored when the City Hall was reached.
Ushered into the chief’s office she sat down and began reading her book. Chief O’Neill
summoned Mayor Harrison 7 and an inquisition began, which lasted an hour. Although
she maintained her self control she could not refrain at times from weeping.
Soon after her arrest she sent the following telegram:

H. Hochstein,8 No. 213 Joseph ave., Rochester, N. Y.:

Don’t worry. Am arrested. Will be out soon. Comfort mother.
E

Miss Goldman told her story as follows:

“While in Buffalo I stopped with Hattie Lang 9 and left for the home of my sister in
Rochester at noon on July 15. I stayed in Rochester until Aug. 17 or 18, and during the
time I was there I wrote five letters to Havel,10 which I suppose are now in the hands of

5. Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy (London: J. Heywood, 1883) is a long prose poem reflecting
the influence of Walt Whitman and expressing Carpenter’s belief in the movement of humanity to-
ward freedom and happiness.
6. In a similar article published in the New York Times of the same date, EG was quoted as saying, “Am
I accountable because some crack-brained person put a wrong construction on my words? Leon
Czolgosz, I am convinced, planned the deed unaided and entirely alone” (New York Times, 11 Sep-
tember 1901).
7. Carter H. Harrison, Jr. (1860 –1953) was mayor of Chicago from 1897 to 1905 and the son of Carter
Harrison, who had been mayor of Chicago for five terms, one of which encompassed the Haymar-
ket riot and trial. After the McKinley assassination, he prevented EG from speaking in Chicago.
8. EG’s sister, Helene Hochstein.
9. Hattie Lang was a Buffalo anarchist and the local distribution agent for Free Society. EG stayed with
her in Buffalo in 1901.
10. After traveling to the United States with EG, Hippolyte Havel settled in Chicago.

466 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

the police. From Rochester I went to a number of other cities, accompanied by relatives.
I was taking a short vacation and visiting my friends. I stopped in Buffalo, Pittsburg,
Cincinnati and St. Louis. I came to Chicago, as I had intended, and was to have gone
from here to Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Buffalo and New York. In these various cities
I sold office supplies to pay my expenses.” 11

HEARD THE NEWS IN ST. LOUIS.

“I first heard of the President’s attempted assassination Friday afternoon. The newsboys
of St. Louis were crying it. I was riding on a Tower Grove line car at the time, and was on
my way to my boarding-house at No. 1350 South Thirteenth street. I did not buy a pa-
per, because I did not believe the news to be true. They print so many things that are not
true! This is especially the case whenever a ruler travels. They are always finding plots
and bombs on those occasions.
“I did not read a paper until Saturday noon. I had got through with my business, and
when I went to lunch I thought I would see what was causing all the excitement. I never
was more surprised in my life than when I saw that I had been connected with the affair.
“That afternoon I sent a telegram to some friends in Chicago asking if the Isaaks 12
were in trouble. The newspapers said they were under arrest, but I would not believe
them. I wanted to get information from persons who tell the truth. I received a reply to
my telegram, stating that the newspaper account was true and that the Isaaks were be-
ing held.
“This information caused me to determine to come to Chicago and help them if I
could. I left St. Louis Saturday night by the Wabash, and arrived at the Polk Street Depot
about 8 o’clock Sunday morning. I was dressed as I am to-day, except that I was not wear-
ing my glasses. I do not always wear them. They become painful after I wear them a
while. I had a wrap and a small handbag, which I gave to the porter. I came from the train
with a crowd. A woman preceded me and a woman followed me. I saw a detective—you
know you can’t miss them if you ever have had any experience with them.”

NE VER SAW MISS GOLDMAN.

“He was about as intelligent as the usual one of his profession. He looked at the woman
ahead and the woman behind, but never a glance did he give to me. I called a cab and
went to a hotel, the name of which I do not care to give. I registered under an assumed
name, so it’s no use to try to find the place.
“Sunday I walked about town and Monday I went shopping at Field’s, walked up and
down State street and passed the City Hall two or three times. Monday evening I went to

11. EG worked for Edward Brady’s firm as a traveling salesperson to supplement her income while on
lecture tours.
12. Abe and Mary Isaak were arrested directly after the assassination along with their son, Abe Jr.,
daughter Mary, and others. The women were released on 10 September, and the men were charged
with conspiracy to commit an illegal act and held until 23 September 1901.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 467

 No. 303 Sheffield avenue. I had known Mr. Norris in a business way. I did not know his
mother or sister. I told him the situation and asked him to take me in. This he did and
said he was glad to give me shelter. I do not know even if he is a believer in my faith. I
never talked to him about it. I simply met him when he was a travelling salesman and
I have known him about a year. I could think of no place else to go, so I went there, sure
of a welcome.
“If the police had been half an hour later I would have given them a surprise. I in-
tended as soon as I saw that the women arrested at Isaak’s 13 were turned loose to give
myself up. I knew if the police wanted me it was only a question of a short time when
they would get me.”

WANTED TO “HAVE FUN.”

“I was amused when Capt. Schuettler and his detectives came. I was dressed in a loose
wrapper, and it occurred to me to have some fun with them. I wanted to see how smart
they were.
“‘We are looking for Miss Goldman,’ said the handsome captain.
“‘I do not know her,’ I replied in a Swedish accent. ‘I am sure there is no such woman
here.’
“‘And who are you?’ he asked.
“‘My name is Thorsen,’ I answered. ‘I am a domestic here.’
“Then he began a search in the closets and under the beds and all over the premises.
When nothing had been found except a pen-holder with my name on it the Captain said
he would have to leave one of his detectives with me until he could make a further search.
I took a good look at the detective and told the Captain that he need go no further, that I
was Miss Goldman. He allowed me to dress, and I came to the station with them.”
Mayor Harrison here said:
“Miss Goldman, are you sure that fellow Czolgosz didn’t talk plots and assassinations
to you?”
“I am certain he did not,” came the impetuous reply, “but I heard he talked ‘plots’ and
‘inner circles’ to Mr. Isaak and for that reason was denounced as a spy.” 14
“Did any person write to you about this man?” asked the Mayor.
Miss Goldman answered in the negative.
“Suppose a Democrat had shot the President,” Miss Goldman suddenly burst forth,
“would you arrest every Democrat in the land and drag their children to prison as you
have done with us?”
“Why did you come back here,” she was asked.

13. Julia Mechanic was arrested along with Isaak’s wife and daughter.
14. Abe Isaak became suspicious of Czolgosz after his appearance in Chicago when he began inquiring
about anarchist secret societies and talked of violence. After receiving a warning from Cleveland an-
archist Emil Schilling, who had similar suspicions, Isaak printed a warning in Free Society calling
“the attention of the comrades . . . to another police spy” who had recently attended anarchist meet-
ings in Cleveland and Chicago (see Free Society, 1 September 1901).

468 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

SOUGHT TO HELP THE ISAAKS.
“I came to get the Isaaks out. I was at the house at No. 303 Sheffield avenue since yes-
terday. I wanted to know if bail would be allowed to get them out of prison.”
“Where would you get the money to bail them out?”
“I have seen certain people.”
“Who were they?”
“You would not expect me to tell that,” she replied with a smile.
“I have nothing to fear from your officers and your law,” Miss Goldman continued. “I
did not hide from you more than suited my own convenience. I went about the neigh-
borhood where I was staying and yesterday I came downtown. I also walked around the
City Hall and I saw your policemen, but they did not see me. It speaks volumes for the
freedom of this country to see the way myself and my friends are deprived of liberty sim-
ply because we exercise the right of free speech.”
Miss Goldman almost burst into tears at this point.

WAS HUNGRY, SHE SAID.

Then she smiled on all about her and said: “Mr. Mayor, if the State can afford it I would
like to have something to eat. I am awfully hungry. I have ate nothing since 7 o’clock this
morning.”
“You shall have a good dinner because you are an obliging little woman,” said Chief
O’Neill.
“But first,” continued the Chief, “you are such a good-looking woman I really must
have a picture of you.”
The woman smiled and said: “You shall have it.”
Then she burst into tears, but controlled herself in a moment. A carriage was called
and Capt. Schuettler escorted his prisoner to a restaurant, where she ate a hearty dinner.
From there she was driven to the Harrison Street Police Station, where she sat for two
negatives. Then she was turned over to the matron and given the best room in the an-
nex. Once in the matron’s rooms she again gave way to tears, but soon composed herself
and received all callers.
Obstacles confront the Federal and State authorities in Chicago in the possible pros-
ecution of Emma Goldman. It is the opinion of several lawyers that she cannot be taken
for trial in New York unless she and Czolgosz are charged with an offense under the Fed-
eral statutes.

QUESTION OF EXTRADITION.
The suggestion that the assassin must be tried under the State laws of New York for as-
sault with intent to kill would, it is said, preclude the possibility of Miss Goldman’s be-
ing extradited as an accessory before the fact, as her alleged incendiary statements were
not made in New York, and she is not a fugitive from justice from that State.
It is stated, however, that she and Czolgosz might be charged with an offense under
section 5508 of the Federal statutes, which fixes a ten-year term of imprisonment and a

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 469

 $5,000 fine for two or more persons who conspire to injure any citizen in the exercise of
any right secured to him by the Constitution and laws of the United States. The en-
forcement of this statute against Miss Goldman and Czolgosz would, it is said, permit of
the former’s extradition from any State.

“ TIP” CAME FROM A WOMAN.

The “tip” that caused the arrest of Emma Goldman came from a woman. She lives close
to the Norris flat in Sheffield avenue, and while not an Anarchist, is acquainted with
many of them. She saw Emma Goldman enter the flat yesterday, and while not certain of
her identity suspected it. This morning she saw the Goldman woman again and instantly
hastened to Police Headquarters with the information.
Charles Goldsmith Norris, with his mother and sister, Mrs. Stella Thorndale, occupy
the flat. They have lived in it since May and have been puzzles to their neighbors. Norris
is an insurance agent, twenty-nine years old, a Canadian by birth.
“I have known Miss Goldman about a year,” he said. “I met her when she was here in
June. When she asked me for a room I took her in.”
“Why did you not notify the police?” asked the chief. “You knew she was wanted.”
“I don’t want to talk about it until I consult an attorney,” said Norris. “I did not and
don’t think now that she is guilty of anything.”
Percival Verral, a clerk, and Miss Edith Unealt, a relative of Norris, also lived in the
flat. Norris was the only one arrested.

New York World, 11 September 1901, pp. 1, 3.

470 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 Essay in F R E E S O C I E T Y
New York, 6 October 1901

The Tragedy at Buffalo.

For they starve the little frightened child

Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and gray,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Oscar Wilde 1

Never before in the history of governments has the sound of a pistol shot so startled, ter-
rorized, and horrified the self-satisfied, indifferent, contented, and indolent public, as
has the one fired by Leon Czolgosz when he struck down William McKinley,2 president
of the money kings and trust magnates of this country.
Not that this modern Caesar was the first to die at the hands of a Brutus.3 Oh, no!
Since man has trampled upon the rights of his fellowmen, rebellious spirits have been
afloat in the atmosphere. Not that William McKinley was a greater man than those who
throned upon the fettered form of Liberty. He did not compare either in intellect, ability,
personality, or force of character with those who had to pay the penalty of their power.
Nor will history be able to record his extraordinary kindness, generosity, and sympathy
with those whom ignorance and greed have condemned to a life of misery, hopelessness,
and despair.
Why, then, were the mighty and powerful thrown into such consternation by the deed
of September 6? Why this howl of a hired press? Why such blood-thirsty and violent ut-
terances from the clergy, whose usual business it is to preach “peace on earth and good-
will to all”? Why the mad ravings of the mob, the demand for rigid laws to curtail free-
dom of press and speech? 4

1. From Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (London, 1898), part 5.

2. Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley on 6 September 1901, severely wounding but not
killing him. Suffering from two bullet wounds to his abdomen (surgeons were able to remove only
one of the bullets), McKinley died as a result of gangrene in both the stomach and pancreas on 14 Sep-
tember 1901.
3. EG also referred to AB as a “Brutus,” a positive term among anarchists for one who destroyed despotic
power, for his attentat on Henry Clay Frick.
4. Following Czolgosz’s assassination attempt there was a strong wave of anti-anarchist hysteria among
the press, various community leaders, and law enforcement officers. Almost immediately after the as-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 471

 For more than thirty years a small band of parasites have robbed the American people,
and trampled upon the fundamental principles laid down by the forefathers of this coun-
try, guaranteeing to every man, woman, and child, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap-
piness.” For thirty years they have been increasing their wealth and power at the expense
of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging the army of the unemployed, the hungry,
homeless, and friendless portion of humanity, tramping the country from east to west
and north to south, in a vain search for work. For many years the home has been left
to the care of the little ones, while the parents are working their life and strength away
for a small pittance. For thirty years the sturdy sons of America were sacrificed on the
battlefield of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt factory surroundings.
For long and weary years this process of undermining the nation’s health, vigor, and
pride, without much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been going on.
Maddened by success and victory, the money-powers of this “free land of our’s” became
more and more audacious in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with rotten and de-
cayed European tyrannies in supremacy of power.
With the minds of the young poisoned with a perverted conception of patriotism, and
the fallacious notion that all are equal and that each one has the same opportunity to be-
come a millionaire (provided he can steal the first hundred thousand dollars), it was an
easy matter indeed to check the discontent of the people; one is therefore not surprised
when one hears Americans say, “We can understand why the poor Russians kill their
czar, or the Italians their king, for think of the conditions that prevail there; but he who
lives in a republic, where each one has the opportunity to become president of the United
States, (provided he has a powerful party back of him); we are the people, and acts of vio-
lence in our country are impossible.”
And now that the impossible has happened, that even America has given birth to the

sassination attempt the press began to associate all anarchists, and especially EG, with the crime. As
early as 7 September, the day after McKinley was shot, newspapers across the country were linking
EG’s words with Czolgosz’s deed. Headlines claimed “Czolgosz Declares Emma Goldman’s Words
Drove Him to Murder” (San Francisco Chronicle, 8 September 1901); “Nieman’s Crime Expected to
Result in Movement to Rid Country of Red Conspirators” (Chicago Tribune, 7 September 1901); “Po-
lice Dragnet Out for Emma Goldman, Vigorous Search for Her in Chicago and Other Cities” (New
York World, 9 September 1901); “All Are Guilty, Punishment Is in Store for Anarchist Who Advised
Violence Against the President” (Buffalo Commercial, 9 September 1901); and the most sensational,
“Czolgosz’s Portrait in Emma Goldman’s Room, Police Are Confident That She Was a Party to the At-
tempted Assassination of the President” (San Francisco Examiner, 10 September 1901). As early as 10
September, a Chicago group, the National Association of Merchants and Travelers, adopted resolu-
tions to prevent anarchists from entering the United States. In California, Representative Metcalf pro-
posed an anti-anarchist immigration law, and in New York the police commissioner ordered a careful
census of all anarchists in the city to “make conditions disagreeable for those named.” Also in New
York the Marquette Club organized a committee to “extirpate Anarchists.” See Free Society, 6 October
1901, for a sampling of unsolicited letters sent to the paper in the wake of McKinley’s death. Reports
of EG being hung in effigy were also circulated.

472 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

Police mug shot of Goldman in Chicago on 10 September 1901, taken upon her arrest based on circumstantial evi-
dence in relation to President McKinley’s assassination. With no official charges, she was released on 24 September.
(Library of Congress)

man who struck down the king of the republic, they have lost their heads, and are shout-
ing vengeance upon those who for years have shown that the conditions here were be-
ginning to be alarming, and unless a halt be called, despotism would set its heavy foot on
the hitherto relatively free limbs of the people.
In vain have the mouthpieces of wealth denounced Leon Czolgosz as a foreigner; 5 in

5. Leon Czolgosz was an American-born citizen, his parents were Polish immigrants.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 473

 Police intake report describing Goldman’s physical characteristics at her 10 September 1901 arrest in Chicago. (Li-
brary of Congress)

vain they are making the world believe that he is the product of European conditions, and
influenced by European ideas. This time the assassin happens to be the child of Colum-
bia, who lulled him to sleep with

“My country, ’t is of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,” etc.,

and who held out the hope to him that he too could become president of the country.
Who can tell how many times this American child had gloried in the celebration of the

474 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

4th of July, or on Decoration Day, when he faithfully honored the nation’s dead? Who
knows but what he too was willing to “fight for his country and die for her liberty”; un-
til it dawned on him that those he belonged to have no country, because they have been
robbed of all that they have produced; until he saw that all the liberty and independence
of his youthful dreams are but a farce. Perhaps he also learned that it is nonsense to talk
of equality between those who have all and those who have nothing, hence he rebelled.
“But his act was mad and cowardly,” say the ruling class. “It was foolish and imprac-
tical,” echo all petty reformers, Socialists, and even some Anarchists.6
What absurdity! As if an act of this kind can be measured by its usefulness, expedi-
ency, or practicability. We might as well ask ourselves of the usefulness of a cyclone, tor-
nado, a violent thunderstorm, or the ceaseless fall of the Niagara waters. All these forces
are the natural results of natural causes, which we may not yet have been able to explain,
but which are nevertheless a part of nature, just as all force is natural and part of man
and beast, developed or checked, according to the pressure of conditions and man’s un-
derstanding. An act of violence is therefore not only the result of conditions, but also
of man’s psychical and physical nature, and his susceptibility to the world surround-
ing him.7
Does not the summer fight against the winter, does it not resist, mourn, and weep
oceans of tears in its eager attempt to shield its children from the icy grip of frost? And
does not the winter enshroud mother earth with a white, hard cover, lest the warm spring
sunshine should melt the heart of the hardened old gentleman? And does he not gather
his last forces for a bitter and fierce battle for supremacy, until the burning rays of the
sun disperse his rank?
Resistance against force is a fact all through nature. Man being part of nature, he, too,
is swayed by the same force to defend himself against invasion. Force will continue to be
a natural factor just so long as economic slavery, social superiority, inequality, exploita-
tion, and war continue to destroy all that is good and noble in man.
That the economic and political conditions of this country have been pregnant with
the embryo of greed and despotism, no one who thinks and has closely watched events
can deny. It was therefore but a question of time for the first signs of labor pains to be-

6. Immediately following Czolgosz’s act there was general confusion and debate in anarchist circles.
Some anarchists, including Saul Yanovsky, editor of Freie Arbeiter Stimme, whose offices in New York
were attacked on 15 September, denounced Czolgosz’s act. Some, such as EG and Kate Austin, de-
fended Czolgosz in Free Society, while others, including Abe Isaak, Jr., tried to explain and interpret
his actions; still others, such as C. L. James, argued that attempts made by police and government
officials to suppress anarchism actually did more to further anarchist propaganda than anarchists
themselves could ever accomplish. Some individualist anarchists, including Joseph Labadie, were ap-
palled by the affair and considered Czolgosz insane.
7. EG’s comparison of individual acts of violence to natural phenomena echoes August Spies’s discus-
sion of revolution in his address to the jury on 6 October 1886, reproduced in The Accused, the Ac-
cusers . . . (Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Society, [1886?]). For another example of EG’s use of Spies’s
analogy, see Letter to the Detroit Sentinel, 25 July 1898.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 475

 gin. And they began when McKinley, more than any other president, had betrayed the
trust of the people, and became the tool of the moneyed kings. They began when he and
his class had stained the memory of the men who produced the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, through the blood of the massacred Filipinos.8 They grew more violent at the rec-
ollection of Hazleton,9 Virden,10 Idaho,11 and other places, where capital has waged war
on labor; until on the 6th of September the child begotten, nourished and reared by vio-
lence, was born.
That violence is not the result of conditions only, but also largely depends upon man’s
inner nature, is best proven by the fact that while thousands loathe tyranny, but one will
strike down a tyrant. What is it that drives him to commit the act, while others pass qui-
etly by? It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more
keenly and with greater intensity than others.
It is, therefore, not cruelty, or a thirst for blood, or any other criminal tendency, that
induces such a man to strike a blow at organized power. On the contrary, it is mostly be-
cause of a strong social instinct, because of an abundance of love and an overflow of sym-
pathy with the pain and sorrow around us, a love which seeks refuge in the embrace
of mankind, a love so strong that it shrinks before no consequence, a love so broad that
it can never be wrapped up in one object, as long as thousands perish, a love so all-
absorbing that it can neither calculate, reason, investigate, but only dare at all costs.
It is generally believed that men prompted to put the dagger or bullet in the cowardly
heart of government, were men conceited enough to think that they will thereby liberate
the world from the fetters of despotism. As far as I have studied the psychology of an act
of violence, I find that nothing could be further away from the thought of such a man
than that if the king were dead, the mob will cease to shout, “Long live the king!”
The cause for such an act lies deeper, far too deep for the shallow multitude to com-
prehend. It lies in the fact that the world within the individual, and the world around
him, are two antagonistic forces, and therefore must clash.
Do I say that Czolgosz is made of that material? No. Neither can I say that he was not.
Nor am I in a position to say whether or not he is an Anarchist; I did not know the man;
no one as far as I am aware seems to have known him, but from his attitude and behav-
ior so far, (I hope that no reader of Free Society has believed the newspaper lies), I feel that
he was a soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world of ours, a soul
“impractical,” inexpedient, lacking in caution, (according to the dictum of the wise); but
daring just the same, and I cannot help but bow in reverenced silence before the power

8. EG refers to the independence movement in the Philippines where, after the Spanish-American
War, the United States fought for colonial control of the country for a decade.
9. EG refers to the 10 September 1897 massacre of peacefully striking coal miners in Pennsylvania.
10. EG refers to the 13 October 1898 coal strike at Virden, Illinois, where armed guards of the Chicago-
Virden Coal Company killed seven miners; four guards also died.
11. EG refers to the strike at the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mining Company in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in
1899, organized by the Western Federation of Miners.

476 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

of such a soul, that has broken the narrow walls of its prison, and has taken a daring leap
into the unknown.
Having shown that violence is not the result of personal influence, or one particular
ideal, I deem it unnecessary to go into a lengthy theoretical discussion as to whether An-
archism contains the element of force or not. The question has been discussed time and
again, and it is proven that Anarchism and violence are as far apart from each other as
liberty and tyranny. I care not what the rabble says; but to those who are still capable of
understanding I would say that Anarchism, being a philosophy of life, aims to establish
a state of society in which man’s inner make-up and the conditions around him, can
blend harmoniously together, so that he will be able to utilize all the forces to enlarge and
beautify the life about him. To those I would also say that I do not advocate violence; gov-
ernment does this, and force begets force.12 It is a fact which cannot be done away with
through the prosecution of a few men and women, or by more stringent laws—this only
tends to increase it.
Violence will die a natural death when man will learn to understand that each unit has
its place in the universe, and while being closely linked together, it must remain free to
grow and expand.
Some people have hastily said that Czolgosz’s act was foolish and will check the
growth of progress. Those worthy people are wrong in forming hasty conclusions. What
results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one thing, however, is certain: he
has wounded government in its most vital spot. As to stopping the wheel of progress,
that is absurd. Ideas cannot be retarded by restraint. And as to petty police persecution,
what matter?
As I write this, my thoughts wander to the death cell at Auburn,13 to the young man
with the girlish face, about to be put to death by the coarse, brutal hands of the law, walk-
ing up and down the narrow cell, with cold, cruel eyes following him,

“Who watch him when he tries to weep

And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.” 14

And my heart goes out to him in deep sympathy, and to all those victims of a system of
inequality, and the many who will die the forerunners of a better, nobler, grander life.

Emma Goldman.

12. These words would be echoed by Hippolyte Havel, Harry Kelly, and AB in 1912, after EG’s and Ben
Reitman’s brutal experience with vigilantes in San Diego during the IWW’s free speech fights there.
In a letter written on 14 May and published in the 18 May 1912 New York World they write, “Violence
begets violence. Terror from above breeds terror from below.”
13. After Czolgosz was sentenced to death on 26 September, he was transferred to the Auburn prison
in Cayuga County, New York, where on 29 October he was executed.
14. Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol, part 1.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 477

 Free Society, 6 October 1901, pp. 1–2. Reprinted in Mother Earth 1 (October 1906): 11–16. This essay ap-
peared in the first issue of Free Society published after the arrest of its editor, Abe Isaak, following Czolgosz’s
assassination of McKinley. The article caused some of EG’s associates to distance themselves from her,
while others, including Kate Austin, joined her in defending Czolgosz’s act in the pages of Free Society (see
“Who Are the Guilty,” 13 October 1901, p. 4, and “Why Not Be Logical,” 8 December 1901, p. 1). Other an-
archists offered more staunch support for Czolgosz’s act; see, for example, the article “Czolgosz,” published
in the 26 October 1906 issue of L’Aurora (an Italian-language anarchist paper from Spring Valley, Illinois),
written by the paper’s editor, Guiseppi Ciancabilla, who was also arrested in the wake of McKinley’s death.
EG’s essay builds on her earlier lectures and writings on political violence (see, for example, EG’s discussion
of Michele Angiolillo and Gaetano Bresci). EG later incorporated part of her description of Czolgosz and his
attentat into her essay “The Psychology of Political Violence” (1911).

478 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 To L U C I F E R , T H E L I G H T B E A R E R
New York, 11 November 1901

Emma Goldman Defines Her Position.

In Lucifer No. 889 was printed a report that at a meeting of the Manhattan Liberal Club
I deplored the assassination of McKinley.1 This is a misrepresentation, for at that partic-
ular meeting there was no particular occasion to either deplore or applaud the assassi-
nation, consequently I made no such statements. Besides, in my article on the Buffalo
tragedy in Free Society of Oct. 6 I plainly and emphatically stated my position,2 and in-
stead of retracting I could only add that I have since come to the firm conclusion that
Czolgosz was a man with the beautiful soul of a child and the energy of a giant. I have
observed with great sorrow that the majority of Anarchists have utterly failed to com-
prehend the depth of that soul, that was put to death by organized authority on Oct. 29.3
Methinks that Anarchy is the philosophy of life, and as such it includes every branch
of human knowledge pertaining to life. If this be so, and I know of no Anarchists who
would deny it, Anarchists ought to be students of psychology and honestly endeavor to
explain certain phenomena, not only from a politico-economic but also from a psycho-
logical standpoint. Had they done so, they would not have joined the thoughtless rabble
in its superficial denunciation of Leon Czolgosz as a lunatic and a villain. Do not we
know that every act which ignorant minds have failed to explain, have ever been stamped
as insane or villainous?
Surely it does not behoove thinking people to adopt such methods in their search for
a cause for certain acts. Besides, is it not time to perceive that the act of Sept. 6,4 like
many previous acts, was but the result of the elements pent up and stifled in the human
heart through a false and pernicious system and bound to leap through the heavy walls
of organized authority sooner or later?
Of course I believe that each individual has a right to his opinion, but I do not wish to
be a party in the vain endeavor of some of our Anarchists to bow before respectability by
sacrificing their ideas to its altar.
It has taken all my time for the past fourteen years to deplore human misery in all its
awful forms, so I have not a moment left to deplore the assassination of one, who has ig-
nored all rights of the people, and bowed before the dictum of a privileged few; then, too,

1. EG refers to a meeting on 8 October, which Lucifer summarized in its report as follows: “Emma Gold-
man is quoted as saying that, as an Anarchist, she was opposed to violence. She deplored the assassi-
nation of McKinley, and said that if the people want to do away with assassins they must do away with
the conditions which produce murderers” (Lucifer, 31 October 1901, p. 338).
2. See “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” Article in Free Society, 6 October 1901, above.
3. Leon Czolgosz was executed on 29 October 1901.
4. Czolgosz shot President McKinley on 6 September 1901.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 479

 Following President McKinley’s assassination, wide-ranging and unsubstantiated accusations against Goldman per-
meated the mainstream press; this front-page feature article in the 10 September 1901 New York World is among the
most strikingly negative representations.

I am kept busy regretting the fact that so many even in the radical ranks have lost their
manhood and womanhood at the sight of Government and Power let loose, and have de-
nounced the man, who was so pitiful in his loneliness and yet so sublime in his silence
and superiority over his enemies.

Emma Goldman.

Lucifer, the Lightbearer, 21 November 1901, p. 366.

480 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 To M A X N E T T L A U
New York, 24 November 1901

Dear Comrade Netlau.

You have undoubtedly been amazed by my lack of punctuality, but you should not believe
that lack of punctuality also belongs to my many other faults. I am otherwise always very
prompt, but this time I wanted to wait until I could provide you with something certain
about the book. Unfortunately I can not do that even now, as I have yet to hear anything
definite about the book up to this point, but I believe that nothing will come from the
whole affair. The good man lost his courage at the last moment, for it would truly take
courage to publish an anarchist work, or indeed the “Life of E.G.,” at this time.1 You can
imagine how great the prejudice is, fabricated by a dishonest and rotten press, that would
make an American pass up material gain, for there is no doubt that thousands of copies
of the book would be sold. Indeed no one would have worried about prejudice if I had
given my approval to let the book appear in a truly shrill and sensational form, but some-
thing soberly instructional and objective, according to the esteemed publisher, “not in
the interest of our middle class people.” And thus the matter appears to have fallen
through. For my part I am happy about it, as it would have been very difficult for me to
have written objectively about my life. One has to be able to stand above one’s life in or-
der to do that, or at least outside of the events. But when one is standing right in the
middle of the battlefield surrounded by enemy fire, as I am, one can not judge things ob-
jectively, and thus I am happy not to have to report about my life at this time. For propa-
ganda it would clearly be of great significance if a series of essays about Anarchism
would appear at this moment, indeed if it would appear in book form and out of a pub-
lishing house, for you would not believe what nonsense is being spread about A., simply
hair-raising and without even one voice raised in objection. There is a complete and ut-
ter lack of truly great minds here who possess not only talent but also courage and a
sense of justice. Men such as Dean Howell,2 Crosby 3 and Hawthorne,4 who on other oc-

1. No book on EG was published during this period, nor any prospective publisher identified.
2. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), American novelist and critic, was editor of the Atlantic Monthly
from 1871 to 1881. Howells publicly defended the Haymarket anarchists in 1887, attempting to win
support for a stay of execution. Howells became discouraged by the prevailing attitude in the country
and ceased submitting editorials to newspapers. His sympathy for the Haymarket anarchists influ-
enced his later writings, considered by many to be identified with socialism, most notably Annie Kil-
burn (New York: Harper, 1889), A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890),
and A Traveler From Altruria (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894). He was also a member of the
Society of Friends of Russian Freedom.
3. EG refers to Ernest Crosby, who was the leading U.S. proponent of Tolstoyan anarchism; he offered
to help EG secure a pardon for AB.
4. In his novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) explored the conflict between social constraints and
human passions, and featured complex female protagonists, especially evident in The Scarlet Letter

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 481

 casions have had a good word for us, have drawn back in a cowardly fashion, and what of
our own people? Well, firstly there are only a small number of people of any importance
here, and secondly these people lack courage and I am telling you, one could despair if
one listens to the whimpering of these comrades, their convulsive exertions [several words
illegible] it was simply horrible. These same people who could exalt Bresci, Luccheni and
Ravachal 5 as martyrs have shamefully abandoned poor Leon C.6 and have denounced
him. Fortunately he belongs to the small number of people who bear a never-failing
source of strength, energy and conviction and can manage without the world; otherwise
he would have to despair of everything and everyone.—Have you read my article in FS
from Oct 6th? 7 How I was attacked over this article in our own ranks, and what confu-
sion came into view. I am telling you if we need 1/2 a century to bring clarity to our own
ranks, how much longer to lift the cloud which hangs over the spirit of the masses?
I do not have your letter on hand, since I am writing from the bedside of a patient who
is sleeping,8 and thus can not respond to it. Heartfelt thanks for the sources you sent me;
even if I can’t make use of them now, I will use them at a later date. I would also like to
hold on to your essays which I received yesterday, may I? HK 9 wrote me that he sent me
the manuscript of the Congress-reports; 10 up till now with the exception of W. Holme’s 11
report I have not received anything and can not understand why the committee did not
send the material a long time ago. The money for the printing has been available for
many months and we are only waiting for the material. It is precisely at this moment that
the Congress-reports would be of great importance. You say people are not well disposed
toward me here, now that is nothing new. They are always the same, followers of Most; 12
consisting of Jews and Germans, but what does that have to do with the reports? Our
good D 13 wrote me immediately after receiving your letter expressing his willingness to
write something for the book, but that is no longer necessary and I have written to him

(1850). His Blithedale Romance (1851) was a fictional study of a socialist community based on his six-
month stay at Brook Farm, an early experiment in communal living, in West Roxbury, Massachu-
setts.
5. EG refers to Gaetano Bresci, who assassinated King Umberto of Italy in 1900; Luigi Luccheni, who
assassinated Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898; and Ravachol, the French anarchist executed in
1892 for the murder of an elderly, rich man.
6. EG refers to Leon Czolgosz, who was executed 29 October 1901, less than two months after he shot
President McKinley.
7. See “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” Article in Free Society, 6 October 1901, above.
8. EG was working as a private practical nurse during this period, often on the night shift.
9. EG refers to the American anarchist Harry Kelly, who worked in London on the anarchist commu-
nist paper Freedom and who aided EG in lobbying for a commutation of AB’s sentence.
10. Apart from the individual reports published in Free Society, no English-language version of the re-
ports to the Paris congress ever appeared. Only Les Temps Nouveaux published a comprehensive edi-
tion of the reports, first serially in its Supplément Littéraire (vol. 3, nos. 23 and 31) and then together
under a separate cover.
11. Anarchist William T. Holmes wrote a report on the history of the anarchist movement in the United
States.
12. EG refers to Johann Most.
13. EG refers to Victor Dave.

482 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

accordingly. His address is still Rue des Boulainvilliers, right? Dear N, would it be pos-
sible for you to obtain Bakunin’s letters to Alex Herzen for me, either in Russian or Ger-
man,14 I would be most obliged. Everything is in a state of paralysis here, the comrades
have not yet recovered from their fright over the recent affair, and thus their reactions
could take on even further dimensions.—On Monday we are opening the Social Science
Club,15 and if the police don’t interfere I intend a rather lively agitation this winter. Noth-
ing more for today, please write back very soon, even if I was not as punctual. I am work-
ing 14 hours a day now, and am taking care of a neurotic, so you can imagine that I am
in frightfully great demand.

Greetings,
EG

ALI, Max Nettlau Archive, IISH. Translated from German.

14. A volume of collected letters from Bakunin to Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev, edited by
M. P. Dragomanov, had appeared in German as Michael Bakunin’s Socialpolitischer Briefwechsel mit
Alexander Iw.Herzen und Ogarjow (Stuttgart, 1895), and in Russian as Pisma M.A. Bakunina k. A.I.
Gertsenu i N.P. Ogarevu (Geneva, 1896). Alexander Herzen (1812 –1870) was an influential radi-
cal author and editor of the newspaper Kolokol (The Bell; 1857–1865). An associate of Bakunin, he
argued for a free Russia and believed in small cooperatives for landowners and regional self-
government.
15. The Social Science Club met weekly at 250 West 23rd Street in New York City.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 483

 From A L E X A N D E R B E R K M A N
Western Penitentiar y, Allegheny Cit y, Pa., 20 December 1901 — Sub rosa

Dearest Girl:

I know how your visit 1 and my strange behavior have affected you . . . . The sight of your
face after all the years completely unnerved me. I could not think, I could not speak. It
was as if all my dreams of freedom, the whole world of the living, were concentrated in
the shiny little trinket that was dangling from your watch chain . . . . I couldn’t take my
eyes off it, I couldn’t keep my hand from playing with it. It absorbed my whole being . . . .
And all the time I felt how nervous you were at my silence, and I couldn’t utter a word.
Perhaps it would have been better for us not to have seen each other under the pres-
ent conditions. It was lucky they did not recognize you: they took you for my “sister,”
though I believe your identity was suspected after you had left. You would surely not have
been permitted the visit, had the old Warden been here. He was ill at the time. He never
got over the shock of the tunnel, and finally he has been persuaded by the prison physi-
cian (who has secret aspirations to the Wardenship) that the anxieties of his position are
a menace to his advanced age. Considerable dissatisfaction has also developed of late
against the Warden among the Inspectors. Well, he has resigned at last, thank goodness!
The prisoners have been praying for it for years, and some of the boys on the range cel-
ebrated the event by getting drunk on wood alcohol. The new Warden has just assumed
charge, and we hope for improvement. He is a physician by profession, with the title of
Major in the Pennsylvania militia.
It was entirely uncalled for on the part of the officious friend, whoever he may have
been, to cause you unnecessary worry over my health, and my renewed persecution. You
remember that in July the new Inspector released me from the strait-jacket and assigned
me to work on the range. But I was locked up again in October, after the McKinley inci-
dent.2 The President of the Board of Inspectors was at the time in New York. He inquired
by wire what I was doing. Upon being informed that I was working on the range, he or-
dered me into solitary. The new Warden, on assuming office, sent for me. “They give you
a bad reputation,” he said; “but I will let you out of the cell if you’ll promise to do what is
right by me.” He spoke brusquely, in the manner of a man closing a business deal, with
the power of dictating terms. He reminded me of Bismark at Versailles. Yet he did not
seem unkind; the thought of escape was probably in his mind. But the new law has ger-
minated the hope of survival; my weakened condition and the unexpected shortening of

1. EG visited AB sometime between the 19th and 24th of August 1901, her first visit since Novem-
ber 1892.
2. AB refers to the assassination of William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz on 6 September 1901.

484 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

my sentence have at last decided me to abandon the idea of escape.3 I therefore replied
to the Warden: “I will do what is right by you, if you treat me right.” Thereupon he as-
signed me to work on the range. It is almost like liberty to have the freedom of the cell-
house after the close solitary.
And you, dear friend? In your letters I feel how terribly torn you are by the events of
the recent months. I lived in great fear for your safety, and I can barely credit the good
news that you are at liberty. It seems almost a miracle.
I followed the newspapers with great anxiety. The whole country seemed to be swept
with the fury of revenge. To a considerable extent the press fanned the fires of persecu-
tion. Here in the prison very little sincere grief was manifested. Out of hearing of the
guards, the men passed very uncomplimentary remarks about the dead president. The
average prisoner corresponds to the average citizen—their patriotism is very passive, ex-
cept when stimulated by personal interest, or artificially excited. But if the press mirrored
the sentiment of the people, the Nation must have suddenly relapsed into cannibalism.
There were moments when I was in mortal dread for your very life, and for the safety of
the other arrested comrades.4 In previous letters you hinted that it was official rivalry and
jealousy, and your absence from New York, to which you owe your release. You may be
right; yet I believe that your attitude of proud self-respect and your admirable self-con-
trol contributed much to the result. You were splendid, dear; and I was especially moved
by your remark that you would faithfully nurse the wounded man, if he required your
services, but that the poor boy, condemned and deserted by all, needed and deserved your
sympathy and aid more than the president. More strikingly than your letters, that remark
discovered to me the great change wrought in us by the ripening years. Yes, in us, in both,
for my heart echoed your beautiful sentiment. How impossible such a thought would
have been to us in the days of a decade ago! We should have considered it treason to the
spirit of revolution; it would have outraged all our traditions even to admit the humanity
of an official representative of capitalism. Is it not very significant that we two—you liv-
ing in the very heart of Anarchist thought and activity, and I in the atmosphere of ab-
solute suppression and solitude—should have arrived at the same evolutionary point af-
ter a decade of divergent paths?
You have alluded in a recent letter to the ennobling and broadening influence of sor-
row. Yet not upon every one does it exert a similar effect. Some natures grow embittered,
and shrink with the poison of misery. I often wonder at my lack of bitterness and enmity,
even against the old Warden—and surely I have good cause to hate him. Is it because of
greater maturity? I rather think it is temperamentally conditioned. The love of the

3. A commutation law passed by the Pennsylvania legislature enabled AB to appeal his sentence on
18 November 1901. His term was reduced by two and a half years. See Letter from Alexander Berk-
man, 25 July 1901, above.
4. In Chicago, anarchists including the Isaak family, Hippolyte Havel, Clemens Pfuetzner, Alfred
Schneider, Julia Mechanic, Martin Rasnick, Jay Fox, and Enrico Travaglio were arrested, suspected of
conspiring with Czolgosz.

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 485

 people, the hatred of oppression of our younger days, vital as these sentiments were with
us, were mental rather than emotional. Fortunately so, I think. For those like Fedya and
Lewis and Pauline,5 and numerous others, soon have their emotionally inflated idealism
punctured on the thorny path of the social protestant. Only aspirations that sponta-
neously leap from the depths of our soul persist in the face of antagonistic forces. The
revolutionist is born. Beneath our love and hatred of former days lay inherent rebellion,
and the passionate desire for liberty and life.
In the long years of isolation I have looked deeply into my heart. With open mind and
sincere purpose, I have revised every emotion and every thought. Away from my former
atmosphere and the disturbing influence of the world’s turmoil, I have divested myself
of all traditions and accepted beliefs. I have studied the sciences and the humanities, con-
templated life, and pondered over human destiny. For weeks and months I would be ab-
sorbed in the domain of “pure reason,” or discuss with Leibnitz 6 the question of free will,
and seek to penetrate, beyond Spencer,7 into the Unknowable. Political science and eco-
nomics, law and criminology—I studied them with unprejudiced mind, and sought to
slacken my soul’s thirst by delving deeply into religion and theology, seeking the “Key to
Life” at the feet of Mrs. Eddy,8 expectantly listening for the voice of the disembodied,
studying Koreshanity 9 and Theosophy,10 absorbing the prana 11 of knowledge and power,
and concentrating upon the wisdom of the Yogi. And after years of contemplation and
study, chastened by much sorrow and suffering, I arise from the broken fetters of the
world’s folly and delusions, to behold the threshold of a new life of liberty and equality.
My youth’s ideal of a free humanity in the vague future has become clarified and crys-
tallized into the living truth of Anarchy, as the sustaining elemental force of my every-
day existence.
Often I have wondered in the years gone by, was not wisdom dear at the price of en-
thusiasm? At 30 one is not so reckless, not so fanatical and one-sided as at 20. With ma-
turity we become more universal; but life is a Shylock that cannot be cheated of his due.
For every lesson it teaches us, we have a wound or a scar to show. We grow broader; but
too often the heart contracts as the mind expands, and the fires are burning down while
we are learning. At such moments my mind would revert to the days when the momen-

5. AB refers to his cousin Modest Stein, Roman Lewis, and possibly Pauline Sieger, who spoke with
EG and other anarchists at the 1893 Union Square demonstration on unemployment, for which EG
was sentenced for inciting to riot. All had moved away from anarchism by this time.
6. German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 –1716).
7. English sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820 –1903).
8. Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) was the founder of Christian Science. In 1866, she believed that she
had been healed from a serious illness through spiritual means alone and developed a religious al-
ternative to science that encouraged healing through divine law to overcome sin, disease, and death,
which she believed were evils alien to God.
9. An American physician, Cyrus Read Teed (1839 –1908), developed a pseudo-scientific doctrine
called the Universology of Koreshanity (from the Hebrew name “Koresh,” for Cyrus).
10. Incorporating aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism, Theosophy became widely known in the
United States after the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875.
11. Sanskrit word for “life force.”

486 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

tarily expected approach of the Social Revolution absorbed our exclusive interest. The
raging present and its conflicting currents passed us by, while our eyes were riveted upon
the Dawn, in thrilling expectancy of the sunrise. Life and its manifold expressions were
vexatious to the spirit of revolt; and poetry, literature, and art were scorned as hindrances
to progress, unless they sounded the tocsin of immediate revolution. Humanity was
sharply divided in two warring camps,—the noble People, the producers, who yearned
for the light of the new gospel, and the hated oppressors, the exploiters, who craftily
strove to obscure the rising day that was to give back to man his heritage. If only “the
good People” were given an opportunity to hear the great truth, how joyfully they would
embrace Anarchy and walk in triumph into the promised land!
The splendid naivety of the days that resented as a personal reflection the least mis-
giving of the future; the enthusiasm that discounted the power of inherent prejudice and
predilection! Magnificent was the day of hearts on fire with the hatred of oppression and
the love of liberty! Woe indeed to the man or the people whose soul never warmed with
the spark of Prometheus,—for it is youth that has climbed the heights . . . . But maturity
has clarified the way, and the stupendous task of human regeneration will be accom-
plished only by the purified vision of hearts that grow not cold.
And you, my dear friend, with the deeper insight of time, you have yet happily kept
your heart young. I have rejoiced at it in your letters of recent years, and it is especially
evident from the sentiments you have expressed regarding the happening at Buffalo. I
share your view entirely; for that very reason, it is the more distressing to disagree with
you in one very important particular: the value of Leon’s act. I know the terrible ordeal
you have passed through, the fiendish persecution to which you have been subjected.
Worse than all must have been to you the general lack of understanding for such phe-
nomena; and, sadder yet, the despicable attitude of some would-be radicals in denounc-
ing the man and his act. But I am confident you will not mistake my expressed dis-
agreement for condemnation.
We need not discuss the phase of the Attentat which manifested the rebellion of a tor-
tured soul, the individual protest against social wrong. Such phenomena are the natural
result of evil conditions, as inevitable as the flooding of the river banks by the swelling
mountain torrents. But I cannot agree with you regarding the social value of Leon’s act.
I have read of the beautiful personality of the youth, of his inability to adapt himself
to brutal conditions, and the rebellion of his soul. It throws a significant light upon the
causes of the Attentat. Indeed, it is at once the greatest tragedy of martyrdom, and the
most terrible indictment of society, that it forces the noblest men and women to shed hu-
man blood, though their souls shrink from it. But the more imperative it is that drastic
methods of this character be resorted to only as a last extremity. To prove of value, they
must be motived by social rather than individual necessity, and be directed against a real
and immediate enemy of the people. The significance of such a deed is understood by
the popular mind—and in that alone is the propagandistic, educational importance of
an Attentat, except if it is exclusively an act of terrorism.
Now, I do not believe that this deed was terroristic; and I doubt whether it was educa-

MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901 487

 tional, because the social necessity for its performance was not manifest. That you may
not misunderstand, I repeat: as an expression of personal revolt it was inevitable, and in
itself an indictment of existing conditions. But the background of social necessity was
lacking, and therefore the value of the act was to a great extent nullified.
In Russia, where political oppression is popularly felt, such a deed would be of great
value. But the scheme of political subjection is more subtle in America. And though
McKinley was the chief representative of our modern slavery, he could not be considered
in the light of a direct and immediate enemy of the people; while in an absolutism, the
autocrat is visible and tangible. The real despotism of republican institutions is far
deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and
independence. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny, and, as such, it cannot be
reached with a bullet.
In modern capitalism, exploitation rather than oppression is the real enemy of the
people. Oppression is but its handmaid. Hence the battle is to be waged in the economic
rather than the political field. It is therefore that I regard my own act as far more
significant and educational than Leon’s. It was directed against a tangible, real oppressor,
visualized as such by the people.12
As long as misery and tyranny fill the world, social contrasts and consequent hatreds
will persist, and the noblest of the race— our Czolgoszes—burst forth in “rockets of
iron.” But does this lightning really illumine the social horizon, or merely confuse minds
with the succeeding darkness? The struggle of labor against capital is a class war, essen-
tially and chiefly economic. In that arena the battles must be fought.
It was not these considerations, of course, that inspired the nation-wide man-hunt, or
the attitude even of alleged radicals. Their cowardice has filled me with loathing and sad-
ness. The brutal farce of the trial, the hypocrisy of the whole proceeding, the thirst for the
blood of the martyr,—these make one almost despair of humanity.
I must close. The friend to smuggle out this letter will be uneasy about its bulk. Send
me sign of receipt, and I hope that you may be permitted a little rest and peace, to recover
from the nightmare of the last months.

Sasha.

Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pp. 412 –17.

12. EG strongly disagreed with AB’s position on Czolgosz’s act. In his Prison Memoirs, AB recalled EG’s
reaction to his stance: “Continued correspondence with the Girl accentuates the divergences of our
views, painfully discovering the fundamental difference of attitude underlying even common con-
clusions. By degrees the stress of activities reacts upon my friend’s correspondence. Our discussion
lags, and soon ceases entirely.” Many years later EG wrote AB: “That you could sit down and cold-
bloodedly analyse an act of violence nine years after your own, actually implying that your act was
more important was the most terrible thing I had yet experienced . . .” (see Berkman, Prison Mem-
oirs of an Anarchist, p. 418; and EG to AB, 23 November 1928, EGP, reel 20).

488 MADE FOR AMERICA • 1901

 CHRONOLOGY

1869 DECEMBER 7
JUNE 27 National Free-Love Convention held in Ra-
EG born to Taube Bienowitch and Abraham venna, Ohio. Ezra and Angela Heywood and
Goldman in Kovno, Lithuania, a province of Benjamin Tucker attended.
the Russian empire.

1874
1870
Lassallean Social Democratic Working-Men’s
Ezra Heywood published Uncivil Liberty, in
Party of North America (SDWMPNA) formed
support of suffrage and against marriage,
with Adolph Strasser as head of executive
which later served as the introduction to
board.
Cupid’s Yokes, the harbinger of free speech
and obscenity cases for years to come.
NOVEMBER 21 1876
Alexander Berkman born in Vilna, Lithuania. Comstock Act amended.
Ezra Heywood published Cupid’s Yokes.
1871 JULY 4
MARCH 18 – MAY 28 In Philadelphia, the National Liberal League
Paris Commune. founded the First Centennial Congress of Lib-
erals, called by the Free Religious Association
1872 and attended by freethought advocates. Oppo-
SEPTEMBER sition to the Comstock laws of 1873 (amended
The congress at Saint-Imier, Switzerland, 1876) was organized.
marked the beginning of the Anti-Authoritar- JULY 19 – 23
ian International, following the split in the At a Unity Convention in Philadelphia, the
First International at The Hague. Among the Working Men’s Party of the United States
delegates in attendance were Michael Baku- was founded when American delegates of
nin, Carlo Cafiero, and Errico Malatesta. the International Working Men’s Association
dissolved their party and merged with the
1873 Workingmen’s Party of Illinois, the Social Po-
MARCH 3 litical Workingmen’s Society of Cincinnati,
Comstock Act signed into law in the United and the Social Democratic Working-Men’s
States. Party of North America.

489
 OCTOBER 21 (with 70,000 signatures) to Congress protest-
At their secret congress held in the village of ing the Comstock Act and calling for its repeal.
Tosti (near Florence), the Italian Federation of JUNE 12
the Anti-Authoritarian International formally National Defense Association formed by E. B.
adopted the ideas of anarchist communism, Foote, A. L. Rawson, Edward Chamberlain,
breaking with Bakunin’s collectivist ideology. and others. Heywood, Benjamin Tucker, and
Flora Tilton joined its executive committee.
1877
JUNE 25
JULY 16
Heywood’s appeal scheduled but delayed
First in series of strikes, later known as Great
pending the outcome of a Supreme Court de-
Railway Strikes. Baltimore and Ohio freight
cision of the constitutionality of the Comstock
fireman and brakemen halt work after learn-
laws. Sentenced to two years imprisonment
ing that lucrative dividends were paid to com-
and a $100 fine when the Supreme Court up-
pany shareholders, on the heels of another
held the Comstock Act.
10 percent cut in wages. Albert Parsons black-
AUGUST 1
listed for speaking at rally for Working-Mens
Mass meeting to protest Heywood’s convic-
Party of the United States in Chicago’s Market
tion held in Boston by National Defense Asso-
Square.
ciation, which petitioned President Hayes for
SEPTEMBER 6 – 8
pardon.
At the final congress of the Anti-Authoritarian
OCTOBER
International in Verviers, Belgium, European
Anti-socialist laws passed in Germany.
anarchists groups were represented, as well
DECEMBER 10
as anarchist groups from Mexico, Uruguay,
D. M. Bennett, the editor of The Truth Seeker,
and Argentina. Peter Kropotkin was among
arrested on obscenity charges under Com-
the delegates.
stock Act for sending Cupid’s Yokes through
NOVEMBER 2
the mail.
Anthony Comstock personally arrested Ezra
DECEMBER 16
Heywood at meeting of the New England Free
President Hayes pardoned Heywood.
Love League in Boston; Heywood was charged
DECEMBER 19
with mailing two obscene publications, Cu-
Heywood released from prison.
pid’s Yokes and R. T. Trall’s Sexual Physiology
pamphlet. 1879
DECEMBER MARCH 18
The Working-Mens Party of the United States Bennett’s case set to begin. He was found
became the Socialist Labor Party of North guilty of mailing obscenity.
America (SLP) at its convention in Newark, MAY 15
New Jersey. The ruling against Bennett upheld.
JUNE 5
1878
Bennett sentenced to thirteen months at hard
JANUARY 22
labor and a $300 fine.
Ezra Heywood’s trial began. Cupid’s Yokes
deemed obscene by the jury, while Sexual 1880
Physiology was not. Sentencing postponed APRIL
pending Heywood’s appeal. Bennett released from prison.
FEBRUARY OCTOBER
National Liberal League presented petition In Switzerland, Peter Kropotkin’s definition

490 CHRONOLOGY • 1877

of anarchist communism was adopted at the AUGUST

Congress of La Chaux-de-Fonds of the Jura Liberty founded, Boston, Massachusetts.

Federation. OCTOBER 21 – 23
Congress of Social Revolutionary Groups in
Chicago. Proceedings led by Albert Parsons,
1881 Michael Schwab, and August Spies. The Rev-
MARCH 13 (NEW STYLE; MARCH 1, GREGORIAN olutionary Socialistic Party was formed, the
CALENDAR) first national anarchist association in the
Alexander II mortally wounded by bomb in United States.
St. Petersburg set by the revolutionary group
Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). 1882
MARCH 30 OCTOBER 25
Johann Most arrested in London for endorsing Johann Most released from prison.
the assassination of Alexander II in 19 March OCTOBER 26
Freiheit. Held for three months during his ar- Ezra Heywood arrested by Anthony Comstock
raignment and trial (25–26 May); after an un- for mailing Cupid’s Yokes and also mailing a
successful appeal (18 June), was sentenced special issue of The Word, featuring two po-
(29 June) to sixteen months at hard labor. ems by Walt Whitman including “A Woman
APRIL – MAY Waits for Me” and an advertisement for a con-
Pogroms in Russia, tolerated and in some traceptive syringe called by Heywood “the
areas abetted by the authorities; instigated by Comstock syringe.”
rumors that the tsar’s assassins were Jews. DECEMBER 18
APRIL 15 Most arrives in the United States; Freiheit re-
N. I. Kibalchich, Alexander Mikhailov, Sophia established in New York.
Perovskaya, Ivanovich Rysakov, and Andrei
Ivanovich Zhelyabov, members of Narodnaya 1883
Volya, hanged for their part in the assassina- APRIL 12
tion of Alexander II. Ezra Heywood found not guilty of charges
JULY 14 – 19 arising from his arrest on 26 October 1881.
International Social Revolutionary and Anar- AUGUST 24
chist Congress in London. Delegates over- Lucifer, the Lightbearer founded, Valley Falls,
whelmingly endorsed propaganda by the deed. Kansas.
Among the participants were Victor Dave, OCTOBER 14 – 16
Frank Kitz, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Pittsburgh congress convened in Pittsburgh,
Saverio Merlino, Louise Michel, Johann Neve, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh Manifesto written
and Joseph Peukert. Several American revo- largely by Johann Most but amended by Victor
lutionary groups were represented, including Drury, Albert Parsons, Joseph Reifgraber, and
the Social Revolutionary Club of New York, August Spies; document served as the ideo-
Social Revolutionary Group of Philadelphia, logical and programmatic basis of the Inter-
and Socialist Labor Party of New York, Ger- national Working People’s Association. This
man Branch; Gustave Brocher represented was the first and last congress of the IWPA.
the Iowa Icarians; Miss M. P. LeCompte, asso-
ciate editor of the Labor Standard, represented 1884
the Boston Revolutionists. Closed sessions OCTOBER 4
were followed by a public meeting on 20 July. The Alarm founded, Chicago, Illinois.

CHRONOLOGY • 1884 491

 DECEMBER 6 guilty and sentenced to death (George Engel,
Der arme Teufel founded, Detroit, Michigan. Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg,
Albert Parsons, Michael Schwab, and August
1885 Spies). Oscar Neebe was also found guilty of
DECEMBER 29 murder but sentenced to fifteen years in
EG arrived in the United States with her sister prison.
Helene; they settle in Rochester, New York,
with their sister Lena. 1887
Comstock again arrested Heywood and
1886 charged him with mailing obscene materials;
EG found work as a garment worker. The rest the case, however, was not prosecuted.
of EG’s family immigrated to Rochester from EG heard New York socialist Johanna Greie
St. Petersburg. Cramer speak in Rochester on the Haymarket
APRIL 26 case. See LML, p. 7.
The Alarm is suppressed in Chicago. FEBRUARY
MAY 1 EG married Jacob Kershner, gaining U.S.
Several hundred thousand workers across citizenship.
United States struck for eight-hour workday. APRIL 1
MAY 3 Most released from Blackwell’s Island.
In Chicago, striking workers of McCormick SEPTEMBER
Harvester plant clashed with police; four Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung founded, Buffalo,
workers killed, several wounded. New York.
MAY 4 SEPTEMBER 21
At a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, After a year of appeals, the Illinois Supreme
bomb was thrown into midst of police. One Court upheld the verdict of the Haymarket
officer was killed, several officers wounded. anarchists.
When police fired into the crowd, six police- NOVEMBER 5
men died from their wounds, and an un- The Alarm resumes publication under
known number of civilians. Casualties totaled Dyer D. Lum’s editorship.
67, most from police bullets rather than NOVEMBER 10
bomb fragments. The identity of the bomb Refusing to let the state take his life, Haymar-
thrower was never determined but prominent ket anarchist Louis Lingg committed suicide
Chicago anarchists subsequently arrested and by exploding in his mouth a dynamite car-
tried for murder. tridge that had been smuggled in by Dyer D.
MAY 11 Lum in a cigar.
Johann Most arrested for incendiary nature of Illinois Governor Oglesby commuted
speech given to Workingmen’s Rifle Club in Fielden’s and Schwab’s death sentences to life
New York. in prison.
JUNE 2 NOVEMBER 11
Most sentenced to one year in prison on Haymarket anarchists George Engel, Adolph
Blackwell’s Island for inciting to riot as a re- Fischer, Albert Parsons, and August Spies
sult of his speech on 11 May. executed.
AUGUST 20 NOVEMBER 16
Seven of the Haymarket anarchists found Most arrested in New York for illegal assem-

492 CHRONOLOGY • 1885

bly and incitement to riot, later sentenced to 1890
one year on Blackwell’s Island; but out on bail JANUARY
pending appeal until 1891. Most arranged EG’s first public lecture tour to
Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland to speak on
the limitations of the eight-hour movement.
1888
See LML, p. 46.
Between November 1887 and February 1888,
JANUARY 25
EG and husband, Jacob Kershner, were di-
Most arrested in New York on 16 November
vorced, and EG left Rochester for New Haven,
1887 charge but then released, pending sec-
Connecticut; met Russian socialists and anar-
ond appeal.
chists, including Hillel Solotaroff; found work
FEBRUARY
at a corset factory. Returned to Rochester, liv-
Joseph Barondess asked EG to recruit women
ing with sister Helene’s family, and worked in
workers for the cloakmakers. See LML,
sewing factory. According to LML (pp. 23–25),
p. 55.
EG remarried Kershner, remained with him
EG became ill and forced to spend several
for three months, and then was shunned by
weeks convalescing; had a brief affair with
her parents when she left Kershner for good.
Modest Stein.
FEBRUARY
Although she and AB contemplated return-
AB immigrated to the United States.
ing to Russia to help with revolutionary activi-
JUNE 16
ties, EG instead accompanied Most on a two-
According to its masthead, The Alarm began
week lecture tour of New England. See LML,
publication in both Chicago and New York un-
pp. 63, 70.
til its cessation in February 1889.
FEBRUARY 16
OCTOBER
EG spoke to Group 1 of the IWPA in Claren-
Lucy Parsons left for speaking tour of England.
don Hall, New York.
FEBRUARY 18
1889 EG gave a talk at the home of J. Kuirim, 443
FEBRUARY 2 Pearl, New York, sponsored by IWPA, Agita-
The Alarm ceased publication. tion Committee.
AUGUST FEBRUARY 22
Der Anarchist founded, St. Louis, Missouri. EG spoke to Group 1 of IWPA in New York.
AUGUST 15 MARCH 16
EG arrived in New York; met AB at Sachs’s Spoke on the Paris Commune to a Newark
restaurant and later met Johann Most at a branch of the IWPA in Phoenix Park Hall,
meeting. Later in the month she found work Newark, New Jersey.
first in a corset factory, then in a silk waist fac- APRIL 12
tory. See LML, pp. 25–29, 37. Spoke on “The Right to Be Lazy” in New York
AUGUST – DECEMBER at Matthei’s, organized by IWPA.
EG worked at Freiheit office, helped organize APRIL 20
11 November Haymarket commemoration. Scheduled to speak to Group 1 of IWPA, New
EG and AB became lovers. They shared an York.
apartment with Modest Stein, and the sis- MAY
ters Helene and Anna Minkin. See LML, Ezra Heywood arrested for sending obscene
pp. 43– 44. material through the mail in his March 1890

CHRONOLOGY • 1890 493

 publication of The Word. Two articles, one a OCTOBER 12

“Letter from a Mother” on the topic of sexual EG lectured in German before German- and
education, and the other an article written by Yiddish-speaking workers’ societies in Eliza-
Angela Heywood charging Anthony Com- beth, New Jersey.
stock with discrimination against women, OCTOBER 19

were cited as obscene. EG spoke in Baltimore to members of IWPA

MAY 1 in the afternoon. Later spoke in German to
Demonstrations celebrating the labor holiday Workers’ Educational Society at Canmakers’
in Andalusia, Spain, end in reprisals by gov- Hall. Michael Cohn and William Harvey also
ernment authorities. In the wave of arrests spoke.
that followed, over 150 anarchists and labor NOVEMBER 7

militants jailed. Most arrested in New York along with oth-

MAY 3 ers, including Lucy Parsons and Hugh O.
EG spoke on “The Pittsburgh Proclamation Pentecost, speaking on the Haymarket
of 1883” to the IWPA, West Side Group, New anarchists.
York. DECEMBER 25

MID-MAY Conference of Yiddish anarchists held in

Heywood’s trial began; found guilty and sen- Clarendon Hall, New York; called by Freie
tenced to two years at hard labor, without Arbeiter Stimme. AB attended and proposed
appeal. an investigation of the charges by Johann
JUNE 15 Most against Joseph Peukert.
AB attended talk in Clarendon Hall by Joseph
Peukert, sponsored by Radikaler Arbeiter- 1891
Bund. MARCH 8
JULY 4 EG spoke at mass meeting of the Interna-
First issue of Freie Arbeiter Stimme, New York. tional Working Men’s Association in New
SUMMER Haven, Connecticut, Trades Council Hall.
To earn money to return to Russia and join MARCH 16
the revolutionary work there, EG moved with Spoke at a “Great Commune Celebration”
AB, Stein, and Helene and Anna Minkin to sponsored by the International Working
New Haven to start a dressmaking coopera- Men’s Association in New Haven, Connecti-
tive. Until they built a clientele, EG worked cut, Trades Council Hall.
temporarily at the corset factory where she MAY 1
had worked in 1888. AB gained employment Marched with the Working Women’s Society
in the printing trade. of the United Hebrew Trades at May Day pa-
They helped organize an anarchist educa- rade in New York. See LML, pp. 79 – 80.
tional group that attracted German, Russian, At a May Day demonstration in Clichy Leval-
and Jewish immigrants; among the invited lois, France, two anarchists were arrested af-
speakers were Most and Hillel Solotaroff. See ter violent clashes with the police and sen-
LML, pp. 70 –71. tenced to three and five years, respectively,
FALL although the prosecutor had asked for the
EG and AB moved back to New York and be- death sentence.
gan attending meetings of the Gruppe Auto- JUNE 16
nomie, led by Joseph Peukert. See LML, Most began second term on Blackwell’s
pp. 74–75. Island.

494 CHRONOLOGY • 1890

JUNE 18 MARCH 11
EG addressed a mass meeting held to protest Ravachol bombed house of the judge who
the Supreme Court’s upholding of Most’s conducted the trial against the Clichy Leval-
1887 conviction for illegal assembly and in- lois anarchists involved in 1 May 1891 inci-
citement to riot. dent; also bombed the prosecutor’s house
on 27 March; there were no injuries from ei-
1892 ther bomb.
WINTER AND SPRING MARCH 30
EG moved to Springfield, Massachusetts; Ravachol arrested in Paris for bombings.
worked in a photography studio with Modest Trial of Walsall anarchists began.
Stein. In Worcester, AB, Stein, and EG APRIL
opened their own studio. When this failed, Liberty moved to New York.
they opened an ice cream parlor; when the ice APRIL 4
cream parlor opened “it was spring and not Four of the six Walsall anarchists (Fred
yet warm enough for an ice-cream rush” Charles, Jean Battola, Victor Cailes, and Joe
(LML, p. 82). They planned to raise money Deakin) found guilty in an English court of
to return to Russia to respond to the political conspiracy to make a bomb. William Ditch-
repression under Alexander III. field and John Westley found innocent and
Socialist League of New York founded during released.
the early part of this year. APRIL 18
JANUARY Most released from Blackwell’s Island.
Der Anarchist moved to New York from APRIL 26
St. Louis, Missouri. Ravachol sentenced to life for bombings.
JANUARY 6 APRIL 30
Joe Deakin arrested in London. First arrest in Liberty’s first issue in New York.
the Walsall case. MAY
JANUARY 8 Freie Arbeiter Stimme ceased publication.
As a result of the government persecutions in MAY 1
1890, uprising of Spanish peasants in Jerez. EG, Most, and other anarchists attempted
Hundreds were arrested and beaten by gov- to speak at the Central Labor Union’s May
ernment agents. Sixteen men tried and con- Day celebration in Union Square, New
victed; their sentences ranged from ten years York.
to life. Anarchist Fermín Salvochea, known as JUNE
the “saint,” was later tried for inciting the Solidarity (John Edelmann, editor) founded,
“riot,” although he had been imprisoned in New York.
Cadiz during the incident. JUNE 22
FEBRUARY 16 Ravachol found guilty of murder of French
Four anarchists, arrested in the wake of the miser (unconnected with bombings).
Jerez uprising, executed in Jerez. JUNE 30
FEBRUARY 18 Workforce locked out of Homestead steel
A meeting was held at Cooper Union, orga- works.
nized by New York anarchist communists to JULY 6
protest against the execution of Spanish com- In a battle with Pinkerton strikebreakers, at
rades in Jerez. John Edelmann, Henry Weis- least nine striking Homestead steel plant
mann, and Roman Lewis all spoke. workers and three Pinkerton detectives killed.

CHRONOLOGY • 1892 495

 JULY 8 along with Joseph Peukert at the Zum Großen
Henry Bauer and two others attacked by strik- Michel saloon, 209 Fifth Street, New York.
ers at Homestead, who “want nothing to do AUGUST 27
with the agents of Most.” Most’s article “Attentats-Reflexionen,” criticiz-
JULY 10 ing AB’s action yet praising his courage, writ-
EG composed an appeal to workers in English ten 31 July, appears in Freiheit.
and German. See LML, p. 86. SEPTEMBER 19
JULY 11 AB sentenced to twenty-two years in prison;
Ravachol executed by guillotine. EG learns about his sentence while lecturing
JULY 12 in Baltimore. Announcement prompts audi-
AB left New York for Pittsburgh, arrived ence alarm, police action, and EG’s arrest.
11 p.m. on 13 July. NOVEMBER
JULY 13 Simon Wing and Charles H. Matchett received
AB registered at the Merchants Hotel near the 21,164 votes for president and vice-president,
train depot as Mr. Rakhmetov. respectively, on the SLP ticket, marking the
JULY 14 first time the socialist movement entered the
At 10 a.m., AB went to Carl Nold’s home, national political scene.
where he stayed for eight days. Met Bauer NOVEMBER 24
through Nold. EG visited AB at the Western Penitentiary,
JULY 23 Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. See LML,
AB shot and stabbed Carnegie’s steel com- p. 111.
pany manager, Henry C. Frick, wounding but DECEMBER
not killing him. Met Robert Reitzel in Detroit. Lectures inter-
In the aftermath, EG suspected of complicity mittently. Met Edward Brady.
but not charged; police raided her apartment, DECEMBER 4
seizing her papers. The press refer to EG as Spoke in Clarendon Hall, New York, at a
the “Queen of the Anarchists.” meeting denouncing congressional schemes
Debate over AB’s act began within anarchist to restrict immigration. John Edelmann, Pe-
and radical circles. dro Esteve, and Saverio Merlino also spoke.
JULY 25 DECEMBER 18
Nold arrested. EG struck Johann Most in the face with a
JULY 26 small horsewhip at a meeting at 98 Forsyth
Bauer arrested. Street, New York.
JULY 27
In an interview with the New York World, Most 1893
criticized AB’s action. SPRING
JULY 30 EG begins her relationship with Ed Brady.
EG attacked Most in Der Anarchist. MARCH
AUGUST 1 Freie Arbeiter Stimme resumes publication.
EG chaired meeting at Military Hall, 193 Bow- MAY
ery, New York, in defense of AB’s act. Speak- New York stock market crashed. In a series of
ers included Dyer D. Lum, Saverio Merlino, events, beginning with the failure of a major
and Joseph Peukert. railroad, the Panic of 1893 began. U.S. Trea-
AUGUST 5 sury will be bankrupted for first time in its
EG spoke at meeting of Gruppe Autonomie, history, threatening collapse of U.S. govern-

496 CHRONOLOGY • 1892

ment. Events lead to public panic and subse- Union Square, New York, where she and oth-
quent rush to withdraw money. By end of ers addressed a crowd of the unemployed.
year, close to 500 banking institutions and AUGUST 21
16,000 businesses declared bankruptcy and EG spoke to a large crowd at Union Square,
hundreds of thousands out of work. New York, in German and English.
JUNE 20 AUGUST 23
At a meeting at Ulrich’s Hall in Chicago, EG lectured in the Brownsville section of
the American Railway Union was officially Brooklyn; went to Philadelphia where she met
launched, with Eugene Debs as president. Max Baginski and Voltairine de Cleyre. See
JUNE 25 LML, pp. 123–24, 216.
Approximately 8,000 attended dedication of AUGUST 25
monument to Haymarket anarchists at Chi- Warrants issued at Essex Market Police in
cago’s Waldheim Cemetery. New York for the arrest of six of the speakers
JUNE 26 at the 21 August Union Square meeting. EG,
Illinois Governor Altgeld unconditionally par- Joseph Barondess, Julius Bodansky, Pauline
doned the remaining Haymarket anarchists Sieger, Claus Timmermann, and Adolph Ury
—Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael were charged with incitement to riot.
Schwab— condemning the Haymarket affair AUGUST 26
as judicial murder, and effectively ending his Claus Timmermann arrested and held on
political career. $5,000 bail. Charged with unlawful assembly.
JUNE – JULY AUGUST 31
EG returned to Rochester to recuperate from As she was about to address a rally of the un-
illness. See LML, p. 120. employed in Buffalo Hall in Philadelphia, EG
JULY arrested on the New York warrant.
Die Brandfackel began publication, New SEPTEMBER 1
York. Claus Timmermann tried for inciting to riot
AUGUST at the 21 August Union Square demonstra-
Solidarity ceased publication. tion; sentenced to six months on Blackwell’s
AUGUST 8 Island.
Anarchists in attendance at the Zurich con- SEPTEMBER 6
gress of the socialist Second International A New York grand jury indicted EG on charges
were excluded, and a resolution was passed stemming from her 21 August speech.
stating that only those who regarded political SEPTEMBER 9
action as a necessary strategy would be per- EG returned from Philadelphia to New York
mitted into the proceedings. by police.
AUGUST 17 SEPTEMBER 11
Unemployed rioted at Walhalla Hall in New Pled not guilty
York. SEPTEMBER 14
AUGUST 18 Bail set at $1,000; released on bail.
EG addressed a meeting at Golden Rule Hall, SEPTEMBER 23
New York, urging the needy to take bread if Benefit concert held at New Irving Hall in
they are hungry. New York to raise money for EG’s defense.
AUGUST 19 SEPTEMBER 24
After speaking at a demonstration in Newark, In retaliation for the Jerez executions, on
EG led procession of several hundred to 16 February 1982, Paulino Pallás attempted to

CHRONOLOGY • 1893 497

 kill the captain general of Catalonia, Arsenio prison terms. The other two laws were passed
Martínez de Campos, wounding him slightly, on 18 December 1893 and 28 July 1894.
killing 2 and wounding 12. He was immedi- DECEMBER 16
ately arrested, subsequently convicted, and A “Grand Concert and Ball” held at New
sentenced to death within days of the incident. York’s Clarendon Hall for the benefit of EG
SEPTEMBER 30 – OCTOBER 8 “and others now suffering for freedom of
The International Anarchist Convention, speech.” Features performance by the Inter-
Chicago, coinciding with the world’s fair, was nationale Arbeiter Liedertafel. Voltairine de
banned by the police but held anyway, on the Cleyre delivered “In Defense of Emma Gold-
premises of the Chicago Times. Broad range mann and the Right of Expropriation.” After-
of anarchist opinion was represented by the ward de Cleyre visited EG in prison.
twenty-five in attendance, including William
Holmes, Voltairine de Cleyre, and C. L. James. 1894
JANUARY 10
OCTOBER 4 – 9
Vaillant on trial for bombing of Chamber of
EG tried; defended by ex-New York mayor
Deputies, found guilty and sentenced to
A. Oakey Hall; found guilty of inciting to
death.
riot.
FEBRUARY 5
OCTOBER 6
Vaillant executed.
Paulino Pallás executed by firing squad.
FEBRUARY 12
OCTOBER 16
In response to the lois scélérates (the “dracon-
EG sentenced to Blackwell’s Island for one
ian” measures of the French government
year.
against anarchists) and the execution of Vail-
OCTOBER 18
lant, Émile Henry bombed Café Terminus in
EG began serving her term; worked first in
Paris, killing one person, and injuring many.
the prison’s sewing department and later as
MARCH 8
an orderly in the prison hospital.
Claus Timmermann released from Black-
NOVEMBER 7 well’s Island.
Avenging Pallás’s execution, Santiago Salva- MAY 10
dor French, an associate, bombed a Barcelona Strike breaks out at Pullman railroad car
opera house, killing 22 and injuring almost plants in Chicago over savage wage cuts.
50. Spanish government suspended constitu- MAY 21
tional liberties; many suspected radicals de- Émile Henry executed.
tained, tortured. Seven anarchists, including JUNE 24
French, later executed, four given life terms. French president Marie François-Sadi Carnot
DECEMBER 9 assassinated in Lyons by Sante Caserio, in re-
Auguste Vaillant threw bomb of nails into the taliation for Vaillant’s execution.
French Chamber of Deputies; no one killed; JUNE 26
Vaillant injured in the blast, later confessed American Railway Union (ARU) servicemen,
while in hospital. under the leadership of Eugene Debs, began
DECEMBER 12 refusing to service trains with Pullman cars
The French government passed the first of in support of the striking Pullman workers.
the three lois scélérates, making provocation of JULY 2
violence, possession of explosives, and con- A federal injunction issued against the lead-
spiratorial associations punishable by long ers of ARU over their actions.

498 CHRONOLOGY • 1893

JULY 3 Ministry, arrested and accused of selling mili-
President Grover Cleveland sent federal tary secrets to the Germans.
troops into Chicago. NOVEMBER
JULY 6 The 15 October arrest of French officer Alfred
Fires caused by 6,000 protesters destroyed Dreyfus for espionage publicly announced in
700 railcars and caused $340,000 of damage the antisemitic paper La Libre Parole.
in South Chicago Panhandle railway yards. NOVEMBER 11
JULY 7 EG spoke at a Haymarket commemoration in
National Guardsmen fired into crowd of strik- New York; Max Baginski, Voltairine de Cleyre,
ers in Chicago, several people killed. Eugene John Edelmann, Charles Mowbray, and Justus
Debs and other ARU leaders arrested for dis- Schwab also spoke.
obeying the federal injunction. NOVEMBER 13
AUGUST 2 Spoke with Charles Mowbray in West Hobo-
Pullman plants reopened; the strike broken. ken, New Jersey.
AUGUST 16 NOVEMBER 16

Sante Caserio executed. Left New York for Pittsburgh.

AUGUST 17 NOVEMBER 17

EG released after serving ten months. Her ac- Spoke in Pittsburgh.

count of her experience, “My Year in Stripes,” NOVEMBER 18

appeared in the New York World on 18 August. Spoke in German in Baltimore at Canmakers’
AUGUST 19
Hall. Mowbray also spoke, in English.
NOVEMBER 21
A meeting at the Thalia Theatre, New York,
welcomed EG back; Sarah Edelstadt, John Santiago Salvador French executed.
DECEMBER 22
Edelmann, Pedro Esteve, Charles Mowbray,
and Maria Roda also spoke. Alfred Dreyfus court-martialed, convicted,
and sentenced to life in prison on Devil’s Is-
AUGUST 21
land, French Guiana. The controversy sur-
EG spoke on “The Right of Free Speech” at a
rounding his case, known as l’Affaire, will
mass meeting in Phoenix Park Hall in New-
grow over the next ten years, dividing the
ark called by the American Labor Union,
country and sparking debate internationally.
Branches 1 and 2. Voltairine de Cleyre, John
DECEMBER 28
Edelmann, and Charles Mowbray also spoke.
C. W. Mowbray arrested and charged with in-
SEPTEMBER
citing to riot and sedition against the Com-
Met with John and Orsena Swinton (both
monwealth of Pennsylvania.
had visited her at Blackwell’s Island), and re-
solved to conduct more propaganda in En-
1895
glish. Spoke in Baltimore. Moved into an
JANUARY
apartment with Edward Brady. See LML,
Die Brandfackel ceased publication.
pp. 154–56.
JANUARY 5
OCTOBER
EG helped organize a ball at Clarendon Hall,
Began a new campaign for the commutation New York, sponsored by the Joint Anarchist
of AB’s sentence; worked as a nurse. See Groups of New York. Proceeds went to Soli-
LML, p. 157. darity, which was struggling financially.
OCTOBER 15 JANUARY 24
Alfred Dreyfus, member of the French War Lectured in hall on 54 East St., New York, on

CHRONOLOGY • 1895 499

 “Strikes.” Landlord at first barred EG from Finsbury with James Tochatti and Louise
hall but later relented for one lecture only and Michel, among others. Spoke on “Political
returned a three-month rent deposit. Justice in England and America,” highlight-
JANUARY 27 ing AB’s case.
The Firebrand founded, Portland, Oregon. SEPTEMBER 14
APRIL 13 EG traveled to Scotland; during her stay lec-
Alfred Dreyfus transferred to Devil’s Island, tured in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Maybole.
where he was placed in solitary confinement. OCTOBER
SPRING Freie Gesellschaft, Yiddish-language anarchist
EG, Claus Timmermann, and Ed Brady opened cultural and literary journal, founded, New
an ice cream parlor in Brownsville, Brooklyn; York.
the venture failed within three weeks. OCTOBER 1
SUMMER EG traveled to Vienna to begin formal train-
AB’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court proved ing in nursing and midwifery at the Allge-
legally impossible; EG began soliciting funds meines Krankenhaus. While there read works
for an appeal to the Pennsylvania Board of by Friedrich Nietzsche, attended Richard
Pardons. See LML, p. 175. Wagner operas, saw Elenora Duse perform,
JUNE and attended lectures by Sigmund Freud.
Der Anarchist ceases publication. Delivered lectures on Saturdays in the circle
JUNE 12 of the independent socialists. See LML,
Debs begins a six-month sentence for con- p. 170.
spiracy over the Pullman strike in McHenry NOVEMBER 22
County Jail, Woodstock, Illinois. Debs released from prison.
JULY 15
La Questione Sociale, Italian-language anar- 1896
chist paper, founded, Paterson, New Jersey. MARCH
AUGUST 15 – 22 Left Vienna for Paris; there met Augustin
EG traveled to England, arrived in London on Hamon.
22nd. Die Sturmglocken founded, Chicago. Ceased
AUGUST 25 publication in April.
Reception in London for EG sponsored by MARCH – APRIL
French anarchists. EG met Louise Michel. The Rebel ceased publication.
FALL APRIL
EG addressed crowds at open air meetings in Lucifer, the Lightbearer moved to Chicago from
London’s Hyde Park; spoke in Whitechapel, Kansas.
Canning Town, Barking, and Stratford. Topics EG back in New York, continued to live with
included “The Futility of Politics and Its Cor- Ed Brady on Eleventh Street; worked as mid-
rupting Influence.” Met Kropotkin and Mala- wife and nurse; solicited Voltairine de Cleyre’s
testa. German police monitored her move- support on AB’s behalf; helped arrange lec-
ments in London, prepared to arrest her if she tures for John Turner. See LML, pp. 176 –78.
entered Germany. APRIL 30
SEPTEMBER Spoke at Clarendon Hall at John Turner’s last
The Rebel founded, Boston. New York lecture (before he traveled to Bos-
SEPTEMBER 13 ton). Speakers included John Edelmann,
EG appeared at the South Place Institute in Charles Mowbray, and Lothrop Withington.

500 CHRONOLOGY • 1895

MAY 1 NOVEMBER 11 – 15
At a demonstration in Union Square, helped EG lectured in Baltimore; raised money for
distribute a manifesto written by her and a AB’s appeal.
group of American-born comrades in New NOVEMBER 20 – 26
York. Lectured in Pittsburgh, primarily in German;
JUNE 7 raised money for AB. Aided by Harry Gor-
Bomb exploded during the Corpus Christi Day don. Topics included “The Jews in America,”
procession in Barcelona killing 11, wounding “Anarchism in America,” and “The Effect of
approximately 40; Spanish authorities impris- the Recent Election on the Condition of the
oned hundreds of anarchists and radicals sus- Workingman.” Her concluding lecture ad-
pected of involvement. Subsequent reports dressed the Haymarket affair.
of torture in Montjuich Prison sparked inter- DECEMBER 11
national protests. Eighty-seven Spanish anarchists on trial for
JULY 27 – AUGUST 3 the Corpus Christi Day bombing.
London congress of the socialist Second Inter- DECEMBER 20
national. Sentences handed down in Corpus Christi
JULY 28 Day bombings. Eighteen given long prison
Anarchist delegates expelled from the London terms, five sentenced to death.
congress of the Second International; anar-
chists and social revolutionaries convened 1897
their own meeting that night. Delegates in- APRIL 23 – 25
cluded Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Pie- EG gave several lectures in Providence, Rhode
tro Gori, Louise Michel, Élisée Reclus, Jean Island, including “What Is Anarchism?” and
Grave, Harry Kelly, and Charles Mowbray. Fi- “Is It Possible to Realize Anarchism?” Police
nal break between anarchism and organized prevented her from addressing a second
international socialism. open-air meeting on the grounds that she had
OCTOBER 12 no permit. Local socialists disavowed connec-
EG acted as chief usher at a debate in Clar- tion to EG.
endon Hall, New York, between John Turner MAY
and Charles H. Cook on “Will Free Coinage EG spoke in Philadelphia on the topic “The
of Silver Benefit the People?” During EG’s Women in the Present and the Future.” Back
speech advertising a commemoration meet- in New York EG underwent an operation
ing for the Haymarket anarchists she was in- on her foot, requiring several months of
terrupted by an abusive and drunken Johann recuperation.
Most. MAY 4
NOVEMBER 4 Five Spanish anarchists executed in connec-
EG spoke before the Philadelphia Ladies’ Lib- tion with the Corpus Christi Day bombing.
eral League on her experiences on Blackwell’s MAY 25
Island. Carl Nold and Henry Bauer released from
NOVEMBER 8 prison. See LML, p. 197.
EG spoke before a mass meeting called by a JUNE 15
Philadelphia Jewish group to honor the Hay- Social Democracy of America was organized
market anarchists and raise money for AB; at the final convention in Chicago of the
spoke later that evening on “Woman’s Cause” American Railway Union. Leading members
to the Young Men’s Liberal League. included Eugene Debs and Victor Berger.

CHRONOLOGY • 1897 501

 AUGUST 8 killed at Hazleton, Pennsylvania; close to 40
Michele Angiolillo assassinated Spanish others seriously injured.
prime minister Cánovas del Castillo in retalia- SEPTEMBER 12
tion for the deaths of the five Spanish anar- EG spoke in Boston at Phoenix Hall. Her
chists executed 4 May. original lecture topic was “Free Speech.” In
AUGUST 16 response to the Hazleton massacre, she spoke
EG spoke at meeting of 1,000 at Clarendon instead on “The Rights of the People.”
Hall in New York celebrating Cánovas’s death. SEPTEMBER 13 – 14
Harry Kelly and Salvatore Pallavencini also Scheduled to speak in New Haven and New
spoke. York on the Hazleton massacre.
AUGUST 22 SEPTEMBER 15
At a public meeting in Clarendon Hall, New Spoke on “Free Love” before the Philadelphia
York, EG faced criticism from Charles B. Coo- Ladies’ Liberal League.
per and other anarchists for glorifying Cáno- Spoke to the Philadelphia Single Tax Society
vas’s death rather than advancing the cause on “Anarchist-Communism.”
of anarchy by explaining the reasons for his SEPTEMBER 17
assassination. Firebrand editor A. J. Pope arrested for sending
SEPTEMBER 3 obscene material through the mail, including
Beginning a four-month lecture tour, EG Walt Whitman’s poem “A Woman Waits for
spoke at an open air meeting in Olneyville Me”; co-editors Abe Isaak and Henry Addis
Square, Providence, Rhode Island. arrested soon thereafter on same charge. Fire-
SEPTEMBER 4 brand ceased publication that month.
Spoke at an open air meeting in Burgess SEPTEMBER 19
Square, Providence. EG delivered an afternoon and evening lec-
SEPTEMBER 5 ture before the Philadelphia Friendship Lib-
Spoke in Boston on the topic “Must We Be- eral League.
come Angels to Live in an Anarchist Soci- L ATE SEPTEMBER
ety?”; collected money for victims of Spanish EG in Pittsburgh; met Nold and Bauer, who
repression. That evening spoke on Cánovas’s informed her that AB planned to escape
assassination at Providence Casino. John H. from prison if his appeal failed. Spoke be-
Cook chaired meeting. fore a Turner gymnastic society in Monaca,
SEPTEMBER 8 Pennsylvania.
Having been warned by Providence’s mayor SEPTEMBER 27 – 29
that she would be arrested if she spoke out- EG addressed convention of reform clubs and
doors again, EG held an open-air lecture at trade unions in Chicago. Eugene Debs, Ross
Market Square, Providence, Rhode Island, Winn, and Jay Fox were also in attendance.
in opposition to his warning. She was pre- SEPTEMBER 29
vented by the police from continuing her EG held her own meeting after walking out of
speech, taken to the police station, held over- the convention on the 28th.
night, and released the next day at noon, but SEPTEMBER 30
was threatened with three months impris- Spoke in Chicago to the Lucifer Circle on
onment if she did not leave town within “Prostitution: Its Causes and Cure.”
24 hours. OCTOBER 7
SEPTEMBER 10 Spoke in Chicago to the Lucifer Circle on
At least 19 striking coal miners shot and “Free Love” at 1394 Congress Street.

502 CHRONOLOGY • 1897

MID-OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 23 EG spoke at the Detroit People’s Tabernacle.
Kropotkin toured the United States for the Jo Labadie helped arrange the meeting. It was
first time. reported in local newspapers that the follow-
OCTOBER 13 ing day a majority of its congregants and dea-
EG spoke with Max Baginski, Moses Har- cons asked McGowan to resign and threat-
man, and Lucy Parsons at Zepf’s Hall in Chi- ened to leave the church.
cago at a fundraiser for imprisoned Firebrand NOVEMBER 21
editors. Lectured in Cleveland on “What Anarchy
OCTOBER 16 Means”; collected money for Firebrand edi-
EG gave lecture in German in St. Louis at tors. Meeting arranged by Fred Schulder.
Harugari Hall on “Anarchy.” NOVEMBER 28
OCTOBER 17 Spoke at Council Hall, Buffalo, New York.
Spoke in German at Ohlman’s Hall, St. DECEMBER
Louis. AB’s hearing before Pennsylvania Board of
OCTOBER 19 Pardons postponed.
St. Louis’s House of Delegates supported DECEMBER 1
mayor’s ban on EG’s open-air meetings; her EG spoke in Buffalo, New York, at Spiritual-
lectures, including “Revolution” and “Why I ists Tabernacle on “Anarchy.”
Am an Anarchist and Communist,” were held DECEMBER 4
in private halls under police surveillance. Spoke in Rochester, New York, at Germania
OCTOBER 20 Hall.
Spoke at Walhalla Hall in St. Louis. DECEMBER 5
L ATE OCTOBER Lectured on “The Aim of Humanity,” at the
EG in Caplinger Mills, Missouri; meetings Labor Lyceum in Rochester.
arranged by Kate and Sam Austin; topics in- MID-DECEMBER
cluded “The Aim of Humanity,” “Religion,” EG returned to New York.
“Anarchy,” and “Free Love.” Told a St. Louis
reporter she planned to lecture next in Kansas 1898
City, Topeka, and Denver. JANUARY
NOVEMBER EG’s brother Morris Goldman moved into EG
Sturmvogel founded, New York. and Brady’s New York apartment.
NOVEMBER 11 JANUARY 5
EG spoke at a commemoration of the Hay- Lectured in German on “The New Woman” to
market anarchists in German in Turner Hall the Brooklyn Social Science Club.
in Chicago. Meeting chaired by Jay Fox and JANUARY 13
Theodore Appel. In the French journal L’Aurore, Émile Zola
NOVEMBER 14 published an open letter to the French presi-
Free Society founded, San Francisco. dent of the Republic, accusing the officials
NOVEMBER 16 involved in the Dreyfus case of meddling
EG spoke in German at Turner Hall, Detroit, with the truth. Zola’s letter became known
Michigan; meeting commemorated Haymar- as J’Accuse, coined by the owner/editor of
ket, organized by Central Labor Union. L’Aurore, Georges Clemenceau.
NOVEMBER 19 JANUARY 15
Having been invited by its pastor, Reverend EG announced lecture topics for the com-
McCowan, despite considerable opposition, ing year in Sturmvogel: “Charity,” “Patriot-

CHRONOLOGY • 1898 503

 ism,” “Authority,” “Majority Rule,” “The New FEBRUARY 26

Woman,” “The Woman Question,” and “The Lectured in Monaca, Pennsylvania, in front of
Inquisition of Our Postal Service.” the Glass Blowers’ Union local.
JANUARY 21 – 23 FEBRUARY 27

Returned to Providence, Rhode Island; lec- Lectured in Beaver Falls, Pa., and in Marion
tured without interference from the mayor or Hall in Pittsburgh in English.
police; assisted by John H. Cook. James F. MARCH 1

Morton, Jr. also spoke. Lectured in Carnegie, Pa.

To defray traveling expenses, EG made sales MARCH 2

for Brady’s stationery business while on tour. Scheduled to speak in Allegheny City but the
JANUARY 24 lecture was canceled when the owners of
Lectured on “Authority” to economics stu- Northside Turner Hall refused to let her
dents in Phoenix Hall, Boston. James F. Mor- speak.
ton, Jr. also spoke. MARCH 4

FEBRUARY – JUNE Lectured in Duquesne, Pa.

Addressed 66 meetings in 12 states and 18 MARCH 5

cities; participated in one debate. Reporters Spoke in McKeesport, Pa.

noted EG’s improved command of English. MARCH 6

FEBRUARY 13 Spoke in Pittsburgh, Pa. in German at the Im-

Spoke before the Brooklyn Philosophical perial Dancing Academy.
Society. MARCH 7

FEBRUARY 15 Lectured in Challeroi, Pa.

The USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana MARCH 8

harbor. Spoke in Roscoe, Pa.

FEBRUARY 16 – 20 MARCH 10

EG lectured in Philadelphia before Ladies’ Spoke in Newton, Pa..

Liberal League, Single Tax Society, Society of MARCH 11

Ethical Research, and German Anarchist So- Lectured in Tarentum, Pa.

ciety; lectured twice before Friendship Liberal MARCH 12

League. Topics included “The Absurdity of Spoke with Nold and Harry Gordon in Pitts-
Non-resistance to Evil,” “The Basis of Moral- burgh at a twenty-seventh anniversary cele-
ity,” “Freedom,” “Patriotism,” and “Charity.” bration of the Paris Commune at the Imperial
FEBRUARY 23 – MARCH 12 Dancing Academy on Wylie Avenue.
Nold and Bauer invited EG to lecture in Pitts- MARCH 13

burgh and nearby mining towns. Topics in- Traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, lectured be-
cluded “Patriotism,” the Hazleton massacre, fore the Franklin Club on the “Basis of
and “The Coming War with Spain.” Morality.”
EG suffered “nervous attacks” from the strain MARCH 14

of continuous lecturing. Lectured at Glessen’s Hall in Cleveland on

FEBRUARY 24 “Charity.”
Lectured at Odd Fellows Hall in Pittsburgh in MARCH 15

English. Lectured again before the Franklin Club in

FEBRUARY 25 Cleveland on “The New Woman.”
Lectured in German at Vorwaerts Saenger MID-MARCH

Hall in Lawrenceville, Pa. Visited the ailing Robert Reitzel in Detroit.

504 CHRONOLOGY • 1898

MARCH 20 – 26 Committee on Agitation of the Progressive
Gave several lectures before Chicago labor Labor Organization of Chicago. Moses Har-
unions, aided by Joseph Peukert. Visited man also spoke.
Max Baginski at the Chicagoer Arbeiter- APRIL 3 – 4
Zeitung office; discussed women’s eman- Spoke in Milwaukee at Central Park and
cipation with Moses Harman. Visited Mi- Garten Falls on the 3rd; and at Ragger’s Hall
chael Schwab, who was hospitalized with on the 4th.
tuberculosis. APRIL 6 – 10
MARCH 20 Delivered five lectures in St. Louis; no inter-
Lectured in front of the Economic Educational ference by mayor or police.
Club in Chicago on “Authority.” APRIL 6
MARCH 21 Spoke on “Patriotism” in St. Louis.
Spoke to the Brewers’ and Malters’ Union in APRIL 7
Chicago on “Trade Unionism.” Spoke on “Authority vs. Liberty” in St.
MARCH 22 Louis.
Spoke in Chicago to the Painters and Decora- APRIL 8
tors Union on “Trade Unionism.” Spoke on “Basis of Morality” in St. Louis.
MARCH 23 APRIL 9
Addressed the Cooperative College of Citi- Spoke on “The Absurdity of Non-Resistance”
zenship group of the IWA in Chicago on in St. Louis.
“Patriotism.” APRIL 10
MARCH 24 Final lecture in St. Louis on “Charity.”
Spoke in Chicago to the Turnverein (Turner APRIL 13 – 18
Gymnastic Society) of the Vorwärts newspaper William and Lizzie Holmes arranged EG’s
on the “New Woman.” five lectures in Denver, Colorado; William
MARCH 26 rated “The Basis of Morality” her best. Spon-
Spoke on “Passive Resistance” to the Bakers’ sors included the Denver Educational Club, a
and Confectioners’ Union in Chicago. Jewish group.
MARCH 27 – 28 APRIL 24
Lectured before Ohio Liberal Society in Spain declared war on the United States.
Cincinnati. APRIL 25
MARCH 29 United States Congress declared war on
Returned to Chicago; lectured on “Charity.” Spain and made the declaration retroactive
MARCH 30 to 21 April.
Spoke in Chicago to the International Group L ATE APRIL – EARLY MAY
on “The Basis of Morality.” EG in San Francisco. While in town stayed
MARCH 31 with Abe Isaak; met socialist Anna Strunsky
Lectured in Chicago on “The Inquisition of and, through Strunsky, writer and socialist
Our Postal Service” to a Bohemian workers Jack London.
group, addressing the Firebrand case; group APRIL 26
unanimously adopted a resolution protesting Spoke on “Patriotism” at the Turk Street
postal censorship. Temple in San Francisco.
Robert Reitzel died in Detroit. MAY 1
APRIL 2 Spoke at a May Day rally with socialist Emil
EG honored at a farewell meeting held by the Liess and others in San Francisco.

CHRONOLOGY • 1898 505

 MAY 4 Andrew Carnegie’s influence in granting
Debated Emil Liess in San Francisco. AB a pardon. They approached Benjamin
MAY 5 – 8 Tucker to act as intermediary but withdrew
Violent demonstrations in Milan over taxes, their request after reading Tucker’s pro-
rising food prices; martial law declared. Death posed letter to Carnegie; plan was eventually
toll was over 80, including 2 policemen; ap- abandoned.
proximately 450 wounded. King Umberto NOVEMBER 24 – DECEMBER 21
awarded General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris International Anti-Anarchist Conference con-
Italy’s highest award for his role in suppress- vened in Rome by the Italian government un-
ing the riots. Incident given the name Fatti di der international pressure after the assassi-
Maggio. nation of the Austrian empress by Luigi
MAY Luccheni. Organized to coordinate interna-
EG spoke in San Jose and Los Angeles. Re- tional efforts to police and punish anarchist
turned to San Francisco for additional lectures. activity, the conference was attended by diplo-
EARLY JUNE mats, ambassadors, and law enforcement
EG’s three Portland lectures arranged by agents. The delegates represented twenty-one
Henry Addis. countries, including all of Europe as well as
JUNE 7 – 10 Russia and Turkey. Among the items dis-
In Ulrich’s Hall, Chicago, EG attended first cussed at the conference were methods for
convention of Eugene Debs’s Social Democ- identifying anarchists (including the portrait
racy, held 7–10 June, and labeled the event a parlé, a system based on criminal anthropom-
“fiasco.” At the end of the conference a large etry), and extradition and deportation tactics,
group of members walked out, including Eu- including the deportation of anarchists to
gene Debs and Victor Berger, who proceeded their countries of origin. The network of in-
to form the Social Democratic Party. ternational police communication created
JUNE 20 during the conference contributed to the de-
Firebrand case dismissed by United States velopment of the International Criminal Po-
District Court in Portland, Oregon. lice Organization, or Interpol.
JUNE 29 DECEMBER 10
Michael Schwab died. President McKinley signed peace treaty with
JULY Spain. As part of the treaty, United States ac-
EG returned to New York. Supported textile quired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philip-
strike in Summit, New Jersey, with Salvatore pines; Spain relinquished claim to Cuba.
Pallavencini and other Italian anarchists. DECEMBER 21
SEPTEMBER 10 EG scheduled to lecture at Lear’s Hall, 61 E.
Empress Elizabeth of Austria stabbed to death 4th Street, New York, on “The Power of the
by Luigi Luccheni. Idea.”
SEPTEMBER 18
EG lectured in Boston on “Charity.” 1899
SEPTEMBER 20 JANUARY
EG lectured in Lynn, Massachusetts, on “Au- EG ended relationship with Edward Brady.
thority vs. Liberty.” JANUARY 5
NOVEMBER – DECEMBER Spoke at a large meeting at Cooper Union,
With Justus Schwab and Brady, EG sought New York, protesting the Anti-Anarchist Con-

506 CHRONOLOGY • 1898

ference in Rome. Other speakers included MARCH 16

George Brown, J. H. Cook, Pedro Esteve, and EG scheduled to speak in Detroit at Turner
Saul Yanovsky. Hall, Sherman Street, in German.
L ATE JANUARY – SEPTEMBER L ATE MARCH

EG conducted nine-month lecture tour of In Cincinnati spoke on trade unionism before

eleven states, beginning in Barre, Vermont, the Ohio Liberal Society; in St. Louis gave ten
where she was hosted by Salvatore Pallaven- lectures, including one before the Bricklayers’
cini. Met Luigi Galleani. Union; two lectures in the nearby mining
JANUARY 21 town of Mount Olive, including “The Eight-
Gave lecture in Barre on “Authority v. Liberty” Hour Struggle and the Condition of the Min-
at Tomasis Hall, Mairs Street. ers of the Whole World.”
JANUARY 25 APRIL – MAY

Gave another lecture in Tomasis Hall, Barre, Spent over a month in Chicago; delivered
on “Trades Unionism—What It Is and What about twenty-five lectures in German and En-
It Ought To Be.” glish; topics included “Religion,” “Women’s
JANUARY 28 Emancipation,” “Origins of Evil,” and “Politics
Third lecture at Tomasis Hall, Barre; spoke on and Its Corrupting Influence on Man.” Aided
“The New Woman.” by Max Baginski and other German com-
JANUARY 31 rades, spoke before trade unions, philosophi-
Final lecture in Barre at Tomasis Hall, on cal and social societies, and women’s clubs;
“Authority vs. Liberty” suppressed by police. English lectures included “Trade-Unionism
Local anarchists printed and distributed and What It Should Be.” Her address before
copies of the speech she was to deliver. the conservative Amalgamated Wood Workers
FEBRUARY 4 Union was the first by an anarchist.
Insurgent forces began rebellion against rule MAY

of United States in Philippines. EG spent a few days visiting miners in Spring

FEBRUARY 6 Valley, Illinois.
Congress approved treaty with Spain by one- Sturmvogel ceased publication.
vote margin, after Senate opposition. MAY 20

MID-FEBRUARY In Tacoma, Washington, debated “Socialism

EG delivered lectures in German and English versus Anarchism.” Spiritualist temple was
in Philadelphia; spoke before Friendship Lib- offered to EG free of charge for her lecture se-
eral League, Ladies’ Liberal League, Fellow- ries, but offer withdrawn when she proposed
ship for Ethical Research, Knights of Liberty, to lecture on “Free Love.”
and Radikaler Arbeiter-Bund. MAY 28

L ATE FEBRUARY Lectured at the Germania Hall in Seattle,

Spoke in Cleveland. Washington, on “Anarchism: Its Philosophy
MARCH 13 and Ideas.”
EG scheduled to speak in Detroit at 224 Ran- MAY 29

dolph Street on “The Dying Republic.” Lectured at the Germania Hall in Seattle on
MARCH 14 “Politics and its Corrupting Effects.”
EG scheduled to speak in Detroit at the Trade JUNE

Council Hall on “Trade Unionism: What It Is Visited the anarchist Home Colony, near
and What It Should Be.” Lakebay, Washington.

CHRONOLOGY • 1899 507

 JUNE 5 again, with extenuating circumstances, and
French Court of Appeal overturned the 1894 sentenced to ten years’ detention.
sentence of Alfred Dreyfus. SEPTEMBER 10
JUNE 10 – 17 Spoke in Pittsburgh.
Supported by Henry Addis, lectured in Port- SEPTEMBER 19
land, Oregon, and in the farming town of Alfred Dreyfus formally pardoned.
Scio met Gertie Vose, Donald Vose’s mother, SEPTEMBER 23
where town marshal offered her use of city Spoke in West Newton, Pa.
hall. SEPTEMBER 24
JUNE 22 Spoke in Collinsburg, Pa.
Arrived in San Francisco; began seven-week SEPTEMBER 26
lecture series in San Francisco, Oakland, Spoke in Hope Church, Pa.
San Jose, and Stockton, California. Topics SEPTEMBER 28
included “Why I Am an Anarchist Commu- Spoke in Lawrenceville, Pa.
nist,” “The Aim of Humanity,” “The Develop- FALL
ment of Trades-Unionism,” and “Charity.” EG arranged for work to begin on AB’s escape
Socialists were antagonistic to her on sev- tunnel.
eral occasions. “Sex Problems” talk stirred OCTOBER 3 – 4
debate. Spoke in McDonald, Pa.
JULY 14 OCTOBER 9
Lectured on “The Aim of Humanity” at Spoke in Roscoe, Pa.
Grand Army Hall, Oakland. OCTOBER 11
AUGUST 7 Anglo-Boer War began.
Second trial of Alfred Dreyfus began before a MID-OCTOBER
French court martial. Returned to New York. With Saul Yanovsky
MID- TO L ATE AUGUST and others, raised money for AB’s escape tun-
EG delivered three lectures arranged by Wil- nel under the guise of pursuing new legal ac-
liam Holmes in Ouray, Colorado; in Denver, tion on AB’s behalf.
lectures included “The Power of the Idea,” NOVEMBER 3
“Education,” and an open air meeting on “Pa- Traveled with Mary Isaak to Europe via Lon-
triotism.” Traveled to the farming town of don with the intention of attending the 1900
Caplinger Mills, Missouri, as the guest of International Revolutionary Congress of the
Kate and Sam Austin; delivered three lec- Working People in Paris, and then to study
tures, including “Patriotism.” medicine in Zurich, Switzerland. Also
SEPTEMBER 4 planned to meet AB in Europe after his es-
In the mining town of Spring Valley, Illinois, cape from prison.
headed a Labor Day procession. Afterwards NOVEMBER 13 – DECEMBER 9
spoke in defiance of the mayor’s injunction at In London stayed with Harry Kelly and fam-
a meeting arranged by the miners’ union. ily; lectured in English and German. Topics
SEPTEMBER 7 included “America: The Land of the Free and
Spoke in Pittsburgh. the Home of the Brave,” “Strikes and Their
SEPTEMBER 8 Effect on the American Worker,” and “Mar-
Spoke in Fayette City, Pa. riage.” Visited Peter Kropotkin at his home in
SEPTEMBER 9 Bromley, met Nicholas Chaikovsky. Argued
Alfred Dreyfus found guilty of treason once with Kropotkin over political significance of

508 CHRONOLOGY • 1899

“the sex problem.” Met Hippolyte Havel; met the International Revolutionary Congress
German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, editor of of the Working People, scheduled to begin
the Yiddish anarchist Arbeter Fraint. 19 September. Decided against pursuing
DECEMBER 9 medicine to concentrate on political activity.
Spoke with Louise Michel, Kropotkin, Var- Addressed organizing committee of the
laam Cherkesov, Tom Mann, and Tarrida del Paris congress on the state of the American
Mármol at a London meeting on behalf of vic- movement.
tims of Italian political repression. EG presented papers on behalf of Lizzie
DECEMBER 10 Holmes and William Holmes, Abe Isaak,
Traveled to Leeds to deliver several lectures. Susan Patton, Kate Austin, and others.
Scheduled to remain until the 23rd, she left af- MAY 17
ter a week, returning with pleuritis to London EG lectured at the Libertarian Library, 26 rue
where she was confined to bed for two weeks. Titon, Paris.
MAY 19
1900 EG spoke on women’s emancipation at the
Freie Gesellschaft ceases publication. Harmonie Hall, 94 rue Angoulême, Paris.
EARLY JANUARY JUNE 14
EG attended a Russian New Year party in Lon- French police surveillance noted presence
don; met Russian revolutionary exiles. of EG and Havel at a women’s congress in
Cherkezov, Chaikovsky, and Kropotkin pres- Paris.
ent. See LML, p. 262. JULY 9
MID TO L ATE JANUARY SDP and Hillquit’s section of the Socialist
Scheduled to lecture in Glasgow, Dundee, and Labor Party merged to form SDP based in
Edinburgh, where she met anarchist Thomas Springfield, Massachusetts. There remained
Bell. another SDP that disfavored the union being
JANUARY 19 headquartered in Chicago. They decided to
Lectured in Glasgow. form tacit truce in order to present a unified
JANUARY 21 campaign in upcoming presidential elections.
Gave two lectures in Dundee. The afternoon JULY 26
lecture was entitled “Authority vs. Liberty”; AB’s escape tunnel discovered. Shortly there-
the evening lecture was entitled “The Aim of after, Eric Morton left for Paris.
Humanity.” JULY 29
FEBRUARY 20 King Umberto of Italy assassinated by Gae-
Back in London, spoke out against the Anglo- tano Bresci to avenge the victims of Fatti di
Boer War in “The Effect of War on the Work- Maggio, 5– 8 May 1898.
ers” at a meeting of the Freedom Discussion AUGUST 4 – 6
Group in the Club and Institute Hall, Cler- International Conference of Neo-Malthusians
kenwell. Other speakers include Harry Kelly, held in Paris. Representatives attended from
Samuel Mainwaring, Tom Mann, and Lothrop Holland, England, France, and Germany. EG
Withington. obtained birth control literature and contra-
FEBRUARY 26 ceptives to take back to the United States and
Honored at a farewell concert and ball; Peter informed participants on the illegal status of
Kropotkin and Louise Michel spoke. birth control dissemination in America.
MARCH SEPTEMBER 6
With Havel, traveled to Paris to prepare for Der arme Teufel ceased publication.

CHRONOLOGY • 1900 509

 SEPTEMBER 18 FEBRUARY
The primarily anarchist International Revo- Free Society moved to Chicago from San
lutionary Congress of the Working People, Francisco.
scheduled to begin the following day, was pro- FEBRUARY – MAY
hibited by the French Council of Ministers. Kropotkin’s second U.S. tour. EG helped with
That evening a protest meeting was prevented arrangements.
by the police. MARCH 4
OCTOBER 8 McKinley inaugurated for second term.
EG attended two secret meetings held by an- MARCH 8
archists at 26 rue Vitou in Paris regarding the EG lectured at the Manhattan Liberal Club in
barred International Revolutionary Congress New York at 8:00 p.m. on “What Will Lessen
of the Working People. Vice.”
NOVEMBER APRIL 2 – JUNE 13
The socialist ticket of Debs and Job Harriman Spoke in Lynn, Massachusetts; Boston, Pitts-
as president and vice president, respectively, burgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Phila-
gains 96,978 votes. delphia, and Spring Valley, Illinois. Topics
NOVEMBER 1 included “Anarchism and Trade Unionism,”
EG reported by French police as departing “The Cause of Vice,” and “Cooperation
Paris for Boulogne with Havel and John Leroy a Factor in the Industrial Struggle.”
(Eric B. Morton), en route back to the United APRIL 6
States. A letter in defense of EG (with regard to
EARLY DECEMBER attacks on her character and charges that
Arrived in New York with Havel and Eric she has unfairly incited attacks against Jo-
Morton. hann Most), dated 30 March, appears in De
DECEMBER 11 Vrije Socialist. Letter signed by Victor Dave,
EG addressed Social Science meeting at Everett Christiaan and Lily Cornelissen, Tárrida
Hall in New York. Owner threatened to “turn del Marmol, Max Nettlau, Albert Zibelin,
out lights” if meeting took anarchistic turn. Marie Goldsmith, Marc Pierrot, and
Pedro Esteve addressed meeting in Spanish. Léon Rémy.
DECEMBER 23 APRIL 7
Spoke to the Italian group of New London, EG in Philadelphia. She gave one lecture in
Connecticut. Pedro Esteve also spoke. the afternoon under the auspices of the Work-
1901 ingmen’s Cooperative Association on the sub-
JANUARY – MARCH ject “The Necessity of Cooperation among La-
Worked as a nurse; re-established friendship bor Organizations.” A second lecture under
with Ed Brady. See LML, pp. 283, 288. the auspices of the Social Science Club was
JANUARY 15 prohibited by the police.
Dutch anarchist Douwe Boersma charged EG APRIL 9
as the instigator of slanders against Most in EG forcibly prevented from speaking on
Domela Nieuwenhuis’s paper, De Vrije Social- “Trade Unionism” at Standard Hall in Phila-
ist, prompting debate about EG’s character delphia. The meeting was sponsored by the
and her role in the anarchist movement. Shirt Makers Union, and EG was accompa-
JANUARY 20 nied by Natasha Notkin before being barred
Salvatore Pallavencini died in Paris. entry by the police.

510 CHRONOLOGY • 1900

APRIL 11 Schilling to ask for suggested readings and in-
EG spoke to an audience of 200 at the Single formation on “secret” anarchist societies. He
Tax Society of Philadelphia at Mercantile Li- visited Schilling three more times by early
brary Hall. The police were unaware of the August.
meeting until it ended. MAY 21
APRIL 14 The brothers Jesús and Ricardo Flores Magón
Spoke at the Social Science Club in Philadel- arrested in Mexico City office of Regeneración,
phia with Voltairine de Cleyre and others be- charged with writing an inflammatory article,
fore 2,000 people at the Industrial Art Hall; sentenced to eleven months.
Social Science Club passes a resolution pro- EG spoke in Chicago to the Scandinavian
testing the violation of her right to free Painters Union on “Cooperation an Important
speech. The police did not attempt to stop Factor in the Industrial Struggle.”
EG from speaking on this occasion. MAY 23
APRIL 17 Bresci died in prison, reportedly by suicide.
Lectured with Voltairine de Cleyre at Brick- MAY 25
layer’s Hall, Philadelphia, sponsored by Spoke before the Blacksmith Helpers Union
United Labor League. in Chicago on “Trade Unionism from an An-
APRIL 26 – MAY 4 archist Standpoint.”
Spoke in Pittsburgh; gave four lectures: MAY 26
“Modern Phases of Anarchism,” “Anarchism Spoke before the Anthropological Society in
and Trades Unionism,” “The Causes of Vice,” Chicago at 3:00 p.m. on “Modern Phases of
and “Cooperation a Factor in the Industrial Anarchism.”
Struggle.” She also gave a lecture in Cecil, MAY 30
Pennsylvania, during this time. EG delivered address at Decoration Day gath-
MAY 4 ering in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery.
Delivered eulogy in Pittsburgh at the funeral JUNE 22
of a young Italian anarchist who had commit- Spoke in German on “Trades Unionism
ted suicide. from an Anarchist Standpoint” in front of
MAY 5 the Brewers’ and Malters’ Union at 122 West
Lectured on “The Modern Phase of Anarchy” Lake Street, Chicago.
before the Liberty Association of the Franklin JUNE 25
Liberal Club in Cleveland. Leon Czolgosz in Spoke to the Lucifer Circle in Chicago, 500
attendance. EG later recognized Czolgosz as Fulton Street, on “Failure of So-called Free
the young man who approached her at the in- Unions.”
termission and asked her recommendation JULY 2
for books to read. Later that evening EG spoke Spoke in German before the German Painters
on the “Cause and Effect of Vice.” Union in Lauterbach’s Hall in Chicago. Lec-
MAY 11 ture entitled “Cooperation an Important Fac-
Pennsylvania’s Commutation Act of 1901 tor in the Industrial Struggle.”
passed. The act allowed for the reduction of JULY 11
prison sentences for good behavior and short- Czolgosz left Cleveland for Chicago.
ened AB’s sentence to just five more years. JULY 12
MAY 19 Czolgosz attempted to visit office of Free Soci-
Czolgosz visited Cleveland anarchist Emil ety in Chicago, came back later the same day

CHRONOLOGY • 1901 511

 and introduced himself as Mr. Nieman from ately bought a train ticket for Buffalo, although
Cleveland. Havel, Max Baginski, and others he was not yet planning to kill the president.
from the office were leaving for the train sta- AUGUST 31
tion to see EG off to Buffalo and Rochester. Czolgosz called on his friend Walter Nowak
Czolgosz joined them. After EG left Chicago, and asked to stay with him. Began visiting the
her comrades became suspicious of Nieman’s exposition grounds a few times each day.
repeated references to acts of violence. A let- SEPTEMBER 1
ter (from Emil Schilling) later arrived at the EG in Cincinnati. Left that night for St. Louis.
Free Society office from Cleveland warning Abe Isaak’s Free Society carried a notice warn-
that “Nieman” was an assumed name and ing people against an agent provocateur who
that Czolgosz was probably a spy. is “soliciting aid for acts of contemplated vio-
JULY 15 lence.” This is Leon Czolgosz.
EG left Buffalo for Rochester, where she SEPTEMBER 2
stayed for the next five weeks. During her stay EG arrived in St. Louis, where she worked
with her sister, she took short trips to Niagara for Ed Brady’s firm until after Czolgosz shot
Falls and New York. While in Rochester, EG McKinley.
learned that AB’s sentence had been com- SEPTEMBER 3 – 5
muted by two and one-half years and he was Czolgosz followed McKinley around to public
permitted to receive visitors. appearances, waiting for a chance to shoot
JULY 29 him.
At the Socialist Unity Convention in India- SEPTEMBER 6
napolis, in what was the largest gathering of Czolgosz waited in line for the president at the
socialists in the United States at that time, the Temple of Music during the Pan American
two SDPs voted to unite and the Socialist Exposition in Buffalo. He shot and severely
Party was created, based in St. Louis and led wounded McKinley. Czolgosz was arrested
by Eugene Debs and Victor Berger. immediately and later confessed to the crime.
AUGUST 15 EG was canvassing stores in St. Louis for Ed
EG left Rochester for Buffalo. Brady’s firm when she first heard of the Mc-
AUGUST 18 Kinley shooting.
EG visited Pan American Exposition in Buf- Czolgosz signed a statement at 10:20 p.m.
falo with Marie Isaak, Abe Isaak’s sixteen- saying that the last public speaker he had
year-old daughter. heard was EG, but that she had never told
AUGUST 19 him to kill the president.
EG went to Pittsburgh to work as a traveling Secret Service officers in Buffalo sent a tele-
saleswoman for a New York firm (Ed Brady’s gram to Chicago officials, asking them to in-
stationery and office supply company). Dur- vestigate and find the location of Free Society’s
ing her stay in Pittsburgh she visits AB for the headquarters. Abe Isaak, Abe Isaak, Jr., Hip-
first time in nine years at the Western Peni- polyte Havel, Enrico Travagilo, Clemens
tentiary, Allegheny City. Pfeutzner, Julia Mechanic, Mary Isaak, Mary
AUGUST 24 Isaak, Jr., and Alfred Schneider were arrested
EG left Pittsburgh for Cincinnati, Ohio. and charged as accomplices in the plot to as-
L ATE AUGUST sassinate the president. The men were sub-
In Chicago, Czolgosz read in the paper that jected to all-night interrogations and held
President McKinley would be visiting the Pan without bail; the women were released three
American Exposition in Buffalo. He immedi- days later.

512 CHRONOLOGY • 1901

SEPTEMBER 7 Harry Gordon and Carl Nold arrested in
EG left St. Louis for Chicago to help Isaak, Pittsburgh.
Havel, and the other anarchists arrested after Hearing for Free Society arrestees. Women
McKinley’s assassination. allowed $3,000 bail and released later in the
Secret Service launched a search for any anar- day at the prosecution’s request. Case post-
chists implicated in the assassination attempt. poned to the 17th and then to the 23rd.
Police ransacked Free Society’s headquarters Secret Service men in Paterson, New Jersey,
again and arrested Jay Fox, Martin Rasnick, searched office of La Questione Sociale and
and Michael Roz. questioned editor Pedro Esteve, trying to de-
Czolgosz admitted in a statement that he had termine if anarchists there were involved in
met EG in Chicago, but insisted that EG had the plot to kill the president.
not spoken to him. SEPTEMBER 10
“Murder against Murder,” an old article by Warrant issued for EG’s arrest. Police go to
Karl Heinzen praising tyrannicide, appeared Norris’s house where EG was hiding; she
in Freiheit No. 36, ironically used as a space fil- posed as Swedish maid to evade them but
ler by Most, who was short of copy. eventually gave herself up. She was subjected
SEPTEMBER 8 to intensive interrogation. Though initially
EG arrived in Chicago, was met by Max Ba- denied, bail was set at $20,000.
ginski, and went into hiding at the home of Cases against Free Society women (Julia Me-
Charles Norris. According to the Chicago Tri- chanic, Mary Isaak, and daughter Mary Isaak,
bune, she registered in a hotel under a ficti- Jr.) dropped for lack of evidence.
tious name before going to Norris’s home. The National Association of Merchants and
The Chicago Tribune let it be known it was Travelers, a Chicago group, adopted resolu-
prepared to give EG $5,000 for an exclusive tions to prevent anarchists from entering the
interview; she however needed to stay in hid- United States. Representative Metcalf of Cali-
ing long enough to secure the money for the fornia proposed an anti-anarchist immigra-
defense of the Free Society anarchists. tion law.
Czolgosz named EG and another free-love New York police commissioner ordered a
proponent as influential to him. “careful census” of all anarchists in the city to
SEPTEMBER 9 be compiled and turned over to the detective
The Buffalo Commercial reported that “accord- bureau to “make conditions disagreeable” for
ing to the law as construed by the Illinois su- those named.
preme court in the case of the Chicago SEPTEMBER 11
anarchists involved in the Haymarket riot EG arraigned in Chicago, denied bail and
some years ago, Emma Goldman and all the hearing date set for the 19th.
other anarchists who belonged to the anar- Gordon and Nold released for lack of evidence.
chistic society with which Czolgosz was af- SEPTEMBER 12
filiated, or whose addresses or writings in Buffalo district attorney announced he had no
any way might tend to induce Czolgosz to evidence to warrant EG’s extradition.
shoot the President, are equally guilty with Johann Most arrested for publication of Hein-
him.” zen’s article on political violence in Freiheit.
Cleveland police issued an official statement Despite past differences, EG later supported
to the Associated Press regarding the alleged Most and helped raise funds for his defense.
anarchist plot to kill the president: they found SEPTEMBER 13
no definitive proof of a plot. Managers of the musical comedy The New

CHRONOLOGY • 1901 513

 Yorkers announced they had to rewrite the case dropped for lack of evidence. She was
comic opera, omitting the three anarchist never officially charged with a crime.
characters because of bitter public sentiment Czolgosz found guilty of first-degree murder.
against anarchists. James E. Larkin, Charles L. Govan, G. Mo-
Most was arraigned and his bail set at $1,000. rong, and James W. Adams, all connected to
He was sent to the Tombs in default of bail. the anarchist paper Discontent, charged with
SEPTEMBER 14 using the mail to distribute obscene literature.
President McKinley died from gangrenous in- SEPTEMBER 26
fection stemming from his wounds. Czolgosz sentenced to death.
SEPTEMBER 15 SEPTEMBER 27
EG received wire in jail from Ed Brady prom- Czolgosz moved from Buffalo to Auburn
ising the backing of his firm. In the evening prison. When his train arrived at 3:10 a.m.,
she was questioned by Chief O’Neill, whom he was brutally dragged from the train
she claimed in Living My Life (p. 302) said he through a crowd of several hundred.
believed her innocent. OCTOBER
Offices of Freie Arbeiter Stimme attacked by AB locked up again in solitary confinement in
mob. aftermath of McKinley’s assassination.
Anarchist settlement Guffey Hollow, Pennsyl- OCTOBER 3
vania, raided and 25 anarchist families forced EG scheduled but prevented from deliver-
to leave the area. ing the same lecture that allegedly inspired
SEPTEMBER 16 Czolgosz.
Article appeared in New York Journal suggest- OCTOBER 6
ing EG had been a tsarist spy since 1891. EG’s “The Tragedy at Buffalo” appeared in
Johann Most arraigned and released on bail. Free Society.
Czolgosz arraigned. OCTOBER 6 – 29
Gaetano Bresci’s widow asked to leave Cliff- Finding it difficult to secure an apartment
side Park, New Jersey, by mayor. or job, EG adopted the pseudonym “E. G.
SEPTEMBER 17 Smith.”
Wife of Bresci’s alleged co-conspirator, Quin- OCTOBER 8
tevallo, forced to leave Union Hill, New Jersey. EG spoke at the Manhattan Liberal Club, New
SEPTEMBER 18 York.
EG’s bail set at $20,000, and her hearing for OCTOBER 13
the 24th. Free Society printed statement of apology to
SEPTEMBER 19 Czolgosz, retracting previous accusation of
McKinley’s funeral held. his being a spy.
SEPTEMBER 23 OCTOBER 14
EG transferred to Chicago’s Cook County Jail, Most convicted for publication of “Murder
claimed she was struck by a guard and lost a against Murder.” Sentenced to one year for vi-
tooth. olating section 675 of New York penal code.
Czolgosz’s trial began in Buffalo Supreme OCTOBER 29
Court. He was charged with first degree Czolgosz executed.
murder. Most released pending appeal.
Free Society arrestees discharged by judge. NOVEMBER 18
SEPTEMBER 24 Berkman appealed to Pittsburgh Superior
EG released after a two-week incarceration; Court for release. His appeal was based upon

514 CHRONOLOGY • 1901

the argument that his lesser indictments, in- the appeal was in Berkman’s name, it was car-
cluding entering Frick’s office, carrying con- ried out without his permission.
cealed weapons, and carrying firearms, DECEMBER 9
should have been merged under the greater EG spoke at meeting of Social Science Club
indictment of felonious assault, that he in Civic Hall, New York; Rudolph Grossman
should have been sentenced to ten years not also spoke on “Anarchism and Communism.”
twenty-one, and that under the new commu- DECEMBER 18
tation law passed in Pennsylvania his time Discontent publishers discovered six issues
should expire on 2 December 1901. Although had been held by Tacoma post office.

CHRONOLOGY • 1901 515

 Directory of INDIVIDUALS

Addis, Henry (1864–1934) American anarchist, writer, editor, and lecturer. Formerly a resident of
Colorado, Addis settled in Portland in 1890. He published the anarchist paper Freedom (1893–
1894). A leading Portland anarchist, Addis co-founded the Firebrand in 1895. Addis was tried with
fellow Firebrand editors Abe Isaak and A. J. Pope on obscenity charges in the fall of 1897 (for pub-
lishing, among other articles, Walt Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for Me” in the 14 March 1897
issue); all three were convicted. While Pope spent four months in prison, Addis’s and Isaak’s con-
victions were overturned on appeal in 1898. Addis remained in Portland after Isaak relocated Fire-
brand to San Francisco. Addis later moved to Home Colony in Washington State and continued to
write for the paper, re-named Free Society. Writing from Holland from 1903 to 1904, he contributed
to Free Society. Among his published works are Receptive and Imperative Wants and Their Gratifica-
tion through Labor Exchange (Portland: Morris-Jones, 1894), Essays on the Social Problem (San Fran-
cisco: Free Society Publishing, 1898), and Communism, published in a single pamphlet with Jay
Fox’s Roosevelt, Czolgosz and Anarchy (New York: New York Anarchists, 1902).

Altgeld, John Peter (1847–1902) Democratic governor of Illinois (1892 –1896). Born in Germany
and raised in Ohio, Altgeld at the time of his election was a successful real estate developer in Chi-
cago, a superior court judge, and a leading advocate of penal reform. In June 1893 he pardoned the
surviving anarchists convicted in the Haymarket affair, releasing Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe,
and Michael Schwab from prison. In a detailed statement in a pamphlet titled Reasons for Pardon-
ing Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab, Altgeld attacked the legality of the original trial, addressing the ille-
gitimacy of jury selection, the conduct of the police and prosecution, and the bias of Judge Joseph
E. Gary, and concluded that the proceedings were a clear miscarriage of justice. Issued along with
the texts of the pardons, Altgeld’s 1893 pamphlet circulated for years among anarchists and social-
ists (publishers included Free Society Publishing, Lucy E. Parsons, C. H. Kerr, and New York Labor
News). During the 1894 Pullman strike in Chicago, Altgeld supported the striking American Rail-
road Union and protested President Grover Cleveland’s dispatch of federal troops to Chicago to stop
the strike. After losing his re-election campaign in 1896, he returned to the practice of law in part-
nership with Clarence Darrow. Altgeld’s writings include Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims (Chi-
cago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884), The Eight Hour Labor Movement (Boston: Labor Leader Publishing,
1890), Organized Labor’s Demands with Eugene Debs (New York: Morning Advertiser, 1894), Ora-
tory: Its Requirements and Rewards (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1901), and The Cost of Something for Noth-
ing (Chicago: Hammersmark Publishing, 1904).

516
Angiolillo, Michele (1871–1897) Italian anarchist. Angiolillo (often referred to in newspapers as
“Golli”) shot and killed Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the prime minister of Spain, on 8 August
1897, at the Santa Agueda baths in the Basque region of Spain. Born in Foggia, Italy, Angiolillo at-
tended technical school and was reported to have become interested in anarchism while serving in
the military. He worked as a printer until 1895, when he was forced to flee Italy for printing an anti-
government manifesto. In the interim between leaving Italy and shooting Cánovas del Castillo, he
lived in Spain, France, Belgium, and England. Reportedly, Angiolillo committed the act to avenge
the tortures and deaths of the Montjuich prisoners. He was executed by garrote on 20 August 1897.

Aronstam, Modest see Stein, Modest.

Austin, Kate (1864–1902) American anarchist, advocate of women’s independence, and free-
thinker. Born Catherine Cooper in La Salle, Illinois, she settled with her husband, Sam Austin, on
a farm near Caplinger Mills, Missouri. She was an early freethought and free-love advocate, and a
lifelong anarchist communist influenced by the trial and execution of the Haymarket anarchists.
Kate Austin was a friend and correspondent of William Holmes and Carl Nold. She and Sam ar-
ranged EG’s Missouri lectures in 1897 and 1899. According to Living My Life, EG intended to, but
was barred from, delivering Austin’s report on “The Question of the Sexes,” on the history of the
free-love movement in the United States, at the 1900 International Revolutionary Congress of the
Working People in Paris; a group of French anarchists feared “that any discussion of sex would only
serve to increase the misconceptions of anarchism” (LML, p. 271). The text of Austin’s paper did
however appear in the official reports of the 1900 Paris congress in Les Temps Nouveaux, as well as
in the Italian-American anarchist newspaper La Protesta Humana. In 1901 Austin joined EG in de-
fending Czolgosz’s act in the pages of Free Society. Austin was a contributor to Free Society, Fire-
brand, Lucifer the Lightbearer, and Discontent and a regular correspondent to a variety of papers. She
died of consumption in Kingman, Kansas, on 28 October 1902 while traveling to Denver. Austin
was memorialized in obituaries by both EG and Voltairine de Cleyre.

Baginski, Max (1864–1943) German American anarchist and editor. Baginski was a member of
the German Social Democratic Party and became a follower of Johann Most. By 1891 he was a
member of Youth, the anarchistic group in the Social Democratic Party, and editor-in-chief of Pro-
letarier aus dem Eulengebirge. Baginski was also a member of the New Free Popular Theater in Berlin
and in 1891 guided his roommate Gerhardt Hauptmann (see vol. 2) through Silesia, which Haupt-
mann later depicted in his drama The Weavers (1892). Baginski left Berlin after a thirty-month
prison term for press violations, traveled through Zurich and London, arriving in New York in 1893
with his brother Richard Baginski. Max Baginski first met EG in Philadelphia in August 1893; he
settled in Chicago where he became lovers with EG in 1898. Baginski later married Emilie (Millie)
Schumm. Honoring their lifelong friendship, EG later wrote, “Max showed greater breadth, sym-
pathy, and understanding than I had found among even the best of the German anarchists” (LML,
p. 217). Baginski lived for a short time in Paris with his companion Millie Schumm in 1900, re-
turning to the United States in 1901. Baginski wrote for Freiheit in New York and edited the Chica-
goer Arbeiter-Zeitung from 1894 to approximately 1907, as well as its two weeklies, Die Fackel and
Der Verbote (from 1893 to [?]), and published four issues of his own journal, Die Sturmglocken (in
1896). See also vols. 2, 3.

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 517

 Bakunin, Michael (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary and theorist of anarchism. Bakunin was
born into the aristocracy of Premukhino, in Tver province, and later was a part of the Russian in-
telligentsia. Radicalized under the repressive regime of Nicholas I, Bakunin found in Western En-
lightenment philosophy, especially in the works of Johann G. Fichte and Georg W. F. Hegel, a the-
oretical basis for opposition to tsarist autocracy. He moved to Berlin in 1840 and joined the circle
of the Young Hegelians. In Paris in 1844 Bakunin met and was influenced by Karl Marx, who would
later become his political adversary, and by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom he
became fast friends. After his arrest in Dresden, Bakunin was condemned to death for his part in
the revolutionary activity of 1848 and 1849; he was transferred to Russia, placed under government
custody, and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. In 1861 Bakunin escaped from exile in
Siberia, traveling to Japan, the United States, England, Italy, and ultimately to Switzerland. Bakunin
first joined the International in 1864, and by 1872, when Marx succeeded in expelling him from the
International, Bakuninists probably constituted a majority of the organization’s members. As a
leading force in the anti-authoritarian opposition to Marx in the First International, Bakunin first
described himself verbally as an anarchist in the mid-1860s, and in writing in 1867. His writings
explored the idea of anarchist collectivism, an ideology later adopted by Victor Dave and Johann
Most. Bakunin, preferring the life of an activist more than that of a theoretician, never wrote com-
plete polemical tracts, with most of his writings unfinished fragments. His principal works are Sta-
tism and Anarchy (1873) and God and the State (1882), originally translated into English by Benjamin
Tucker (Boston: Benjamin Tucker, 1883). God and the State was reprinted in 1896 by E. H. Fulton
(Columbus Junction, Iowa: E. H. Fulton, 1896) and again in 1900 by Abe Isaak (San Francisco: A.
Isaak, 1900). Tucker also serialized Bakunin’s The Political Theology of Mazzini and the Interna-
tional, translated by Sarah E. Holmes, in Liberty in 1886 and 1887. Bakunin died in Berne, Switzer-
land, on 1 July 1876.

Barondess, Joseph (1867–1928) Russian-born trade union organizer. Barondess was born in
Kamenets-Podolsk, Russia, the son of a rabbi; he immigrated first to England where he was an ac-
tive trade unionist, and in 1888 to the United States. Barondess was employed in New York City as
a kneepants maker, while attending night school at New York University Law School. He quickly
became a popular labor leader and worked with the United Hebrew Trades in the 1890s, after lead-
ing the striking cloakmakers in New York City in 1890. In 1893 charges of extortion were brought
against Barondess by a group of employers allegedly intent on slandering union officials. He was
convicted and briefly fled to Canada; upon his return he spent a short time in jail before being par-
doned by the governor of New York. In 1895 he led an unsuccessful general strike of cloakmakers
that weakened both the union and his leadership. Barondess was sympathetic to anarchism and
was an occasional contributor to Freie Arbeiter Stimme during the 1890s. In 1894 he left New York
City and his work for the cloakmakers union, moving to Baltimore where he started the short-lived
Yiddish paper Free Press. By the late 1890s he had gravitated toward socialism, and in 1897 he co-
founded the Jewish Daily Forward, a socialist paper opposed to the Socialist Labor Party. In 1898
Barondess joined Eugene Debs and Victor Berger in the Social Democratic party and contributed
articles to the Social Democratic Herald. A force in founding the International Ladies Garment
Workers’ Union in 1900, Barondess was invited to join the National Civic Federation that same
year. See also vol. 2.

518 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

Battola, Jean (dates unknown) Italian anarchist exile living in England, shoemaker. A Walsall an-
archist, Battola was arrested in January 1892 and charged with conspiracy to make explosives. He
was sentenced to ten years in prison on 4 April 1892.

Bauer, Henry (1861–1934) German-born anarchist. Bauer immigrated to the United States in 1880
and settled in Pittsburgh, where he took part in the movement for an eight-hour workday. Bauer
was drawn to anarchism in response to the Haymarket trial and executions. AB stayed with Bauer
and Carl Nold in Pittsburgh before his attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick. With Nold,
Bauer was sentenced to five years, and served four, in prison on two charges: incitement to riot
(stemming from their distribution of a handbill addressed to striking Homestead workers on
8 July); and conspiracy (with AB) to commit murder. Bauer was also charged $50 and sixty days in
county jail for contempt of court when he refused to name the other men involved in distributing
the leaflets (one of whom was Max Metzkow). Bauer corresponded with AB through the journal
Prison Blossoms, created within the walls of the Western Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. After his re-
lease, Bauer served as secretary of the Berkman Defense Committee. Settling in Pittsburgh, he be-
came western Pennsylvania’s distributor of English- and German-language anarchist books, pam-
phlets, and newspapers, including Firebrand, Free Society, and Freiheit. He contributed to Freedom
(1892, on the consequences of the Frick shooting) and to Free Society (25 December 1898, “Can An-
archism Be Killed?” a reprint of an interview first published in the Pittsburg Leader).

Berkman, Alexander (Ovsej Berkman) (1870 –1936) Lithuanian-born anarchist and early mentor,
lover, and lifelong comrade of EG. Berkman, whose legal name was Alexander Schmidt Bergmann
and nickname was “Sasha,” was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Lithuania (then a part of
Russia). Berkman’s uncle, Mark Natanson, was a founder of the Chaikovsky Circle and the Zemlya
i Volya (Land and Liberty) society, the largest Russian populist group in the 1870s; Natanson would
become an important figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party and at various times in his life sup-
ported the strategy of terrorism. AB’s interest in anarchism was first aroused upon reading an ar-
ticle on the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887. He immigrated to the United States just
a few months later, at the age of 17 in February 1888, and frequented Jewish and German anarchist
groups. Berkman joined and became an active member of Pionere der Frayhayt (Pioneers of Lib-
erty). He worked as a cigar maker and tailor before learning typesetting, a skill he exercised in his
work on Johann Most’s paper, Freiheit. Gradually AB distanced himself ideologically from Most and
Freiheit, gravitating toward the anarchism of Joseph Peukert and the Autonomy Group associated
with the anarchist communist paper Die Autonomie. AB and EG first met in August 1889, upon her
moving to New York, and within a short time they began to live together communally with Modest
Stein and the sisters Anna and Helene Minkin. In 1890 the group moved to New Haven, Con-
necticut, to open a dressmaking co-operative modeled after that in N. G. Chernyshevsky’s novel en-
titled What Is to Be Done? (Boston: Benjamin Tucker, 1886). Then in 1891 AB, EG, and Stein moved
to Worcester, Massachusetts, where for a short time they operated an ice cream parlor. Upon hear-
ing the news of the Homestead strike and lockout, however, they returned to New York in a effort
to find a way to help the steel workers. AB, EG, and Stein planned AB’s attentat in early July 1892.
AB then traveled to Pittsburgh, arriving on 13 July and staying with Henry Bauer and Carl Nold.
While in Pittsburgh he used the name Rahkmetov, a central character from What Is to Be Done? On
23 July 1892, AB made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick, for which he was

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 519

 sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, although his act under Pennsylvania law only called
for seven years in prison. He edited the journal Prison Blossoms with Henry Bauer and Carl Nold
from inside Western Penitentiary. In 1900 Berkman, with the help of Eric B. Morton and others,
organized an escape; the plan was to tunnel into the prison and rescue Berkman. While EG was in
Paris, the plot was discovered and thus abandoned. The Berkman Defense Association was formed
shortly after AB’s imprisonment to work for AB’s release, a reduction in his sentence, and at one
time as a cover to raise funds for his tunnel escape. Harry Gordon, Henry Bauer, Carl Nold, Ed
Brady, Harry Kelly, and EG were the driving forces behind these efforts. Although instinctively sym-
pathetic to Leon Czolgosz, Berkman was critical of his act, believing the assassination would nei-
ther help the working people nor further the cause of anarchist propaganda.

Berman, Nahum H. (also Burmin) (d. 1900) Russian-born Jewish anarchist communist. Berman
immigrated to the United States in 1885 and worked on Freiheit, Solidarity, and the Alarm before he
anonymously helped edit the Rebel from 1895 to 1896. A close friend of Harry Kelly and Charles
Mowbray, and a one-time lover of Voltairine de Cleyre, Berman helped start the short-lived anarchist
paper Match in 1896. He died insane in Chicago; de Cleyre wrote his obituary for Free Society.

Bly, Nellie (1864–1922) American journalist. Writing under a nom de plume, Bly (who was born
Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman) began her career with the New York World in 1887 with an exposé
of abuses at the Women’s Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, to which she had herself commit-
ted in order to get the story. This investigative style of reportage soon became Bly’s trademark. Bly
left the New York World staff following her celebrated trek around the world in under eighty days in
the winter of 1889 –90, returning to the paper in 1893 when she interviewed EG. She wrote Around
the World in Seventy-Two Days (New York: The Pictorial Weeklies Co., 1890).

Borland, Wilfred P. (b. ca. 1830) Michigan and then Chicago anarchist communist and trade union-
ist. Borland, a frequent lecturer in Chicago around the turn of the century, worked with Eugene
Debs on the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine and was a member of the colonization
commission of the Social Democracy of America in 1898. An occasional contributor to the Fire-
brand, Borland also acted as a Chicago subscription agent for Free Society.

Brady, Edward (1852 –1903) Austrian anarchist born in Vienna. Arrested in Munich in 1885 for dis-
tributing anarchist literature and deported to Vienna, Brady served eight years of a twelve-year
prison sentence at hard labor. Upon his release, Brady emigrated to the United States in 1892. He
met EG in December 1892 at a meeting for the commutation of AB’s sentence. Brady soon became
EG’s teacher, mentor, and lover, and introduced her to the classics of European literature. His re-
sentment of EG’s singular devotion to the anarchist cause ultimately ended their intimate relation-
ship in 1897, although they remained close friends and comrades. Brady served as treasurer of the
Workingmen’s Defense Association in 1901, working to appeal the imprisonment of Johann Most
in the wake of the McKinley assassination; and for a brief time he also published Der Anarchist.
Harry Kelly wrote the obituary for Brady in the May 1903 Freedom.

Bresci, Gaetano (1869 –1901) Italian American anarchist. Born in Prato, Tuscany, Bresci ap-
prenticed as a silk weaver in Milan, where he first joined the anarchist movement. Bresci settled in
early 1898 in Paterson, New Jersey, where he worked as a silk weaver. He was drawn to the anti-
organizzatori (anti-organization) affinity group in Paterson, where he became a subscriber and

520 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

benefactor of the paper La Questione Sociale. In May 1900, to avenge the victims of government
repression in Milan and Sicily, he left his home in New Jersey to assassinate King Umberto of Italy
at Monza on 29 July 1900. He died in prison the following year, reportedly by suicide, and was con-
sidered a martyr of heroic significance to many within the American and European anarchist
movement.

Brown, John (1800 –1859) American abolitionist. Brown attacked the national government for its
link to slavery and led the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, in an attempt to secure arms and distrib-
ute them to slaves for rebellion. Brown was tried for murder, slave insurrection, and treason in the
state of Virginia, and was hanged 2 December 1859. He was regarded as a martyr and a hero for
the bravery he exercised at his trial before facing death. EG and other anarchists identified with his
willingness to die for his principles, and for adhering to a law of ethics while challenging the state
in pursuit of a more just society.

Bruno, Giordano (1548 –1600) Italian philosopher, Dominican monk. A victim of the Spanish In-
quisition, Bruno was venerated by anarchists, among others, as a martyr to freedom of thought. Lu-
cifer used the death of Bruno, rather than the birth of Jesus, to serially date issues of the paper.

Cailes, Victor (1858 –1926) French anarchist. Cailes was convicted in the Walsall affair. Wanted in
France for incitement to “incendiarism, murder and pillage” after a riot in Nantes, he arrived in
England in 1890. Cailes was arrested with Fred Charles on 7 January 1892, at the Walsall Socialist
Club, and later served seven and a half years of a ten-year sentence.

Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio (1828 –1897) Spanish prime minister, historian, and writer. Cánovas
was assassinated by Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo after ordering the execution of five anar-
chists and the torture of hundreds of anarchists and radicals for their alleged involvement in the
7 June 1896 bombing of a Corpus Christi Day parade in Barcelona.

Cantwell, Thomas Edward (1864–1906) English anarchist, compositor. A member of the London
branch of the Socialist League, Cantwell was the compositor and printer for The Commonweal from
1890 to 1894, except for the six months he spent in prison in 1893 after an anti-royalist demon-
stration at Tower Bridge. He was the compositor for Freedom from 1895 to 1902.

Carnegie, Andrew (1835–1919) Scottish-born American industrialist, philanthropist. Carnegie im-

migrated with his family in 1848 and settled in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, where he began work-
ing at the age of 13. By his twenties Carnegie had become a financier with a fortune amassed from
his investments. In the 1860s he founded an iron and steel works business and by 1889 had con-
solidated his interests into the Carnegie Steel Company. In April 1892, with Henry C. Frick acting
as his proxy, Carnegie declared that the mills at Homestead, Pennsylvania, would become non-
union in June of that year. Frick was given carte blanche authority to implement Carnegie’s deci-
sion, the results of which led both to the Homestead lockout and to Berkman’s failed attentat on
Frick’s life. In a letter printed in the November 1911 edition of the London anarchist newspaper
Freedom, AB claimed that “it was universally understood that Carnegie arranged the Homestead
lock-out and absented himself merely to shift responsibility for the troubles which he knew would
follow.” In 1901 Carnegie transferred his steel trust to the United States Steel Corporation and re-
tired with significant reserves of wealth, which he later distributed according to the philosophy of

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 521

 his book, The Gospel of Wealth (London: F. C. Hagen, 1889), donating huge sums to educational and
scientific institutions.

Carnot, Marie François-Sadi (1837–1894) French president, the fourth (1887–1894) during the
Third Republic. Carnot was stabbed to death by Italian anarchist Sante Caserio on 24 June 1894,
in retaliation for his refusal to pardon Auguste Vaillant, who was executed on 6 February 1894 for
attempting to blow up the Chamber of Deputies on 9 December 1893.

Caserio, Sante (1873–1894) Italian anarchist. Caserio was from Motta Visconti, near Pavia, and a
baker by trade. Caserio sought to avenge the execution of Auguste Vaillant on 6 February 1894 by
assassinating French president Sadi Carnot in Lyon on 24 June 1894, which led to the passage
of the third of three anti-socialist “Exceptional Laws” (also known as lois scélérates) on 26 and 27
July 1894.

Chaikovsky, Nikolai (1851–1926) Russian revolutionary. In St. Petersburg in 1869 he founded with
Mark Natanson (AB’s uncle) what became known as the Chaikovsky Circle, a group of radical stu-
dents and intellectuals, including Peter Kropotkin and Sophia Perovskaya, who devoted themselves
to a populist program of studying political and social issues, publishing radical literature, and prop-
agandizing among workers and peasants. Chaikovsky left Russia in 1874, and apart from two trips
to the United States (1875–1879, 1882 –1885), spent his exile years in London. As an authority on
Russian politics, he was well known among those British intellectuals who were critical of the
tsarist regime. Chaikovsky was a delegate to the July 1881 anarchist meeting in London (the Inter-
national Social Revolutionary Congress) and member of the Freedom Group. EG met him in 1900
in London at Kropotkin’s house. Chaikovsky joined the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party when
it was organized during 1901 and 1902. See also vol. 2.

Chamberlain, Joseph (1836 –1914) British politician and prominent member of the Liberal Party.
Chamberlain became town councilor in 1868 and mayor of Birmingham in 1873. He won a seat in
the House of Commons in 1876 and in 1880 was appointed president of the Board of Trade. His
strong opposition to Irish Home Rule, symptomatic of his strong support of British imperialism,
led him to form the Liberal Unionist faction, which broke with the Liberals and allied with the Con-
servative Party. For his support of the Irish Act of Union, he was appointed British colonial secre-
tary from 1895 to 1903, responsible for British policy during the Boer War. By 1906, his proposed
system of protective tariffs within the British empire failed, and after serious illness that same year
he withdrew from public life.

Charles, Fred (original name F. C. Slaughter) (1864–1934) British anarchist. Born in Norwich, En-
gland, he was a leading member of the Socialist League between 1885 and 1892; he attended the
1887 international socialist conference in Paris and co-founded the Sheffield Anarchist in May 1891.
Arrested 7 January 1892 and convicted on 4 April of conspiracy in connection with the Walsall case,
Slaughter served seven and a half years of a ten-year sentence. He changed his name after his
release.

Cherkesov, Varlaam N. (1846 –1925) Georgian anarchist and revolutionary. Born to nobility,
Cherkesov joined Russian revolutionary circles in the 1860s, conspiring against the tsar’s life in
1866. Arrested in 1869 and exiled to Siberia, Cherkesov escaped in January 1876 to London where
he befriended Peter Kropotkin, becoming one of his closest collaborators. A member of the Free-

522 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

dom Group, Cherkesov contributed articles to Freedom, Liberty (London), and Les Temps Nouveaux.
Cherkesov also wrote Let Us Be Just (London: Liberty Press, 1896), Pages of Socialist History: Teach-
ings and Acts of Social Democracy (New York: Charles B. Cooper, 1902), and Concentration of Capi-
tal, A Marxian Fallacy (London: Freedom Press, 1911). He returned to his native Georgia briefly in
1905 and again in 1917, dying in London in 1925.

Cipriani, Amilcare (1844–1918) Italian revolutionary. Cipriani was born in Anzio and served under
Giuseppe Garibaldi between 1860 and 1870. A member of the general staff of the Paris Commune,
Cipriani spent eight years in a French penal colony before being granted amnesty in 1880. Re-
turning to Italy, Cipriani joined other revolutionaries, including the anarchist Carlo Cafiero, in or-
ganizing a revolt against the monarchy after which the government arrested him for an 1867 mur-
der that it had earlier deemed to have been in self-defense, sentencing him to twenty-five years in
prison. A popular revolutionary leader, Cipriani’s case became a cause célèbre for the Italian left,
which mounted a sustained campaign for his release, including helping elect Cipriani to the Ital-
ian parliament four times. Widespread public sympathy won him a pardon in July 1888. Cipriani
and Errico Malatesta were the leading speakers at a conference of anarchists at Ticino in January
1891. His imprisonment again for participating in Rome’s May Day riots of 1891 sealed Cipriani’s
legacy as a heroic figure for many nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchists.

Cleveland, Grover (1837–1908) United States president (1885–1889, 1893–1897) and New York
governor (1882 –1884), the only president elected to two nonconsecutive terms, and the first Dem-
ocrat elected after the Civil War. Under the auspices of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, Cleve-
land ordered federal troops to Chicago on 3 July 1894. He claimed that the Pullman strike inter-
fered with the delivery of the mail; the arrival of federal troops sparked rioting, bloodshed, and led
to the strike’s eventual collapse. EG, in the 22 November 1896 Pittsburg Leader, criticized Cleveland
for signing the extradition treaty negotiated with Russia in June 1893, which stipulated that Rus-
sian political dissidents living in the United States could be subject to extradition.

Cohn, Michael Alexander (1867–1939) Russian-born Jewish anarchist, physician, and lifelong
friend and financial supporter of both EG and AB. Cohn spent two years in rabbinical training be-
fore deciding to study mathematics and the Russian language in Warsaw. Instead of graduating, he
emigrated in 1886 to Boston where he worked as a tailor and began writing for the Yiddish peri-
odical New Yorker Volkszeitung. Cohn studied medicine at New York University and in Baltimore,
while remaining an active anarchist. Deeply affected by the execution of the Haymarket anarchists,
by 1890 he had become a regular contributor to Freie Arbeiter Stimme. His first wife, Annie, was
also a strong supporter of the anarchist movement and highly regarded by EG (in 1916 both Cohn
and his wife would work with EG in the fight for birth control). From 1890 Cohn practiced medi-
cine in Brooklyn and continued to contribute intellectually and financially to the Jewish anarchist
movement. He helped work for AB’s release from prison. Cohn attended the 1900 International
Revolutionary Congress of the Working People in Paris with EG, where he gave a report on “The
History of the Jewish Movement in America.” In addition to Freie Arbeiter Stimme, Cohn con-
tributed to Twentieth Century Magazine and Free Society, including a series of European reports dur-
ing his 1900 trip. See also vols. 3, 4.

Comstock, Anthony (1844–1915) American reformer, founder of the Society for the Suppression of
Vice in 1872. In 1873, Comstock successfully lobbied Congress for passage of a law giving the postal

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 523

 service unprecedented powers to exclude “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material from the mails.
Offenders were subject to prison terms of up to ten years. As the postal official charged with en-
forcing the law, which was known as the Comstock Act, Comstock prosecuted a wide range of pro-
gressive and radical publications. A frequent target of Comstock’s attention, EG sharply criticized
his role as censor in many of her talks and essays. Comstock’s published works included Frauds Ex-
posed (New York: J. H. Brown, 1880), Traps for the Young (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883),
Morals versus Art (Chicago: J. S. Ogilvie, 1887), and Gambling Outrages; Or Improving the Breed of
Horses at the Expense of Public Morals (New York: American News, 1887). See also vols. 2, 3.

Cook, John H. (d. 1931) American anarchist. A socialist until his late twenties, he was a mainstay of
the labor movement in his home city of Providence, Rhode Island, involved in the city’s Wendell
Phillips Educational Club, and served as founding secretary of the local carpenters’ union for fifty
years and for several years as the president of the Central Labor Union. The local subscription agent
for Free Society as well as a contributor, Cook was also a contributor to Twentieth Century Magazine.
Cook was arrested on several occasions for holding street meetings in defiance of local ordinances.
He regularly arranged and introduced EG’s Providence meetings beginning in the 1890s. The Prov-
idence press identified Cook as the leader of the local anarchists.

Cooper, Charles B. (1852 –1930) British-born anarchist, active lecturer in New York City. Cooper
worked on Solidarity when it was briefly revived in 1898, contributing articles and acting as treas-
urer for the Solidarity Group; he also contributed to Free Society and Lucifer, the Lightbearer. Cooper
published Varlaam Cherkesov’s Pages of Socialist History (New York: Charles B. Cooper, 1902).
Cooper shared an apartment with anarchist Alex Horr in New York City in 1902.

Cornelissen, Christianus Gerardus (Christiaan) (1864–1942) Dutch anti-parliamentarian socialist

and syndicalist; close associate of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. While Nieuwenhuis was con-
cerned with intellectual emancipation through education, Cornelissen stressed industrial labor or-
ganization and the educational potential of syndicalism. Cornelissen published the journal Recht
voor Allen (from 1892) with Nieuwenhuis and organized syndicates through the Nationaal Arbeids-
Secretariaat in 1893. Cornelissen also organized anarchists, syndicalists, and anti-Marxists against
the social democratic faction at the 1896 London congress of the socialist Second International—
a cooperative effort taken with Fernand Pelloutier, Émile Pouget, Errico Malatesta, Gustav Landauer,
and others. Moving to France in 1898, Cornelissen contributed to various socialist, anarchist, and
syndicalist publications, including Les Temps Nouveaux and his own journal, Bulletin International
du Mouvement Syndicaliste (Paris, 1907). Cornelissen’s written works in this period include Les di-
verses tendences du Parti Ouvrier International (1896), Le Communisme révolutionnaire: Projet pour une
entente et pour l’action commune de socialistes révolutionnaires et communistes anarchistes (1896), and
Het revolutionaire Kommunisme: zijn Beginselen en zijn Taktiek (1897). EG befriended Cornelissen
and his wife, Lily, in Paris in 1900. See also vol. 2.

Coulon, Auguste (dates unknown) French anarchist. Coulon worked at the libertarian International
Sunday School in London founded by Louise Michel and contributed regularly to The Commonweal.
A central co-conspirator in the 1892 Walsall affair and the only one not arrested, subsequent events
suggested he was an agent provocateur, later exposed by David Nicoll, among others.

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Crosby, Ernest Howard (1856 –1907) American social reformer, single-taxer, lecturer, author. A
leading proponent of Tolstoyan anarchism in the United States, Crosby was also profoundly
influenced by the ideas of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and the poet Walt Whitman. He suc-
ceeded his friend Theodore Roosevelt in 1887 as a representative to the New York state assembly,
and in 1889 was appointed to the International Court in Egypt as a judge. In 1894, Crosby,
influenced by the ideas of Tolstoy, gave up his judgeship to advocate pacifism and anti-militarism
as chairman of the New York branch of the Friends of Russian Freedom (see vol. 2) and president of
the New York Anti-Militarist League (1900 –1904). Crosby was also one of the founders and first
president of the Social Reform Club of New York and president of the Anti-Imperialism League in
New York as well as serving on the executive committee of the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, an in-
terdenominational group formed to establish a “Kingdom of God on Earth” in 1896. He offered to
assist EG in her attempt to secure a pardon for Berkman in 1898 and 1899 by acting as Berkman’s
spokesman and applying to Andrew Carnegie for his support, a plan which was eventually aban-
doned. Crosby was associate editor of the Christian Socialist journal Social Gospel (from 1898 to
1901) and editor of The Whim, “a periodical with several tendencies” (from 1901 to 1904), and con-
tributed a series of articles to The Kingdom (1895) on the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in
which he developed a seven-point program for a revolutionary movement, which included nonvio-
lent resistance with a working class base. Crosby’s publications from this period include Plain Talk
in Psalm and Parable (London: Brotherhood Publishing, 1898), Edward Carpenter: Poet and Prophet
(Philadelphia: The Conservator, 1901), and The Absurdities of Militarism (Boston: American Peace
Society, 1901). See also vol. 2.

Czolgosz, Leon (1873–1901) American laborer, self-proclaimed anarchist, and assassin of President
William McKinley. Born near Detroit of Polish-immigrant parents, Czolgosz supported his family
upon his mother’s death when he was young, working at a glass factory in Pennsylvania, and later
at a wire mill in Cleveland, Ohio, where after participating in a strike at the mill, he first used the
alias “Fred Nieman” in 1893 to circumvent the company blacklist. In the fall of 1897, Czolgosz suf-
fered a nervous breakdown and returned to the family farm in Ohio. He began reading radical pub-
lications and traveling to Cleveland to attend various socialist and anarchist meetings. Czolgosz
was greatly influenced by Gaetano Bresci’s assassination of King Umberto of Italy in July 1900, an
event glorified in anarchist publications, including Free Society. Czolgosz heard EG speak in Cleve-
land on 5 May 1901, while he was traveling, under the Nieman alias, between Chicago, Cleveland,
and Buffalo. He contacted EG and the publishers of Free Society in Chicago in July 1901. Upon re-
ceiving a warning from Cleveland anarchist Emil Schilling about Czolgosz’s suspicious demeanor
and his repeated questions about anarchist secret societies and acts of violence, editor Abe Isaak
printed an alert in Free Society on 1 September 1901 labeling “Nieman” an agent provocateur. On 6
September 1901, after tailing President McKinley for several days at the Pan American Exposition
in Buffalo, New York, and hearing him speak the previous day, Czolgosz shot him. Eight days later
McKinley died. Czolgosz, who had been arrested and beaten immediately after his assassination
attempt, was charged with first-degree murder. Accused by some of being involved in a large anar-
chist conspiracy, his act was linked in the press to the influence of EG’s speeches. Despite Czol-
gosz’s claims that he had acted independently, the assassination ignited a fierce wave of anti-
anarchist sentiment in the United States, resulting in the arrests of many prominent anarchists
(including EG, Johann Most, Abe Isaak, Hippolyte Havel, and others), several criminal anarchy

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 525

 acts, and the passage in 1903 of an immigration law that excluded alien anarchists from entering
the country. Czolgosz’s trial began 23 September 1901; he was convicted the following day, sen-
tenced to death on 26 September, and electrocuted at Auburn, New York, on 29 October 1901.

Darrow, Clarence Seward (1857–1938) American socialist, freethinker, single taxer, and lawyer. A
friend and associate of John Altgeld, Darrow served on the Haymarket amnesty committee peti-
tioning Governor Altgeld, but later he criticized Altgeld’s pardon of the three anarchists as a per-
sonal attack on the court. Relinquishing his position as legal counsel for the Chicago and North-
western railway, Darrow gained national repute as a labor lawyer defending Eugene Debs and the
American Railway Union during the 1894 Pullman strike. In 1901 he won the release of Abe Isaak
and other anarchists arrested after McKinley’s assassination. Darrow ran unsuccessfully for Con-
gress in 1896. During this period his publications included A Persian Pearl: And Other Essays (East
Aurora, N.Y.: Roycroft Shop, 1899), Realism in Literature and Art (Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius
Co., 1899), and The Skeleton in the Closet (Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius Co., 1899).

Dave, Victor (1845–1922) Belgian-born anarchist writer, editor, sometime advocate of propaganda
by the deed. The son of the president of Belgium’s Revenue Court, Dave attended the University of
Liège and the University of Brussels. Drawn to the libertarian wing of the First International as a
student, Dave was an associate of Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Johann Most, as well as
one of Max Nettlau’s confidants. In 1869 he became a member of the General Council of the First
International. In 1873 he took part in the uprising in Catalonia and represented the Verviers branch
at the congress of the Anti-Authoritarian International held in Geneva. He settled in Paris and mar-
ried in 1878. Deported for his activism, he relocated to London in 1880. After spending two years
in a German prison for high treason and violating the 1878 anti-socialist law, Dave returned to Lon-
don in 1884. Dave became the leader of the opposition to Joseph Peukert and his followers in the
Bruderkrieg (Brothers War), the infighting that plagued the German anarchist movement; he was
also a strong proponent of propaganda by the deed. In what was essentially a struggle for ideologi-
cal and personal control of the movement, Most and Dave stood for Bakuninist collectivism while
Peukert advocated Kropotkin’s anarchist communism. Dave contributed to Augustin Hamon’s
L’Humanité nouvelle and became secretary of its editorial board in 1897. He met EG in Paris in
1900, where they both came to attend the banned International Revolutionary Congress of the
Working People. Dave wrote, with E. Belfort Bax and William Morris, A Short Account of the Com-
mune of Paris (London: Socialist League Office, 1886).

David, Marie Louise (b. 1840s) French individualist anarchist. A delegate to the General Council of
the First International in London (1868), she immigrated to the United States in 1870. David’s ar-
ticles were published in a variety of radical publications, including The Alarm, Individualist (Den-
ver, 1889 –1890), Twentieth Century Magazine (New York), and Liberty (Boston and New York). In
the early 1890s she was a regular speaker at Socialist League meetings in New York. In 1895 she
and EG were the featured subjects of a comparative phrenological analysis of political activists in
the Phrenological Journal.

Davies, Ann A. (pseudonym Libertas, most often referred to as Miss Davies) (dates unknown) Irish
and American anarchist. For many years Davies was associated with the London paper Freedom.
She became an anarchist while living in New York City in the 1890s. With John Edelmann, Save-
rio Merlino, and others, she was part of the circle around the New York Socialist League and the an-

526 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

archist paper Solidarity. Her interest in Irish independence led her to London in 1897. In 1898 she
joined the Freedom Group, helping to print the paper as well as working with Max Nettlau to com-
pile its “International Notes” section, and occasionally contributing articles under her pseudonym.
She also founded the Libertarian Lecture Society, in the spirit of the Freedom Discussion Group, as
a weekly (later biweekly) anarchist forum on contemporary thought, art, and politics. Both ventures
lasted until 1902. She attended the suppressed International Revolutionary Congress of the Work-
ing People in Paris in 1900. From February to April 1905 her story “The King and the Anarchist”
was serialized in Freedom (under her pseudonym, Libertas) and issued in May of that year as Free-
dom Pamphlet No. 25. Around 1910 Davies left the Freedom Group and joined the suffrage move-
ment, still maintaining contact with her anarchist circle well into the 1920s.

Deakin, Joe (dates unknown) English anarchist, secretary of the Walsall Socialist Club. Arrested on
6 January 1892 and, although he later claimed he had been tricked, Deakin confessed to the charge
of manufacturing explosives and was subsequently denounced in The Commonweal as an informer.
It was, however, this confession that revealed the depth of Auguste Coulon’s complicity. Deakin was
found guilty of possessing explosives on 4 April 1892, and sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Debs, Eugene Victor (1855–1926) American socialist, labor leader, five-time presidential candidate.
In February 1875 Debs joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and in 1880 he accepted the
editorship of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine. Debs was elected to the Indiana leg-
islature in 1884 as a Democrat. In 1893 he was elected the first president of the American Railway
Union and helped lead the new organization to a successful strike against the Great Northern Rail-
road in 1894. Then in May 1894 Debs led the Pullman strike, calling for railway workers nation-
wide to boycott all trains carrying Pullman cars. On 3 July President Grover Cleveland ordered fed-
eral troops to Chicago and the strike was defeated. Debs was arrested for contempt of a court
injunction and sentenced to six months imprisonment. During his imprisonment, Debs gravitated
toward socialism and in 1897 formed, with Victor Berger and others, the Social Democracy of
America (SDA), which supported policies of both electoral political action and utopian coloniza-
tion. EG met him for the first time that September at a Chicago labor convention. The SDA split
the following year, with Debs leading a faction, along with Berger, to form the Social Democratic
Party, which subsequently merged in 1901 with Morris Hillquit’s New York branch of the Socialist
Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America. His works include Liberty: A Speech Delivered at
Battery D, Chicago, on Release from Woodstock Jail November 22, 1895 (Terre Haute, Ind.: E. V. Debs
and Co., 1895) and Prison Labor (Terre Haute, Ind.: E.V. Debs and Co., 1899).

de Cleyre, Voltairine (1866 –1912) American anarchist, freethinker, advocate of women’s indepen-
dence, poet, essayist. De Cleyre was one of very few women anarchist lecturers of her time. Born
in Michigan and named after the French philosopher Voltaire, she spent four years in a convent
school, though she would later reject religion. Like EG, she became an anarchist after the Hay-
market hangings in 1887. In 1889, she moved to Philadelphia, where she taught English to Rus-
sian Jewish immigrants and became a mainstay of the city’s radical life, often speaking at meetings
and organizing, with Natasha Notkin, the Ladies’ Liberal League. She first met EG in Philadelphia
in August 1893 and, later that year, visited her in prison in New York. Though she consistently de-
fended EG in public, privately the more austere de Cleyre maintained a critical view of EG’s flam-
boyant political style. De Cleyre began her correspondence with AB in prison from 1893. She trav-

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 527

 eled to England in June 1897, where she stayed with John Turner and met the entire Freedom Group,
including Peter Kropotkin, Max Nettlau, and others, and returned to the United States in October.
Soon after de Cleyre began contributing a column, “American Notes,” to Freedom in London (No-
vember 1897 to January 1899). In 1900 she wrote a report on the state of the anarchist movement
in Philadelphia slated for delivery at the banned International Revolutionary Congress of the Work-
ing People in Paris. A member of the American Secular Union, in 1901, de Cleyre organized the
Social Science Club of Philadelphia, whose reading list at de Cleyre’s suggestion was compiled by
C. L. James. Also in 1901 she and anarchist George Brown initiated a series of open air meetings
and distributed occasional handbills and leaflets, all of which were suppressed in the wake of the
McKinley assassination. De Cleyre was a frequent contributor to anarchist and free-thought peri-
odicals, including The Boston Investigator, Firebrand, Freedom (both the Chicago and London pa-
pers), Free Society, Free Thinkers Magazine, Freie Arbeiter Stimme, Liberty, Lucifer, and The Rebel. She
also translated Yiddish and French anarchist literature into English, including Jean Grave’s Mori-
bund Society and Anarchy (San Francisco: A. Isaak, 1899). De Cleyre’s works of this period include
The Drama of the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: R. Staley, 1889), The Gods and the People (London:
Liberty Press, 1897; also published by Abe Isaak in San Francisco in 1898), In Defense of Emma
Goldman (Philadelphia: V. de Cleyre, 1894; lecture originally given on 16 December 1893), The Past
and Future of the Ladies Liberal League (Philadelphia: Ladies’ Liberal League, 1895; serialized in The
Rebel, 20 October 1895 through January 1896), and The Worm Turns (Philadelphia: Innes and Sons,
1900). See also vols. 2, 3.

De Leon, Daniel (1852 –1914) Socialist, journalist, and polemicist. Born in Curacao in the Dutch
West Indies, De Leon studied medicine in Amsterdam before graduating from Columbia Univer-
sity Law School in New York City in 1876. After working as a lawyer and a university law lecturer,
De Leon became involved in Henry George’s single-tax plan and then in the promotion of Edward
Bellamy’s ideas about nationalism. In 1890 De Leon joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and
quickly rose through the ranks, becoming editor of its daily paper, the Daily People, and its undis-
puted leader. De Leon would dominate and transform the party for the next twenty-four years. In
1895 De Leon launched the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance to serve as an alternative labor fed-
eration to the AFL. His rigid leadership style elicited numerous enemies within socialist ranks and
resulted in a split within the party in 1899 when Morris Hillquit’s faction formed a rival SLP based
in Rochester. See also vol. 2.

Ditchfield, William (dates unknown) English anarchist, brushmaker. One of the Walsall anarchists
arrested in January 1892, Ditchfield was charged with conspiracy to make explosives; he was re-
leased in April 1892 when the court pronounced him “not guilty.”

Dreyfus, Alfred (1859 –1935) French army captain court-martialed for treason; later cleared of all
suspicion of wrongdoing. Dreyfus was arrested on 15 October 1894, charged with passing military
secrets to Germany, and sentenced to life in prison at Devil’s Island, French Guiana. His trial was
accompanied by virulent antisemitic reporting. Doubts about his sentence grew, however, when an-
other officer was found guilty of espionage and when it was discovered that much of the evidence
against Dreyfus had been forged. Anarchists, especially Bernard Lazare, were instrumental in re-
opening the extremely divisive case. On 13 January 1898, L’Aurore printed “J’Accuse,” Émile Zola’s
condemnation of the French state’s misconduct in the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was granted a retrial

528 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

on 5 June 1899 and left Devil’s Island on 9 June. On 20 July 1906, with his innocence firmly es-
tablished, Dreyfus was reinstated in the army and received the Legion of Honor medal.

Edelmann, John H. (1852 –1900) American anarchist. The son of German immigrants, Edelmann
was an architect in Louis Sullivan’s Chicago firm in the 1870s. A supporter of Henry George and
the single tax, Edelmann managed George’s New York mayoral campaign in 1886. Edelmann was
a member of the Anti-Poverty Society (1890). Edelmann became a regular lecturer of the Ameri-
can Branch of the New York City Socialist Labor Party. In 1892 Edelmann, along with John C. Ken-
worthy, William C. Owen, and others, founded the Socialist League, a New York anarchist organi-
zation modeled after the Socialist League of England. He edited the anarchist communist journal
Solidarity (in the years 1892, 1893, 1895, 1898). In a letter appearing on the front page of the 1 March
1895 issue of Solidarity, Edelmann renounced and criticized George and the single-tax movement,
asserting that the scheme would merely shift economic bondage from the control of landlords to
politicians. Edelmann hosted Kropotkin in New York during his 1897 visit and often spoke on the
same platform as EG in the 1890s.

Engel, George (1836 –1887) German-born American anarchist, Haymarket defendant. Engel was
co-editor with Adolph Fischer of Der Anarchist (Chicago, 1886); both men were executed after the
Haymarket affair. Apprenticed to a painter at age fourteen, Engel married in 1868 and immigrated
to the United States in 1872, arriving in Philadelphia on 8 January 1873 and settling by the end of
the year in Chicago. There he became interested in socialism, opened a toy shop in 1876, and joined
the SLP. In 1883 he became a member of the North West Side Group of the IWPA. Engel’s and Fis-
cher’s anarchist communist paper Der Anarchist promoted all forms of violent resistance.

Engels, Friedrich (1820 –1895) German Socialist, political theorist, and associate of Karl Marx. Af-
ter spending time in Manchester, England, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in En-
gland in 1844 (1845) to expose the poverty of the city and the shockingly harsh condition of the work-
ers, a book on which Marx collaborated, inserting in it ideas that would become the foundations
of revolutionary materialist socialism. In 1846, Engels joined, with Marx, the secret Communist
League, and represented the Paris communists at the two League congresses in London in 1847.
He collaborated with Marx on the Communist Manifesto (1848) and after Marx’s death, edited the
second and third volumes of Das Kapital (1885, 1894) from Marx’s notes and drafts. Engels’s own
works include Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880; New York: New York Labor News Co., 1892)
and The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (1884; Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1902).

Esteve, Pedro (1865–1925) Spanish and American anarchist, editor. Trained as a typesetter, Esteve
worked for a leading newspaper of Spanish anarchism, El Productor (Barcelona, 1887–1893). Esteve
was already a prominent anarchist when he embarked on a propaganda tour of Spain with Errico
Malatesta in 1891–1892. He left for North America in the wake of the 1892 Jerez uprising. Fluent
in Italian as well as Spanish, Esteve distinguished himself among anarchist propagandists and la-
bor organizers within a wide range of groups from Spanish and Cuban cigar makers in Tampa and
Ybor City, Florida, Spanish sailors and dockworkers in New York, to Italian silkworkers in Paterson,
New Jersey. Esteve edited El Despertar (New York, 1891–1902), El Esclavo (Tampa, 1894–1898), La
Questione Sociale (Paterson, 1895–1908), and Cultura Obrera (New York, 1911–1927). His works in-
clude Reflexiones sobre el movimiento obrero en Mexico (1911) and Reformismo, dictadura, federalismo

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 529

 (1922). A friend of EG, Esteve often shared the platform with her and acted as her interpreter. Es-
teve married Italian anarchist Maria Roda.

Fielden, Samuel (1847–1922) English-born American anarchist, manual laborer, Haymarket de-
fendant. Fielden grew up in a Chartist household, arriving in New York in 1868. Except for a visit
to England in 1879, he lived in Chicago from 1871, working at a variety of manual jobs, the last as
a hauler of stone. Fielden joined the Chicago Teamsters Union in 1880 and soon became its vice
president. A freethinker, Fielden was vice president of the Chicago Liberal League and its delegate
to the national congress of the American Secular Union in Milwaukee in 1883. A frequent and ef-
fective speaker at radical meetings, Fielden joined the American Group of the IWPA in 1884 and
served as its treasurer. Fielden was sentenced to death at the Haymarket trial; a petition for com-
mutation of his sentence resulted in its reduction to life imprisonment. Pardoned in June 1893 by
Governor John Altgeld, Fielden returned to his former job. Upon inheriting money, he purchased
an isolated ranch in Colorado. He was still in contact with his old comrade William Holmes when
he died on 7 February 1922. See also vol. 3.

Fischer, Adolph (1858 –1887) German-born American anarchist; Haymarket defendant. Fischer
was co-editor with George Engel of Der Anarchist (Chicago, 1886); both men were executed after
the Haymarket affair. Fischer arrived in the United States in 1873, trained as a compositor, and
moved to Chicago in 1883 where he worked as a printer on the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung. He joined
the IWPA in 1883 and also the Lehr-und-Wehr Verein (Education and Defense Society), an armed
workers’ defense group. With fellow Haymarket defendant George Engel, Fischer was part of the
autonomist-leaning Chicago North West Side Group of the IWPA. He was also a member of Typo-
graphical Union, Branch Number 9. Influenced by the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
sympathetic to individualism, Fischer, who was not a public speaker, was reputed for the gentleness
of his character. With George Engel, he co-edited Der Anarchist, an organ of the autonomist and an-
archist communist faction, which ran for four issues beginning in January 1886. The paper advo-
cated propaganda by deed (influenced by Most’s Revolutionary War Science) as a tactic for destroy-
ing capitalism and promoted autonomy in workers’ organizations. It was Fischer who arranged the
printing of handbills and solicited speakers for the Haymarket rally. Fischer was arrested on 5 May,
the day after the bombing. He continued to assert his belief in violence as a means of social change,
refusing to petition for his life and reacting angrily to attempts by supporters to water down the mil-
itancy of anarchist ideas.

Fox, Jay (1870 –1961) Irish-born American anarchist, labor organizer, and syndicalist. A promi-
nent Chicago anarchist who had been present at the 1886 Haymarket affair, Fox joined Lucy Par-
sons and others in forming local Branch 2 of Debs’s short-lived Social Democracy of America,
played a major part in the publication of Free Society in Chicago, and was among those arrested in
1901 after the McKinley assassination. See also vols. 2, 3.

Francis Joseph I (1830 –1916) Hapsburg dynasty emperor of Austria (1848 –1916). Known for his
conservativism, Francis Joseph I assumed the throne in the aftermath of the nationalist revolution
of 1848 and was thrust into coping with a growing, violent nationalist movement. In the Austro-
Prussian War of 1866, Austria’s influence over German affairs waned, and in 1867 pressure from
Hungary led to the reorganization of the empire as an Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. Hungary
became an independent kingdom—whose ruler was also the emperor of Austria. Francis Joseph

530 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

I’s policies for maintaining order generally included harsh punishment for social and political dis-
sent, and legislation discouraging the organization of workers. Although he survived an assassina-
tion attempt in 1853, his wife, Elizabeth (known as “Sisi”), was assassinated by an anarchist in 1898
and his son and heir, Francis Ferdinand, shot by a nationalist in 1914.

Frick, Henry Clay (1849 –1919) American industrialist. Frick was a coal mine owner, whose com-
pany, Frick Coke, was established in 1871 and controlled 80 percent of the coal output in Pennsyl-
vania. Frick became partners with Andrew Carnegie, and in 1889, became chairman of the
Carnegie Company. Frick played a central role in organizing and establishing Carnegie Steel Com-
pany in 1892. Frick’s decision to increase profits by lowering the piecework wage rate led to the
1892 call to strike by the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers Union. His strong anti-union poli-
cies during the Homestead strike and his decision to employ 300 Pinkerton strikebreakers, lead-
ing to the death of nine workers, was the impetus for AB’s attentat.

Fulton, Edward H. (dates unknown) American anarchist communist, later individualist anarchist.
A land reformer, Fulton contributed occasionally to Firebrand and published several journals, in-
cluding the Age of Thought (1896 –1898), as well as a series of Liberty Library Monthly publications,
including his own Land, Money and Property (Columbus Junction, Iowa: E. H. Fulton, 1896). Ful-
ton also reprinted classic anarchist texts, including Michael Bakunin’s God and the State (Columbus
Junction, Iowa: E. H. Fulton, 1896) and Élisée Reclus’s An Anarchist on Anarchy (Columbus Junc-
tion, Iowa: E. H. Fulton, 1896).

George, Henry (1839 –1897) American economist, writer, and leader of the single-tax movement.
Co-founder of the San Francisco Evening Post (1871–1875) and editor of the New York weekly The
Standard (1887–1891), George also authored several works on economics and politics, including
Progress and Poverty (San Francisco: W. M. Hilton, 1879), the best-selling book on economics of its
time; The Irish Land Question (New York: D. Appleton, 1881); Social Problems (National Single Tax
League, 1883); Protection or Free Trade (New York: H. George and Co., 1886); The Condition of Labor.
An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII (New York: Doubleday, 1891); and A Perplexed Philosopher (1892). His
Science of Political Economy (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1898), a summary of his philo-
sophical and economic views, unfinished at his death, was published posthumously. George ran
unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City in 1887 and for president of the United States the fol-
lowing year. Supported by a wide coalition of labor interests including the Central Labor Union, he
ran again for mayor in 1897, but died suddenly four days before the election. EG and other anar-
chists were bitterly angered by his renunciation of support for the executed Haymarket anarchists
during his 1888 presidential campaign, a topic addressed in pamphlet form by Benjamin Tucker
(Henry George, Traitor, 1896).

Goldsmith, Marie (aliases M. Isidine, M. Korn) (1873–1933) Russian anarchist and scientist living
in Paris. Goldsmith was an associate, friend, and regular correspondent of Peter Kropotkin after
1897. Her father, Isidor, published radical journals in St. Petersburg and after her mother, Sofia,
completed medical studies, the family joined various proscribed associations. In 1884, the family
fled Russia and settled in Paris, where, in 1886, Isidor died. EG probably met Goldsmith during
her visit to Europe from 1895 to 1896. Goldsmith was awarded a doctorate in biology at the Sor-
bonne in 1915 and published numerous scientific papers. She was an active and well-respected fig-
ure in Russian anarchist circles who maintained strong relationships with the broad Russian revo-

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 531

 lutionary movement. She wrote regularly for the anarchist press, often under the pseudonym M.
Korn, in English, French, Italian, and Russian, and also for the Yiddish periodical Freie Arbeiter
Stimme. The Paris apartment she shared with her mother was an important meeting place for Rus-
sian anarchists of the city. Just hours after her mother fell ill and died, Goldsmith committed sui-
cide. See also vol. 2.

Gompers, Samuel (1850 –1924) English-born American labor organizer. Elected as the first presi-
dent of the newly organized American Federation of Labor in December 1886, Gompers held this
position, with the exception of the year 1895, until he died in 1924. Early in life, Gompers worked
as a shoemaker and then as a cigar maker, a trade which he pursued when he immigrated to New
York with his parents in 1863. As president of the AFL, Gompers wrote to Pennsylvania senator
Boles Penrose on 19 April 1899, asking him to intercede with the pardon board on AB’s behalf.
Publications include The Philosophy of the Labor Movement: A Paper Read before the International La-
bor Congress (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1893); The Eight-Hour Workday: Its
Inauguration, Enforcement, and Influences (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1897);
and Address of Samuel Gompers, President, American Federation of Labor, Before the Arbitration Con-
ference, Held at Chicago, Ill., Dec. 17, 1900, Under the Auspices of the National Civic Federation (Wash-
ington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1901).

Gordon, Harry (1866 –1941) Lithuanian-born Jewish American anarchist and machinist. Born to
a prosperous family, Gordon settled in Pittsburgh. EG described him as “one of our best workers,
a faithful and enthusiastic friend.” Gordon served as secretary and treasurer of the Berkman De-
fense Association, and in 1901, was the first person allowed to visit AB in prison in nine years.

Grave, Jean (1854–1939) French anarchist communist, participant in the Paris Commune, writer,
and editor. A shoemaker by trade, Grave was attracted to anarchism in 1879. In 1880 Grave co-
founded the Social Study Group, the first significant anarchist group in Paris after the fall of the
Commune; it was attended by Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero. In 1882 Grave wrote for Le Droit
Social. In 1883, Grave’s Organisation de la propagande révoltionnaire called for propaganda by the
deed carried out by small, clandestine, spontaneously organized groups. In the same year, after
Kropotkin’s arrest and imprisonment for belonging to the International, Élisée Reclus asked Grave
to assume the editorship of the leading anarchist paper Le Révolté. Grave moved the paper from
Geneva to Paris in 1885, and changed the name to La Révolte in 1887, adding a popular literary sup-
plement. In March 1894 French authorities banned the paper and imprisoned Grave under the lois
scélérates. Upon his release, Grave began publishing Les Temps Nouveaux, until it ceased publication
in August 1914. One of the four primary anarchist newspapers in France at the time, with an aux-
iliary press that published numerous pamphlets (at least eighty-eight between 1895 and 1914), its
combined circulation reached into the millions. Grave attended the congress of the socialist Sec-
ond International in London in 1896 that led to the final split between the anarchists and social-
ists. In 1900, Grave published Enseignement bourgeois et enseignement libertaire, a brochure con-
trasting libertarian education with bourgeois education. His La Société mourante et l’anarchi
(Moribund society and anarchy; San Francisco: The Free Society Library, 1899) was translated into
English by Voltairine de Cleyre.

Hall, Abraham Oakey (1826 –1898) New York lawyer, lecturer, journalist, and Tammany Hall politi-
cian. Part of the notorious Tweed Ring (the corrupt Democratic political machine that controlled
New York City under William Mercy “Boss” Tweed) during the 1860s, Hall served as district attor-

532 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

ney and then mayor of New York (1868 –1872). After nine years in London, practicing law and rep-
resenting the New York Herald there, Hall returned to New York at the end of 1892. EG’s 1893 trial
marked his reentry into the courtroom. In her autobiography, EG commented on his engagement
with party politics, remembering him as far “too humane and democratic for the politicians.”

Hamon, Augustin (1862 –1945) French sociologist, critic, and editor. An anarchist during the 1890s,
Hamon was a delegate to the London congress of the socialist Second International in 1896; his
early attachment to anarchism influenced his four decades of activity in the Socialist Party in Brit-
tany and his participation in the French Resistance during World War II. He founded and edited
L’Humanité nouvelle (1897–1903), was a translator and critic of George Bernard Shaw, contributed
to The Free Review (London), and authored, among other books, Psychologie de l’anarchiste-socialiste
(1895), Psychologie du militaire professionel (1894), Le Socialisme et le congrès de Londres (1897), and
The Universal Illusion of Free Will and Criminal Responsibility (London: The University Press, 1899).
EG met Hamon in Paris in 1896.

Hanna, Marcus Alonzo (nickname Mark) (1837–1904) Cleveland industrialist, politician. Hanna
was involved in industrial businesses including lake shipping, iron and coal mines, and shipbuild-
ing; he also owned the Cleveland Herald. First elected as a delegate to the Republican National Con-
vention in 1884, Hanna managed the party’s funds in 1888, as well as William McKinley’s success-
ful gubernatorial campaigns in 1891 and 1893, and rose to chairman of the Republican Party in
1896. In this post, Hanna engineered the presidential nomination of his fellow Ohioan William
McKinley, as well as McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan in the general election. Hanna
was later appointed to the Ohio Senate seat vacated in 1897, and elected to the seat in 1898. Through-
out his political career, Hanna promoted political support of business interests and was commonly
portrayed in the radical press as being the real power behind the McKinley administration.

Harman, Lillian (1870 –1929) American sex radical and anarchist editor, daughter of Moses Har-
man. She assisted her father in publication of Lucifer, the Lightbearer and Our New Humanity (1895–
1897), and assumed editorial and publishing duties for American Journal of Eugenics after his death,
with the single and final issue, “Memorial to Moses Harman” (30 January 1910). Harman then
transferred the subscriptions of American Journal of Eugenics to Mother Earth when she was no
longer able to continue publication. Harman also edited Fair Play (1888 –1891) with E. C. Walker,
and contributed to The Adult (1898) during her 1898 tour of England, where in 1897 she had been
elected president of the Legitimation League. Her writings include Some Problems of Social Freedom,
etc (London: Office of the Adult, 1898), Marriage and Morality (Chicago: M. Harman, 1900), and
The Regeneration of Society (Chicago: M. Harman, 1900).

Harman, Moses (1830 –1910) American sex radical, anarchist, editor, and publisher. Harman, a
prominent early free-love, women’s rights, and “family limitation” (birth control) advocate, was an
abolitionist and liberal and freethought editor before he moved to sex radicalism and anarchism.
His journal Lucifer, the Lightbearer (1883–1907), like Ezra Heywood’s The Word (1872 –1893), helped
define sex radicalism for many anarchists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Amer-
ica. Harman suffered repeated persecution for obscenity violations under the Comstock Act of
1873. In 1890 he was sentenced to five years in prison based on a previous arrest in 1887 for print-
ing obscene material in his journal, then released after four months on a technicality. Harman was
again arrested and tried under the Comstock Act; sentenced to a year, he served eight months be-
fore his release but was soon re-sentenced in 1895 to a year of hard labor for his first conviction. Af-

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 533

 ter serving a year, he was finally released in April 1896. EG first met Harman in the fall of 1897 in
Chicago. His publications during this period include Free Press: Arguments in Support of Demurrer
to the Indictment of M. Harman, E. C. Walker, and Geo. Harman (Valley Falls, Kans.: Lucifer Pub-
lishing, 1889), The Next Revolution: or Women’s Emancipation from Sex Slavery (four pamphlets; Val-
ley Falls, Kans.: Lucifer Publishing, 1890 –1891), Love in Freedom (Chicago, 1900), Motherhood in
Freedom (Chicago, 1900), and Institutional Marriage (Chicago, 1901), as well as editing the monthly
journal Our New Humanity (1895–1897) with his daughter Lillian Harman.

Havel, Hippolyte (1869 –1950) Czech anarchist communist, journalist, and editor. Havel was ar-
rested in Vienna in 1893 or 1894 for delivering an inflammatory speech, imprisoned for eighteen
months, and deported. Upon returning to Vienna to visit his family, he again faced a short period
of incarceration. Via Zurich, Paris, and Berlin, he arrived in London where he met EG in 1899.
They became lovers and the following year he accompanied her to the International Revolutionary
Congress of the Working People in Paris. Havel returned with EG to the United States and settled
in Chicago, where he was briefly arrested with the Isaaks, EG, and others after the assassination of
McKinley. In Living My Life EG describes him as “a veritable encyclopedia” of the movement, but
rather changeable in his moods (LML, p. 259).

Henry, Émile (1872 –1894) French anarchist, advocate of propaganda by the deed. The son of a
Communard, Henry won a scholarship in 1888 to the Ecole Polytechnique, where he became an
anarchist. He wrote articles for Le Père Peinard (Paris) and La Révolte (Paris). On 8 November 1892,
Henry carried out an attack against the management of the Carmaux mining company, which re-
cently had violently quashed a strike. A year later, on 12 February 1894, Henry threw a bomb into
the Café Terminus at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris to avenge the execution of Auguste Vaillant,
who was convicted for throwing a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies the previous December.
(Henry’s act was also to protest the lois scélérates.) Taken to court on 25 April, he delivered what be-
came a widely circulated speech, first published by The Times on 30 April, and subsequently in the
May 1894 issue of Freedom. Henry’s speech was later issued as a pamphlet, published and trans-
lated into many languages. Henry was executed on 21 May 1894.

Hill, David Bennett (1843–1910) U.S. senator (1892 –1897), twice governor of New York (1885–
1892), nominated for governor but defeated in 1894. Hill, a Democrat and a lawyer, as chair of the
Committee on Immigration brought for debate to the Senate floor in August 1894 a bill designed
to bar anarchists from entering the United States.

Hillquit, Morris (born Moishe Hillkowitz) (1869 –1933) Russian Jewish immigrant socialist, trade
unionist, politician, and labor lawyer. Hillquit joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) in 1887 and
was a founder and corresponding secretary of the United Hebrew Trades Organization, initially
an umbrella group of Jewish trade unions formed by two Jewish sections of the SLP, the United
German Trades, and three small Jewish trade unions (1888). Hillquit helped found the Yiddish-
language, socialist Arbeiter Zeitung (Workers’ Paper) in March 1890, which often published articles
and commentary in opposition to anarchism; he worked as both business manager and editorial
contributor for the paper. In 1891 Hillquit began attending law school at New York University,
prompted by his belief that social revolution did not require mass violent action and his desire to
reform the legal structure of the state from within. During this time his participation in the SLP
and the UHT was minimal. After passing the bar exam in 1893, however, he served as a lawyer for

534 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

several UHT locals. Hillquit transferred his membership from the all-Jewish, Russian-speaking
branch of the SLP to the American section of the New York party. In 1898 Hillquit led the opposi-
tion within the SLP to the party’s leader Daniel De Leon, criticizing his authoritarian style, unwill-
ingness to “Americanize” the SLP, and his Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, an industrial union
aimed at organizing unorganized workers. Instead, Hillquit favored the tactic of “boring from
within,” working with the already established American Federation of Labor. This culminated in
the split of the party in 1899 into two competing factions, one led by De Leon and the other by
Hillquit. After a court ruled the De Leon faction was the only legal executive of the party, Hillquit’s
group moved its headquarters to Rochester and in 1900 merged with Eugene Debs’s Social Dem-
ocratic Party. In 1901 Hillquit became a prominent member of the newly formed Socialist Party and
defended Most after McKinley’s assassination.

Hochstein, Helena (1860 –1920) EG’s older and the most protective of her half-sisters, with whom
she immigrated to the United States in 1886. Helena, a socialist, had attended socialist meetings
with EG in Rochester, where both had first settled. In 1892, EG wrote to her sister to secure money,
which Helena gave, for AB’s attempt on Frick. In the late 1890s Hochstein subscribed to both Free
Society and Lucifer, and collected funds for the Berkman Defense Association. She had three chil-
dren with Hyman Hochstein, including David Hochstein, a violinist, whose performances EG
would promote among her substantial circle of acquaintances. See also vol. 3.

Holmes, Lizzie (born Lizzie May Swank) (1850 –1926) American anarchist and journalist, dress-
maker. Co-editor with Albert Parsons of the Alarm, Holmes was arrested with the other anar-
chist leaders of the movement for the eight-hour workday in the wake of the Haymarket riot, but
released before trial. Holmes helped re-launch the Alarm with Dyer D. Lum in 1887. She con-
tributed to Freedom, Free Society, The Labor Enquirer, Wilshire’s Magazine, Our New Humanity
(1895–1897), and Lucifer, the Lightbearer, among other papers, as well as writing for the Associated
Labor Press. Together with her husband, William, she co-edited the Labor Exchange Guide (Den-
ver, 1897).

Holmes, William T. (1850 –1928) English-born American anarchist. Holmes immigrated to the
United States with his family as a child. He was an early member of the Socialist Labor Party and
a close friend of Albert Parsons in Chicago in the 1880s. In 1883 he joined the American Group of
the IWPA with Parsons in Chicago, where he immediately became secretary of the group. In sup-
port of the Haymarket defense and amnesty campaigns, Holmes initiated his own speaking tour of
the Midwest and West to raise support for the condemned men. After the execution of the Hay-
market anarchists, William and Lizzie remained active in the anarchist movement in Chicago,
helping to organize the city’s 1893 anarchist conference, for which Holmes served as secretary. In
the mid-1890s they moved to La Veta, Colorado, and later to Denver, where he practiced law. He ar-
ranged EG’s lectures in Colorado in 1898 and 1899. In 1900 Holmes was asked to write the report
on the state of the American anarchist movement for the anarchist congress in Paris. The paper, “A
Short History of the Movement in America,” was later published in the report of the congress in
Les Temps Nouveaux. He wrote articles for the Alarm, Firebrand, Free Society, Labor Enquirer, Liberty,
Solidarity, and was the editor, with his wife, of the Labor Exchange Guide (Denver, 1897), and the au-
thor of a Liberty Library Monthly pamphlet, The Historical, Philosophical, and Economical Bases of
Anarchy (Columbus Junction, Iowa: E. H. Fulton, 1895). See also vol. 3.

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 535

 Isaak, Abe (1856 –1937) Russian-born American anarchist, editor. Raised in a Mennonite colony,
Isaak moved to Odessa as a young man, joining the movement against the tsar. To avoid arrest he
fled first to South America and then the United States with his wife, Mary Dyck Isaak. In 1889
Isaak settled with his wife and three children in Portland, Oregon. In January 1895, along with
Henry Addis, J. H. Morris, Abner J. Pope, John Pawson, Ezekiel Slabs, and Mary Squire, he started
the Firebrand, a weekly paper that succeeded in its mission to introduce anarchist communist ideas
to English-speaking radicals. An early member of the Socialist Labor Party, Isaak resigned when the
1896 London congress of the socialist Second International ejected anarchists. The Firebrand
ceased publication in September 1897 after its editors were indicted on obscenity charges stem-
ming from the paper’s longstanding emphasis on free love, including its reprinting of Walt Whit-
man’s poem “A Woman Waits for Me.” Isaak, his wife, Mary, and their children, Abe, Jr., Mary, and
Peter, moved to San Francisco where he reestablished the paper in November as Free Society. In
1900 Isaak moved the paper to Chicago, where in 1901 after meeting Leon Czolgosz and respond-
ing to a warning by Cleveland anarchist Emil Schilling, he placed a notice in Free Society warning
readers that Czolgosz may be a police spy. In the wake of the McKinley assassination, Isaak and his
family were arrested on conspiracy charges, along with other Chicago anarchists, and eventually
freed.

Isaak, Mary (born Marie Dyck) (1861–1934) Russian-born American anarchist, publisher, and ed-
itor. Mary Isaak was born into a Dutch family of Mennonites in Russia. She married Abe Isaak in
1879 in Russia and immigrated in 1889, living first in Portland, then San Francisco, Chicago, and
New York, where she helped publish, with her husband and others, both the Firebrand and Free So-
ciety. Free Society was published from their home by the entire family, including children, Abe, Jr.,
Mary, and Peter. Their house was also a gathering place for local anarchists and radicals. EG met
her in San Francisco in 1897, and in 1900 they went to England together, where Mary met Peter
Kropotkin. All four of the Isaaks were arrested in September 1901 after the McKinley assassination.
In 1904 the family moved Free Society to New York; Mary and Abe later moved to a cooperative agri-
cultural colony in Lincoln, California, where she died in 1934.

Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826) Third president of the United States. Jefferson founded the Re-
publican Party to limit the power of federal government. Though a drafter of the Declaration of In-
dependence, Jefferson was a wary supporter of the Constitution in 1787. In 1787 he wrote a letter
to James Madison warning that the Constitution concentrated too much power in the federal gov-
ernment. Jefferson also drafted the 1799 Kentucky Resolution, asserting the power of local state
government and protesting the alien and sedition laws enacted by Congress, which the Kentucky
assembly viewed as unconstitutional. Jefferson was often evoked by EG to place anarchism in a po-
litical tradition of American anti-statism.

Kelly, Henry May (nickname Harry) (1871–1953) American anarchist, printer, lecturer. An active
trade unionist in St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston, Kelly was drawn to anarchism in 1894 after hear-
ing a lecture by English anarchist Charles Mowbray. Kelly traveled to England in 1895 with a letter
of introduction from Mowbray to John Turner, with whom Kelly later became friends. (It was Kelly
who persuaded Turner to embark on his first speaking tour of the United States in 1896, and who
then helped to organize it.) Kelly also met Peter Kropotkin as well as Errico Malatesta, Louise
Michel, Frank Kitz, and Alfred Marsh, among other members of the Freedom Group. In Boston

536 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

Kelly co-edited, with Mowbray and Nahum Berman, an anarchist monthly, The Rebel (1895–1896),
and the smaller and more ephemeral Match. Around this time Kelly introduced a petition to the
Boston Central Labor Union (of which he served as financial secretary) calling for the commuta-
tion of AB’s sentence. The resolution passed and was sent to the governor of Pennsylvania, elicit-
ing a letter of thanks and an offer of friendship from EG, who a short time later asked Kelly if he
would help arrange her Boston lectures. In 1897 at Harry Gordon’s call, Kelly traveled to Pittsburgh
to aid in the agitation on AB’s behalf. He lobbied workers’ organizations to pass resolutions sup-
porting a reduction in AB’s sentence. En route to England, Kelly stopped in New York where EG
and Ed Brady persuaded him to continue working for AB’s release through the end of the year. In
January 1898 Kelly was in London and working with the Freedom Group, helping to publish the pa-
per and lecturing at meetings. While in England he became involved in the obscenity trial of
George Bedborough and the Free Press Defense Committee, reporting on the events in the pages
of Free Society in December 1898. Kelly remained in England until 1904. Besides editing The Rebel
and The Match, he contributed to Freedom and Free Society. See also vols. 2, 3.

Kennan, George (1845–1924) American journalist, lecturer. Kennan, a leading authority on Russia
and Siberia, recounted his experiences as part of a survey team investigating a possible telegraph
line route across Siberia to Europe in Tent Life in Siberia (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1870).
After a fifteen-month investigation of the Russian government’s system of Siberian exile for polit-
ical prisoners from 1885 to 1886 (which included meetings with Russian émigrés in London), Ken-
nan reversed his earlier stance of support for the regime in an influential series of articles for Cen-
tury magazine, beginning in May 1888; the articles were later published in book form under the
title Siberia and the Exile System (New York: Century, 1891). On this trip Kennan met, among other
political prisoners and refugees of the tsarist state, Catherine Breshkovskaya and Peter Kropotkin,
then in Siberian and London exile, respectively. His other publications include Campaigning in Cuba
(New York: Century, 1899), which covers the Spanish-American War.

Kenworthy, John Coleman (b. 1863) English Christian anarchist, writer, popularized Tolstoy in En-
gland. While visiting the United States between 1890 and 1892, Kenworthy, along with W. C. Owen
and John Edelmann, helped organize the New York Socialist League in 1892. Kenworthy visited Tol-
stoy in 1895 and in 1900, publishing Tolstoy: His Life and Works in 1902. Active in the effort to pre-
vent anarchist exclusion from the 1896 London congress of the socialist Second International, Ken-
worthy also contributed to James Tochatti’s Liberty.

Kershner, Jacob A. (also Kersner) (1865?–1919) Russian-born tailor. Kershner came to the United
States from Odessa in 1881, settling in Rochester. He met EG in Leopold Garson’s factory and, as
EG remembers, he “filled a void in my life, and I was strongly attracted to him” (LML, p. 20). They
were married in a Jewish traditional ceremony in February 1887. According to Living My Life, they
later separated, due in part to Kershner’s impotence, divorcing shortly after the Haymarket execu-
tions in November 1887. EG then moved to New Haven to work in a corset factory. She returned
shortly to Rochester due to poor health and almost immediately remarried Kershner after he threat-
ened suicide (LML, p. 25). EG remained with him for three months, then moved to New York City,
though she and Kershner never officially divorced after EG left the second time. Kershner contin-
ued to live in Rochester until 1907, then moved to Chicago under the name Jacob Lewis (the name
on his death certificate). See also vols. 2, 4.

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 537

 Kitz, Frank (born Francis Kitz Platt) (1849 –1923) English anarchist. Kitz was a member of radical
working-class clubs in the 1870s and a delegate to the International Social Revolutionary Congress
in 1881. Fluent in German, he had strong ties to German exiles in London and served as secretary
of the Freiheit Defense Committee and editor of its English-language version of Freiheit published
while Johann Most was in prison between 1881 and 1882. A dyer by trade, Kitz was the delegate of
the Garment Dyers Union to the 1896 London congress of the socialist Second International. He
joined the Socialist League in the 1880s, became a member of its general council, served as its sec-
retary between 1888 and 1891, and co-edited its organ, The Commonweal, with David Nicoll after
May 1890. In 1891 Kitz was accused of embezzling Socialist League funds and subsequently ex-
pelled, but continued to work and lecture in and around anarchist circles, moving increasingly to-
ward the ideology of syndicalism. In 1907 he contributed an article on “slums” to the Voice of La-
bor. Kitz’s “Recollections and Reflections” were printed in Freedom between January and July 1912.

Kropotkin, Peter (1842 –1921) Russian revolutionary, geographer, geologist, and principal theorist
of anarchist communism. Born into the Russian aristocracy in Moscow, Kropotkin spent his youth
in Alexander II’s Corps of Pages, subsequently serving as an officer in Siberia, where his experi-
ences helped form his radical consciousness and lay the foundation of his scientific career.
Kropotkin traveled to Switzerland in 1872 where he met Bakunin’s associate, James Guillaume, and
visited the anarchist Jura Federation of workers, returning to Russia a convert to Bakunin’s revolu-
tionary collectivism. Joining the Chaikovsky Circle, Kropotkin was arrested in 1874 for revolution-
ary activity but escaped in 1876, settling in Switzerland. There in 1879 he founded Le Révolté
(changed to La Révolte in 1887), the editorship of which was taken over by Jean Grave in 1883. In
July of 1881 Kropotkin attended the London International Social Revolutionary Congress where
support for propaganda by the deed was one among several resolutions adopted. Expelled from
Switzerland in 1881, Kropotkin went to France, where he was arrested and imprisoned (1882 –
1886) for membership in the International. From 1886 until his return to Russia in 1917, he lived
in England, where he met EG in 1895. A founder of Freedom and a regular contributor to La Révolte
and Les Temps Nouveaux, Kropotkin spent his years in England developing and refining his theory
of anarchist communism. Although the major concepts of anarchist communism had been circu-
lating throughout anarchist and socialist circles since the 1870s, Kropotkin formalized them into a
broad theory of economics, society, culture, and ethics, with particular emphasis on the develop-
ment of a scientific basis for anarchist communism. Kropotkin posited that evolutionary theory
proved that cooperation, and not competition, was the law of nature, a perspective at odds with fel-
low evolutionists including T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer.
Kropotkin played an active role in the protests against the trial of the Haymarket anarchists in
1886. Together with Stepniak, William Morris, and George Bernard Shaw, he addressed a mass
rally in London against the Haymarket death sentence.
Kropotkin visited the United States twice (1897 and 1901), lecturing at the Lowell Institute in
Boston, the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., the Association for the Advance-
ment of Science, and various universities, as well as to anarchist audiences. He donated $249 from
the proceeds from his 1897 U.S. lecture tour to Solidarity, and his 1901 tour helped finance many
other anarchist newspapers, generating large sums for Free Society, Freedom, and Discontent. An
admirer of American federalism, Kropotkin extolled the American Revolution and Declaration of
Independence, in spite of his strong criticism of capitalism and the U.S. government’s abuses of
power. Kropotkin met leading American anarchists, including Johann Most, Benjamin Tucker,

538 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

Joseph Labadie, Harry Kelly, Saul Yanovsky, Voltairine de Cleyre, and EG, who helped arrange the
New York segment of his second visit (although he failed in his attempt to visit AB in prison); he
also met a variety of American progressives including Jane Addams and Lillian Wald. He also vis-
ited the tomb of the Haymarket anarchists. He would remain EG’s ideological mentor for the next
decade, although they would continue to disagree over the emphasis anarchists should place on
personal and sexual issues.
At the urging of Robert Erskine Ely and other American friends, Kropotkin wrote his memoirs,
first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly (from September 1898 to September 1899) and then revised
and published in book form as Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899). His
other major works written during this period include Fields, Factories, and Workshops (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1899) and La Conquête du Pain (Paris: Tresse et Stock, 1892; first English trans-
lation, London: Chapmann and Hall, 1906). Besides these major works, Kropotkin also published
numerous articles, many later published as pamphlets, including “An Appeal to the Young” (first
English translation by H. M. Hyndman serialized in Justice [London], 1885; published in pamphlet
form by both Modern Press [London] and International Workmen’s Association [San Francisco],
1885), “Law and Authority: An Anarchist Essay” (first English translation published as a pamphlet
by International Publishers [London], 1886), “Communism and the Wage System” (serialized in
Freedom, 1888), “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles” (London: Freedom Pamphlet
No. 4, 1891), “Revolutionary Government” (first English translation serialized in The Commonweal,
1892; pamphlet published by the Socialist League/The Commonweal [London], 1892), “Anarchist
Morality” (serialized in Die Autonomie and Freiheit, 1891; pamphlet published by Die Autonomie
[London], 1891; first English translation serialized in Freedom, 1892, and published as Freedom
Pamphlet no. 6 [London], 1892), “Expropriation” (serialized in Die Autonomie and Freiheit [New
York], 1892), and “The Spirit of Revolt” (first English translation serialized in The Commonweal,
1892), as well as the numerous articles published in The Nineteenth Century, beginning in 1890,
which would make up his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann, 1902).

Landauer, Gustav (1870 –1919) German anarchist. Landauer wrote for Der Sozialist, organ of the
libertarian group Jungen (Youth), from the time it was founded in 1891 to its termination in 1899
and again from 1909, when the paper was resurrected under Landauer’s editorship, to 1915. At the
1893 congress of the socialist Second International in Zurich, Landauer and other anarchists were
excluded for arguing that parliamentarian politics only serve the bourgeois state. Landauer was also
present at the London Conference of 1896 where the anarchists were expelled. Several issues of Der
Sozialist expressed the groups’ objections to Marxism, including the Jungen call for “free, ruler-less
socialism.” Landauer also voiced his differences with the “collectivist anarchists,” remarking “there
are only individuals.” He was responsible for facilitating the accessibility of Proudhon and
Kropotkin to the German-reading public. His translations of Proudhon were preserved in the Der
Sozialist issues published after 1909. Landauer’s works during this period include the pamphlets
An den Zuricher Kongress: Bericht uber die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: W. Werner Verlag, 1893)
and Von Zurich bis London (Paris, 1896).

Lavrov, Peter L. (1823–1900) Russian populist, writer, philosopher, and mathematician. Lavrov was
convicted of treason in 1866 and exiled to Vologda, escaping to western Europe in 1870. Influen-
tial in revolutionary circles in and outside of Russia for his political writings, especially his Histor-
ical Letters (published serially from 1868 to 1869), Lavrov joined the Paris section of the First In-

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 539

 ternational in 1870, and, although never formally identified as a Marxist, he later supported Marx’s
opposition to Bakunin when the First International collapsed. From 1873 to 1876, Lavrov edited
Vperëd! (Forward; Zurich, 1873–1874; London, 1874–1877), and co-edited Vestnik Narodnoi Voli
(Messenger of the People’s Will; Geneva, 1883–1886).

Leggatt, Ted (d. 1935) English anarchist. Leggatt was a carman in London’s East End and an early
member of the Socialist League; he was later associated with the Torch group centered around the
Rossetti family. A tireless speaker, Leggatt addressed numerous propaganda meetings in the parks
of London. In 1896 he was a delegate of the Carmen’s Union to the socialist Second International
Congress in London. A powerful advocate of anti-parliamentary direct action, Leggatt was arrested
many times, and his activities were regularly covered in The Firebrand. He worked with both the
Carmen’s Union and Yiddish-speaking anarchists in Whitechapel at the beginning of the twentieth
century. By 1935, Leggatt was said to have adopted a more mainstream perspective as a trade union
leader in the Transport Union.

Lewis, Roman (1865–1918) New York Jewish anarchist and journalist. Lewis was a leading member
of the Jewish anarchist group the Pioneers of Liberty, founded in 1886, and served on the editorial
board of the world’s first Yiddish-language anarchist periodical, the weekly Varhayt. In 1890 Lewis
became the first editor of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme. After six months he left the post and began
working for the cloakmakers’ union. Modest Stein claimed in a letter to EG on 20 September 1929
(see EGP, reel 21) that Lewis could well have leaked the information to the police that alerted them
to intercept Stein when he arrived in Pittsburgh to “finish off” Henry C. Frick after AB’s attempts
had failed. By the end of 1892 Lewis had become a social democrat and was later elected an assis-
tant district attorney in Chicago as a Democrat. He committed suicide in 1918. His publications in-
clude Der gezetslikher mord in Tshikago fun 11 November 1887: Der groyser proteses gegen di anarkhisten
fun Tshikago (The legal murder in Chicago on 11 November 1887: The great protest in support of
the Chicago anarchists; New York: Pioneers of Liberty and Knights of Liberty, 1889).

Lingg, Louis (1864–1887) German-born American anarchist, carpenter, Haymarket defendant.

Born in Schwetzingen, in Freiburg, Lingg joined the Lassallean Working Men’s Educational Society
before moving to Zurich in 1883, where he was drawn to anarchism, vehemently supporting propa-
ganda by the deed. To escape military service, Lingg came to the United States in 1885, becoming an
organizer for the International Carpenters and Joiners Union, and serving as delegate to the Chicago
Central Labor Union. A member of the Chicago North Side Group of the IWPA, Lingg was one of
five anarchists sentenced to hang after the bombing at Haymarket. He ignored much of his trial,
spending his time reading instead. After he was sentenced, he declared to the court: “I despise your
order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it.” Lingg took his own life the day be-
fore the execution by placing a dynamite cartridge, smuggled to him by fellow anarchist Dyer D. Lum,
in his mouth. To EG he “was the sublime hero among the eight” Haymarket anarchists (LML, p. 42).

Luccheni, Luigi (1873–1910) Italian anarchist. Luccheni assassinated Empress Elizabeth of Austria
in Geneva on 10 September 1898, stabbing her to death with a sharpened file. Luccheni suppos-
edly had planned to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, who was to be visiting Geneva, but when he
did not come Luccheni decided instead to assassinate the empress, who happened by coincidence
to be in town. In a letter to the New York World, EG repudiated Luccheni’s act, pointing out that
because the empress was not a political enemy of anarchism, the violence was senseless and re-

540 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

flected badly on anarchists in general. Luccheni, who was sentenced to life in prison, hung himself
in 1910.

Malatesta, Errico (1853–1932) Italian anarchist. Born in Santa Maria Capua Vetere (Caserta), Mala-
testa joined the IWMA in 1871, and met Michael Bakunin in Switzerland in 1872. Malatesta advo-
cated insurrection as the primary strategy for the realization of anarchy; after taking part in several
such actions he was forced into exile in 1878. Traveling widely, he met Peter Kropotkin and Élisée
Reclus, and lived in London between 1881 and 1883 before returning to Italy. From 1888 to 1889 he
edited L’Associazione; he later edited L’Agitazione from 1897 to 1898. Arrested in 1898, he escaped
from his island prison in 1899 and traveled to the United States, where he edited (anonymously)
La Questione Sociale in Paterson, New Jersey, from 1899 to 1900. During this period he was shot by
a fellow anarchist during a heated debate over tactics. He refused to press any charges. He then
moved to London where he worked as a mechanic. Malatesta had a considerable impact on Amer-
ican anarchist communist theory through his pamphlets Anarchy (London: C. M. Wilson, 1892)
and A Talk about Anarchist Communism between Two Workers (San Francisco: Free Society, 1898).
See also vols. 2, 3.

Manning, Henry Edward (1808 –1892) English theologian. Manning joined the Roman Catholic
Church in 1851, became Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, and a cardinal in 1875. Manning acted
as intermediary in the London dock strike of 1889. In response to the Trafalgar Square “Bloody
Sunday” deaths on 13 November 1887, he wrote: “Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a
natural right to his neighbour’s bread” (“Distress in London: A Note on Outdoor Relief,” Fortnightly
Review 49, 1 January–1 June 1888; London: Chapman and Hall, 1888; reprinted in Miscellanies,
London: Burns and Oates, 1888). Anarchists, including Charles Mowbray and Voltairine de Cleyre,
as well as EG in Living My Life, cite Manning as the inspiration for EG’s words in the speeches she
delivered during the 1893 unemployment demonstrations in New York City. Manning’s works in-
clude The English Church (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1835), The Rule of Faith (London: J. G. and
F. Rivington, 1838), The Unity of the Church (London: J. Murray, 1842), The Grounds of Faith (Lon-
don: Burns and Lambert, 1852), England and Christendom (London: Longmans, Green, 1867).

Martin, James L. (b. 1851) Sheriff of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Martin, a former mine worker
who was elected county sheriff in 1895, led the police forces that, on 10 September 1897, opened
fire on a procession of 3,000 peaceful, flag-carrying, and unarmed miners, marching on an open
highway toward Lattimer, Pennsylvania, where a strike was in progress. Martin’s men killed 19 min-
ers and seriously wounded up to 40 others. The incident caused an outrage in radical circles and
led Samuel Gompers to write a caustic article about the incident, published in the New York World,
criticizing the actions of the police force. Martin and his deputies were acquitted of murder and
manslaughter charges on 9 March 1898 after a month-long trial in Wilkes-Barre.

Martine, Randolph B. (1844–1895) American judge. Martine was a graduate of Columbia Univer-
sity Law School and a prominent figure in Tammany Hall, the allegedly corrupt Democratic politi-
cal machine in New York City. Martine was elected Democratic district attorney in 1884 and a judge
of the Court of General Sessions in 1887, where he presided over EG’s 1893 trial.

Marx, Karl Henrich (1818 –1883) German philosopher of history, who developed the concepts of sci-
entific socialism and international communism. Marx and his lifelong friend and political collabo-

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 541

 rator Friedrich Engels played an active role in the International Working Men’s Association—the
First International—from its inception on 28 September 1864. Principal works include The Com-
munist Manifesto (1848, translated into English in 1888) and Das Kapital, published in three vol-
umes, the first in 1867, the last two posthumously in 1885 and 1894 (the first volume was trans-
lated into English in 1886). From 1852 to 1861 Marx wrote hundreds of articles, published (in
English) in mainstream papers as varied as the New York Tribune and the National Workingmen’s Ad-
vocate; his articles written in German appeared in the New England Zeitung (Boston) and the Turn-
Zeitung (New York), among others. Antagonistic toward anarchism, he and Michael Bakunin
struggled for control of the International Working Men’s Association, a tension replicated in the of-
ten discordant relationships between American socialists and anarchists.

Masur, Carl (dates unknown) German American anarchist editor and shoemaker, based in New
York. Masur was a contributor to Freiheit and Lucifer, the Lightbearer, as well as a member of the
Radikaler Arbeiter-Bund and editor of Der Anarchist (from 1891 to 1895).

McKinley, William (1843–1901) Republican president of the United States from 1897 to 1901. Pres-
ident McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz on 6 September 1901, in Buffalo, New York. Before serv-
ing as president, McKinley was a congressman from Ohio (1877–1891) and served two terms
(1892 –1896) as governor of Ohio. While governor, he formed a state board to regulate labor dis-
putes and became friends with millionaire industrialist Mark Hanna, who managed his 1896 pres-
idential campaign. McKinley is credited with being the first president to make the United States an
imperial power, principally because, as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United
States gained the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. While delivering a speech
at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo on 6 September 1901, McKinley was shot twice by Leon
Czolgosz and died from complications of his wounds on 14 September 1901. Two collections of his
speeches were published: Speeches and Address of William McKinley from His Election to Congress to
the Present Time (New York: D. Appleton, 1893) and Speeches and Address of William McKinley from
March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1900).

Merlino, Francesco Saverio (1856 –1930) Italian anarchist, lawyer, writer. Born in Naples, Merlino
became a leading anarchist agitator and theoretician and a close associate of Errico Malatesta; both
men were convicted of conspiracy in 1884 with six other anarchists, although Merlino fled the
country the following year. He spent most of his exile in London, writing articles for Italian- and
English-language periodicals, and scholarly works on anarchism and socialism; he was also active
in the Freedom Group. In 1892 he lectured in the United States and founded two anarchist papers,
Il Grido degli Oppressi and the English-language Solidarity, the latter with John H. Edelmann. Re-
turning to Italy in 1893, Merlino was imprisoned for his 1884 conviction and released two years
later. In 1897 Merlino repudiated the anarchist policy of abstentionism, calling for anarchists to
participate in the electoral process and join a political front against the Crispi regime. The ensuing
debate between Merlino and Malatesta was a major event in the Italian and international anarchist
movement, the former arguing for a pragmatic alliance with parliamentarian socialists, the latter
for the importance of doctrinal purity. Merlino then left the movement to join the socialists and
eventually withdrew from party politics.

Metzkow, Max (1854–1945) Berlin-born socialist and later anarchist. A follower of Johann Most,
with whom he was in correspondence from 1879 on, Metzkow was arrested in 1876 for distribut-
ing anti-militarist leaflets, and again in 1880 for high treason. Metzkow was sentenced to two years

542 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

imprisonment, the first case under the Bismarck regime’s anti-socialist laws in 1881. Upon his re-
lease in 1883, Metzkow left Germany for London where he was active in the Socialist League and
the Autonomie Club. Metzkow emigrated to the United States in 1888 and worked as a composi-
tor for Most’s Freiheit and Dyer D. Lum’s Alarm. Metzkow lived in Pittsburgh during the 1890s,
where he was acquainted with Henry Bauer and Carl Nold and helped distribute the manifesto in
support of the Homestead strikers with Bauer and Nold in 1892. Metzkow accompanied EG to Al-
legheny City in November 1892 when she made the first of two visits to AB in prison. Active in the
International Typographical Union, Metzkow moved to Buffalo soon after the Homestead affair,
where he worked on the Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung. Metzkow was active in the anarchist movement
until around 1900. See also vol. 2.

Michel, Louise (1830 –1905) French anarchist, teacher, writer, Communard. After moving in 1856
to Paris, Michel combined teaching, literary work, and politics, becoming first a republican, then a
socialist. A frontline fighter on the barricades during the Paris Commune, Michel was banished in
1873 to New Caledonia, where she taught, became a supporter of the colony’s movement for inde-
pendence from France, and was drawn to anarchism. Pardoned with her fellow Communards in
1880, Michel returned to France and joined the circle around the anarchist journal La Révolution
Sociale (published in Paris between 1880 and 1881). In 1883 she was arrested with Émile Pouget
after a Paris bread riot and imprisoned until January 1886. In January 1888 she was shot by an as-
sailant while speaking in Le Havre, but refused to press charges. In 1890, to avoid another prison
term, Michel fled to London, there founding and operating the libertarian International Sunday
School. For the remainder of her life, Michel traveled frequently between England and France,
propagandizing. In 1892, she joined Malatesta and Kropotkin, among others, in an informal group
calling on anarchists to work more closely with trade unions. EG met Michel in London in 1895
and invited her to the United States, but the trip never materialized. During the Dreyfus Affair,
Michel argued that anarchists should refrain from supporting Alfred Dreyfus, because he was a
bourgeois career officer. A contributor to both Les Temps Nouveaux and, at its founding, to Le Li-
bertaire (Paris, 1895–1956), as well as numerous other anarchist periodicals, Michel wrote essays,
novels, poetry, history, her memoirs, and an opera. Revered for her legendary kindness as well as
for her devotion to anarchism, she died while on a lecture tour in France in 1905.

Milner, Alfred (1854–1925) British colonial government official. From 1890 to 1892, Milner was
the undersecretary of finance in Egypt. His book England in Egypt (1892) argued for greater British
involvement in the country. From 1897 to 1905, Milner served as governor of Cape Colony, and also
as British high commissioner of South Africa. Allegedly, his efforts to gain political rights for Brit-
ish settlers in Boer territories heightened growing tensions between the rival groups and precipi-
tated the Anglo-Boer War, which began on 11 October 1899 when the Boer republics declared war
on Britain. After the war, his career came under fire when local British settlers hostile to Chinese
immigrants discovered he had imported indentured Chinese labor to work the South African gold
mines. The British cabinet originally had agreed with his importation of Chinese labor, but Milner
was censured by the House of Commons when it was discovered the Chinese were being flogged
“like Africans.” He resigned his post as governor in 1905.

Mollock, Frank (dates unknown) Austrian-born anarchist, baker. AB, EG, and Modest Stein met
Mollock in Peukert’s Autonomy Group and lived at the New York apartment he shared with

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 543

 Josephine Mollock in the weeks preceding AB’s attack on Frick. Mollock was arrested on 26 July
1892 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and taken to Pittsburgh on suspicion of being AB’s accomplice.
Years later, EG remembered in Living My Life her indignation when, a few days after Mollock’s ar-
rest, Josephine locked her out of the apartment under pressure from the landlord. The Pennsylva-
nia police failed to prove Mollock had any role in AB’s action.

Morris, J. H. (d. 1904) American anarchist, printer, and poet. Morris was co-founder and printer of
the Firebrand in Portland, Oregon, in 1895; he also published its predecessor, Freedom, with Henry
Addis and Mauritz Linden in Portland (1893–1894). After the paper’s removal to San Francisco,
Morris remained in Oregon but continued to contribute to its successor, Free Society.

Morris, William (1834–1896) English poet, writer, designer, and self-styled libertarian socialist.
Morris joined the Democratic Federation (later the Social Democratic Federation) in January 1883
and was a leader in the anti-parliamentarian faction that split off in December 1884 to form the So-
cialist League. In addition to writing the League’s manifesto, Morris edited its weekly organ, The
Commonweal, from 1885 to 1890. He also wrote a number of popular pamphlets, including Useful
Work versus Useless Toil (London: Socialist League Office, 1885), The Tables Turned; or Nupkins Awak-
ened (London: Office of The Commonweal, 1887), True and False Society (London: Socialist League
Office, 1888), and Monopoly, or, How Labour Is Robbed (London: Office of The Commonweal, 1890).
His utopian novel, News from Nowhere; or, an Epoch of Rest (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890), a re-
sponse to Edward Bellamy’s state socialist utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), was first serial-
ized in The Commonweal between January and July 1890. Morris withdrew from the League in
1890 in response to what he considered some anarchists’ irresponsible support of violence.

Morton, Eric B. (d. ca.1930) Norwegian-born American anarchist. Morton was nicknamed “Eric the
Red,” after the hero of an Icelandic saga, and also “Ibsen,” after the Norwegian playwright, in AB’s
Prison Memoirs. At EG’s request, Morton attempted to dig AB’s escape tunnel during 1899 and
1900. Morton fled to join EG in Paris after the plot was discovered and after poisonous fumes in
the tunnel infected his blood and caused him to contract a skin disease. See also vols. 2, 3.

Morton, James F., Jr. (1870 –1941) New York lawyer, Harvard graduate, freethinker, free-love sup-
porter, and anarchist. Morton first met EG in the late 1890s. Morton embarked on a cross-country
anarchist speaking tour (1899 –1900), ending in San Francisco where he briefly edited Free Society
(1900). He moved in 1901 to the Home Colony, near Tacoma, Washington, where he taught school
and edited Discontent (1898 –1902) until it ceased publication in the wake of the McKinley assassi-
nation and the persistent and mounting persecution by the postal agencies. Morton’s essay, first
published in Free Society, “Another Blow to Royalty” about Bresci, was reprinted as a leaflet in 1900.
Morton also wrote Is It All a Dream? (San Francisco: A. Isaak, 1900), which was published as a dual
edition with Errico Malatesta’s Anarchy, and contributed to Free Society, Lucifer, the Lightbearer, Our
New Humanity (1895–1897), and The Truth Seeker. See also vol. 2.

Most, Johann (1846 –1906) Bavarian-born orator, editor, actor; social democrat, then anarchist,
and at this time a fierce advocate of propaganda by the deed. Most joined the labor movement in
1867 in Jura, then two years later, at a workers’ demonstration in Vienna, he was sentenced to a
month in prison for delivering a speech criticizing the German republic. In July 1870 Most was sen-
tenced to five years imprisonment (although he was released after only a few months) for high trea-
son for his role in organizing a march in front of the House of Parliament demanding “manhood

544 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

suffrage.” Granted amnesty in February 1871, Most was expelled from Austria and left for Ger-
many, where he edited the socialist paper Chemnitzer Freie Presse between 1871 and 1873 and initi-
ated the first satirical paper of German social democracy, Der Nußknacker (1871–1872), a supple-
ment to the Chemnitzer Freie Presse, for which he was subject to several arrests. In his first year as
editor of Chemnitzer Freie Presse, Most was summoned to court forty-three times. In February of
1873 he began a prison sentence in Zwickaue under charges of lèse-majesté and insulting the army.
Severe and continued police harassment prompted him to leave for Mainz, where he edited Süd-
deutschen Volksstimme (1873–1874). Despite his criticism of parliamentary politics, in January 1874
Most was elected into the Reichstag, but in Berlin three months later while delivering a speech on
the Paris Commune Most was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. He was re-elected to
the Reichstag in January 1878, but the relentless harassment and the passing of the anti-socialist
laws prompted Most to leave Germany in December 1878 and never return. Most moved to London
and became publisher of Freiheit, the organ of the German Communistic Workingmen’s Club, in
January 1879. Freiheit’s political stance had gradually evolved from social democratic to social rev-
olutionary, and, by the time Most was publishing the paper in London, anarchist. Most was even-
tually sentenced (March 1881), in a trial that virtually ended freedom of the press in England, to
eighteen months imprisonment (April 1881 to October 1882) for writing and publishing an article
endorsing the assassination of Russian tsar Alexander II. Upon his release Most left for New York
at the invitation of Justus Schwab, arriving on 18 December 1882 and resuming the publication of
Freiheit. In 1883 Most took the lead in the writing of the Pittsburgh Manifesto, the first clearly
defined statement of the anarchist movement in the United States, adopted by the newly founded
International Working People’s Association. Most’s Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft (Revolutionary
War Science), published in 1885, was essentially a manual for the attentater. On 12 November 1887,
the day after the Haymarket anarchists were hung, Most delivered an incendiary speech in New
York for which he was tried and condemned to a year in prison. He unsuccessfully appealed the
conviction but served his sentence from June 1891 to April 1892. Most became embroiled in a bit-
ter controversy with Benjamin Tucker, who accused him of complicity with the violent and crimi-
nal methods of some of Most’s followers. Tucker, in his parody of Most’s “Beast of Property,” called
“The Beast of Communism” and published in the 27 March 1886 issue of Liberty, accused Most’s
followers of committing arson motivated by greed as part of an insurance fraud scheme. Each man
attempted to excommunicate the other from the anarchist movement. Most forbid his adherents to
subscribe to Liberty, and Justus Schwab broke away from Most over the incident. In 1887, a split,
which had been brewing for some time, between Most’s anarchist collectivists and another wing of
the German anarchist movement led by Joseph Peukert and proponents of Kropotkin’s anarchist
communism, solidified with the arrest of Johann Neve, who was a close comrade of Most’s and well
liked throughout the movement. Peukert was implicated in Neve’s arrest because of his friendship
with Karl Theodor Reuss, later revealed to be a member of the Berlin Political Police, and identified
as “suspicious” at the time by Victor Dave, an anarchist and Most supporter. Influential among the
Jewish anarchists, Most contributed to the Varhayt (1889) in New York, and was a popular actor and
songwriter. Initially a close acquaintance of both EG and AB (he was for a time EG’s lover, mentor,
and organizer of her first lecture tour, when at the same time AB worked on the press of Freiheit),
their move away from Freiheit and anarchist collectivism toward Peukert and anarchist commu-
nism in the early 1890s distanced them from Most. Most was critical of Berkman’s attempted at-
tentat on Henry Clay Frick in 1892; his criticism cemented their feud, which was never resolved.

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 545

 In 1901, after President McKinley’s assassination, Most was imprisoned for printing “Murder
against Murder” in Freiheit, an article advocating political assassinations. During his time in the
United States, Most’s ideas on anarchism developed, first as a collectivist, then as a communist, then
by the late 1890s back to the syndicalist ideas he had espoused in the 1870s. Most’s varied political
journey contributed to his growing ideological tolerance, although he remained a highly emotional
and irascible man. Several of Most’s works were translated into English during this period, includ-
ing The Beast of Property (New Haven, Conn.: International Working Men’s Association, 1890), The
Social Monster; a Paper on Communism and Anarchism (New York: Bernhard and Schenck, 1890),
and The Free Society. Tract on Communism and Anarchy (New York: J. Müller, 1891). See also vol. 2.

Mowbray, Charles Wilfred (1855–1910) English anarchist, lecturer, tailor, advocate of propaganda
by the deed, onetime soldier. Mowbray was a member of the London branch of the Socialist League.
His arrest on 20 September 1885 for obstructing a public thoroughfare marked the beginning of a
long free-speech fight, involving unemployment demonstrations and Haymarket protests among
other issues. After Mowbray was arrested following a meeting in Norwich marketplace, the au-
thorities alleged that a bank and several shops were damaged by the crowd; Mowbray was sentenced
to nine months imprisonment. He was excluded from the Zurich congress of the socialist Second
International along with Gustav Landauer and other anarchists, who proceeded to hold their own
“counter-convention.” Arrested again during the Walsall case in April 1892 and, based on an article
written by David Nicoll entitled “Are These Men Fit to Live?” (published in The Commonweal, of
which Mowbray was the publisher), Mowbray was charged with inciting to murder, tried, and ac-
quitted. When Mowbray was released, he resumed his agitation for the Socialist League, taking part
in annual Paris Commune and Haymarket commemorations, along with Peter Kropotkin, Errico
Malatesta, Louise Michel, and Saul Yanovsky. After the Socialist League disbanded and The Com-
monweal ceased publication, Mowbray traveled to the United States on a speaking tour. He spoke at
the 19 August 1894 meeting at New York City’s Thalia Theatre, celebrating EG’s release from
prison, the first of many times that they shared a platform. In Philadelphia, Mowbray sparked a free
speech fight after his 28 December 1894 arrest for inciting to riot and sedition against the Com-
monwealth of Pennsylvania. Mowbray settled in Boston in 1895; his friends in America included
the rivals Johann Most and Joseph Peukert. Harry Kelly credited his own attraction to anarchism to
a speech by Mowbray. Kelly and Mowbray served as secretaries to the Union Cooperative Society of
Printers and to the Union Cooperative Society of Journeymen Tailors, organizations associated
with the Central Labor Union of Boston. Together with others, they founded The Rebel (an anarchist
communist monthly) on 20 September 1895 and in 1896 published two issues of an anarchist pa-
per called The Match. A few years later Mowbray opened a saloon in Hoboken, New Jersey. Re-
turning to London in the 1900s, Mowbray was active in the Industrial Union of Direct Actionists,
a federation of anarchist and syndicalist groups.

Neebe, Oscar W. (1850 –1916) American anarchist, Haymarket defendant. Born in New York City,
educated in Germany, Neebe worked in Chicago from 1866 to 1886, with short stints in New York
and Philadelphia. Neebe was a manager of the Socialistic Publishing Society, publisher of the
Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, Der Verbote, and Die Fackel, and an organizer for the Central Labor
Union. One of the eight anarchists tried and convicted after the Haymarket riot of 1886, Neebe was
sentenced to fifteen years but pardoned by Illinois governor John P. Altgeld in 1893.

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Nettlau, Max (1865–1944) Austrian-born anarchist writer and historian. Nettlau became a social-
ist and then an anarchist communist as a student (1878 –1880). Nettlau studied philology in Berlin
and in 1885 traveled to London, where he worked on his dissertation on Celtic languages in the Brit-
ish Library. In London he was active in the Socialist League (1885–1890) and wrote articles for its
paper, The Commonweal. Between May and August 1890 Nettlau edited and financed four issues of
the Anarchist Labour Leaf, which consisted of articles he and Henry Davis had written. In the 1890s
Nettlau contributed to Johann Most’s Freiheit, joined the Freedom Group, and became a regular con-
tributor to Freedom. From 1893 to 1894 he was a member of the Commonweal Group and anony-
mously wrote their declaration, “Why We Are Anarchists” first published as a series in The Com-
monweal in 1893, and in 1894, as a pamphlet. Independently wealthy until the post–World War I
economic collapse, Nettlau devoted himself to studying, writing, and collecting anarchist material.
EG met Nettlau for the first time during her 1900 visit to London. Through his travels, Nettlau met
all the leading figures in the anarchist movement, including Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta,
Rudolf Rocker, Victor Dave, and Élisée Reclus, at whose invitation he compiled the first bibliogra-
phy on anarchism, Bibliographie de l’anarchie (Paris: Bibliothèque des Temps Nouveaux, 1897). But
it was Michael Bakunin who absorbed much of Nettlau’s energy. Between 1896 and 1900 Nettlau
wrote and published fifty multigraphed copies of a massive, three-volume biography of Bakunin
and in his later years completed the last volumes of the biography. Other works include Michael
Bakunin, Ouvres (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1895–1913), Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle
(London: Freedom, 1900), which was first delivered as a lecture before the Freedom Discussion
Group on 5 December 1899, and Michael Bakunin; eine biographische skizze (Berlin: P. Pawlowitsch,
1901). Other works followed, including a biography of Malatesta and a history of anarchism, al-
though many remained unpublished. See also vols. 2, 3.

Neve, Johann (1844–1896) German socialist and later, anarchist. Born in Schleswig (then Den-
mark), Neve apprenticed to his father as a joiner. In 1866 Neve moved to Paris and in 1868 to the
United States, where he lived until 1874. Neve then returned to Europe, first to Paris and finally to
London, where he became for a decade one of the anarchist movement’s most respected and active
members, admired for his bravery in the smuggling of revolutionary publications and materials
into Germany, and for his personal magnanimousness. Neve was arrested in Belgium in February
1887 and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Neve’s arrest—and the resulting accusations of
police spies posing as anarchists aiding in his capture— deepened the split between the collectivist
(Most) and communist (Peukert) wings of the German anarchist movement. Neve died in Moabit
prison on 8 December 1896.

Nicoll, David (1859 –1919) English anarchist, Socialist League member, co-editor with Frank Kitz
of The Commonweal from 1889. Nicoll was at the forefront of the defense of the Walsall anarchists
in 1892, and accused Auguste Coulon of being an agent provocateur. Nicoll was arrested after the
guilty verdict and imprisoned for his condemnation of the proceedings, which were printed in The
Commonweal and repeated at a rally in Hyde Park. After serving eighteen months, Nicoll wrote nu-
merous pamphlets about the case and his sentence, including The Walsall Anarchists (Sheffield,
n.d.) and Anarchy at the Bar (London, 1895).

Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Domela (1846 –1919) Dutch freethinker and socialist, then anarchist. Af-
ter a career as a Lutheran pastor, Nieuwenhuis left the church and in 1879 founded the socialist and

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 547

 pacifist journal Recht voor Allen (Justice for All; Amsterdam, 1879 –1900), which was followed by
De Vrije Socialist (The Free Socialist, 1898 –1919). In 1881 Nieuwenhuis helped found a Dutch So-
cialist League and was a founder of the Dutch Social Democratic Party, and by 1888 he was the first
socialist member of the Dutch parliament (1888 –1891). Nieuwenhuis was attracted to anarchism
after his disillusionment with parliamentary politics. He probably met EG in Paris during the sup-
pressed 1900 International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People. Nieuwenhuis pub-
lished numerous pamphlets, including Het Internationaal Kongres te Londen in 1896 (1897), Social-
ism in Danger (London: J. Tochatti, Liberty Press, 1896?), and The Pyramid of Tyranny (London:
Freedom Office, 1901). See also vols. 2, 3.

Nold, Carl (1869 –1934) German-born anarchist. Born in Weinsberg, Nold immigrated to the
United States in 1883. Nold was an associate and supporter of Johann Most. AB stayed with Nold
and Henry Bauer in Pittsburgh before his attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick. With
Bauer, Nold was sentenced to five years, and served four, in prison on two charges: incitement to
riot (stemming from their distribution of a handbill addressed to striking Homestead workers on
8 July), and conspiracy (with AB) to commit murder. Although Nold had not known AB before July
1892, in prison they grew very close (exclusively through notes smuggled between them and
through their prisoners’ journal Prison Blossoms). Upon his release from prison in May 1897, Nold
worked for the reduction of AB’s sentence and was active in the Berkman Defense Association. Af-
ter a failed attempt to establish a cooperative farm, Nold lived in St. Louis, moving to Detroit in the
early 1900s, where he remained politically active. Nold contributed to various anarchist publica-
tions including the Firebrand, Free Society, and Discontent. See also vol. 2.

Oerter, Friedrich Joseph “Sepp” (1870 –1928) German anarchist, bookbinder, and onetime lover
of EG. Oerter became an anarchist in 1890 and in 1892 edited Der Anarchist in New York, leaving
in October for London, Holland, and ultimately Germany where he was arrested with his brother
Joseph Friedrich “Fritz” Oerter (1869 –1935) in December. Convicted in October 1893 for smug-
gling and distributing illegal literature and explosives, Oerter was sentenced to eight years at forced
labor in the Münster penitentiary. His brother served eighteen months, sparking a decade of de-
clining health. While his brother Fritz remained an anarchist all his life, Sepp became after 1912 a
Social Democrat, during which time he was elected prime minister of Braunschweig (1920 –1921);
ultimately Oerter became a National Socialist.

Owen, William C. (1854–1929) English anarchist, journalist. Owen was a graduate of Oxford and
an early socialist. He came to New York in 1882 and in 1884 moved to San Francisco, where he be-
came an associate of California socialist Burnette C. Haskell, serving in 1885 as secretary of the cen-
tral committee of Haskell’s International Workmen’s Association. In 1887, while living in Portland,
Owen represented that city at the American Socialist Federation. Owen’s early influences included
Michael Bakunin, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. In San Francisco Owen became acquainted
with H. G. Wilshire, the son of a manufacturer, who had became a socialist and started Wilshire’s
Magazine; shortly after, Owen’s wife left him for Wilshire. In 1890 Owen visited New York, where
he denounced his early association with socialism and Burnette Haskell, calling Haskell and his
Kaweah Commonwealth an autocracy. In 1891 Owen was an active lecturer in the Socialist Labor
Party in New York. After leaving the SLP, Owen helped found the anarchist-leaning American So-
cialist League with John Edelmann and John Kenworthy. In 1893 he returned briefly to England,

548 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

where he lectured and met Kropotkin, with whom he corresponded for many years. Though Owen
admired Kropotkin, by 1895 he moved toward individualism, influenced by Benjamin Tucker’s In-
stead of a Book (1893); he was also a regular subscriber to Liberty. Owen was a frequent contributor
to a number of socialist and anarchist papers, including Haskell’s The Truth, and became editor of
the Nationalist, published first in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco. He contributed to the La-
bor Enquirer (1886 –1887), Solidarity, Firebrand, Freedom, Free Society, and translated Kropotkin’s
“Words of a Rebel” for various labor papers, especially Avant Courier of Portland, Oregon. Owen
was also the author of William Morris (New York: Humboldt Publishing, 1891) and The Economics
of Herbert Spencer (New York: Humboldt Publishing, 1891). See also vol. 3.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) English writer, freethinker, and humanitarian. Paine was influential in
shaping public opinion during the American Revolution and an active participant in the French
Revolution. His major writings include Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791–1792), and
Age of Reason (1794, 1796). Many anarchists and freethinkers, including Leonard Abbott, James F.
Morton, Jr., and individualist anarchist E. C. Walker, joined the Thomas Paine National Historical
Association. EG and other anarchists identified with both Paine’s hostility to established religion
and his attempt to keep government as small as possible.

Pallás, Paulino (1862 –1893) Spanish socialist, then anarchist, typesetter. Pallás moved in his youth
to Argentina, where he became an anarchist communist. In 1891 Pallás was involved with the revo-
lutionary movement in Brazil, where he threw a bomb into the Alcantara Theatre in Rio De Janeiro
in May 1892. Returning to Spain in October 1892, Pallás threw two bombs at Arsenio Martínez de
Campos, the captain general of Catalonia, on 24 September 1893, in revenge for the Spanish
officer’s role in the violent repression of the Jerez uprising of January 1892 and the subsequent exe-
cution of four Jerez anarchists. Pallás missed his target and at least two bystanders died. Pallás was
tried by a court martial and was executed by firing squad on 6 October.

Parsons, Albert (1848 –1887) American anarchist and Haymarket defendant. Parsons, editor of the
Alarm, was executed after the Haymarket affair. Parsons became a Confederate soldier when he was
13. After the war he settled in Waco, Texas, and became a Republican, publishing a weekly paper
advocating the civil rights of African Americans. By 1872 he was married to Lucy E. Parsons, a
woman of Mexican, Native American, and African American descent, and they moved to Chicago.
Radicalized in part by the nationwide railway strike of 1877, Parsons founded the IWPA’s American
Group of Chicago in 1883, whose membership included Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Oscar
Neebe, and August Spies. An accomplished orator and writer, Parsons began publishing the Alarm
in 1884. He turned himself in to stand trial for the Haymarket bombing. Found guilty of murder,
Parsons was executed on 11 November 1887. His works include Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Sci-
entific Basis as Defined by Some of Its Apostles (Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1887).

Parsons, Lucy E. (1853–1942) American anarchist, labor activist, speaker, writer, editor. Parsons
was the widow of Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons, whom she had met in Texas and married
by 1872. After the Haymarket executions, Parsons traveled to England in 1888 where she was a
guest of the Socialist League and met William Morris and Peter Kropotkin. Parsons applauded AB’s
attempt on Henry C. Frick, called AB a hero, and later spoke at a defense meeting for Carl Nold and
Henry Bauer in February 1893. She met EG at the Chicago Trade Union and Reform Club con-

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 549

 vention in 1897. In the summer of 1897 Parsons and other prominent Chicago anarchists includ-
ing Jay Fox joined Chicago Branch 2 of Debs’s Social Democracy movement. Debs later expelled
Branch 2 over the particularly incendiary resolutions it passed in response to the 10 September
massacre of striking miners at Lattimer, Pennsylvania in 1898. In October 1897 Parsons partici-
pated in a defense meeting for the editors of The Firebrand, who were being prosecuted under the
Comstock Act for publishing obscene material (including Walt Whitman’s poem “A Woman Waits
for Me”); the other speakers were EG and Moses Harman. At the meeting Parsons clarified her dis-
approval of the discussion of sex reform and free love within the pages of The Firebrand and ex-
pressed her intention to distance herself from any anarchist group associated with free love. In
early 1898 she embarked on a speaking tour through the eastern states. She joined the Socialist
Party of America in 1901. Parsons was the editor of Freedom (Chicago, 1890 –1892) and a contrib-
utor to a number of papers, including The Alarm, Labor Enquirer (Denver), The Rebel, and Free So-
ciety. She wrote The Life of Albert Parsons (Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1899), and published two of
Albert Parsons’s works, Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists (Chicago: Socialistic Pub-
lishing Socety, 1886) and Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis as Defined by Some of Its Apos-
tles (Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1897).

Pelloutier, Fernand Léonce Émile (1867–1901) French anarchist, syndicalist. Pelloutier was edu-
cated in religious schools and then Saint-Nazaire College. As a young journalist, Pelloutier moved
from republicanism to socialism, and then, in 1894–1895, to anarchism. He joined Jules Guesde’s
Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français in 1892 but left after the party rejected the tactics of the general
strike and union independence. Widely regarded as the father of anarcho-syndicalism, after 1895
Pelloutier was the general secretary of the Fédération Nationale des Bourse du Travail. Pelloutier,
who focused on class struggle, envisaged the union as the primary proletarian organization to lead
the fight against capitalism in the form of industrial direct action culminating in the general strike.
He was an associate of Jean Grave, Augustin Hamon, and Émile Pouget and wrote numerous ar-
ticles in Les Temps Nouveaux between 1895 and 1901. Pelloutier was author of L’organisation corpo-
rative et l’anarchie (Paris, 1896), and founder and editor of the periodical L’ouvrier des deux Mondes
(Paris, 1898 –1899). He met EG in Paris in 1900. Pelloutier’s influential Histoire des Bourses du Tra-
vail, origine, institutions, avenir (Paris: Schleicher, 1902) was published posthumously in 1902.

Perovskaya, Sophia (1853–1881) Russian revolutionary, populist. A member of the Chaikovsky

Circle, a propaganda group of which Peter Kropotkin was also a member, Perovskaya became a
leader of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), a clandestine socialist group that emerged out of a split
in the populist Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) and adopted assassination as a political strategy.
Perovskaya was revered by her contemporaries for her selfless determination, and Peter Kropotkin
wrote fondly in his memoirs of her “earnest courage, her bright intelligence, and her loving na-
ture,” praising her as “a fighter of the truest steel” (Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, pp. 318 –
19). On the first of March 1881, Perovskaya stationed her Narodnaya Volya co-conspirators along the
route of Alexander II, signaling them when he was in range of their bombs, and thus facilitating
the successful assassination of the tsar. Arrested on 22 March 1881, she was hanged on 15 April
1881. The first woman political prisoner in Russia to be executed, Perovskaya stood out among the
revolutionary women of Russia from whom EG often drew inspiration.

550 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

Peukert, Joseph (1855–1910) Bohemian-born social democrat, then anarchist; beginning in 1884,
an opponent of Johann Most and his associate Victor Dave. Peukert co-edited Zukunft (The Future;
Vienna, 1879 –1884) from December 1881 until its suppression in January 1884. Some months
later, Peukert arrived in London and joined the group that published Der Rebell, which included
Otto Rinke. In 1886 the two men founded the Gruppe Autonomie and began publishing the jour-
nal Die Autonomie (1886 –1893). Their program and orientation was from the start anarchist com-
munist, following the new theoretical ideas advanced by Peter Kropotkin, rather than those advo-
cated by Most, who at that time still identified as an anarchist collectivist. The Autonomists
promoted decentralized organization, emphasizing individuals and small groups, and the tactic of
propaganda by the deed. Most and his supporters, including Victor Dave, exchanged accusations
and insults with Peukert, Rinke, and the Autonomists. All possibilities of reconciliation between
the two camps were lost when Most and Dave alleged that Peukert acted as an informant for the po-
lice in the arrest of the highly respected anarchist Johann Neve in Belgium on 21 February 1887,
and, in turn, Peukert also accused Dave of being a police spy. In 1890 Peukert immigrated to the
United States, joined the editorial group around Der Anarchist, and attempted to clear his name.
He took a public stand in favor of AB’s failed attentat on Henry C. Frick in Der Anarchist and shared
the platform with Dyer D. Lum and EG at the 1 August 1892 meeting praising AB’s act. Disillu-
sioned with the internal feuds of the anarchist movement, Peukert disappeared from the anarchist
movement in 1894 and became involved in labor organizing. Der Anarchist ceased publication in
1895. Peukert also attended the 1905 founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World
as a representative of the Chicago Debaters’ Club, an organization of primarily anarchists and so-
cial democrats. Toward the end of his life Peukert wrote his memoirs, Erinnerungen Eines Proletariers
aus der Revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: Verlag des Sozialistischen Bundes, 1913). He died
in Chicago on 3 March 1910. Although EG was not drawn to Peukert as a person, she maintained
an amiable friendship with him for many years, and was especially appreciative of his efforts to se-
cure labor union support for her in Chicago, where he lived during the last years of his life.

Phillips, Wendell (1811–1884) American abolitionist, orator, lawyer, and women’s rights and labor
advocate. In 1837 Phillips gave up his legal practice to dedicate himself to the abolition movement.
He worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison, writing for Garrison’s The Liberator. Phillips was
the critical cohesive force behind the Anti-Slavery Society until the 15th Amendment was passed.
He then shifted focus to prohibition, woman suffrage, the abolition of capital punishment, cur-
rency reform, and labor rights. In 1870 Phillips ran for governor of Massachusetts representing the
Prohibition and Labor Reform parties, and won almost 15 percent of the vote. EG, as an anarchist,
looked to him as among those who represented what she perceived as an anti-statist American
tradition.

Pope, Abner J. (b. 1824) American anarchist, editor, and publisher of The Firebrand. Of Quaker
background, Pope devoted much of his $30,000 inheritance to The Firebrand (based in Portland,
Oreg.) and to the anarchist movement. He was arrested in September 1897 and tried in January
1898, along with fellow editors Abe Isaak and Henry Addis under the Comstock Act for sending
obscene materials through the mails. As the primary owner of the printing press, he initially faced
a $2,000 bail. Though the amount was reduced to $200, Pope on principle refused to sign a bond
to the government and remained in jail, refusing counsel as well. After the editors were each found

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 551

 guilty on one of four counts, Addis and Isaak successfully appealed the verdict while Pope, holding
to his belief that the United States had no right to govern him, declined to appeal. On 1 March 1898,
he received a four-month sentence and a $1 fine. With The Firebrand banned from the mails, Pope
was destroyed financially.

Pouget, Jean Joseph (Émile) (1860 –1931) French anarchist, syndicalist and editor. Pouget launched
his first newspaper, Le Lycéen républicain, when he was fifteen; later he became editor of Le Père
Peinard (in 1889) and La Sociale (in 1895). Pouget was an active union organizer by the time he be-
came an anarchist in 1880. On 8 March 1883 with Louise Michel, Pouget led a series of attacks on
three bakeries, literally “taking bread,” during a demonstration of the Parisian unemployed (an in-
cident widely recognized as the first time the black flag appeared as an anarchist symbol). Sen-
tenced to eight years in prison, Pouget served only three. Again the target of government harass-
ment, Pouget fled to England in 1894 (where he continued to publish Le Père Peinard), returning
after a general amnesty in May 1895. Active in the Dreyfus Affair, Pouget demanded justice for an-
archists serving time on Devil’s Island in his pamphlet Les Lois scélérates de 1893–94 (Paris, 1899).
A leading theorist of French syndicalism, in 1879 Pouget was an organizer of the textile employees
union and in 1895, became a leading member of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). In
1900 Pouget founded CGT’s publishing organ, La Voix du Peuple, with Fernand Pelloutier. See also
vols. 2, 3.

Quinn, T. Putnam (dates unknown) Irish American, New York and then Chicago anarchist. Quinn
was an early member of the Knights of Labor in New York during the Haymarket affair. He became
a member of Chicago Branch 2 of the Social Democracy of America in 1897, and was also a mem-
ber of the Chicago Philosophical Society from 1901 to 1902. Quinn was a contributor to Free Soci-
ety and wrote a laudatory obituary of John Altgeld in the 30 March 1902 Free Society, commending
his pardon of the Haymarket anarchists.

Ravachol (pseudonym of François-Claudius Koenigstein) (1859 –1892) French anarchist. Ravachol

bombed the homes of the judge and prosecuting attorneys in the trial of the anarchists arrested at
an 1891 May Day parade outside Paris. For his 1891 murder of a rich elderly man, he was executed
on 11 July 1892. Ravachol—who claimed that bourgeois society was immoral, not he—idealized
his crimes and for his audacity was elevated to the stature of a hero by many anarchists, artists, and
intellectuals.

Reclus, Jean-Jacques (Élisée) (1830 –1905) French anarchist communist and geographer. Born
into the family of a dissident Protestant pastor, Reclus was a leading theorist of anarchist commu-
nism, distinguished by his unusual tolerance and generosity to other anarchist tendencies. Origi-
nally a follower of Proudhon, Reclus became closely involved with Bakunin in the 1860s and also
Jean Grave. Reclus was imprisoned after the Paris Commune (1871) and sentenced to ten years ban-
ishment, which he spent in Switzerland writing his monumental Nouvelle géographie universelle
(published as The Earth and its Inhabitants; London: J. S. Virtue, 1876 –1894). Reclus placed partic-
ular emphasis on the free associative action of individuals and was an advocate of propaganda by
the deed in the pages of Le Révolté. However, he was dismayed by the infighting and “verbal vio-
lence” rife in the anarchist circles of Paris and Lyon. Reclus wrote numerous works on anar-
chism, including the widely translated and reprinted pamphlets An Anarchist on Anarchy (Boston:

552 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

B. R. Tucker, 1884) and Evolution and Revolution (London: W. Reeves, 1884). From 1894 on Reclus
lived in Belgium, teaching at a university founded in his honor.

Reitzel, Robert (1849 –1898) German-born American anarchist poet, critic, translator. Founder
and editor of Der arme Teufel (1884–1898), Reitzel came to the United States in 1870, and in 1871
was appointed minister of the German Reform Church in Washington. Reitzel traveled through the
United States, lecturing on literary and social topics, and finally settling in Detroit. As an editor,
Reitzel celebrated Germany’s literary masters, especially the Romantics, and helped introduce Ger-
man Americans to classic English-language literature of the United States and Europe, including
the works of Emerson, Whitman, and Shakespeare. A champion of free speech, Reitzel assumed a
prominent role in the campaign to save the Haymarket anarchists; in 1887 he and Dyer D. Lum
planned, but never carried out, a strategy to free them. He spoke at the funeral of the Haymarket
anarchists on 13 November 1887. Reitzel wrote in support of AB’s attempted attentat and, in late
1892, he befriended EG, who visited him shortly before his death. His posthumous publications
include Das Reitzel-Buch einem Vielgeliebten zum Gedachtniss, ed. Martin Drescher (The Reitzel-
book: In memory of a loved-one; Detroit, 1900), Abenteuer eines Grunen (Adventures of a green-
horn: An autobiographical novel; Chicago: Mees, Deuss, 1902), and Des armen Teufel, ed. Max Ba-
ginski (Collected writings from The Poor Devil; Detroit: Reitzel Klub, 1913). See also vols. 2, 3.

Rémy, Léon (1870 –1910) French anarchist; after 1905, socialist and militant syndicalist. Fluent in
German, Russian, and English, Rémy participated in the 1896 London congress of the socialist
Second International and was the secretary of the suppressed 1900 International Revolutionary
Congress of the Working People in Paris. Rémy edited the reports of the 1900 congress, which were
published in Les Temps Nouveaux.

Rhodes, Cecil (1853–1902) British diamond magnate, leading colonialist in Africa. Rhodes owned
the De Beers Consolidated diamond mine, which by 1891 owned 91 percent of the world’s diamond
mines. Rhodes’s accumulated wealth won him political power, and in 1890 he was granted the po-
sition of prime minister of Cape Colony by the British High Commissioner. Rhodes wanted to
bring all of Africa under British control, and also recover American colonies for the British empire.
In 1901, at the end of his life, Rhodes supported the decision of Alfred Milner to suspend the con-
stitution of Cape Colony until the Anglo-Boer War, which broke out in October 1899, was over.

Rockefeller, John D. (1839 –1937) American industrialist and primary founder of the Standard Oil
Company. In 1863, twelve years after the first successful oil drilling took place in 1851, Rockefel-
ler was inspired to establish his own refinery. In response to the steep and chaotic drops and rises
in barrel prices, Rockefeller and his business partners consolidated their resources to form the
Standard Oil Company in 1870. Through the then-legal railroad rebates and predatory pricing, the
company grew to control 90 percent of the American oil industry by 1880; by 1882 Standard Oil
had become one of the first and largest American trusts, and the target of political reformers as
a symbol of greed. Always active in the Baptist church, Rockefeller increased his philanthropic
activity as his wealth grew. By 1897 Rockefeller, largely retired from Standard Oil, spent most of
his time giving away his earnings. In 1889 he gave $600,000 to help establish the University of
Chicago.

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 553

 Roda, Maria (b. ca. 1878) Italian anarchist. Roda was a schoolmate of Sante Caserio and member
of an anarchist group to which Caserio also belonged. Roda and several of her Italian anarchist
comrades were briefly imprisoned in Italy after Caserio assassinated French president Sadi Carnot
in June 1894, in retaliation for the death of Vaillant. Immediately after her release from prison,
Roda emigrated to the United States. Her speech on the occasion of EG’s release from Blackwell’s
Island greatly impressed EG, who described the sixteen-year-old Italian as “the most exquisite crea-
ture I had ever seen.” Afterward, at a gathering at Justus Schwab’s saloon, Roda met Spanish anar-
chist Pedro Esteve, whom she later married and with whom she had eight children.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712 –1778) French-Swiss political philosopher and writer. Rousseau was
a strong critic of modern society, arguing that man is naturally good and is made unhappy and cor-
rupted by his experiences in society. To Rousseau, the natural human state of being is self-
sufficiency and self-governance, while social human beings become dependant and restricted. Nat-
ural human beings, he argued, are born neither good nor bad, and in a self-governing, strictly
egalitarian community they would strive to be good. One of the first modern writers to seriously at-
tack the institution of private property, Rousseau’s most famous works—Discourse on Inequality
Among Men (1761), The Social Contract (1762), and Emile (1762)—all explore in some way the rela-
tionship of the individual to society; these works influenced the development of European anarchist
theory.

Ruedebusch, Emil F. (dates unknown) German-born sex reformer based in Wisconsin. Ruedebusch
was the author of The Old and New Ideal, published first in German and then in English (Mayville,
Wis., 1895, 1896); the treatise, in defense of sexual varietism, sold two thousand copies before it
was banned in 1898. Ruedebusch was fined $1,200 by a federal court in Wisconsin for the distri-
bution of his book. In 1906 Mother Earth reported that Ruedebusch was president of the Mayville,
Wisconsin, Transvaluation Society (a term used by Nietzsche to reassess the worth of things in
terms of their “value for life”). The society was dedicated to the transvaluation of all values per-
taining to the relation of the sexes. Ruedebusch was a contributor to Freiheit and Lucifer, the Light-
bearer; he also published Die Eigenen: Ein Tendenzroman für Freie Geister (One’s own things: A ten-
dentious novel for free spirits; Berlin: Johannes Räde, n.d.), Frei Menschen in der Liebe und Ehe: Ein
Versuch, die Menschen glücklicher und besser zu machen (Free people in love and marriage: An at-
tempt to make people happier and better; Mayville, Wis., 1895), and, with Helmar Lerski, Lebt die
Liebe! Aphorismen (Love lives! Aphorisms; Schmargendor-Berlin: O. Lehman, 1905).

Schilling, Emil (dates unknown) Cleveland anarchist and subscription agent for Free Society. James
F. Morton, Jr. stayed with Schilling during his 1900 cross-country lecture tour. Schilling came into
contact with Leon Czolgosz in Cleveland in 1901 and after several meetings suspected Czolgosz of
being an agent provocateur. Schilling’s suspicions led to Abe Isaak’s warning in the 1 September
1901 issue of Free Society that Czolgosz may be a spy.

Schuettler, Hermann (dates unknown) Chicago detective. Known for his dramatic arrest of Hay-
market anarchist Louis Lingg, Schuettler was later promoted to assistant chief of police. See
also vol. 2.

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Schwab, Justus H. (1847–1900) German-born anarchist. Schwab immigrated to the United States
in 1868; his Lower East Side saloon at 50 East First Street was a popular gathering place for radi-
cals and writers including Ambrose Bierce, Sadakichi Hartmann, and James Huneker. EG used it
as her return address for many years; it was also the address of the periodical Sturmvogel. Arrested
for unfurling a red flag during the 13 January 1874 Tompkins Square riot, a demonstration of the
unemployed dispersed by the police, Schwab evoked the Paris Commune and sang the “Marseil-
laise” as he was dragged away. Initially a socialist (Schwab was expelled from the Socialist Labor
Party for his opposition to the Greenback alliance in the 1880 election), by the early 1880s Schwab
embraced anarchism and became a founder of the New York Social Revolutionary Club. He played
a leading role in the October 1881 Chicago congress of social revolutionaries as the representative
of the Social Revolutionary Club of New York. The congress, which was attended by anarchists and
others, denounced wage slavery and private property, and endorsed the resolutions of the earlier
July 1881 London International Social Revolutionary Congress, including propaganda by the deed
and other methods of armed insurrection. Schwab was instrumental in bringing Johann Most,
through the Social Revolutionary Club, to New York in December 1882, when he formally intro-
duced Most at his first appearance before an American audience. Schwab was a member of the In-
ternational Working People’s Association from its inception in 1883; he corresponded with Albert
Parsons in Cook County Jail. A onetime business manager of Freiheit, Schwab was for many years
an agent of Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. As reported in Liberty, Schwab broke away from Most in
1886, in a scandal that allegedly involved some anarchist communists setting house fires as part of
an insurance fraud scheme. Though not directly involved in the fires, Most refused to condemn
those who set them, after which Schwab distanced himself personally, but not publicly, from Most
and Freiheit. In response, Freiheit issued a warning against Schwab to all anarchists; Most, however,
still delivered a glowing eulogy for Schwab at his funeral. Schwab was also a leader of the German
anarchist singing group Internationale Arbeiter Liedertafel, which no doubt enlivened his saloon.
Schwab was a close friend and supporter of EG, who described him as having a “surprising capac-
ity for friendship, a veritable genius for responding generously and beautifully” (LML, p. 320).

Schwab, Michael (1853–1898) German-born American anarchist and Haymarket defendant.

Trained as a bookbinder, Michael Schwab joined the newly formed Bookbinders Union in 1872.
Shortly afterward he joined the Social Democratic Party. Schwab immigrated to the United States
in 1879, moving immediately to Chicago. He worked at various trades and traveled regularly, join-
ing the Socialist Labor Party and, from there, gravitated toward anarchism. In 1881 Schwab became
a reporter for the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung and then its associate editor. Together with others, in-
cluding Oscar Neebe, Schwab was a founding member of the Chicago North Side Group of the
IWPA, ran its library, and was a member of its general committee. He also acted as a distributor for
Freiheit. In early 1886 Schwab spoke regularly at meetings and demonstrations in favor of the eight-
hour day and to the locked-out workers at the McCormick Harvester plant. Schwab was seen by the
autonomist faction as a moderate, although he had spoken out in favor of dynamite. Arrested on
5 May, the day after the Haymarket explosion, Schwab was sentenced to death. He continued to
contribute to the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, smuggling articles out of the prison. Schwab appealed
for clemency in November 1887, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Michael
Schwab was pardoned by Illinois governor John Altgeld on 26 June 1893, moving back to his old

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 555

 job. He resigned from the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1895, opening a shoe store which failed.
Schwab contracted tuberculosis and was dying when EG visited him in spring 1898. She wrote, “I
felt with a feeling of awe for the man whose staunch and proud spirit the cruel powers had failed
to break” (LML, p. 221). He was buried at Waldheim Cemetery.

Seymour, Henry (1860 –1938) English individualist anarchist, editor, and printer. Seymour was
an early member of the National Secular Society. He published a pamphlet on Bakunin, Michael
Bakounine: A Biographical Sketch (London: H. Seymour, 1888), and translated Élisée Reclus’s Evo-
lution et revolution (London: International Publishing, 1885). From 1885 to 1888, Seymour edited
the Anarchist, a paper with a Proudhonist tone but still open to publishing articles from various per-
spectives of anarchist thought. In 1889 Seymour edited the Revolutionary Review and in 1892, as
part of the free currency campaign, Free Exchange and Free Trade. From 1897 to 1899 Seymour ed-
ited the Adult, and in 1898 was honorary secretary of the Free Speech Defense Committee, work-
ing on the defense campaign of the Legitimation League’s secretary George Bedborough, who was
prosecuted for publishing Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis. Later he became honorary secretary
of the Bacon Society and a pioneer of the gramophone record, editing the journals Talking Machine
and Sound Wave. Seymour’s pamphlets include The Fallacy of Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value (Lon-
don, 1897), The Physiology of Love: A Study in Stirpiculture (London, 1898), The Anarchy of Love: or,
The Science of the Sexes (London, 1888), An Examination of the Malthusian Theory (1889), and The
Monomaniacs: A Fable in Finance (London, 1895). Seymour was also the author of The Reproduction
of Sound (London, 1918).

Solotaroff, Hillel (1865–1921) Russian-born physician and anarchist lecturer and writer. Solotaroff
was an important figure in the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement from the mid-1880s, when
he was a principal activist in Pionire der Frayhayt (Pioneers of Liberty), the first Jewish anarchist
group in the United States. EG heard Solotaroff lecture in New Haven in 1886, and sought him out
when she arrived in New York City the following year. It was Solotaroff who introduced her to
Alexander Berkman. Along with other members of Pioneers of Liberty, Solotaroff contributed to
the 15 March 1889 Paris Commune anniversary edition of Varhayt, the first U.S. Yiddish-language
anarchist periodical. Solotaroff was a speaker at the Proletarian Club in New York City in Decem-
ber 1890. He was also a main speaker at the 1891 New York City Yom Kippur ball. These annual
balls served as an anti-religious expression for mainly Jewish anarchists who, while retaining a de-
votion to the secular aspects of being Jewish, aggressively rejected religion as an instrument of priv-
ilege and superstition in favor of science and reason. Solotaroff, along with Moshe Katz, briefly
edited Freie Arbeiter Stimme after David Edelstadt’s death in 1892. He contributed to various other
Yiddish papers, including Tfileh Zakeh (Pure Prayer; New York, 1889 –1893), an anti-religious jour-
nal issued annually on Yom Kippur by the Pioneers of Liberty. In 1897 Solotaroff hosted a gather-
ing for Peter Kropotkin during Kropotkin’s first visit to America, and later joined the executive
committee of the Kropotkin Literary Society, founded in 1912. See also vol. 2.

Spencer, Herbert (1820 –1903) English philosopher, sociologist. Spencer advocated the importance
of the individual over society, and of science over religion. He argued for the application of com-
plete laissez-faire in economic and social matters. Spencer was a strong proponent of the theory of
evolution as applied to human society, characterizing social evolution as a process of increasing in-
dividualization. In 1882 Spencer traveled to the United States, where his works were popular and

556 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

where he was well respected, visiting such notable Americans as John Fiske and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. His only American speech, at his farewell banquet in New York, however, was openly crit-
ical of the American way of life. His works, influential among individualist anarchists, included So-
cial Statics (whose chapter on “The Right to Ignore the State” he deleted, although it was later
reprinted as a pamphlet by Benjamin Tucker in 1907, and Freedom Press in 1913) and Synthetic
Philosophy: First Principles (1862). EG would write about the influence of Spencer’s notion of liberty
in What I Believe (1908). See also vol. 2.

Spies, August Vincent Theodore (1855–1887) German-born American anarchist, editor, Haymarket
defendant. Spies came to New York City from Germany in late 1872 where he learned the uphol-
stery trade. The following year he moved to Chicago, opening his own shop in 1876. Spies’s inter-
est in socialism dated from his attendance at a Working-Men’s Party meeting in 1875, but his radi-
cal activity increased dramatically after the nationwide railroad strike of 1877. By 1880 Spies, a
skilled orator, had been expelled from the Socialist Labor Party for his anarchist ideas. That same
year he began working as manager of the anarchist Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, and in 1884 became
the newspaper’s editor. Along with Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, and Oscar
Neebe, Spies was a member of the IWPA’s American Group of Chicago, founded in 1883 by Par-
sons. Arrested following the Haymarket affair, Spies was found guilty of murder and died on the
scaffold on 11 November 1887. His last words, “The day will come when our silence will be more
powerful than the voices you are throttling today,” were inscribed on the monument dedicated to
the Haymarket anarchists in Waldheim Cemetery in 1893.

Stein, Modest (born Modest Aronstam, nickname Fedya) (1871–1958) AB’s cousin and schoolmate
in Russia. Stein changed his name sometime after 1900. An artist who later became a successful
illustrator, Stein immigrated to the United States in 1888 and joined AB in the anarchist movement
in New York. Stein lived and worked with AB and EG from 1889 to July 1892 and was briefly EG’s
lover in a loose ménage à trois. As EG recalled in Living My Life, “Could I love two persons at the
same time? I loved Sasha. At that very moment my resentment at his harshness gave way to yearn-
ing for my strong, arduous lover. Yet I felt Sasha had left something untouched in me, something
Fedya could perhaps waken to life. Yes, it must be possible to love more than one! All I had felt for
the boy artist must have been love without my being aware of it till now I decided” (LML, p. 45). To-
gether the three were co-conspirators in AB’s attempt on the life of Henry C. Frick (though to shield
his reputation, Stein’s role was intentionally omitted from the accounts in Prison Memoirs and Liv-
ing My Life). When AB failed to kill Frick, Stein traveled to Pittsburgh intending to dynamite Frick’s
house, but when news of his presence was leaked to the local authorities he abandoned the plan.
He later met EG in Rochester where she gave him money to return to New York. From there he trav-
eled to Detroit, staying first with Robert Reitzel, and settled into a job at an engraving firm. Despite
Stein’s eventual interest in communism and his rejection of anarchism, he remained a close friend
and financial supporter of EG and AB throughout their years in exile.

Stirner, Max (born Johann Caspar Schmidt) (1806 –1856) German individualist. Stirner had a pow-
erful influence on individualist anarchism both in the United States and internationally through
his Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum, translated as The Ego and His Own (trans. Steven T. Byington;
New York: Benjamin Tucker, 1907). Stirner’s contention that enlightened self-interest was the only

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 557

 motivating force in human conduct (the philosophy known as “egoism”) was adopted by Benjamin
Tucker around 1891. The book itself was reviewed equivocally in the May 1907 Mother Earth by Max
Baginski. Both EG and AB, at various times, called themselves egoists, and Stirner’s influence on
EG would grow during her next decade.

Swinton, John (1829 –1901) Scottish-born journalist and labor activist. Swinton came to the United
States in 1850 after a brief visit in Canada. He worked as a printer, became an abolitionist (joining
John Brown’s raid at Osawatomie, Kansas in 1857), and fought in the Civil War. Swinton developed
a national reputation for his work as an editor and writer for the New York Times (from 1860 to
1870) and the New York Sun (from 1870 to 1883 and 1887 to 1897), as well as for founding his own
highly regarded pro–labor union publication, John Swinton’s Paper (1883–1887), a reliable source
reporting on various strikes. Also devoted to free speech, the paper published an article by the Na-
tional Defense Association’s treasurer E. W. Chamberlain. Devoted to labor activism after the Tomp-
kins Square riot of 1874, Swinton ran unsuccessfully that year for mayor of New York on the SLP
ticket and for state senator under the Progressive Labor Party in 1887. He was also active in at-
tempts to save the Haymarket anarchists. Swinton led efforts against the Chinese exclusion move-
ment and tirelessly fought for Russian freedom. Swinton (who went blind in 1889) and his wife,
Orsena (a daughter of the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler), visited EG at Blackwell’s Island in
1894. EG was fond of Swinton, whom she first met at Justus Schwab’s saloon (Swinton, along with
Johann Most, delivered the eulogies at Schwab’s funeral). She credited Swinton with giving her a
new outlook on her adopted country shortly after her release from prison in 1894, as well as her de-
cision to devote herself to propagandizing in English to a wider, native-born audience. Swinton
presided over Kropotkin’s 1897 New York meeting at Chickering Hall. Swinton, who corresponded
with Karl Marx, also wrote for European papers and published numerous pamphlets and longer
works, including A Model Factory in a Model City: A Social Study (New York: Press of Brown, Green
and Adams, 1887) and Striking for Life (Philadelphia: Keller, 1894).

Timmermann, Claus (1866 –1941) German-born anarchist and editor. Timmermann immigrated to
the United States around 1883. In St. Louis he edited and published Der Anarchist from 1889 to
1891. In the summer of 1891 Timmermann ceased publishing the paper and moved to New York.
The following year, according to EG, she and AB confided in Timmermann about their Homestead
plan, and he helped them write the manifesto to the striking steelworkers, “Labor Awakens.” Tim-
mermann was tried on 1 September 1893, and sentenced to six months on the charge of inciting to
riot for his speech at the 21 August rally in Union Square, the political gathering that, for the same
charges, prompted EG’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment. In New York, Timmermann edited the an-
archist papers Die Brandfackel (from 1893 to 1894) and Sturmvogel (from 1897 to 1899).

Tochatti, James (born Moncure Douglas) (1852 –1928) Scottish-born anarchist activist and editor.
A tailor by trade, Tochatti was a close friend of William Morris and active in the Hammersmith
branch of the Socialist League. He founded the anarchist monthly Liberty in January 1894, a forum
for libertarians of all hues, which clarified Tochatti’s opposition to the anarchist strategy of bomb-
ings so prevalent in Europe. Financial difficulties and illness forced him to suspend publication in
December 1896. Tochatti was never again as active in the anarchist movement, although his
Hammersmith bookshop was used for political meetings. Later in 1912 Tochatti joined the cam-
paign against Errico Malatesta’s deportation from England.

558 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

Tolstoy, Leo (Count Lev Nikolayevich) (1828 –1910) Russian novelist, philosopher, pacifist, and
mystic. Tolstoy was best known for his literary works, including War and Peace (1869), Anna Kare-
nina (1877), and The Death of Ivan Illyich (1884); his later philosophical essays, including Confession
(1884), What Then Must We Do? (1886), The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), and The Slavery
of Our Times (1900); and for his attempt to combine both in his more polemic fiction, including
Master and Man (1895). His Kreutzer Sonata (1891?), banned by the tsar, was initially distributed in
Russia by manuscript and lithograph form. Benjamin Tucker translated and distributed Kreutzer
Sonata in the United States, only to have it banned from the mails under the Comstock Act; Tucker
also published the first volumes of Tolstoy’s Church and State (1891), a collection of essays on social
problems. A portion of the profits from his last novel, Resurrection (1899 –1900), was donated to
Jane Addams’s Hull House. Though Tolstoy himself resisted the title “anarchist,” anarchists ad-
mired his compassion for the poor and his anti-feudal sentiments, recognizing that he was a
pacifist and anti-militarist who condemned all acts of revolutionary violence. Anarchists also cele-
brated Tolstoy’s rejection of institutionalized religion despite his advocacy of Christian love as the
primary vehicle for improving society. EG respected Tolstoy as a great Russian literary talent, and
appreciated the sentiments that propelled his work. Although the American anarchist individualist
press wrote about Tolstoy and promoted and published his works, American anarchist communist
papers of this period barely mentioned him. Tolstoy’s ideas were also popularized in the United
States by Ernest Crosby.

Tucker, Benjamin R. (1854–1939) American individualist anarchist. Tucker was the founder, editor,
and publisher of Liberty (Boston, 1881–1892; New York, 1892 –1908); he translated and published
European literature in addition to works on anarchist individualism. In 1872 Ezra Heywood intro-
duced Tucker to the New England Labor Reform League, whose membership included Josiah War-
ren, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and William B. Greene (who became Tucker’s
mentor). In 1873, Tucker, Greene, and anarchist Ezra Heywood unsuccessfully petitioned the Mas-
sachusetts legislature for a mutual banking law. Tucker and the radical feminist Victoria Woodhull
became lovers, traveling together, along with her sister Tennessee Claflin, in 1873 to France, where
Tucker steeped himself in the writings of Bakunin and Proudhon. After Greene’s death in 1878,
Tucker emerged as the leading exponent of individualist anarchism. In 1876 Tucker translated
Proudhon’s “What Is Property?” and, the following year, part one of Proudhon’s “The System of
Economical Contradictions” in his journal The Radical Review (1870 –1878). Tucker’s translation of
Proudhon’s essay “The Malthusians” appeared in the freethought journal The Boston Index and his
translation of Proudhon’s debate with the French economist Frederic Bastiat was published in the
New York Irish World in 1879. During this time Tucker also periodically worked as a reporter for the
Boston Daily Globe. In August 1881 Tucker launched Liberty, the leading publication identified with
anarchist individualism, and still the longest-running English-language anarchist paper in the
United States. Tucker was a prolific translator and publisher of books and pamphlets on anarchism
and related subjects; his magazine printed works by George Bernard Shaw, Émile Zola, Octave
Mirabeau, Felix Pyat, Claude Tillier, and Sophie Kropotkin, among others. He translated and pub-
lished the writings of Michael Bakunin, Victor Hugo, N. G. Chernyshevsky, Max Stirner, Herbert
Spencer, and Leo Tolstoy in both book and pamphlet form. Tucker also published The Transatlantic,
a biweekly literary magazine (1889 –1890). Within the pages of Liberty Tucker was a devoted advo-
cate of anarchist individualism and often argued heatedly with anarchist communists, maintaining

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 559

 that all forms of communism were authoritarian and antithetical to the principles of anarchism. By
1891 he had converted to the idea of egoism as outlined in Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own. Following
AB’s attentat on Henry C. Frick, Tucker wrote an editorial on the inefficacy of violence, asserting
that while he admired AB and considered Frick a thief, an anarchist revolution would never be re-
alized through violence; Tucker summed up his argument as “No Pity for Frick, No Praise for Berk-
man.” Tucker left a voluminous translation and publishing legacy, and only one book of his own, a
collection of writings from Liberty entitled Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One (New
York, 1893). See also vol. 2.

Turner, John (1864–1934) British anarchist, lecturer, journalist, and founder of the Shop Assis-
tants’ Union. Turner became an anarchist in response to the execution of the Haymarket anar-
chists; he joined William Morris’s Socialist League. During the 1890s Turner was associated with
the Freedom Group and from 1894 to 1906 was the official publisher of Freedom. In March 1896 at
Harry Kelly’s suggestion, he embarked on a seven-month lecture tour of the United States, with EG
and other New York anarchists assisting with local arrangements and introductions. EG had previ-
ously met Turner during her 1895 trip to London. Through Turner’s lecture tour EG was exposed
to a wider native-born and English-speaking audience. In 1898, back in England, Turner was the
national organizer for the National Amalgamated Union and in 1900 for the International Fed-
eration of Commercial Employees. His sister Lizzie, also an anarchist, was the companion of
Thomas H. Bell, a Scottish-born associate of EG. See also vol. 2.

Vaillant, Auguste (1861–1894) French anarchist. Vaillant threw a bomb from the public gallery into
France’s Chamber of Deputies on 9 December 1893, injuring about eighty people. He was executed
on 6 February 1894. At his trial Vaillant declared “the deputies are responsible for all society’s afflic-
tions.” After his death Vaillant’s daughter Sidonie—“the crown princess of anarchy”—was en-
trusted to Sébastien Faure. Vaillant’s action led to the passage of the anti-anarchist lois scélérates and
triggered Sante Caserio’s assassination of Sadi Carnot. A pamphlet of Vaillant’s speech to the court
was widely circulated; the speech was reprinted by Benjamin Tucker in Liberty (24 February 1894),
and Zola featured Vaillant in his novel Paris (1898) as the anarchist character Salvat.

Vaughan, Ernest (1841–1929) French socialist. Vaughan was a member of the First International
and an associate of Élisée Reclus and Louise Michel. An enthusiastic admirer of Proudhon, he
joined the International in 1867. After attending a meeting in support of the Paris Commune in
1871, Vaughan spent several weeks in prison, then took refuge in Brussels. There Vaughan founded
a section of the International and collaborated on various newspapers including Le Moniteur in-
dustriel, La Gazette de Hollande (Paris, 1867), and Le Mot pour rire. Vaughan returned to France in
1880 and wrote articles for a newspaper in Lyon, L’Émancipation (1880). The following year
Vaughan became manager of Henri Rochefort’s paper L’lntransigeant, and in 1897 he founded L’Au-
rore (Paris). On 13 January 1898, L’Aurore printed “J’Accuse,” Émile Zola’s condemnation of the
French government’s conduct in the Dreyfus Affair. Vaughan’s literary works include two volumes
of humorous tales under the pseudonym “Frère Jean” (1866 and 1875), a collection of portraits of
the politicians of the day entitled Le Pilori de L’Intransigeant (1885), and Souvenirs sans regrets (1902).
Vaughan also wrote the postscript, “A Sketch of the Criminal Record of the Author,” to Élisée
Reclus’s An Anarchist on Anarchy (Boston: B. Tucker, 1884).

560 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

Waldeck-Rousseau, Rene (1846 –1904) French statesman and lawyer. Waldeck-Rousseau served
twice as minister of the interior (in 1881–1882 and 1883–1885) and as premier (1899 –1902). A
member of the republican left, he supported the workers’ right to strike, legalizing trade unions
with the passage of the 1884 Waldeck-Rousseau law. In 1893, he defended A. Gustave Eiffel against
charges of corruption in the Panama Canal trial; he was also instrumental in securing a pardon for
Alfred Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair of 1899. In 1899, Waldeck-Rousseau was appointed premier,
serving until 1902, when he resigned due to failing health. He was responsible for the Associations
Law of 1901, which harshly limited the right of free association between religious orders. That year
he also signed the extradition order expelling EG from France. His writings included Associations
et Congregations (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1901) and Politique Française et Etrangere (Paris: Bibliothèque
Charpentier, 1903).

Weismann, Henry (1863–1935) Bavarian-born anarchist, editor, and trade unionist. Weismann im-
migrated to the United States in his teens, settling in San Francisco. A member of the anarchist In-
ternational Working People’s Association, Weismann helped publish Burnette Haskell’s paper
Truth. Weismann was active in the anti-Chinese exclusion efforts and the labor movement, orga-
nizing bakers, brewery workers, and coastal seamen. He joined the Knights of Labor in 1884 and
helped found the Representative Council of the Federated Trades and Labor Organization. Weis-
mann was arrested and imprisoned for several months on charges of possessing explosives while
serving as president of the Anti-Coolie League. Weismann moved to New York in 1890 and the fol-
lowing year assumed the editorship of the Bakers’ Journal, the official publication of the Journey-
men Bakers’ and Confectioners’ International Union, of which he also became international sec-
retary in 1895. Also in 1891 Weismann helped organize the New York City Federation of Labor as
an alternative to the Central Labor Union. In June 1892 Weismann spoke at the anarchist com-
munist International Club on the topic of “Revolution versus the Ballot.” At the annual convention
of the American Federation of Labor in 1896, Weismann successfully proposed a resolution call-
ing for a reduction of the sentence imposed on AB for his attempt on Frick’s life. In 1897 Weis-
mann resigned from the AFL, left the labor movement, and later became a lawyer.

Westley, John (dates unknown) English anarchist, saddlebar filer. Westley was one of the Walsall
anarchists arrested in January 1892 and charged with possessing explosives. He was found not
guilty in April 1892.

Withington, Lothrop (1856 –1915) American individualist anarchist. Withington was the son of one
of the leading families of Newburyport, Massachusetts, whose interest in genealogy as a youth first
took him to England. Beginning in the early 1880s Withington spent an increasing amount of time
in London, where he was a member of the Manhood Suffrage League, a reformist and republican
organization, and a close associate of Henry Seymour, whose paper, the Anarchist, published With-
ington’s articles. A powerful speaker, Withington shared the platform with figures as prominent as
Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. Withington’s speech at the Communist Club on 7 October
1887, a London meeting protesting the impending execution of the Haymarket anarchists, was later
published as Constructive Murder (London: International Publishing, 1887). In 1889 Withington
published three issues of the paper Democratic Review. He wrote a classic work of genealogy, Vir-
ginia Gleanings in England (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1880), authored the pamphlet Free

DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS 561

 Currency (London, 1889), and edited Caleb Haskell’s Diary. May 5, 1775 –May 30, 1776 (Newbury-
port, Mass.: W. H. Huse, 1881). Withington died on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk
by German submarines in May 1915.

Yanovsky, Saul Josef (1864–1939) Polish-born Jewish anarchist. Born in Pinsk, Yanovsky immi-
grated to America in 1885, where he was an early member of Pionire der Frayhaty (Pioneers of Lib-
erty). Arriving in London in March 1890, his experience as a capmaker in London’s slums led to
his involvement in radical labor affairs. Yanovsky authored What Do the Anarchists Want? (1890), one
of the first Yiddish-language treatises on anarchism. Under his editorship, Arbeter Fraint (1891–
1894) developed a cohesive anarchist program. Yanovsky returned to the United States in January
1895, where his organizational skills put Freie Arbeiter Stimme (1895–1919) on sound financial foot-
ing. He was perceived by EG as “despotic” and by AB as “rigid and dictatorial.” Yanovsky criticized
EG’s essay “The Tragedy at Buffalo” as contradictory and called her lack of clarity a danger to anar-
chism. See also vols. 2, 3.

Zola, Émile (1840 –1902) French novelist, naturalist, and social critic. In Germinal (1885), Zola’s
character Souvarine epitomizes the nihilist and attentater. In Paris (1898), the anarchist character
Salvat is closely based on Auguste Vaillant. Zola was also a vigorous defender of Alfred Dreyfus.

562 DIRECTORY OF INDIVIDUALS

 Directory of PERIODICALS

The Adult London: vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1897), subtitled A Journal for the Advancement of Freedom in
Sexual Relationships; vol. 1, no. 2 (September 1897), subtitled A Crusade Against Sex-enslavement;
vol. 1, no. 3 (October 1897), subtitled A Journal for the Free Discussion of Tabooed Subjects; vol. 1,
no. 4– (monthly); vol. 2, no. 1– (February 1898), subtitled A Journal of Sex; vol. 3, no. 1 (January
1899)–vol. 3, no. 3 (March 1899), subtitled An Unconventional Journal. The journal of the Legiti-
mation League, organized for the purpose of ensuring the rights of children born out of wedlock.
Edited by George Bedborough, it published articles on a variety of subjects, but particularly on sex-
ual questions, including the nature of sexual attraction, “varietism,” monogamy, and polygamy. The
Legitimation League was closely connected with the Lucifer Group, beginning correspondence with
Lucifer in 1893; the League named its headquarters Harman Villa, and in 1897, Lillian Harman was
elected its president. Editorial responsibilities passed to Henry Seymour for the July 1898 issue,
following the arrest of Bedborough for distributing Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion. Contributors
included Oswald Dawson, Lillian Harman, Moses Harman, Emil F. Ruedebusch, E. C. Walker, and
Lothrop Withington. The journal printed the work of James F. Morton, Jr., and a report of a lecture
by Voltairine de Cleyre.

The Alarm Chicago: vol. 1, no. 1 (4 October 1884)–vol. 3, no. 3 (24 April 1886), weekly, then
biweekly; n.s. vol. 1, no. 1 (5 November 1887)–; New York: (16 June 1888)–no. 47 (2 February 1889),
weekly. Founded as a “socialist weekly” and the English-language organ of the International
Working People’s Association. Edited by Albert Parsons and Lucy Parsons from 1884 to 1886, and
Dyer D. Lum, with Lizzie Holmes as assistant editor, from 1887 to 1888. Suppressed following the
Haymarket incident. Contributors included William Holmes, C. L. James, Gertrude B. Kelly, and
John F. Kelly.

Der Anarchist (The Anarchist) St. Louis: vol. 1, no. 1 (1 August 1889)–[irregular?]; vol. 3, no. 1 [?],
biweekly. New York: (19 September 1891)–vol. 2, no. 24 (26 December 1891); vol. 4, no. 1 (9 Janu-
ary 1892)–vol. 4, no. 51 (31 December 1892), weekly; vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1893)–vol. 7, no. 9 (22
June 1895), biweekly. Anarchist communist newspaper, autonomist in viewpoint, which defined it-
self as the successor to George Engel and Adolf Fischer’s Der Anarchist (Chicago). First edited by
Claus Timmermann in St. Louis; then published in New York by Die Autonomen Gruppen
Amerikas and edited by the Radikaler Arbeiter-Bund (Radical Workers League), whose members
included Carl Masur, Otto Rinke, Joseph Peukert, and Sepp Oerter. Published an endorsement of

563
 AB’s attempt on Frick. EG was among its original contributors, but by the time of her imprison-
ment in 1893–1894, she was critical of the people working on the paper.

The Anarchist London: no. 1 (March 1885)–no. 40 (1 August 1888), monthly, various subtitles. An-
archist paper edited by Henry Seymour. Although from April 1886 to March 1887 it was associated
with the anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin and the Freedom Group, before and afterwards it
was an anarchist individualist publication. Predominantly a source of news, reprints, and articles
by Seymour, it also printed works by Élisée Reclus and Lothrop Withington.

Der arme Teufel (The Poor Devil) Detroit: vol. 1, no. 1 (6 December 1884)–no. 822 (22 September
1900). German radical and literary weekly, edited by Robert Reitzel; continued in 1898, after Reit-
zel’s death, by Martin Drescher. Perhaps the most successful German literary publication in the
United States, with subscriptions peaking at over 7,000. Printed translations of the works of many
literary figures, including Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain. It published supportive editorials and ar-
ticles about AB’s attentat on Frick and was the only radical or labor journal that AB was permitted
to read in prison. He recalled that “the arrival of the Teufel is a great event” (Prison Memoirs of an
Anarchist, p. 166).

Die Autonomie (Autonomy) London: vol. 1, no. 1 (6 November 1886)–no. 211 (22 April 1893),
weekly, subtitled Anarchistisch-communistisches Organ (Anarchist-Communist Organ). Anarchist
communist paper, printed and published by R. Gunderson, edited by Joseph Peukert and others.
Autonomist and uncompromising, the paper was central in the conflict between Johann Most and
Peukert. Published early German-language translations of parts of Peter Kropotkin’s Conquest of
Bread, his article “The Spirit of Revolt,” and excerpts of Élisée Reclus’s Evolution and Revolution.
Both EG and AB were strongly influenced by the ideas expressed in its articles. Of it EG wrote,
“While not comparible with the Freiheit in force and picturesqueness of language, it nevertheless
seemed to me to express anarchism in a clearer and more convincing manner” (LML, p. 74).

Die Brandfackel (The Torch of War) New York: vol. 1, no. 1 (July 1893)–vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1895),
monthly, subtitled Anarchistische Monatsschrift (Anarchist Monthly). Anarchist communist paper
edited by Claus Timmermann; published several of EG’s earliest articles. Claus Niedermann edited
the paper while Timmermann was imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island in 1893. The first issue con-
tained an eighteen-page spread supporting AB’s attentat.

Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago Labor News) Chicago: 1 June 1876 –13 October 1919. Began
as the triweekly Volks-Zeitung, published by the Socialistic Publishing Society; became the daily
Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1879. Initiated by socialists, it gradually transformed into an anarchist publica-
tion, with new editors August Spies and Michael Schwab from 1884 to 1886 and Max Baginski
from 1894 to [1907?]. A popular paper, it published local news and articles in its four pages, and its
circulation in 1886 was over 5,000. In 1910 it reverted to its original socialist editorial perspective.

The Commonweal London: vol. 1, no. 1 (February 1885)–[?] (December 1890), weekly, subtitled The
Official Journal of the Socialist League; [?]–vol. 7 (whole no. 329) (September 1892), monthly, sub-
titled A Journal of Revolutionary Socialism; n.s. vol. 1, no. 1 (1 May 1893)–vol. 2, no. 32 (6 October
1894), weekly, subtitled A Revolutionary Journal of Anarchist-Communism. Libertarian socialist, then
anarchist communist organ of the Socialist League; the paper reflected the League’s changing pol-
itics. It was edited by William Morris from 1885 until his resignation in 1889, at which point David

564 DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS

Nicoll, appointed assistant editor in 1889, presided until his arrest in April 1892. George Cores
acted as temporary editor for a month, followed by Henry B. Samuels from May 1892 to 1894, and
finally John Turner and Ernest Young from August 1894 to October 1894. Regularly reported on
EG’s activities. Serially published Morris’s News from Nowhere. David Nicoll published a number of
later periodicals using the same name, The Commonweal.

Discontent Home [Colony] and Lakebay, Wash.: vol. 1, no. 1 (11 May 1898)–vol. 4, no. 31 (30 April
1902), weekly, subtitled Mother of Progress. Anarchist communist newspaper founded by O. A. Ver-
ity, Charles H. Govan, and others and published by James F. Morton, Jr. Contributors included
Henry Addis, Kate Austin, Moses Harman, Lizzie Holmes, William Holmes, C. L. James, Francis
B. Livesey, and Ross Winn. Joseph Labadie’s “Cranky Notions” column was reprinted periodically.
On 18 December 1901, it was discovered that a number of issues of the paper had been held up
at the Tacoma post office, by order of the postal inspector in Spokane. James E. Larkin, Charles L.
Govan, and James W. Adams were charged with using the mails to distribute articles on sexuality
deemed obscene under the Comstock laws. On 11 March 1902, charges were dismissed, but on the
30th the entire Home Colony post office was shut down. Publication of Discontent continued by as-
suming a new name, The Demonstrator.

The Firebrand Portland, Oreg.: vol. 1, no. 1 (27 January 1895)–vol. 3, no. 32 (whole no. 136) (12 Sep-
tember 1897), weekly, subtitled For the Burning Away of the Cobwebs of Superstition and Ignorance.
The newspaper was an important forum for the propagation and discussion of anarchist commu-
nism among American-born, English-speaking anarchists. Contributors included Kate Austin,
Steven T. Byington, EG, William Holmes, W. C. Owen, and Ross Winn. In September 1897 editors
Abe Isaak, Henry Addis, and Abner J. Pope were prosecuted—and the paper banned from the
mails—for publishing obscene material, including Walt Whitman’s poem “A Woman Waits for
Me.” In June 1898 charges were dismissed. Isaak resumed the publication as Free Society when he
relocated to San Francisco later that year.

Forverts (also labeled in English, Forward) New York: 22 April 1897–28 January 1983, daily; 4 Feb-
ruary 1983–, weekly. Yiddish-language socialist paper, for many years the largest and most suc-
cessful Yiddish-language publication in the world, edited by Abraham Cahan from 1902 until his
death in 1951. Serially published a Yiddish translation of selections from EG’s Living My Life from
30 May to 31 October 1931.

Freedom London: October 1886 –December 1927, monthly. Principal English-language publish-
ing organ for the theoretical development of anarchist communism; founded by Peter Kropotkin
and Charlotte Wilson, among others. Editors included Wilson, James Blackwell, Joseph Pressburg,
Alfred Marsh, John Turner, and Thomas Keell. Reported news of EG’s activities and lectures.
Continued publication under various titles after 1930, including Spain and the World and War
Commentary.

Free Society San Francisco: 14 November 1897–December 1901, weekly, 4 pages; Chicago: Febru-
ary 1901–1904, 8 pages; New York: 27 March 1904–20 November 1904. Succeeded The Firebrand
(see above). Anarchist communist newspaper edited by Abe Isaak. Free Society was the principal
English-language forum for anarchist ideas in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Contributors included Kate Austin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Michael Cohn, Jay Fox, EG, Lizzie

DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS 565

 Holmes, William Holmes, C. L. James, Harry Kelly, James F. Morton, Jr., and Ross Winn. In its
28 April 1901 issue, published the first English translation of Peter Kropotkin’s article “The Black
Invasion.”

Freie Arbeiter Stimme (German transliteration, which appeared on masthead, for Fraye Arbeter
Shtime, Free Voice of Labor) New York: July 1890 –May 1892, May 1893–1894 and 1899 –1977,
weekly. Yiddish-language anarchist paper, edited by Roman Lewis, J. A. Maryson, David Edelstadt,
Hillel Solotaroff, and Moishe Katz, consecutively; then by Saul Yanovsky, who edited the paper af-
ter its revival in 1899 until 1919. Its masthead included Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons’s
words “Let the voice of the people be heard.” During the 1890s it regularly covered EG’s activities
and advertised her talks and lectures, although it published an editorial criticizing EG’s article “The
Tragedy at Buffalo.” Among the paper’s contributors were Peter Kropotkin, Johann Most, Max Nett-
lau, Rudolf Rocker, and poet Morris Winchevsky. It was the longest-running Yiddish-language an-
archist paper in the world.

Freiheit (Freedom) Principally London and Paris; also Dielsdorf, Switzerland; Buffalo, N.Y.; and New
York City: 4 January 1879 –13 August 1910, weekly. German-language social democratic, then an-
archist paper, edited primarily by Johann Most. The most powerful and popular German-language
anarchist paper in its time. Justus Schwab was co-editor during the paper’s first year in the United
States. From September 1897 to July 1898, it was published as the weekly supplement to the Buf-
faloer Arbeiter-Zeitung, of which Most was then editor. Max Baginski and Henry Bauer edited Frei-
heit after Most’s death. Published works of Hippolyte Havel, Robert Reitzel, Rudolf Rocker, and
many others. From 1892 onward, the paper took a stand in bitter opposition to EG, although it pub-
lished appeals from the Berkman Defense Association. Between August and December 1889, EG
worked at the Freiheit office, and, for some time, AB also worked as a compositor on the paper.

L’Humanité nouvelle (New Humanity) Paris and Brussels: May 1897–1903, subtitled Revue inter-
nationale (International Review). Anarchist and cultural journal founded by Augustin Hamon, with
editorial assistance from Victor Émile Michelet and Louis Dumon-Wilder. A journal of social
thought and literature, it published works by Peter Kropotkin, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard
Shaw, Domela Nieuwenhuis, Victor Dave, Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev, Leo Tolstoy, and
Maksim Gorky. EG apparently submitted articles, but none were published. The journal would be
the role model for Mother Earth.

Internationale Bibliothek (International Library) New York: no. 1 (April 1887)–no. 13 (June 1888);
no. 15 (May 1890)–no. 18 (August 1891). Published by John Müller, the journal was primarily de-
voted to the writings of Johann Most, including “Die Gottespest” (The god pestilence, June 1887)
and “Die Gesellschaft” (The free society; August 1887). The magazine also published Peter Kropot-
kin’s “Appeal to the Young” (October 1887) and Max Nettlau’s “Historical Development of Anar-
chism” (June 1890). Influential in the development of EG’s political and theoretical ideas.

Le Libertaire (The Libertarian) Paris: 1895–1 August 1914, weekly. Anarchist communist newspa-
per, founded by Sébastien Faure and Louise Michel, edited by Faure. An influential French anar-
chist paper, published in 1899 as the daily Le Journal du Peuple, and reappeared in 1919 under its
original title.

Liberty London: vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1894)–, monthly, 8 pages; vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1896)–,
12 pages; vol. 3, no. 11 (November 1896)–vol. 3, no. 12 (December 1896), 8 pages. Anarchist com-

566 DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS

munist journal, founded and edited by James Tochatti. Published articles expounding a wide vari-
ety of anarchist ideas, including articles by Augustin Hamon, J. C. Kenworthy, Peter Kropotkin,
David Nicoll, Louise Michel, W. C. Owen, and Henry Seymour; also carried reports on EG’s activi-
ties during her 1895 European tour.

Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order Boston: vol. 1, no. 1 (6 August 1881)–, biweekly,
4 pages; vol. 2, no. 16 (17 May 1884)–; vol. 7, no. 3 (7 June 1890)–, associate editor Victor Yarros;
vol. 8, no. 7 (25 July 1891)–vol. 8, no. 36 (13 February 1892), weekly; New York: vol. 8, no. 37
(30 April 1892)–, without Yarros; vol. 9, no. 45 (August 1893)–, monthly; vol. 9, no. 47 (24 Febru-
ary 1894)–, biweekly; vol. 10, no. 10 (22 September 1894)–vol. 17, no. 1 (April 1908), varied fre-
quency. Anarchist individualist paper with an international reach, founded and edited by Benja-
min R. Tucker. It was instrumental in introducing the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, George Bernard Shaw, Max Stirner, and Leo Tolstoy to America. Contributors included
E. H. Fulton, Joshua K. Ingalls, Joseph Labadie, Dyer D. Lum, John Beverly Robinson, and Victor
Yarros (also for a time its associate editor). Although highly critical of EG and anarchist commu-
nists in general, the paper usually extended its support to them when arrested, but, following AB’s
attempt on Henry Clay Frick, it offered “neither sympathy for Frick nor support for AB.”

Lucifer, the Lightbearer Valley Falls, Kans.: 1883–1896; Chicago: 8 May 1896 – 6 June 1907; vari-
ous subtitles, including A Journal of Investigating and Reform and Devoted to the Emancipation of
Women from Sex Slavery. Mostly a weekly newspaper, founded and edited by Moses Harman; co-
editors included Lillian Harman and Edwin C. Walker. Published articles on anarchism, atheism,
and free speech, but became especially well known for open discussions of sexuality, marriage, and
feminism. EG spoke at various Lucifer circles, and the paper regularly featured her talks and inter-
views. Supported efforts to release AB. Contributors included Kate Austin, Voltairine de Cleyre,
Edward Bliss Foote, Jr., Edward Bond Foote, C. L. James, Abe Isaak, James F. Morton, Jr., and Emil
Ruedebusch. Was dated “E.M.” (for Era of Man) from the death of Giordano Bruno in 1600, rather
than the birth of Christ.

Le Père Peinard (Cool Daddy) Paris: 24 February 1889 –16 March 1902. Anarchist communist and
syndicalist newspaper, founded and edited by Émile Pouget. Written in a working-class vernacular
style, it was one of the most popular French labor papers of its time. Replaced briefly in 1895–1896
by La Sociale (see below). Commented favorably on EG’s activities.

Prison Blossoms (also Zuchthausblüthen) Western Penitentiary, Allegheny City, Penn.: no. 1
[1892?]–no. 48 [1904?]. German- and English-language publication, handwritten mostly on 3-by-5-
inch cards and circulated by Henry Bauer, AB, Carl Nold, and unknown other prisoners. It included
poetry, essays, and stories of prison life. Essays by AB included “A Few Words as to My Deed” and
a series titled “Prisons and Crime,” which included an essay on homosexuality. A number of issues
rescued and preserved were consulted by AB while he was working on his Prison Memoirs of an
Anarchist.

The Rebel Boston: vol. 1, no. 1 (September 1895)–vol. 1, no. 4 (January 1896), monthly, first issue
8 pages, then 12 pages, subtitled A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Exposition of Anarchism Commu-
nism; vol. 1, no. 5 (February 1896)–vol. 1, no. 6 (March/April 1896), under new subtitle, An Anar-
chist Communist Journal Devoted to the Solution of the Labor Question. Anarchist communist journal,
founded and edited jointly by Charles Mowbray, Harry Kelly, James Robb, and N. H. Berman. Con-

DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS 567

 tributors included Voltairine de Cleyre, John Edelmann, Pietro Gori, William Holmes, William C.
Owen, Lucy Parsons, and Ross Winn; also reprinted various articles by Peter Kropotkin.

Le Révolté (The Rebel) Geneva: February 1879 –14 March 1885, weekly; Paris: April 1885–
September 1887. Anarchist communist paper, founded by Peter Kropotkin, Varlaam N. Cherkesov,
and others. It became the leading anarchist communist paper of its time. Edited from 1879 to 1883
by Kropotkin, and from then on by Jean Grave. In September 1887 the name was changed to La Ré-
volte (see below).

La Révolte (Rebellion) Paris: September 1887–March 1894, weekly. Succeeded Le Révolté (see
above). Suppressed in March 1894 after editor Jean Grave’s arrest and imprisonment under French
anti-anarchist laws. After his release, Grave continued editing, founding Les Temps Nouveaux in
May 1895 (see below).

La Sociale (Social Affairs) Paris: 12 May 1895–18 October 1896. See Le Père Peinard above.

Solidarity New York: no. 1 (18 June 1892)–no. 23 (26 August 1893), mostly biweekly; n.s. vol. 1,
no. 1 (1 January 1895)–vol. 1, no. 8 (15 April 1895); vol. 1, no. 9 (15 March 1898)–vol. 1, no. 16 (15 July
1898), subtitled A Fortnightly Review of the Relations between Different Sections of the Working Com-
munity of the United States and an Exponent of Anarchist-Socialism. The first English-language anar-
chist communist paper in New York, it was founded by Italian anarchist Saverio Merlino and
John H. Edelmann. Of AB’s attempt on Henry Clay Frick’s life it said, “A cause which may enlist
such men is sure to win.” When Merlino left for London at the beginning of 1893, Edelmann as-
sumed primary editorial responsibilities and sustained the journal through August when it sus-
pended publication. He revived it in January 1895, an effort thwarted by lack of funds that forced
it to close later in the year. When Peter Kropotkin donated the proceeds from his 1897 U.S. lec-
ture tour, Edelmann revived the paper once more in 1898, with the additional assistance of Wil-
liam C. Owen and Charles B. Cooper. Solidarity Groups were formed in Brooklyn, Philadelphia,
and Boston. Contributing authors included Lizzie M. Holmes, William Holmes, Marie Louise
David, Dyer D. Lum, C. W. Mowbray, John Turner, and Lothrop Withington; also published were
letters from EG and Harry Kelly. EG often helped the paper financially.

Die Sturmglocke (The Alarm Bell) Chicago: no. 1 (28 March)–no. 4 (18 April 1896), weekly. Anar-
chist paper edited by Max Baginski and supported by Freiheit.

Sturmvogel (Storm Bird) New York: 1 November 1897–[16 May 1899?], semi-monthly. German-
language anarchist communist paper, edited by Claus Timmermann; its motto was “Lewwer duad
ues Slaav” (Better dead than a slave). Printed news and agitational reports, including EG’s accounts
of her tours; also printed works by Peter Kropotkin and Carl Nold.

Les Temps Nouveaux (New Times) Paris: May 1895–August 1914, weekly. Anarchist communist
paper, founded and edited by Jean Grave following his release from prison. With a circulation of
around five thousand after 1902, it was a leading French anarchist newspaper. Frequently included
Supplément Littéraire, which printed literature, social commentary, and lithographs. Published the
report of the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People in Paris in 1900. Con-
tributors included Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Fernand Pelloutier, Paul Delesalle, André Girard,
and V. N. Cherkesov.

568 DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS

The Torch London: 1891–1893, subtitled A Journal of International Socialism; n. s. no. 1 (June[?]
1894)–, monthly, subtitled A Revolutionary Journal of Anarchist-Communism; vol. 2, no 5 (18 Octo-
ber 1895)–vol. 2, no. 12 (1 June 1896), monthly, titled The Torch of Anarchy: A Monthly Revolution-
ary Journal. Founded by the children of Pre-Raphaelite author William Rossetti, Olivia (later Olivia
Agresti), Arthur, and Helen (later Helen Angeli). The first series was handwritten, duplicated us-
ing a hectograph, and sold in Hyde Park on weekends by the Rossetti family. Covered EG’s tour of
Britain in 1895. Contributors included EG, Frank Kitz, Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, Octave
Mirbeau, and Saul Yanovsky. With its last issue in June 1896, the Rossettis left the paper. Max Nett-
lau and Bernhard Kampffmeyer then purchased the printing plant and assumed the lease on the
Torch office for the Freedom Group.

Der Verbote (The Harbinger) Chicago: 14 February 1873–30 April 1924, weekly. From around 1879
until 1919, Der Verbote was the weekly edition of the daily Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung. Intended for
a national audience, it contained national and international political and labor news. Editors in-
cluded August Spies and Michael Schwab from 1882[?] to 1886, and Max Baginski from 1894 [to
1907?]. Was suppressed, along with Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, following the Haymarket affair but
resumed publication when German-born revolutionary and philosopher Joseph Dietzgen became
the new editor.

Vorwärts See Forverts above.

DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS 569

 D i r e c t o r y o f O R G A N I Z AT I O N S

Berkman Defense Association Several organizations raised funds to assist efforts to free Alexander
Berkman from prison. Immediately after AB’s arrest in 1892, Harry Gordon and Max Metzkow or-
ganized the Committee for Berkman in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Over time, a
core group of Berkman supporters formed different organizations, each with a variant on the orig-
inal name. In 1895 EG appealed to the readers of Firebrand to send funds directly to Charles Schnei-
der in Allegheny City to secure the commutation of AB’s sentence. In 1896 Gordon reported that
EG’s lectures in Pittsburgh had raised approximately $30 for the Berkman Rescue Fund. In 1897,
Harry Gordon assumed the role as treasurer of a group known simply as The Berkman Fund. The
most prominent of the various defense groups appears to have been the Berkman Defense Associ-
ation, whose organizers included Bauer, Gordon, Nold, EG, Edward Brady, Peter Heiber, and Jus-
tus H. Schwab, and whose mission, in 1896, included petitioning the state for a reduction of AB’s
sentence.
In 1897, the association sent a delegation (Harry Kelly and Edward Brady) to the Central Labor
Union, which endorsed its resolution calling for an application to the Pennsylvania Board of Par-
dons for AB. In 1898 the association employed attorney John Marron to apply for a pardon on AB’s
behalf. The Pennsylvania Board of Pardons announced that it would base its decision largely on the
wishes of Andrew Carnegie, owner of the Homestead steel plant. The defense association pro-
ceeded to recruit Benjamin Tucker to lobby Andrew Carnegie. Tucker drafted a letter to Carnegie
calling Berkman and his supporters “penitent sinners” and AB’s attempt a “foolish act of bar-
barism.” The association vehemently disagreed with Tucker’s views and withdrew its request. They
then approached Ernest Crosby but ultimately decided not to appeal to Carnegie at all. Ironically in
any case, the calendar of the state pardon board would not have accepted AB’s appeal at the time in-
tended. Saul Yanovsky, Michael Cohn, and Hillel Solotaroff, through a committee formed in 1899
at the convention of Free Society and Freie Arbeiter Stimme readers and supporters, began in 1900
to collect money for Freie Arbeiter Stimme’s Berkman fund. Within a short time the fund totaled over
one thousand dollars. While the purported function of this fund was to pay for further appeals in
Berkman’s defense, the money was actually used to rent a house near the Western Penitentiary and
dig the tunnel for AB’s planned escape from prison. The attempt failed. Also in 1900 the United
Mine Workers of America passed a resolution of solidarity with Berkman and petitioned for his re-
lease. In 1901 EG organized the Berkman Relief Association, again employing John Marron, who
in November 1901 appealed for AB’s pardon to the Pennsylvania State Superior Court without suc-
cess and without AB’s permission. After 1901 legal and extralegal attempts to free AB were for the

570
most part abandoned. A new law automatically commuted AB’s sentence to just five more years, af-
ter which he chose to stop petitioning a system that had given him no mercy in the past.

Central Labor Union (CLU) The Central Labor Union of New York, founded at a conference held on
11 February 1882 and attended by delegates from fourteen unions, was a local council composed of
various trade unions in New York City. Initially influenced by a predominance of Socialist Labor
Party (SLP) members, the CLU was socialist in spirit, and its actions were based on the group’s as-
sumption that both union and electoral political activity were necessary for working-class advance-
ment. CLU membership grew rapidly and by 1886 it represented about 150,000 members from
207 different unions. The CLU sponsored lectures, mass meetings, parades and festivals, and is
also credited with the founding of Labor Day on the first Monday in September. After supporting
Henry George’s unsuccessful “Single Tax” New York City mayoral campaign in 1886, the CLU shed
the electoral aspect of its SLP roots, abandoned all political affiliations, claiming to have switched
its focus exclusively to trade unionism.
By late 1888 the CLU had become affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), but
charges of graft and corruption within the CLU prompted the remaining socialists to break away
and form a separate organization—the Central Labor Federation (CLF). The Central Labor Feder-
ation then applied for affiliation with the AFL, which Samuel Gompers and the executive council
of the AFL granted. In December 1889 the Central Labor Federation reunited with the Central La-
bor Union, but split again in June 1890, after a quarrel erupted between the two, only to merge back
together after Gompers helped facilitate a reconciliation. However, by the time the Central Labor
Federation applied for its charter from the AFL, among the organizations the CLF represented was
the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Gompers rejected the application on the grounds that the AFL was
a trade union confederation and could not represent a political party. This decision led to a bitter
dispute between the SLP and the AFL with Daniel De Leon calling for socialists to leave the AFL.
In addition to the New York City CLU, there were other analogous local organizations, inde-
pendent of each other but with the same central labor union name, established in various cities
such as Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Cleveland. Their organizing constitutions were often quite sim-
ilar and their overarching goal was to unite the various trade and labor unions in their vicinity. In
Chicago the Central Labor Union was closely linked with the anarchist-dominated International
Working People’s Association (IWPA), and in Boston there was a strong anarchist presence in the
CLU, especially influenced by Charles Mowbray and Harry Kelly, who was the Boston CLU’s fi-
nancial secretary. The Detroit CLU (to which EG lectured in German in November 1897) published
the paper Der Herold, edited first by the socialist Jacob Fuchs and then by Martin Drescher (a
contributor to Der arme Teufel and Freiheit, and after Reitzel’s death, the editor of Der arme Teufel).
John H. Cook was for many years secretary of the Providence CLU. The Central Labor Unions pro-
vided a forum where anarchists were able to obtain trade union support for anarchists and their
causes.

International Working People’s Association (IWPA) The International Working People’s Association,
also known as the Black International, was the expansive organizational name adopted in 1883 at
the Pittsburgh congress for the purpose of creating a unified radical socialist and anarchist move-
ment. The leading delegates of the congress, notably Johann Most, Albert Parsons, and August
Spies, drafted the Pittsburgh Manifesto detailing the organization’s objectives, which included the
destruction of existing class rule and equal rights for all regardless of class, race, and sex. The Black

DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS 571

 International was a loose-knit federation of autonomous groups whose primary function was prop-
aganda. It published numerous pamphlets and papers, of which The Alarm and the German-
language Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung were the most important. The IWPA grew in size steadily,
reaching a zenith of about 5,000 members; most were immigrants, with Germans comprising
the largest segment. Chicago, with a large immigrant population and poor living conditions for
the working class, was the center and stronghold of the movement. The Chicago IWPA claimed the
largest number of members and most active press and additionally, faced the country’s most vio-
lent and repressive police force. In the United States, the IWPA competed with the International
Working Men’s Association (IWMA; also referred to as the Red International), established by Bur-
nette G. Haskell and others in San Francisco on 15 July 1881. Although on several occasions pro-
posals were made to unite the two organizations, no such affiliation ever took place. At the end of
the 1880s Haskell’s IWMA went out of existence, at which time the name IWPA was gradually re-
placed by IWMA; as an international organization, however, it had little practical influence or mem-
bership. Following the Haymarket affair in 1886, there was strong popular backlash against labor
militancy and the IWPA declined in strength and ultimately faded away. IWPA meetings had often
been the venue for EG’s earliest talks. At an anarchist congress in Amsterdam in 1907, an attempt
was made to revive the structure of the organization, but its most successful reincarnation would
not take place until December 1921 with the re-constituting of the IWMA in Berlin, a conference
attended by AB.

Liberal Clubs The Liberal movement adhered to freethought principles and focused especially on
protesting the role of organized religion in state affairs. The national movement came together at
the first Centennial Congress of Liberals, which met in Philadelphia on 4 July 1876, where mem-
bers created a constitution promoting the adoption of a religious freedom amendment to the fed-
eral constitution. Its platform also included advocacy of public control of railroads, cessation of the
sale or granting of public land, and legislation championing the right of workers to organize. At-
tempts to form a national party, however, were short lived, with internal disagreement about the
proposed platform and overall doubts about the venture. The constitution called for the formation
of “local auxiliary chapters of the National Liberal League,” which led to the creation of many
smaller organizations, including the Liberal Alliance, the Women’s National Liberal Union, and
many local Liberal leagues, joined together by a common adherence to the principles outlined in
the group’s national constitution and the concept and identification with the term “liberal.” In 1884,
the National Liberal League split into two factions, divided on the question of further involvement
in social and political initiatives or limiting itself strictly to fighting for the secularization of the
state. Following this split, one faction of the Liberal League was renamed the American Secular
Union, with its own constitution and organizational structure, leaving those who favored more var-
ied social reform activities to work in the regional and local manifestations of Liberal clubs.
The New York Liberal Club, also known as the Manhattan Liberal Club, had been founded in
1869 as an open forum for political discussion on all issues. The club sold radical publications in-
cluding Lucifer and later, Mother Earth. Founding members include the Rev. Stickney Grant, so-
cialist Charles Edward Russell, and muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens. The New York group
published The Manhattan Liberal Club: Its Methods, Objects and Philosophy by E. B. Foote, Jr. and
Thaddeus Wakeman, an organizational history first commissioned by The Truth Seeker, a leading
freethought paper and supporter of the Manhattan Liberal Club, for its twenty-fifth anniversary cel-
ebration in 1894. In her autobiography, EG recalls that she had attended weekly meetings of the

572 DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS

Manhattan Liberal Club from 1894 and that, despite her having become the subject of controversy
within the club following the September 1901 McKinley assassination, she was invited to speak
there on 8 October 1901.
Liberal clubs often provided EG and other radicals with a place to lecture. In Philadelphia, the
Ladies’ Liberal League and the Friendship Liberal League included anarchist members. The Friend-
ship Liberal League was a freethought organization that sponsored lectures primarily on secular-
ism, though Voltairine de Cleyre, James B. Elliott, and other members successfully influenced the
group to broaden the range of its topics and include a discussion of anarchism. Charles Mowbray
lectured before the club in 1894, as did John Turner in 1896. EG addressed the Friendship Liberal
League in 1898 and again in 1901. The Ladies’ Liberal League was an 1892 offshoot of the Friend-
ship Liberal League of Philadelphia. Under the guidance of Voltairine de Cleyre and Natasha
Notkin, it quickly outgrew its origins as a women’s auxiliary and sponsored lectures on a wide va-
riety of subjects, becoming an important forum for radical and feminist activity in Philadelphia.
Prior to EG’s visit, lecturers included Charles Mowbray, arrested after addressing the League in
1894, and Harry Kelly, who spoke before the group in 1896.
In New York there were a number of active Liberal organizations, including the Harlem Liberal
Alliance, where both EG and Voltairine de Cleyre lectured.

National Defense Association Formed on 12 June 1878 by the physician and birth-control advocate
E. B. Foote, Jr. and eight others, including Thaddeus Wakeman, a member of the Manhattan Lib-
eral Club; Edward Chamberlain, a lawyer and free-speech advocate; Benjamin Tucker; and A. L.
Rawson, a theological writer and artist, who was elected the association’s first president. The Na-
tional Defense Association proposed to investigate all questionable cases prosecuted under the
Comstock laws, and defend those unjustly charged. The association often worked to defend its own
members, many of whom were frequently targeted by Anthony Comstock for their publishing or
distributing material considered obscene, providing both defense counsel and funds for bail. In
1878, the association worked vigorously to appeal the two-year imprisonment of Ezra Heywood,
free-love anarchist and publisher of The Word, who was prosecuted under the Comstock laws for
publishing Cupid’s Yokes, a pamphlet that argued for the abolition of marriage. The association or-
ganized meetings and petitions to protest Heywood’s imprisonment, which led to the decision by
President Rutherford B. Hayes to pardon Heywood in December 1878. The association defended
Heywood again in 1890 when he was sentenced to two years at hard labor for obscenity charges,
with Chamberlain serving as his lawyer. Later, the association published U.S. vs. Heywood: Why the
Defendant Should Be Released (New York: National Defense Association, 1891). The association also
defended others targeted under the Comstock laws. In July 1882 it had defended an attack on Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and in 1885 it defended Seward Mitchell, who was arrested by members
of the Young Men’s Christian Association for circulating a poem deemed obscene. In 1880, the as-
sociation published Thaddeus Wakeman’s The Unanswered Argument against the Constitutionality of
the So-called Comstock Postal Laws, and for the Inviolability and Free and Equal Use of the United States
Mail (New York: National Defense Association, 1880) and in 1881, the association published E. B.
Foote’s Fable of the Spider and the Bees, Verified by Facts and Press and Pulpit Comments, Which Should
Command The Serious Attention of Every American Citizen (New York: National Defense Association,
1881), advertised as “Words of Warning to those who aid and abet in the suppression of Free Speech
and Free Press.” In 1886, the association argued for the repeal of a New York censorship statute,
and published it later as a Brief for Argument for the Repeal of Section 3893, Title XLVI, United States

DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS 573

 Revised Statutes (New York: National Defense Association, 1886). Dr. Footes Health Monthly also car-
ried regular news and information about the National Defense Association and its work. Many of
the members of the National Defense Association would help found the Free Speech League in
1902, including Edward Chamberlain, E. B. Foote, Jr., and Benjamin Tucker.

Pionire der Frayhayt (Pioneers of Liberty) The first Jewish anarchist group in the United States,
the Pioneers of Liberty was founded on 9 October 1886 —the day the sentences of the Haymarket
anarchists were announced—by rank-and-file militants, soon joined by accomplished writers and
speakers, including Saul Yanovsky, Roman Lewis, Hillel Solotaroff, Moishe Katz, J. A. Maryson, and
David Edelstadt. The first activity of the Pioneers was the defense of their jailed comrades in Chi-
cago, which corresponded with agitation and propaganda work among the Lower East Side’s Jew-
ish immigrants. The Pioneers were affiliated with the International Working People’s Association.
In February 1889, the Pioneers began publishing Varhayt, the first Yiddish-language anarchist pa-
per in the United States, edited by Joseph Jaffa; it lasted only a few months, until June 1889. A sig-
nificant feature of the Pioneers group was its secular and antireligious nature. While maintaining
their Jewish identity, the Pioneers of Liberty rejected traditional religious practices and, beginning
in 1889, held annual Yom Kippur balls which featured elaborate spreads of food, dancing, and sing-
ing that mocked the somber fasting of the holy day. Through these balls and other social events like
lectures, picnics, and concerts, the Pioneers helped establish a revolutionary counterculture in New
York similar to that which the IWPA provided in Chicago. Several workers’ educational clubs were
formed in the wake of the Pioneers, the most important of which was the anarchist Knights of Lib-
erty of Philadelphia. The Pioneers in conjunction with the Knights of Liberty founded the Yiddish-
language Freie Arbeiter Stimme in July 1890, whose first editor was Roman Lewis. Between 1889 and
1893, the Pioneers also published annually, on Yom Kippur, the paper Tfileh Zakeh (Pure Prayer).
The Pioneers of Liberty became the model for similar clubs in other major eastern cities. AB was
a member from 1888, but EG had no formal affiliation with the group.

Single Tax The single-tax philosophy is based on the idea that private land ownership is the fun-
damental source of social and economic injustice because landlords sap the wealth of workers and
decrease capitalist investment. Single-taxers advocate eliminating the existing system of taxation in
favor of a “single tax” on land intended to end land speculation, create common landownership,
and abolish private property. Lifting the weight of taxation on productive industry would also in-
crease wages. The movement achieved limited legislative success, though the theory remained pop-
ular for decades.
The single-tax movement emerged under the leadership of Henry George and Father McGlynn
(who was expelled from the Catholic church for his support of single tax). Single-tax theory had
taken root before George, but he specifically proposed single tax as a solution to the land question
and popularized the theory with two books, Our Land and Land Policy, National and State (San Fran-
cisco: White and Bauer, 1871) and his landmark Progress and Poverty (San Francisco: W. M. Hilton,
1879). Bolton Hall, G. Frank Stephens, A. C. Pleydell, George Seldes, and others linked the theo-
ries underlying the single tax to those of anarchism. Supporters were most often middle-class in-
tellectuals but also included Populists and wealthy individuals.
Among the first single-tax organizations were the San Francisco Single Tax Club—whose
members included George and James G. Maguire—and the Free Soil Society, founded in New York
in 1883, to which George also belonged. Single-tax organizations proved most successful on the lo-

574 DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS

cal level; despite efforts, there were few national organizations, and single-taxers often preferred to
work through organizations not solely focused on single-tax issues. Some influential national or-
ganizations were the Single Tax League of the United States (founded 1890) and later the Ameri-
can Single Tax League (1907). Among the local groups were George’s Land Reform League of Cali-
fornia (1878), the Free Soil Society (1883), various Land and Labor clubs and Henry George clubs
(1880s), Anti-Poverty societies (late 1880s), and the Henry George Lecture Association (1899). The
number of single-tax clubs increased exponentially nationwide between 1888 and 1889, beginning
with the Manhattan Single Tax Club founded by Bolton Hall, Thomas Shearman, and Lawson
Purdy; and the Chicago Single Tax Club founded by journalist Warren Worth Bailey. Among the 131
single-tax clubs formed by 1889, strongholds were in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
Indiana, California, Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Iowa. Many of these, notably those in Philadel-
phia, Detroit, and Houston, arranged formal meetings with EG.
The first and largest American single-tax colony, in Fairhope, Alabama, was inhabited by col-
onists during 1894 and 1895; it was incorporated as a municipality in 1908, and lasted until 1954.
Fairhope residents attempted gradually to shift state and local taxes from labor and capital to land,
but were unable to fully implement the single-tax doctrine. A second colony, in Arden, Delaware,
was founded in 1900 by the sculptor G. Frank Stephens and the architect Will Price. Among its
residents were the novelist Upton Sinclair and the anarchists George Brown and Mary Hansen.
Single-tax newspapers included the Single Tax Review, the Courier (Fairhope, Ala.), Justice (Phil-
adelphia), and George’s Standard and Economy.
Henry George ran unsuccessfully both in the New York City mayoral campaigns in 1886 (aided
by the CLU) and 1897 and in the 1888 presidential primary campaign. During his bid for the pres-
idency, George wrote an editorial for the Standard in which he retracted his support for the Hay-
market anarchists and affirmed the court’s decision to execute them. Critics suspected that the shift
was politically motivated and many, including EG and Benjamin Tucker, denounced George as a
traitor.
Single-tax organizations formed in Europe in this period as well, including the Land Restora-
tion Society in Scotland, the Land Values League in England, and the Land Reform League in
Germany.

Social Democracy of America (SDA) The Social Democracy of America was organized at the final
convention of the American Railway Union (ARU) on 15 June 1897. The group brought together
members of the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (for which Eugene V. Debs had
recently become an organizer), the Ruskin Colony, the Chicago Labor Union Exchange, and a
number of more scientific socialists from Milwaukee, most notably Victor Berger, Jesse Cox, Sey-
more Stedman, Charles Martin, and Frederic Heath. The Social Democracy of America (with Debs
as its unifying figurehead) was formed as a national organization of socialists that merged two
strategies for achieving socialism— converting America into a cooperative commonwealth and
electing their own candidates to public office. Many of its members believed that they could settle
in a colony in a sparsely populated state in the West and ultimately vote in a socialist government,
then repeat the process in other states. A strong tension existed between the utopian colonizers and
the electoral political actionists, led by Victor Berger, who believed that socialism would be achieved
through gradual, systematic reform. In an uneasy compromise, the SDA became a vehicle for so-
cialist electoral activity, while maintaining its colonization efforts. Past leaders of the ARU were

DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS 575

 nominated to the new executive board of the SDA, including Debs, James Hogan, Sylvester Keli-
her, R. M. Goodwin, and William E. Burns. Each local branch of the SDA was both politically and
ideologically autonomous. The SDA agreed to postpone its involvement in all elections during its
first year; however, special dispensation was given to the Milwaukee SDA, which in February 1898
fielded a political ticket, netting over 2,500 votes. A special convention of Jewish activists in the So-
cialist Labor Party was held in New York at the end of July 1897 at which over 80 percent of the at-
tendees voted to align themselves with the SDA, and broke with the SLP. In general, most of the
SDA’s energies were spent raising money for the purchase of land for its colony, an effort that was
ultimately futile. The SDA, however, also maintained a policy of strong support for labor and fol-
lowing the United Mine Workers’ strike of 1897, took an active part in an August 1897 labor con-
ference on behalf of the miners.
The SDA included a number of anarchists among its active members. According to Frederic
Heath, Johann Most in Freiheit advised readers to join the SDA, and other anarchist papers in-
cluding Free Society were initially receptive to the organization. However, following the murder of
nineteen striking miners in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, on 10 September 1897, Branch 2 of the Social
Democracy in Chicago, led by T. Putnam Quinn, Lucy E. Parsons, and Eric B. Morton, passed a se-
ries of resolutions calling for the murder of “millionaires” in retaliation. Shortly thereafter, Branch
2 had its charter suspended by Debs and the executive council of the SDA. (Other charges against
Chicago branches of the SDA included a suspicion that an excessive number of branches were
formed in the city as a strategy for dominating the national convention with anarchist and colo-
nization sympathizers.) On a national scale, the differences between the colonizers and the politi-
cal actionists could not be reconciled. At the June 1898 national convention, a vote taken in favor
of colonization and against electoral political action passed 53 to 37. Present at the 7 June 1898 con-
vention in Chicago were EG, Lucy E. Parsons, T. P. Quinn, and other anarchists among the 70 del-
egates, representing 94 branches of the SDA. Following the vote, the socialists who favored an elec-
toral strategy left the convention. The following day Berger, Debs (who by this time had abandoned
his belief in colonization), and other political actionists formed their own Social Democratic Party.
The SDA continued their convention, electing to the national committee James Hogan, W. P. Bor-
land, R. M. Goodwin, John F. Lloyd, L. L. Hopkins, I. Frank, C. F. Willard, R. J. Hinton, and G. C.
Clemens. Later that year, the SDA founded a colony on Henderson Bay in Washington state with
approximately a hundred members and published the paper The Co-operator, but as a national or-
ganization, the SDA quickly dissoved. EG, who attended the 1898 convention, wrote in Solidarity
shortly thereafter that she had no faith in the SDA: “I know that nothing short of the propaganda
against political control and against economic dependence will satisfy.” In 1901, Debs and the SDA,
along with the Morris Hillquit faction of the Socialist Labor Party, would form the Socialist Party
of America.
Besides their official newspaper Social Democrat (1897–1898), the SDA published Robert
Blatchford’s Merrie England (Chicago: SDA, 1897). In 1900 Frederic Heath’s Social Democracy Red
Book: A Brief History of Socialism in America (Terre Haute, Ind.: Debs Publishing Co., 1900) re-
corded the contemporary history of the movement.

Social Science “Social Science,” a generic term used to describe any study of social issues, was of-
ten used by anarchists to describe the study of social issues from an anarchist perspective. Many
early Social Science clubs had strong anarchist ties and influences without strictly defining them-

576 DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS

selves as anarchist clubs, and all seemed dedicated to open and free discussion. From 1898, the So-
cial Science Club in New York offered free weekly lectures and discussions, involving many Amer-
ican-born anarchists. Also in 1898 a weekly Social Science Club was started in San Francisco for
“free discussion on all questions.” Advertisements for both clubs’ meetings were placed in Free So-
ciety. In 1900, Free Society advertised another weekly Social Science Club in Chicago. An anarchist
reading group called the Social Science Club was formed in Philadelphia in 1901 by Voltairine de
Cleyre, modeled after a reading and study group that she and Dyer D. Lum had belonged to in the
early 1890s. In an announcement in Free Society in 1900 she wrote: “Let us take up the work as
quiet students, not as disputatious wranglers . . . let us saturate ourselves with the facts concerning
anarchistic tendencies in society; then we may hope to convert others” (Free Society, 30 September
1900). Its first members included George Brown, Mary Hansen, Pearle McLeod, and Natasha Not-
kin, and met every Sunday evening. The club sponsored lectures and published Mary Hansen’s A
Catechism of Anarchy (1902). Hansen suggested in Free Society that although she had written the
first draft, the essay was in fact a group effort of the Social Science Club; she explained that the club
was not named as author because its members were not uniformly self-identified anarchists. The
Philadelphia club also published de Cleyre’s Crime and Punishment (1903) as well as the first En-
glish edition of Peter Kropotkin’s Modern Science and Anarchism (1903), which was translated by
David A. Modell, a Philadelphia physician, anarchist, and member of the city’s Social Science club.
In December 1901, the revitalized New York Social Science Club sponsored a series of lectures,
including “Anarchism and Communism” by Rudolf Grossman, “Discipline” by Elizabeth Ferm,
and “Anarchists and Anarchism: Their Principles and their Tactics” by Alex Horr. The Boston So-
cial Science Club lecturers included Adeline Champney, whose “The Woman Question” was later
published as a pamphlet (New York: Comrade Co-Operative Press, 1903).
The many local Social Science clubs linked the phrase “social science” and anarchism, broad-
ening the definitions for a more inclusive agenda. By 1906 the masthead created by EG for Mother
Earth would read “Monthly Magazine devoted to Social Science and Literature,” and the masthead
of Revolt (1915–1916), a Chicago Swedish-language anarchist paper edited by Theodore Johnson,
read “A Monthly Swedish Journal Devoted to Social Science and Revolutionary Thought.”

Socialist Labor Party (SLP) The Socialist Labor Party, founded as the Working Men’s Party of the
United States in 1876 before being renamed the SLP in 1877, was the first major Marxist socialist
party in the United States. It was, initially at least, almost exclusively a foreign-born and non-
English-speaking organization with German-born male workers comprising the vast majority of its
members and Jewish immigrants accounting for most of the rest (though native-born membership
began to increase in the late 1890s). Partly as a result of this cultural and especially linguistic iso-
lation from the rest of the country, the SLP appeared to achieve only limited political success. It was
most effective in assisting various union organizing efforts, including the Central Labor Union and
the United Hebrew Trades in New York City.
The party struggled in its early years. In 1880 the SLP officially supported the Greenback Labor
Party, a party based on currency reform, and took an active part in drafting their national platform.
Though the relationship between the two organizations was short lived, many radicals within the
SLP left because of their opposition to the alliance, claiming that the Greenbacks were not social-
ists, while some SLP members with anarchist leanings left to form their own more revolutionary
clubs. Albert Parsons and August Spies led the formation, in October 1881, of the Revolutionary

DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS 577

 Socialistic Party (RSP), which was anarchist in spirit. But by October 1883 the RSP had essentially
disappeared and many of its members reconstituted as they helped form the International Work-
ing People’s Association in Pittsburgh. Fearful that the IWPA was stealing away its members
and influence, prominent individuals within the SLP promptly proposed a consolidation with the
IWPA—a plan rejected by the IWPA. Jewish anarchists and socialists proposed a conciliation in the
form of a bipartisan paper in 1889, but after heated debate at a convention, the two camps split with
few prospects for future cooperation. The SLP began to regain strength in the later half of the de-
cade. In 1890 Daniel De Leon joined the party and soon after became its leader and editor of its pa-
per, The Daily People.
The SLP focused its efforts on running candidates for public office in New York, where the bulk
of its membership resided, though in the elections of 1898 the SLP received an unprecedented (for
a socialist party) number of votes for its candidates nationwide. Many members of the party, how-
ever, were alienated by the growing rigidity of its Marxist orientation, especially under the perceived
authoritarian style of De Leon’s leadership. Others were opposed to the Socialist Trade and Labor
Alliance (a trade union established by the SLP to organize unskilled workers) because many SLP
members favored working within the already established American Federation of Labor. This ten-
sion resulted in a major split within the party in July 1899 when Morris Hillquit led a group that
broke with De Leon and formed a Rochester faction of the SLP, which would ultimately be incor-
porated into the Socialist Party of America in 1901, soon eclipsing the influence of De Leon’s SLP.
The SLP’s first English-language paper was The Socialist (1876), based in New York; it soon changed
its name to the Labor Standard (1876 –1877). Albert Parsons helped edit a Chicago SLP paper, also
called The Socialist (1878 –1879). The Bulletin of the Social Labor Movement (1879 –1883) served as
the party’s official organ until it was replaced by the Workmen’s Advocate (1882 –1891), which was
initially published in New Haven before moving to New York. In turn, it was replaced by the Daily
People (1891–1900) and then the Weekly People (1900 –1979). The SLP’s first two German-language
papers were Arbeiterstimme (1878) in New York and Der Verbote (1873–1924) in Chicago. In 1878
SLP members established the German-language daily New Yorker Volkszeitung (1878 –1932), which
became affiliated with the newly formed Socialist Party of America in 1901. In 1892 the weekly Vor-
waerts (1892 –1899) was established, and it too was considered an official party organ until the split
in 1899.

Socialist League An early British anti-parliamentary socialist group, the Socialist League was
formed in 1884 by departing members of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), including
William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Ernest Belfort Bax, and Edward Aveling. The founding followed a
dispute with SDF leader H. H. Hyndman, who refused to resign from his leadership position fol-
lowing a no-confidence vote at a SDF executive meeting held on 27 December 1884. Their main
grievances with Hyndman included the “nationalist and dictatorial methods he used to run the
party” and complaints about his control over the party’s journal, Justice.
Following their departure from the SDF, the League published two documents, To Socialists and
Manifesto of the Socialist League. To Socialists was largely an exposition of the difficulties of working
with Hyndman; and the manifesto, which was written by Morris and Bax, advocated “revolution-
ary international socialism” and explained their anti-parliamentary position. The League also pub-
lished its own journal, The Commonweal (1885–1894). During this period, anarchist influence in
the League grew. From 1890 The Commonweal was edited and published by David Nicoll and
Charles Mowbray.

578 DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS

 Despite the initial slow growth of the organization, by 1895 the Socialist League included over
10,700 members, after which its numbers declined; the organization disbanded in 1901 with less
than 6,000 members.
In 1892 John C. Kenworthy (an English Tolstoyan and pacifist), William C. Owen, and John H.
Edelmann (editor of Solidarity) among others founded a short-lived branch of the Socialist League
in New York, which organized regular weekly meetings. Its members initially consisted of those
“who were expelled from the Socialist Labor Party” (Solidarity, 13 August 1892, p. 4). Speakers at
the meetings of the Socialist League of New York included Edelmann, Owen, Moses Oppenheimer
(who also helped form the Free Speech League in 1902), Marie Louise David, and Saverio Merlino.

Socialist Party of America (SPA) At an Indianapolis convention on 29 July 1901 delegates from the
Social Democratic Party and Hillquit’s breakaway section of the Socialist Labor Party united to form
the Socialist Party of America, led by Eugene V. Debs and Victor Berger. The party was committed
to electoral politics and parliamentary socialism, and was structured in a loose party federation. Fol-
lowing the assassination of President William McKinley in September 1901, the SPA as well as
other left-leaning groups attempted to distance themselves from anarchists and the political vio-
lence with which they were associated. However, attorney Morris Hillquit, an active leader of the
SPA, defended Johann Most as an issue of free speech in the case against him for publishing the
article “Murder Against Murder” in Freiheit on the day before McKinley was shot. Though the SPA
often attacked anarchists, the two camps did communicate at times and work together, organizing
formal debates, including Algie M. Simons’s with Abe Isaak on “Socialism vs. Anarchism” in Chi-
cago on 5 December 1901. Despite ideological and regional factions within it, the party grew im-
pressively in its first years, with membership doubling by 1904. During the same time the SLP de-
clined in strength dramatically, and the SPA became the country’s foremost socialist party.

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Cole, and Sally Thomas. Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995.

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 EMMA’S LIST

The Emma Goldman Papers Project thanks our MARLENE CAROL CLEMENS is remembered
sustaining sponsors (see p. vii) and the following by her parents, Mary and the late Alan
additional donors, who have led Emma’s List, for Dietch.
their vote of confidence and material support over
SARAH T. CROME, who helped found the Emma
the years.
Goldman Papers, is remembered by Andrea
Sohn, her niece; Esther and the late Eugene
IN REMEMBRANCE
Revitch, her sister and brother-in-law; and by
LYDIA AND GEORGE ARONOWITZ, loved for her friends Victoria Brady, Dale Freeman, Ken
their wit and passion. May their goodness Kann, Stephanie Pass, Lyn Reese, and Judy
and sparkle—like Emma’s—live on. Remem- Shattuck, and by her ever grateful colleague
bered by Merrill, Andrew, Todd, and Adam and friend Candace Falk.
Stone, and by Candace Falk. SOPHIE AND JOE DESSER, Emma’s dear friends
LEONARD BASKIN is remembered by Lisa and comrades, are remembered by their
Baskin. daughter, Mildred Desser Grobstein.
THOMAS H. BEADLING is remembered by Patri- CHANELE (ANNA) SCHILHAUS DIAMOND, Emma
cia A. Thomas. Goldman’s seamstress, is remembered by her
SARAH BELLUSH, who loved and taught him to son, David Diamond.
admire Emma Goldman, is remembered by THE FERRER COLONY AND MODERN SCHOOL OF
her son, Bernard Bellush. STELTON, NEW JERSEY , are remembered by
WARREN K. BILLINGS, dignified friend and col- Sally Brown.
league of Alexander Berkman, sentenced to
EMMA GOLDMAN was remembered by the late
life imprisonment in association with the 1916
Art Bortolotti with gratitude for fighting “her
Preparedness Day bombing, is remembered by
last battle with the authorities, a battle that
his niece, Marguerite Joseph.
lasted until her last breath,” on his behalf.
BEN AND IDA CAPES, Emma’s dear friends
EMMA GOLDMAN is also remembered by David
and comrades, are remembered by David and
Judith Capes, their grandchildren; by Bonnie Diamond with gratitude for encouraging him
Capes Tabatznik, their daughter; and by Susan in his youth to pursue his love of music and
Chasson and Albert Chasson, their niece and the violin and “Kling in de ganze Velt” (Play
nephew. for the entire world).

ALICE CHECKOVITZ MAHONEY is remembered ESTHER L ADDON, who gave Emma a home in
by her niece, Susan Wladaver-Morgan. Canada during her exile, is remembered by
her daughter, Ora Laddon Robbins.
STEFANIE CHECKOVITZ WL ADAVER (1920 –
2001) is remembered by her daughter, Susan SARAH L AZAR is remembered by Shirley Van
Wladaver-Morgan. Bourg.

591
 AUNT FAYE LEVY —a great lady!—is remem- ELEANOR ENGSTRAND AND MARGE FRANTZ
bered by Merrill Stone, by her nephew Neil are honored by Carol Jean and Edward F.
Solomon and family, and by her niece Candace Newman.
Falk, whom she counseled over the years to
JANE FALK is honored by Neil Goteiner and
“let Emma Goldman rest in peace, already.”
N. Joseph, by Merrill, Andy, Todd, and Adam
RELL A LOSSY, who captured Emma’s spirit in Stone, and by her sister, Candace, who all wish
her plays, is remembered by Frank T. Lossy. her continued good health and happiness.

HENRY MAYER, friend and fellow biographer, is JOSEPH FRIEDMAN is honored by his son, Larry
remembered by Candace Falk. Friedman.

JANE MAVERICK WELSH is remembered by Beá DOROTHY R. HEALEY is honored by Carol Jean
Welsh Weicker. and Edward F. Newman.

JESSICA MITFORD AND BOB TREUHAF T are re- CAROL L ASSER is honored by Cathy Kornblith.
membered by Peter Stansky.
ANTONIA, who embodies Emma’s spirit, is
CURTIS W. REESE, who delivered Emma’s last honored by her father, David Madson.
eulogy at her gravesite, is remembered by his
KIERSTEN AMANDA ROESEMANN is honored by
son, Curtis W. Reese, Jr.
her father and mother, Douglas N. Roesemann
BEN REITMAN, Emma’s road manager and and Marla Erbin-Roesemann.
lover, is remembered by his daughter, Mecca
EMMA SAMELSON JONES’S graduation is hon-
Reitman Carpenter.
ored by Renee Samelson.
ZILITH ROSEN TURITZ is remembered by her
VERA WEISS is honored by Barbara Bloch.
niece, Nancy Chodorow.
JEAN WILKINSON is honored by her friend Lyn
ARTHUR LEONARD ROSS, Emma’s lawyer and
Reese.
friend, is remembered by his sons, Ralph and
Edgar Ross. ARI WOHLFEILER is honored by Dan Wohlfeiler.

IRMA SHERMAN, aunt, soul-mate, and re- EMMA WOLF is honored by her parents, Louis
spected member of Emma’s List, is remem- Wolf and Dolores Newman.
bered by her daughter, Valerie Broad, and by
her niece Candace Falk. JOSEPH ZELNICK is honored by Carl N. Degler.

JENNY SIDNEY, comrade and mother, is re-

membered by Barry and Paul Pateman. INSTITUTIONAL DONORS

JULIE VAN BOURG is remembered by her American Council for Learned Societies
mother, Shirley Van Bourg. The William Bingham Foundation
California Council for the Humanities
KATE WOLFSON is remembered by her daugh-
Chadwyck-Healey, Inc.
ter, Irene Schneiderman. The Commonwealth Fund
The Ford Foundation
IN HONOR OF THOSE WHO CONTINUE George Gund Foundation
TO KEEP EMMA’S SPIRIT ALIVE Hunt Alternatives Fund
Lucius W. Littauer Foundation
LOIS BLUM FEINBL AT T is honored by the The Los Angeles Educational Partnership
Malino family. Milken Family Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
JANE M. BOUVIER is honored by her daughter,
L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation
Virginia Bouvier.
The Streisand Foundation
DAVID CAPL AN is honored by his father, Sun Microsystems
Michael Caplan. The Vanguard Foundation

592 EMMA’S LIST

Earl Warren Chapter of the American Civil Elizabeth Colton
Liberties Union Margaret Corrigan and Larry Gibbs
H. W. Wilson Foundation Maureen Corrigan and Richard J. Yeselson
Nancy Cott
Carole M. Counihan
INDIVIDUAL DONORS Victoria Crane and Matthew Engle
Matthew, Linda, and Ellen Creager
Martha Ackelsberg
Janet Adelman Carol DeBoer-Langworthy
Harriet Alonso Carl N. Degler
Lisa D. Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich Anna DeLeon
Ron Anastasia and Kim Anway-Anastasia Michael Denneny, Andrew Miller, Robert Weil
Elizabeth Anderson and the late Henry Mayer (St. Martin’s Press)
Joyce Appleby Cleo Deras and Carlos Hernandez
John P. Diggens
Bailey Coy Books
Jill and Martin Dodd
Jonathan Becker
Martin Duberman
Marlou Belyea
Robert Dunn
Richard Berger
Estelle and Howard Bern Samuel and Hope Efron
Anne Bernstein and Conn Hallinan Diane Ehrensaft and Jim Hawley
Elizabeth Berry Robin Einhorn
Marsha and Stephen Berzon Laurel and Eugene Eisner
Barbara and Arthur Bloch Robert Elias and Jennifer Turpin
Lynn A. Bonfield Roz Elms and Donald Sutherland
Paul Bluestone and Susan Sanvidge Matthew and Victoria Engle
Anne Borchardt Shelly Errington
Danice Bordett and William Schechner
Eileen Boris Jane Fajans and Terry Turner
Susan and Jeffrey Brand Jane Falk
Marion Brenner and Robert Shimshak Elaine Feingold and Randall M. Shaw
Ramsay Breslin Laura Fenster and Jon Rosenberg
Sunny and Philip Brodsky Emily Filloy and David Weintraub
Robert Browning and Linda Maio Barbara and Robert Fishman
June and the late Abe Brumer Bruce Fodiman
Paul Bundy Nancy Fox
Julianne Burton-Carvajal B. Franklin and the late Joan F. Kahn
Marge Frantz and Eleanor Engstrand
Michael Caplan Estelle Freedman
Mortimer Caplin Mark Friedman and Marjorie Solomon
Candace M. Carroll Friedman
Clayborne and Susan Carson William Lee Frost
JoAnn Castagna Lisa Fruchtman and Norman Postone
Joseph and Susan Cerny
Yvette Chalom and Paul Fogel Judith Gardiner
Robert Cherny Donald Gibson
Leah and Marvin Chodorow Christina and John Gillis
Nancy Chodorow Susan Glenn and James Gregory
Noam Chomsky Neil Goldberg and Hagit Cohen
Harry Chotiner Sam and Maria Goldberger
Joy Christenberry Rick Goldsmith and Susanna Tadlock
Pat Cody Nancy Gordon (Koret Gallery, Palo Alto, Calif.)
Natalie Cohen Nancy Gordon and Ken Kirsch

EMMA’S LIST 593

 Richard Gordon and Meredith Miller Cornelia and Lawrence Levine
Joanne Grant and Victor Rabinowitz Lynda and Carl Levinson (Max and Anna
Edward de Grazia Levinson Foundation)
Marty Nesselbush Green Rita Lewis and family
Janet Greenberg Rae and William Lisker
Denyse Gross and Kenneth Morrison Kristin Luker
Susan Groves and Eric Anderson
Mary Gutzi Nancy MacKay
Roland Guyotte Maeva Marcus
Mary Ann Mason
Alice Hall and Michael Smith Antje Mattheus and David Kairys
Robert Hamburger Mary Lynn McCree Bryan
Larry Hannant Maggie McFadden
Nina Hartley Jennifer Mei and Han Min Liu
Stuart Hellman Diane Middlebrook and Carl Gerassi
Frederick Hertz and Randolph Langenbach Sally Miller and Peg Keranen
Ronald Hill Sigrid Miller and Robert Pollin
Robert Hillman and Olivia Crawford the late Jessica Mitford and the late Robert
Sally Hindman Treuhaft
Adrienne Hirt and Jeff Rodman Dominic Montagu
Barbara Hoffer
Patricia Holland Victor Navasky
Lorraine and Victor Honig Marty Nesselbush Green
the late Morris Novik
Elizabeth Jameson
Susan Jarratt Kaoru Ohara
Thomas E. Jeffrey
Erica Jong and Ken Burrows Nell Painter
Keith Park
Jane Kahn Pamela Parker
Kathy Kahn Thomas Peabody
Peggy Kahn John Peck
Roy Kahn Agnes F. Peterson
Susan Kaplan Janice Plotkin
Michael Katz Linda Post and Eugene Rosow
Bruce Kayton Carl Prince and family
Frances Richardson Keller Coby Prins
Loretta Kensinger the late Adele Proom
Richard E. and Linda K. Kerber
John Kessell Rabbi Ferenc Raj and Paula Wolk
Alice Kessler-Harris Harold Ramis
Kristina Kiehl and Bob Friedman Alan Ramo
Kathleen King Joan, Robert, and Heather Reese
Barbara Kingsolver and Stephen Hopp Victor Roberge
Heather and Scott Kleiner Renée Robin and Scott McCreary
Cathy Kornblith (The People’s Eye) David Roediger and Jean Allman
Julia Kraut Shelly and Coleman Romalis
Jay Kugelman Joanna Rose
Peter Rose and Daniel Burton Rose
Arthur Charles Leahy and Mary Kathryn Leahy Ruth Rosen
Eleanore Lee and Ronald Elson Carolyn Cavalier Rosenberg
Jesse Lemisch and Naomi Weisstein Erica Rosenfeld and James Wilson
Gerda Lerner Florence Rosenstock and James Van Luik

594 EMMA’S LIST

Roy Rosenzweig G. Thomas Tanselle
Matthew Ross and Gloria Lawrence Reesa Tansey
Sheila Rowbotham Patricia Anne Thomas
Lillian and Hank Rubin Sally Thomas
Lucio and Marcia Ruotolo Irene Tinker
Barbara Tischler
Prentice and Paul Sack
William M. Tuttle, Jr.
Harriet Sage
Elaine Tyler and Lary May
Samuel Salkin and Frankie Whitman
Renee Samelson Laurel and Gael Ulrich
Ethel Sanjines Carol Unger
Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins
Camille Saviola Patricia Valva
Virginia Scardigli Katrina Van Heuvel
Lois Schiffer Jill and Rudolph Vecoli
Danny Scher
Lillian Schlissel Nora Wagner
Ann and Richard Schmidt, Jr. Judith and Daniel Walkowitz
Irene Schneiderman Deborah and Dan Waterman
Herb Schreier Brenda Webster and Ira Lapidus
Donna Schulman Bonnie Lynn Weimer
Marilyn and Harvey Schwartz Lila Weinberg
Jules and the late Helen Seitz Lynn Weiner and Thomas Moher
Martin Selig Susan Wengraf
Mary Selkirk Marcia Whitebook
Juliet Shaffer Blanche Wiesen Cook
Susan Shaw and Thomas W. Crane the late Norma Wikler
Richard Sheldon John Alexander Williams
Julius and the late Irma Sherman Beth Wilson
Hannah Shostack Vickie Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf )
Alix Kates Shulman Barbara Winslow
Barbara Sicherman S. I. Wisenberg
Harriet F. and John Simon Ann Wrixon
Kitty Sklar and Thomas Dublin the late Wu Ke Kang
Arlene and Jerome Skolnick
Laura X
Andrea Sohn
Mark Solomon Susumu Yamaizumi
Naomi Solomon
Nancy Caldwell Sorel and Ed Sorel Fay Zadeh
Claire Sotnick Rhonda Zangwill
Daniel Soyer Naomi Zauderer
Judith Stacey Martin Zelig
Christine Stansell Margaret Zierdt
Peter Stansky Roslyn and Howard Zinn
Randolph and Frances Starn Joan Zoloth
Gloria Steinem Carol Zullman and Eric Taub
Pessl Beckler Semel Stern
And special thanks to our many donors who
Philip M. Stern
chose to remain anonymous, and the literally
Jean Stone
thousands of others whose contributions,
Susan Strasser
whether large or small, have been absolutely
Evelyn and Norman Tabachnick critical to the survival of the Emma Goldman
Susanna Tadlock and Rick Goldsmith Papers Project.

EMMA’S LIST 595

 We at the Emma Goldman Papers honor the educator devoted to Emma and to the concept
memory of Michael Rogin, member of our ad- of freedom; Norma Wikler, who longed for the
visory board, whose appreciation dated back to guidance of an Emma; and several sweet fam-
his great aunt Rosie Rogin, who in 1906 was ily members of the Goldman Papers staff, in-
arrested with Emma Goldman; Alice Ham- cluding Abe Brumer, Lydia Aronowitz, Faye
burg, a founder of Women for Peace; Helen Levy, Irma Sherman, and Ruth and Merlin
Seitz, the lifelong activist who grew up in Bowen, all of whom supported our work
anarchist colonies and remembered sitting on in their own quiet way; and we honor espe-
Emma’s lap as a child; Bob Treuhaft, labor law- cially the memory of Ian Ballantine, Emma’s
yer and friend; Marcus Cohn, attorney and nephew, editor, and co-literary heir.

596 EMMA’S LIST

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Collaboration is the core component of the Emma Goldman Papers Project. For over twenty years,
many hands have created what has become a secular cathedral to the remembrance of things past
and almost forgotten. Every effort, large and small, built the structure, added complexity and nu-
ance to the work, and confirmed the importance of situating the advocates of free expression into
the historical record as a lasting tribute to courageous spirits.
Emma Goldman’s amazing foresight and daring, her insistence that both political and personal
freedom are realizable—no matter how difficult the struggle or intangible the outcome along the
way—remains an inspiration. The work of preserving and publishing the written artifacts of Gold-
man’s active life has elicited an almost unmatched outpouring of generosity and enthusiasm from
those whose determination and vision resonate with Goldman’s essential daring.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the controversial side of Goldman—the anarchist deported
from the United States, the woman feared for her challenge to organized government—also pro-
voked storm clouds around the historical research for this documentary edition. We have weath-
ered lapses in financial support and editorial continuity. Yet, always an individual or institution has
risen to the occasion, made an extraordinary effort on our behalf, and the project, like Emma Gold-
man herself, has survived. That her papers and these volumes, so full of scholarship and insight
into a world whose tracings are rare and whose importance has often been obscured by political
prejudice, are now an indelible part of the historical record is the shared accomplishment of liter-
ally hundreds of people over the years.
Many of our extended family of friends and colleagues can assert with great authority and
confidence that their individual efforts helped bring the project to publication and made all the dif-
ference. Every bit of research over the last twenty-two years added to the subtlety of our work—
small details gradually linked to present a complex picture of Goldman’s world. Others supported
us by creating a foundation for our efforts, a frame for public history and meticulous research, pro-
viding archival sources and funding resources, cushioning us with kindness. In the mountain of
words and ideas that comprise our work, none can express fully the depth of our appreciation for
the devotion and selflessness showered upon us, sanctioning our perseverance, in spite of all odds,
to preserve the written legacy of Emma Goldman.
It would be impossible to name all those associated with the Emma Goldman Papers Project
over the years, whose remarkable solidarity and support have sustained us. And I, who have facili-
tated the Emma Goldman Papers Project from the beginning, have been privileged to spend so
much of my life poring through Emma Goldman’s papers in the company of those, past and pres-
ent, drawn to the many facets of her exalted and complex vision.

597
 It is a great pleasure to thank the extraordinary people and institutions without which publica-
tion of the selected edition of the Emma Goldman’s papers would have been impossible.
First and foremost, a great tribute is due to the Project’s editorial staff, whose tireless and cre-
ative work gave life to a time and a movement otherwise hidden from history. Barry Pateman, a
scholar and archivist of anarchist sources, in his three years with the Project has transformed the
raw coal of the almost twenty years of archival research into diamonds of scholarship. His associa-
tion with the Emma Goldman Papers, which began in the Project’s early years of searching through
archives and private collections in England, came full circle with his arrival in California in 1999 —
when he became “the fastest study in the West.” As a colleague— every step of the way from daily
administrative tasks to intellectual engagement in the writing of the introductory essays—and as
an enthusiastic mentor to students and aficionado of anarchist history, Barry Pateman’s efforts are
unmatched. It is largely to his herculean efforts that we owe the timely and accurate recording and
contextualization of Goldman’s American years.
The editorial group that has shepherded to completion the volumes covering Goldman’s Amer-
ican years also stands out in the history of the Emma Goldman Papers Project as the very best.
Jessica Moran came to the Project when she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley,
and over time has assumed a critical role in coordinating, maintaining, and researching many cru-
cial components of the volumes—including the biographical and organizational directories—and
managing a plethora of incredible detail with amazing grace. In the process of her work at the Gold-
man Papers she found her passion for the archival world, which will, no doubt, benefit from her
energy and insight.
As the work of the Emma Goldman Papers Project evolved, from the earliest days of searching
for Goldman’s correspondence, writings, newspaper reportage, legal and government surveillance
reports, and photographic images for the comprehensive microfilm edition to the production of
these volumes documenting Goldman’s American years, every aspect of the public history outreach
generated by the Project bears the mark of historian Robert Cohen and illustrations editor Susan
Wengraf.
Robert Cohen began his association with the Project when he was a graduate student studying
the history of student movements, especially of the 1930s. With his constant focus on free expres-
sion and education, he has followed the thread of his interests from the early years of the twentieth
century with Emma Goldman on to the old left of the 1930s and to the new left of the free speech
movement of the 1960s on the University of California, Berkeley, campus. An enormously gener-
ous and insightful colleague and friend, he collaborated on the selection of the documents for the
volumes and critiqued the introductory essays, encouraging me to take a longer view on Goldman,
to face her limitations even as I celebrated her grand achievements. And when, midstream in the
Project’s work, I faced a life-threatening illness, Robby Cohen was among the most devoted to the
work, and his unwavering kindness to me during that harrowing time created a shield of support.
Susan Wengraf’s impeccable visual sensibility and fascination with Goldman and her time
graced the Project with an ever-increasing photographic archive that allowed us to attend to the edi-
tion’s artistic form as well as historical content. Wengraf created a parallel narrative comprised of
facsimiles of original documents from newspapers, magazines, government documents, and per-
sonal correspondence gathered from a wide variety of sources— complementing and distilling the
volumes’ daunting abundance of historical texts. Barry Pateman, in his other role as curator of the
Kate Sharpley Library, generously added his original visual material. In the final hours, Wengraf

598 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
was assisted by John Blaustein and Andrea Sohn, who generously gave of their time and technical
expertise. Wengraf began the search for Goldman-related images almost twenty years ago—build-
ing our visual archive and helping to create a “family album” that evolved into a wonderful travel-
ing exhibition. She continues to assist me, as I prepare to speak on Goldman at campuses around
the nation, by creating the Project’s slide show and streamlining it for local color and historical
context.
The University of California Press, a place where scholarship and public interest meet, has been
the perfect publisher for the Goldman volumes, from the day Stan Holwitz solicited the manuscript
almost twenty years ago, to the wonderful experience of working with Director Lynne Withey,
a woman whose flexibility, compassion, and intelligent guiding hand is largely responsible for
the publication of these volumes. Every step of the way, the Project enjoyed the privilege of the re-
markably skilled editors at the press. Most spectacular of all is Kathleen MacDougall, who has been
immersed in all details of production as well as line-editing and questioning facts— elements of
the publication that when done well make a book appear invisibly seamless and clear. We are grate-
ful for her persistence and remarkable editorial sensibility and talent, and also for her belief in the
social and political value of publishing this selected edition of Goldman’s papers, which made our
professional tie a wondrous collegial and comradely fit. Our A-team included the designer Nicole
Hayward and acquisitions editor Mary Francis.
Indeed, the Emma Goldman Papers has been fortunate to have had the benefit of publishers
who never wavered in their commitment to the work—from the gracious and intelligent publisher
of the 1991–1993 microfilm edition and the 1995 analytic guide, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey and
his associates, especially Mark Hamilton and Doug Roesemann, to the stellar editors at the Uni-
versity of California Press. We thank them all for their part in inscribing Emma Goldman’s life and
times indelibly into the historical record.
Among the historians devoted to the history of dissent and to recording the violent underside
of the nation’s response to issues of race and labor unrest is the revered Leon Litwack, indefatiga-
ble and captivating Morrison Professor of American History at the University of California, Berke-
ley, and chair of the very generous Faculty Advisory Board of the Emma Goldman Papers Project.
Our designated “principal investigator”—his P.I. acronym could easily signify “prince of integ-
rity”—stood by the Emma Goldman Papers tirelessly and, with compassion and enthusiasm, gave
us his astute advice over the past decade of the Emma Goldman Papers Project. To have the cama-
raderie and respect of one who embodies the challenging spirit of Emma Goldman has been an
honor. We thank him for his generosity and his willingness to go the extra mile even with his over-
flowing schedule, without which the Emma Goldman Papers Project could never have come this
far—and for all that he has done for so many, with his characteristic combination of modesty and
force. He held us together when we were drifting—as did members of our faculty advisory board.
A pattern of resilience, determination, and never turning back was set with the aid of two sig-
nificant research companions—the magnificent and practical political visionary the late Sarah
Crome and the multi-talented public historian Sally Thomas. Crome joined me upon her retire-
ment from teaching and, although she initially cringed at the impracticality of Emma’s politics, de-
veloped a fascination for the history of the anarchists, eventually becoming known among younger
anarchist and anti-nuclear activists as “cosmic Sarah.” Thomas worked with the Project in many
different roles over a fourteen-year period and helped set a tone and direction that has remained
our hallmark. Flanked by our muses the three Women for Peace—June Brumer, Rae Lisker, and

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 599
 Beth Wilson—the “volunteers” whose weekly dedication for fifteen years to absolutely anything
that needed to be done, added radiance and ingenuity to our work and contributed to the Project’s
ability to weather occasional storms of uncertainty.
The Emma Goldman Papers Project was conceived in an era of resurgence of interest in
women’s history. The initiator of the Emma Goldman Papers Project was the National Historical
Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives. The NHPRC was mandated by
Congress in 1934 to sponsor documentary editing projects to collect, organize, and publish the pa-
pers of the Founding Fathers. By the 1970s there was a groundswell of interest among historians
in expanding the definition of the nation’s finest leaders to include women, labor, and civil rights
activists. The Emma Goldman Papers, sometimes labeled in jest as one of the “Destroying Mother”
projects, began quietly in 1980, only to be silenced briefly by budget cuts during President Reagan’s
administration. The NHPRC has been the Emma Goldman Papers Project’s most consistent sup-
porter—setting an unparalleled standard of excellence and respect for documentary editing and
laying the foundation for the abundance of high-quality historical editions in American history
published in the twentieth century. The irony of a federal agency becoming the deported Emma
Goldman’s primary source of support was not lost on the NHPRC’s long-time officer, Roger Bruns,
who often mused that perhaps Goldman was mistakenly identified on the commission’s list of
mandated subjects for projects. Bruns jested that they might have presumed they were funding
a great “archivist,” rather than a feared “anarchist.” Piercing through such speculation was the
NHPRC’s genuine belief in free expression as a crucial element of the identity of America, which
propelled the commission and its remarkably kind and engaged staff to value Goldman’s contribu-
tion to American history and sustain the long scholarly quest to document her life and work. In ad-
dition to the compassionate, modest, and erudite Roger Bruns, who not only guided the Emma
Goldman Papers through the years but also provided critical feedback as I wrote the introductory
essays, the Project was fortunate to have the support and clever counsel of Ann Newhall. On the
commission staff, Tim Connelly impressively tended to the myriad of detail, proving that the best
administrative work is done with kindness and intellectual engagement in the task at hand. A host
of NHPRC associates shepherded us through our work over the years, including the empathetic
Mary Giunta, who saw us through many of our hardest times, and the remarkable late Sara Jack-
son, a kindred spirit, who took pride in her contact with the Goldman Papers, declassifying gov-
ernment documents for the collection and even entrusting us with records of racial lynching to
place in the hands of scholars who shared our belief that historians can make a difference by ex-
posing and correcting the documentary record. Over time, the NHPRC staff became our most con-
sistently involved colleagues—we especially thank Richard Sheldon, Nancy Sahli, J. Dane Hart-
grove, Mike Meier, and Suzanne Meyers, as well as the many others who extended themselves over
and over again on our behalf.
My appreciation extends to those who played an integral part in the history of the Emma Gold-
man Papers Project over the last twenty years—from staff members, volunteers, archivists, librar-
ians, scholars in the United States and across the globe, students, grant administrators, and the
many university and community facilitators of our work. While the editors who brought these vol-
umes to completion in the last three years, checking and re-checking facts, writing and re-writing
annotations, framing and re-framing the texts, and pushing themselves to the max with great equa-
nimity and kindness to meet incredibly stringent deadlines, clearly deserve the lion’s share of ap-
preciation, others before them worked very hard to help lay the foundation for what is now the doc-
umentary history of Goldman’s American years. Various configurations of the edition, ranging

600 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
from one to three, and ultimately to four, volumes for the American years, have left tracings of dif-
ferent editorial styles—some of which were eventually abandoned and some absorbed. The vol-
umes have benefited from the talents of each editorial group as they improved on the fine efforts
of the one before it.
The Project also benefited greatly from consultation with Heiner Becker, German anarchist his-
torian, biographer, and collector of anarchist archives affiliated with the International Institute for
Social History in Amsterdam. Becker’s remarkable archives and his breadth of knowledge provided
a timely corrective to the sparse material from the 1890s in our 20,000-document microfilm col-
lection. We especially appreciate his sharing of letters and anarchist journals in Goldman’s native
German language, most notably her earliest articles in Der Brandfackel. In part, because of Becker’s
contribution of copies of rare Goldman and Berkman documents written during the time of Gold-
man’s political initiation, the first volume of the series, Made for America, 1890–1901 (a title also
conceived during his visit), includes scholarly sources and annotations that are both authentic and
new— especially to an American readership.
During 1998 and 1999, a small group of graduate students in history at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, valiantly attempted to bring the early configuration of this documentary history to
completion. Carl Prince, professor of history at New York University and longtime documentary
editor, generously took a “busman’s vacation” during his frequent junkets from New York to Cali-
fornia and spent months editing annotations and working with the graduate student research as-
sociates. Robert Avila coordinated the work of Monica Rico, Daniel Rolde, and Jason Smith, and
worked with various undergraduate and graduate student researchers; together they created a for-
mat for the books, researched and wrote preliminary annotations, refined the editorial principles,
and gave of themselves, taking valuable time from their own dissertation work to forward the work
of the Emma Goldman Papers Project. Many of the Project’s graduate student editors over the years
had been trained in the field of documentary editing by Stephen Cole, who coordinated the early
research of Jennifer Beeson, Chad Bryant, Robert Geraci, Sarah Kim, Brigitte Koenig, and Louise
Nelson, among many others. Cole worked as an associate editor—first on the guide and index to
the microfilm collection, for which he wrote the bibliographical essay, then on the Project’s public
history outreach material including two high school curricula, followed by the writing of grants for
the formative stages of the American years edition. He was especially attuned to editorial principles
and practices, and although the Project has since changed course, we are grateful for Cole’s found-
ing efforts on the volumes. Crossing over during this time was Sally Thomas, the longest-standing
member of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, who worked first as an administrative assistant and
public programs specialist and then as an editor, carefully transcribing the prison letters. Among
the many ways in which she helped shape the Project’s mission, her vision of broad Web access has
become reality.
For a fuller account of the hundreds of people who worked with us over the years, especially as
we collected material for the microfilm and guide, please see Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life
and Documentary Sources (Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995) for the lists of editors, admin-
istrative and program staff (especially the army of graduate students), research associates, produc-
tion editors, editorial assistants, international search coordinators, international researchers, re-
search assistants and translators, the hundreds of contributing library institutions, and donors.
Among those who worked at the Project and helped set the path, we thank especially Ronald J.
Zboray, the microfilm editor for the first six years; Daniel Cornford for his short but important year
as associate editor; Thomas Peabody, who extended his research interests to serve as a key writer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 601
 of the narrative notes for the microfilm edition; Alice Hall, who coordinated the government doc-
ument series; Kurt Thompson, coordinator of the early computerization of our work; Dennis
McEnnerney and Vivian Kleiman, who assisted in the very early domestic and international search;
and the late Brenda Butler, our European and Asian search coordinator. Rebecca Hyman, Barbara
Loomis, and Robert Cohen very wisely built our newspaper collection, always cognizant that the
public perception of Goldman was a critical complement and counterpoint to our collection of her
personal letters. To all those from near and far who came to work with us, even briefly, we extend
our thanks. We hope that you can see the imprint of your work in this documentary edition and rec-
ognize the many facts that you tracked down years ago, now integrated into the historical fabric of
these volumes.
For a more extensive collection of the sources from which much of the documents in this edi-
tion were selected, researchers may consult Emma Goldman: A Comprehensive Microfilm Collection
(Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1991–1993). Though a remarkable number of new documents
were found in the process of working on the annotations for the American years’ edition, the ma-
terial already in the Emma Goldman Papers Project microfilm collection, brought together from
over a thousand archives and private collections, sets a broader documentary context (in raw form
without the scholarly apparatus of annotations). The search for documents and their organization,
identification, and publication in the microfilm archive laid the foundation for the book edition and
took almost fifteen years. I thank the many people who worked with the Emma Goldman Papers in
its early years, when its mission seemed more ephemeral, its tasks somewhat more mundane—
and for the result, an archive that is a quiet gift to scholars and political activists.
A very spirited and talented group of undergraduate research assistants helped us pull the final
details together, provided a fact-checking safety net, and shared our enthusiasm for expanding
the scope of our documentary history to include a history of the anarchist activity in America
and Europe that motivated and informed Goldman’s work. This task required remarkable detec-
tive work and tenacity. Guided by Barry Pateman and Jessica Moran, the office has been buzzing
with the excitement of discovery, the thrill of working with primary sources, and the sense that the
time has come to fill this gap in the historical record—a mission the Emma Goldman Papers Proj-
ect has been primed for and working toward for more than twenty years. Among the many
students who helped with background research for the annotations and appendices and per-
formed critical fact checking for the volumes, we thank especially Katherine Allen, Rajeev Ananda,
Jennifer Beeson, Ryan Boehm, Esther Byum, Theresa Chen, Rebecca Cohen, Evan Daniel, John
Elrod, Karen Rodriguez G’, Jennifer Guth, Karen Hannah, Erik Hetzner, Lisa Hsia, Mary (Mollie)
Hudgens, Alexandra Kemp, Jenny Lah, Hillary Lazar, Tamara Martinez, Dennis Marzan, Shani
McElroy, Sanaz Mozafarian, Jenny Mundy, Sara Newland, Emma Pollin, Heather Reese, Mariyan
Solimon, Sara Smith, Emily Spangler, Sayuri Stabrowski, Kristin Stankiewicz, Rachel Starr, Sarah
Stone, Andrea Valverde, Ehssan Vandaei, Billy Vega, Nicole Waugh, Angeline Young, Nicole Zill-
mer, and Kenyon Zimmer, among others. Gabriella Karl transcribed documents, performed back-
ground research for the annotations and directories, and helped coordinate the work of the
students, with a clear commitment to the Project that extended even to administrative tasks. The
administrative coordination of such a research project is enormous—and we thank especially
the generous-spirited Joanna Sterricker, Georgia Moseley, and Delcianna Windners for keeping
the plethora of forms and budgets and grants and paychecks moving, allowing the book edition to
move forward as well. And in this age of rapidly aging computers and dwindling finances, we thank

602 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Michael Katz for his years and years of frugal technical problem solving and Jason Jedd for coming
to our rescue so effectively over this past year of all-too-frequent computer crashes.
The Project was also graced with the generous talents of translators Paul Sharkey (for French,
Italian, and Spanish), Eli Katz (for Yiddish and German), and Reginald Zelnik and Lisa Little (for
Russian). We thank you all for your steady availability, linguistic and political intuition, and enthu-
siasm for our work. We are grateful for the many outside researchers who took an interest in our
work and led us to new documents—among whom, we especially thank Nicholson Baker for his
gift of the New York World collection and Robert Helms for the kind sharing of his extensive knowl-
edge of Philadelphia anarchists, and the many archivists who pored over their holdings on our be-
half, answering our queries and sending us their discoveries.
Every writer and historian needs a sounding board, constructive criticism, and people on the
outside of the work willing to jump in and pretend to be the average reader, especially in the final
hours when clarity is of the essence. I thank my many friends who functioned as outside editors
and personal advisors—spending hours reading through drafts and re-drafts of the various
configurations of this edition as well as the proposals, letters, and ancillary public history material.
First and foremost among those who gave so generously of themselves and their talents are Lor-
raine Kahn, filmmaker, humorist, and cultural theorist; Julianne Burton-Carvajal, artful editor, pro-
fessor of Latin American literature and film, local historian of Monterey, California, and biogra-
pher; my godson Daniel Burton Rose, offbeat political and cultural consultant; Joan K. Peters,
professor of English and author of dazzling books on women and work—all of these friends have
showered me with love and meticulous attention to the detail of the work, and deserve much credit
for the good within it. I also thank my fellow-biographers, especially Ramsey Breslin, art critic,
whose careful reading of the introduction to the first volume made all the difference, along with
colleagues in the psychobiography study group, particularly Marilyn Fabe, film critic, Stephen Wal-
rod, psychotherapist and art collector, and Alan Elms and William McKinley Runyan, leaders in the
field of psychobiography, who together added depth to my understanding of the interaction be-
tween the historical and psychological conditions that shape individual experience. Remi Omodele,
dear friend, neighbor, and scholar of the theater, not only brightened my daily life, wrapping fam-
ily and work seamlessly together, but imparted her tremendous insight into the political history of
the theater and Goldman’s relationship to it. Harriet Sage, staunch friend and appreciator of books
and of people, shared her keen psychological insights into the inner Goldman, and also coached
me through sickness and health with wisdom and generosity.
Librarians and archivists are at the core of almost every dimension of our work. The foundation
of all documentary editions are the primary sources and the books that provide an accurate histor-
ical context. A documentary editing project would be nowhere without the assistance of archivists
and librarians, whose quiet, persistent, meticulous dedication makes all research possible. We
thank you all. Fine anarchist collections are especially rare, and the Emma Goldman Papers Proj-
ect has been fortunate to work on an almost daily basis with Julie Herrada, who succeeded Ed
Webber and Katherine Beam as curator of the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan;
Herrada shared her material and her expertise with utmost generosity. The International Institute
for Social History in Amsterdam, where Goldman placed both her own collection and Berkman’s
after his death, allowed much of their extensive Goldman archive to be integrated into our com-
prehensive microfilm collection and has continued to assist the Emma Goldman Papers Project,
graciously filling in for previous omissions from her early political years, including rare Berkman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 603
 items, and offering access to the many difficult-to-find journals and photographs preserved in
their archive. We thank especially those who worked at IISH when the Project began—including
Rudolf de Jong, Thea Djuiker, Kees Rodenburg, Mieke Ijzermans, and then-director Erik Fisher—
and the current director, Jaap Kloosterman, for his ongoing assistance. We also honor the memory
of Deborah Bernhardt, director of New York University’s Tamiment Institute and Robert F. Wagner
collections, who graced our project with archival sources and true friendship and camaraderie, and
we thank those who followed her great example.
Fortunately for the Emma Goldman Papers, associate editor Barry Pateman is also the curator
of the Kate Sharpley Library, the largest collection of English-language anarchist material in the
U.K. Especially for the material on Goldman’s early years and for full-run copies of rare anarchist
journals, his collection cannot be matched. It has been remarkable to have access to a breadth of
material, literally at our fingertips, deepening the Project’s understanding of the anarchist move-
ment and refining the historical research for the books.
The Project is also privileged to be part of the University of California, Berkeley, an institution
with one of the most extensive research libraries in the nation. With over a thousand books circu-
lating from their stacks to our office, a steady stream of interlibrary loan requests, almost constant
use of the newspaper microfilm reading room, and frequent trips to the Bancroft Library’s archival
collection—we are deeply indebted to all who have facilitated our work, graciously approving the
multitude of proxy cards in my name, patiently taking our orders, respecting our work, and even
restoring rare manuscripts given to the Project. We thank Beth Sibley for expanding the collection
on our behalf, Gillian Boal for her careful restoration, the staff at the circulation desk, especially
Joyce Ford, a long-time colleague from afar, all the staff at the Interlibrary Loan Service, and all the
staff in the Microfilm Reading Room, especially Vicki Jourdan. We thank also former director of
the library Peter Lyman for his generosity to the Emma Goldman Papers, and we honor the current
University Librarian Tom Leonard, and the director of the Bancroft Library, Charles Faulhaber, who
has been especially kind to the Project, and his staff. In the process of working on these first vol-
umes of the documentary edition, we have had the help of many talented archivists and librarians
across the nation. As kindred book people, we salute your work, and thank you for your assistance
over the years—we literally could not have completed our volumes without you.
We would like particularly to acknowledge the pioneering work of Richard Drinnon, who in
1961 (twenty-one years after her death) published Rebel in Paradise, the first biography of Emma
Goldman. His book presaged the free speech movement on the Berkeley campus and the women’s
movement. The publication of Drinnon’s work may have fanned the flames of protest as organizers
welcomed in the discovery of a resonant historical spirit. The Drinnons helped me years ago, when
I was pregnant with child and also with great hopes as I embarked on the writing of the biography
Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman. Although we came to the Berkeley campus at very different
times, it seems that Richard Drinnon carved the space for Goldman there, and led the way for “Em-
masaries” everywhere.
There are no books at the Project’s office as worn as those written by Paul Avrich, the renowned
scholar of multiple books on the history of anarchism, who has personally and generously helped
us with innumerable questions over the years. For his careful reading of our texts, and his cama-
raderie, we send him our profound respect and appreciation. His dignity and fine work continue
to be an inspiration and our guide.

604 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The story of those who helped sustain the work of the Emma Goldman Papers deserves a
book in itself. Like all good projects without a secure financial base—including Goldman’s maga-
zine Mother Earth—we have relied on the generosity of our friends and our kindred spirits to
pull us through. Over time, our “Emma’s List” (the counterpart to “Emily’s List,” a fund focused on
electing women into public office) has evolved into a strong community bound together by a desire
to preserve the courage of those who, like Emma Goldman, dared to challenge hypocrisy and to
affirm what she considered everybody’s right to a world of economic and social liberty. Our staunch
Emma’s List supporters at all levels have surrounded us with kindness, affirming the significance
of our work and replenishing our resilience and perseverance. We thank you all, from the bottom
of our hearts.
Like Goldman’s own circle of political theorists, writers, journalists, and creative thinkers on
the burning issues of her time, the wide array of professional and personal paths represented on
Emma’s List is a tribute to the all-encompassing hope and inspiration the story of her life contin-
ues to evoke. It is important to note, however, that Emma’s List contributors by no means all agree
on every aspect of Goldman’s political trajectory. The unifying principle of their support is the be-
lief that the history of the early battles for free expression and the story of courage of individuals
like Emma Goldman deserve a permanent place in the nation’s documentary record.
Among the most compassionate and generous of our sustaining contributors is Lois Blum Fein-
blatt, whose modest dignity and concern for every aspect of the Project’s well-being has grounded
us in love. Her commitment to the promotion of mentoring in the schools and her own work as a
psychotherapist combined to bestow upon us all the wisdom, tolerance, and open-mindedness that
characterizes Emma’s List. The matriarch of a remarkably generous and politically impressive fam-
ily, all of whom have contributed to the Emma Goldman Papers, Lois Blum Feinblatt has been the
sweet soul who at various times underwrote the cost of our office space and whose constancy and
faith in the value of long-term research allowed us to push on. Her daughter, Carolyn Patty Blum,
a dear friend and colleague, is a lawyer who has championed human rights and protected political
exiles and whose work—in the spirit of Emma—puts fear into the heart of torturers everywhere.
She not only contributed to our material well-being but also was a brilliant reader for the introduc-
tory essays, especially on issues of human rights so integral to Goldman’s work. Lois’s daughter-in-
law, Judith Smith, an insightful historian of gender and race, sent the Emma Goldman Papers Proj-
ect the royalties from her book on urban history to promote our work; and her sister, Sarah Malino,
also a women’s historian, added her contribution as well. Lois’s cousin, Sunny Jo Brodsky, quilted
beautiful wall hangings with photographic images of Emma to adorn the halls of our Project and
also designed a pot-holder containing Goldman’s recipe for blintzes.
Cora Weiss, an Emma Goldman in her own right, proclaimed that “You don’t have to be an
anarchist to want Emma Goldman resources readily available. Women need role models on how
to be effective advocates, and how to make a perfect blintz.” Weiss is one of the most consistent,
persevering nongovernmental advocates for world peace and the rights of women and girls in the
twentieth century—her accomplishments and force of character have had a remarkable impact on
the movement against war and for global harmony and freedom. With her leadership, the Samuel
Rubin Foundation, committed to the promotion of work for peace and justice, graciously stretched
their guidelines for many years to honor the importance of the documentation of the lives and
activities of those in our past whose courage and vision laid the groundwork for the well-being of

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 605
 present and future generations across the world. One can only hope that the Rubin Foundation, and
Cora Weiss too, will consider documenting their own impressive history as an example of how in-
dividuals can, in fact, make an enormous difference. We have been honored to have their support.
The most remarkable recent rescue of the Emma Goldman Papers Project came from Stephen
Silberstein, a librarian and developer of computer systems who advanced the field of digitized ac-
cess and catalogue information retrieval and was a supporter of the University of California, Berke-
ley’s free speech movement. Working with others, Silberstein ensured that the history of that dra-
matic time in the 1960s would be a point of pride on the Berkeley campus. His contribution to the
Emma Goldman Papers Project followed the path blazed by his generous establishment of the Free
Speech Movement Cafe in Moffitt Library and an archive at the Bancroft Library that is also part of
the California Digital Library, available via the Internet to students of all ages all over the world. We
thank him for his support of the documentation of Emma Goldman’s early battles for free speech,
thus anchoring our work as part of the legacy of those who fought to uphold the right of free ex-
pression on college campuses across the nation.
The J. M. Kaplan Fund, through its project “Furthermore,” has also contributed generously to
our work, helping us get closer to publication and sharing our commitment to the documentary
history of the long and arduous struggle for freedom as well as an appreciation for the feisty and
courageous Emma Goldman.
A large proportion of our supporters, though by no means all, are people I’ve known for a very
long time who generously extended their friendship to the Emma Goldman Papers Project. The
constant thread that ties this extended family of friends is our belief in the possibility of change—
the on-going quest for social and economic ethics, the blossoming of individual creativity, and the
readiness to question authority in the name of social justice. Kernels of such values are evident in
the myriad of activities and life choices of many on Emma’s List.
The generous contributions of Judith Taylor, elegant poet and loyal friend, includes her finely
honed literary sensibilities—and the willingness to make the judgment call at midnight for a sen-
tence fix, to reign in excess, and to extend to the Project her compassion for the arduous process of
years of small victories and minor setbacks. For her belief in the value of work outside conventional
norms and her acceptance and tolerance for both “the good and bad Emma”—icon and complex
political figure—we thank her.
Hannah Kranzberg, a soulful spirit and friend, who has helped give voice to the progressive Jew-
ish community, to a vision of peace and justice, and to the arts, gave graciously of herself in my mo-
ments of despair—like Emma herself, Hannah is grounded in her culture and reaches beyond it,
in the name of freedom.
Extraordinary documentary filmmakers and friends Bill Jersey and Shirley Kessler contributed
generously to the Emma Goldman Papers Project over the years as kindred spirits in the challeng-
ing quest to make the history of the struggle for freedom accessible, piercing, and visually inviting.
Their talents for celebrating the rituals of life have deepened my own understanding of the link be-
tween private and public history.
Among those friends whose contributions to the Project extended into the actual writing and re-
search, are the magnificent Marge Frantz, radical historian, and Eleanor Engstrand, veteran librar-
ian, both women for peace and pillars of the community, who saw me through the very beginnings
of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, spent endless hours discussing nuances of history and mus-
ing about whether or not the world had in fact moved forward. They, along with the silver-tongued

606 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
biographer of William Lloyd Garrison, the late Henry Mayer; the insightful historian of the “com-
rades and chicken farmers” of the Petaluma area, Ken Kann; and the modest Emma Goldman-like
Sarah Crome, my closest early associate at the Project, invited me to join the Chamakome ranch, a
cooperative retreat named after an earlier Native American village on the same ridge along the
north coast of California. Surrounded by beauty and rare quiet, the Chamakome ranch has become
for me a sacred space for finding the focus so vital to the writing and editing of the Goldman vol-
umes. (I often wonder whether Goldman’s ability to put her thoughts in writing could have been
attributed in part to those who gave her “the farm,” her country retreat up the Hudson River in
Ossining, New York, and later, “Bon Esprit” in St. Tropez, France, where she wrote her autobiog-
raphy.) For the privilege of solitude and the solace of community, I thank my Chamakome-mates,
many of whom have also generously extended the ranch spirit of mutual aid to Emma’s List.
I especially thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for granting me the time for my
own writing, the honor of being in the elevated company of its very impressive history of “fellows,”
and for the encouragement to develop aspects of my work that diverge slightly from the path of the
Goldman Papers to include personal and political reflections upon these many years of editorial
engagement with Emma.
One of the most gratifying aspects of Emma’s List support has been the great privilege of re-
ceiving contributions in memory of those who lived in Emma’s spirit and in honor of those who
continue keep her legacy alive. Most touching of all are the contributions from the families of Gold-
man’s nearest and dearest friends—a gesture of continuity that has grounded our historical re-
search across time, across generations. The first of such contributions came years before the vol-
umes had even begun. Art Bortollotti, the Italian anarchist jailed in Canada under the repressive
laws of the pre-World War II era, won his freedom largely due to what was Goldman’s last political
battle—arousing public opinion on his behalf. In homage and appreciation to his dear friend and
comrade, Bortollotti sent his generous contribution of funds for the preservation of Goldman’s pa-
pers and the documentation of her political work with a note written on the Goldman stationery
that he had saved for over forty years.
Mecca Reitman Carpenter, the daughter of Goldman’s wayward lover and road manager, Ben
Reitman, embraced the Project with great ideas especially for our public outreach and funding, as
her father had done for Emma for over a decade. Giving generously of her own resources, she
weathered our struggles and celebrated our victories. Years ago when I wrote the very graphic, erotic
story of Goldman’s complex and passionate relationship with Mecca’s father in Love, Anarchy, and
Emma Goldman, I feared the censure of members of the Reitman family who might take offense at
the sexual themes of the book. Instead, I found the compassionate Mecca, who had worked through
her own relationship to her father in the unusually accepting biography of his many loves, No Re-
grets: Dr. Ben Reitman and the Women Who Loved Him, never shunning the raw complexity of the
clash of love and anarchy between her father and Emma. Even when her own health failed her,
Mecca Reitman Carpenter did not falter in her support of the Emma Goldman Papers.
The same devotion that propelled Goldman’s dear friends Ida and Ben Capes to move close to
her Missouri prison, thus minimizing her isolation with the comfort of visitors during those bleak
eighteen months from 1917 to 1919, also propelled the Capes children, grandchildren, nephews,
and nieces to support the Emma Goldman Papers— one of the most moving outpourings of friend-
ship across generations and across the continents. In a similar extension of camaraderie, we have
received contributions from the sons of Goldman’s witty lawyer, Arthur Leonard Ross; the daugh-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 607
 ter of Goldman’s Canadian friends, Sophie and Joe Desser, who in her youth had also assisted Gold-
man with her secretarial work; the son of Curtis Reese, who delivered an oration at Goldman’s fu-
neral; the daughter of Esther Laddon, who provided Goldman a home base in Canada; and the
daughter of Goldman’s friend Kate Wolfson. David Diamond, composer and violinist, and son of
Goldman’s Rochester, New York, seamstress, Chanele (Anna) Schilhaus, sent his contribution with
a remembrance of Goldman standing on a footstool with pins in her skirt as she cheered on his
musical career as a violinist—“Kling in de ganze Velt” (Play for the entire world)—as the smell of
her rosewater perfume suffused the air. Warren Billings, a friend of Alexander Berkman, who was
jailed in connection with the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco, was remembered
by his niece, who also contributed many of Billings’s books by Goldman to the Project. The Ferrer
Colony in Stelton, New Jersey, was remembered by many of the children of its members, including
the late Helen Seitz, who as a child sat on Emma’s lap when she visited the colony (Helen remem-
bered being scared and repelled by the sweaty embrace of this anarchist celebrity); she told us that
her parents met at a soiree in New York City given in Goldman’s honor. Another dear friend of the
Project is Amy Olay Kaplan, whose grandfather Maximiliano Olay was one of Emma Goldman’s
Spanish translators; together we uncovered her grandparents’ hidden past. Others who joined
Emma’s List grew up in anarchist circles in Chicago, Toronto, New York, and London. The late Wu
Ke Kang (Woo Yang Hao), a member of the Chinese anarchist circle living in Paris and translator
of Goldman’s works, was one among many who sent his support and recollections of Goldman’s
influence on China’s early revolution— especially on the revered author, Ba Jin. The late Arthur
Weinberg, who attended Goldman’s funeral services in Chicago, kindly corrected the reminis-
cences of others interviewed by the Project about the event. One contributor found a chance nota-
tion in his mother’s diary chronicling her attempt with a baby buggy to mount the stairs of a
crowded hall in San Francisco, anxious to hear Goldman lecture. These and other stories add life
and texture to our work, and the sweetness of human contact.
Contributors with personal contact to Goldman in her lifetime added their recollections to the
Project’s reminiscence file, which contains interviews with Goldman associates now deceased,
ranging from Roger Baldwin, the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, to Mollie Ack-
erman, one among many of Goldman’s young secretaries and friends. Ahrne Thorne, editor of
Fraye Arbeter Stimme, spent hours sharing his ideas and commiserating about the mammoth task
I had taken on. Albert Meltzer, the London anarchist whom Goldman referred to as “a young hooli-
gan,” opened his heart to the Emma Goldman Papers Project, sharing his ideas and his books,
widening his circle to include us and our work. Federico Arcos and his late wife, Pura, inspired by
Goldman in their youth in Spain, opened their home in Canada and displayed their collection of
Goldman’s books and suitcases.
Most significant to the publication of Goldman’s works has been the generosity and friendship
bestowed upon us by Goldman’s nephews and literary heirs—David and the late Ian Ballantine.
I remember Ian Ballantine, the publisher of Bantam (and Ballantine) Books, sitting at his desk in
a very tall office building in New York and proclaiming, “Aunt Emma never believed in restrictions
of any kind, so why should I?” Over the years, David Ballantine, an author and collector of antique
guns, shared with the Project various items his aunt had secreted away, including the ledger docu-
menting those who contributed to her work, her legal fees, and the cost of incidentals for her mag-
azine and lecture tours. Without their sanction, the written legacy of Emma Goldman could never
have been as extensively preserved.

608 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 Parents, children, and friends—all have been honored on Emma’s List. The group as a whole is
a remarkable blend—joining together political thinkers Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky; pio-
neers of the women’s movement, most notably Gloria Steinem, and of women’s research, such as
Mariam Chamberlain, Gerda Lerner, and Naomi Weisstein, among many others; and stellar liter-
ary figures including E. L. Doctorow, Barbara Kingsolver, Marilyn French, Erica Jong, Ken Burrows,
Dianne Middlebrook, Peter Glassgold, Brenda Webster, and the late and witty muckraking author
Jessica Mitford, who was completely in thrall to issues raised by Emma’s life but thought it “deadly
boring” to brave organizing anybody’s papers, no matter how great they were.
Among the more theatrical figures on Emma’s List drawn to Goldman’s life are Susan Sarandon
and Tim Robbins, Harold Ramis, and documentary filmmakers Vivian Kleiman, Rick Goldsmith,
Coleman Romalis (whose film on Emma Goldman in Canada includes an interview with the
Emma Goldman Papers Project as well). Others include Pacifica Radio commentator and film-
maker Alan Snitow and Deborah Kauffman, who founded with Janice Plotkin the San Francisco
Jewish Film Festival. The late Rella Lossy wrote a wonderful and playful theater piece on Ben and
Emma. We have worked with several actresses who played Emma in the theatrical adaptation of
E. L. Doctorow’s book Ragtime, especially Camille Saviola and Mary Gutzi. Years ago, the actress
Adele Proom impersonated Emma, pretending to break into what was an inspired benefit perfor-
mance by the spirited singer and songwriter Michelle Shocked—a gathering of remarkable com-
munity and university activists who also read from the Goldman letters and speeches that most
matched their own work. The political satirist and illustrator Ed Sorel once identified Emma in a car-
toon as one of the “messy” characters with which a certain kind of political activist feels at home—
a sentiment to which we all concur. Also among Emma’s List supporters is Nina Hartley, feminist
and pornographic-film actress, proudly carrying on the legacy of Goldman’s celebration of sexuality
and campaign against Puritanism.
Among the contributors to Emma’s List are many who have devoted their lives to the docu-
mentation of the struggle for freedom. Most generous and enthusiastic among women’s historians
is Nancy Hewitt, who believes that much of what has shaped America is “wisdom from the mar-
gins.” In her article published in Voices of Women Historians (1999; edited by Eileen Boris and
Nupur Chaudhuri), Hewitt has claimed us all as the keepers of “Emma’s Thread” of commutar-
ian values and global visions. In a touching gesture of solidarity, over the years Hewitt has made
contributions to the Project in honor of many of her students; when they earn their doctorates, they
receive an archival photograph of Emma Goldman writing at a desk adorned with lilies, printed by
Richard Gordon—the Project’s donor gift to keep the inspiration flowing! We are honored by the
financial support and intellectual vote of confidence from historians across the nation—Martha
Ackelsberg, Harriet Alonso, Eric Anderson, Elizabeth Berry, Virginia Bouvier, Robert Cherny,
Harry Chotiner, Blanche Weisen Cook, Nancy Cott, Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Carl N. Degler,
Martin Duberman, Tom Dublin, Bob Dunn, Robert Elias, Estelle Freedman, Susan Glenn, Jim
Gregory, Susan Groves, Louis Harlan, Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, Ira Lapidus, Jesse
Lemisch, Lawrence and Cornelia Levine, Sally Miller, Nell Painter, Carl Prince, David Roediger,
Ruth Rosen, Carol Rosenberg, Roy Rosenzweig, Sheila Rowbotham, Alix Shulman, Barbara Sicher-
man, Kitty Sklar, Daniel Soyer, Peter Stansky, Randolph Starn, William Tuttle, Laurel Ulrich, Susan
Vladmir-Morgan, Daniel and Judith Walkowitz, Bonnie Lynn Weiner, and Susumu Yamazumi,
among others—and from our colleagues among scholarly documentary editors, especially
Rudolph Vecoli of the Immigration History Project, Maeva Marcus of the First Federal Congress

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 609
 Papers, John and Harriet Simon of the Ulysses S. Grant and of the John Dewey Papers, respectively,
and my dear friends Clayborne and Susan Carson of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers—all of
whose historical work resonates with Goldman’s and makes a difference—today. We are especially
grateful for the research assistance and camaraderie of the Consortium for Women’s History—
most notably Esther Katz and Cathy Moran Hajo of the Margaret Sanger Papers, Ann Gordon and
Patricia Holland of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers, and the soulful pio-
neer of women in documentary editions, Mary Lynn McCree Bryan of the Jane Addams Papers.
Members of Emma Goldman Papers faculty advisory board answered our queries and validated our
work among colleagues across scholarly disciplines. Led by Leon Litwack, they include, among oth-
ers, Lawrence Levine, Reginald Zelnik, Susan Schweik, and the late Michael Rogin, whose appre-
ciation was familial and dated back to 1906, when his great aunt Rosie Rogin was arrested with
Emma Goldman.
Emma’s List has elicited an unusual gathering of supporters for whom Goldman’s story taps
into both their desire to promote the social good and their own streak of rebelliousness and daring.
These desires are expressed in the way they live their lives and in the manner in which they choose
and perform their work—and are the common denominator of this outstanding group. It has
been an honor to be in their midst, and to have their support. Members of Emma’s List come from
a wide range of occupations—from workers in methadone clinics, psychotherapists, and doctors,
to retired women who send $18 each year to signify “chai” or “life” in Hebrew. Many are archivists
and anarchists, students, teachers, librarians, social scientists, university administrators and com-
munity activists, labor leaders, publishers, editors, journalists, newscasters, radio personalities,
economics analysts, philanthropists, foundation officials, professors from an amazing array of
scholarly disciplines, anthropologists, secretaries, flight attendants, architects, designers, photog-
raphers, public health advocates, environmental activists and arborists, scientists, statisticians, ten-
nis and soccer moms and dads, Pulitzer prize winners, progressive religious leaders, gourmet
cooks, computer whizzes and mathematicians, artists, progressive business executives, and a large
contingent of progressive attorneys.
Among those who welcome our calls for help is photographer and friend Marion Brenner, who
continues to grace us with her time and talent. The excellent and creative work of photographer
Richard Gordon and graphic designers Andrea Sohn (the niece of the Project’s co-founder Sarah
Crome) and Lisa Roth on our outreach public-history materials has maintained the level of excel-
lence in the Project.
San Diego consumer advocacy attorney Eric Isaacson, who found us through the Emma Gold-
man Papers website, single-handedly determined that he would change the bad reputation of his
city in which Goldman’s lover and manager Ben Reitman was driven into the desert—tarred, sage-
brushed, and sexually attacked by a band of high-level city officials acting as vigilantes—as part of
the incredibly brutal San Diego free speech fight of 1912. Recently, Eric Isaacson organized support
for the Emma Goldman Papers Project, rallying his partners and friends to come to our aid in a mo-
ment of deep financial crisis. There is a kind of ironic justice underlying this outpouring of sup-
port for the Emma Goldman Papers from advocates for consumer and stockholders’ rights who
have chosen to share a portion of the proceeds of their victories with those who are documenting
the papers of one of the great foremothers of the battle against corporate greed.
Our research base has always been the University of California, Berkeley. By far the most com-
passionate and forward-thinking members of the university’s administrative team have been

610 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Joseph Cerny, the former vice chancellor for research, and his core staff, associate vice chancellor
Linda Fabbri, and director of budget and personnel Susan Hirano—all of whom recognized the
value of the kind of research that didn’t fit neatly into the established categories of the university.
These volumes are a tribute to their belief and support, and to the quiet but critical efforts of oth-
ers who add courage and vision to the mix of administrative duties. We also extend our thanks to
Beth Burnside, the current vice chancellor for research, and her staff.
Seconded by the support of Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl, a champion of maintaining the uni-
versity as a sacred space for interchange and inquiry for even the most challenging ideas, the
Emma Goldman Papers Project has enjoyed a long period of relative security that allowed the work
to move forward—and without which, these volumes could never have been published in such a
timely and careful manner.
We are grateful for the year-long combined outright and matching grant from the National En-
dowment for the Humanities. More than ten years ago, NEH support solidified the Project’s work
with a three-year grant that coincided with parallel support from both the Ford and the Rockefeller
Foundations. Those early grants helped create the base from which these volumes on Goldman’s
American years were written, and are greatly appreciated. We thank especially Sheila Biddle, for-
merly of the Ford Foundation.
There are anarchist archives across the globe in which all the work of processing the material is
voluntary and completely run as a cooperative. Their staffs, unlike ours, all share the same anar-
chist political perspective. The idea of applying for government grants and constantly jumping
through administrative hoops, or even accepting corporate funds, would be abhorrent to them. We
revere their tenacity, devotion, and ability to merge the form and content of their work. We have
benefited from their sources, and from their wisdom, and hope that they too value our efforts,
recognize the validity of our struggles, and will reap the benefits of the Emma Goldman Papers’ re-
markable depth of research—now available to all.
To all our supporters, material and spiritual, the ever-generous members of Emma’s List—
many of whom are unlisted small donors with large spirits, and all of whom have carried us
through our sparsest times—we wish to convey our sincere appreciation and respect and hope that
you will take pride in contributing to a work intended for posterity. The most important grants are
intangible—the gestures of support from friends, family, and community that affirm that this very
long process is worth the effort.
To all those institutions, foundations, and individuals who have lent their names and generous
spirit and talent to the Emma Goldman Papers, we thank you. Your contribution has laid the foun-
dation for the comprehensive reach of the volumes. We appreciate your support but relieve you of
responsibility for factual mistakes or errors of omission on our part. We are deeply grateful to our
extended family of friends and colleagues, unnamed here but not forgotten, without whom this
work would never have come this far.

Emma Goldman and the Emma Goldman Papers Project have been fixed constellations in my im-
mediate family, looming over and around us with a constancy that has been both reassuring and
disconcerting at times—a long-term relationship that has deepened with time. It has been more
than twenty-five years since the day my husband-to-be and I browsed in a guitar store in Chicago’s
Hyde Park with my dog “Emma”—a rambunctious Irish setter–Golden retriever who burst into
the shop after us. From the moment my friend, John Bowen, who worked at the shop, asked her

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 611
 name, my personal history was transformed forever. Scratching his head as he stroked the dog,
Bowen remembered that he had seen back in the storeroom a box of letters that bore the large
scrawl “E. Goldman” on the envelopes’ return addresses. Within minutes, a boot box of old, yel-
lowed letters appeared, and we were overtaken with the torrent of passion and torment between
Emma Goldman, the great heroine of personal and political freedom, and the wayward and promis-
cuous Ben Reitman, her talented road manager and lover. It was not long before I embarked on the
first of many challenging attempts to draw together and interpret the complexities of Goldman’s
all-encompassing spirit. For me, a young student in my twenties and very much a part of the wom-
en’s movement and counterculture “love” generation, reading letters Goldman had written when
she was thirty-eight years old seemed like prying into the surprising vulnerabilities of a very old
woman. Many people helped me muster the confidence to write a respectful biography of her
struggle to balance intimate life with her public proclamations. After more than twenty-five years
of living with the papers of Emma Goldman, the perspective of age has became an important over-
lay and my concerns have shifted and broadened. All through my intense engagement with the is-
sues in and around Goldman’s life, the love and constancy of my family and friends kept me from
losing myself to the past, from losing track of my own trajectory and parallel entitlement to a full
life. For this, and more, I especially thank my husband, Lowell Finley, there from the very first dis-
covery of Emma’s letters, master of titles, editorial sounding board, advocate of free speech and
political justice, shield of caring and love; my daughter Mara, an eloquent young woman, and son,
Jesse, a creative young man with a vision—who have all allowed Emma to be a positive presence
in their lives and have respected the preemptive demands of work on the Emma Goldman Papers
Project with remarkable patience and affection.
When I was pulled by illness all too abruptly into a treacherous and tenuous realm of life and
death, my family, friends, colleagues, and talented healers rallied to my support. I am forever grate-
ful to have survived that harrowing time. That my children’s lives were cradled in kindness and the
momentum of the work of the Emma Goldman Papers hardly faltered, is a tribute to an extraordi-
nary community for whom the desire to repair the world extends to caring for each other. Among
the many who were at my side at that time, I thank especially Norma Blight, mother-in-law extra-
ordinaire; Cornelia Sherman, cousin and soul-mate; and my dear friends Nancy Bardecke, Yvette
Chalom and Paul Fogel, Ruth Butler and Arie Arnon, Joan K. Peters and Peter Passell, Remi Omo-
dele and Ric Lucien, Meredith Miller and Richard Gordon, Cleo Deras and Carlos Hernandez, Deb-
orah Hirtz Waterman, and from afar, my sister, Jane Falk, and my aunts, uncles, cousins, various
in-laws, and adopted family across the country—all of whom never faltered in their caring and love.
And where else but in the Bay Area can one find such remarkably forward-thinking restorers of
health? I am profoundly grateful to my doctors Debu Tripathy and Laura Esserman, who combine
amazing compassion with cutting-edge research, and to Michael Broffman (and his compassion-
ate assistant Louise Estupian), doctor of acupuncture and complementary medicine, whose cre-
ativity and willingness to step away from the dominant paradigm is in the spirit of Emma herself.
I thank also Adele Schwarz, Eileen Poole, Donna La Flamme, and Neil Kostick, whose intuitions
about the intersection of the mind and the body gave me hope in my darkest hours, and to doctors
Philip O’Keefe and Charles Jenkins and Risa Kagan, whose caring attention to detail literally saved
my life, and to my sweet soulful support group—the “bosom buddies” Denyse Gross, Barbara Hof-
fer, Anja Hübener, and the late Jeannie McGregor.

612 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 Ultimately, the Emma Goldman Papers Project too could not have survived without a commu-
nity of support—scholars, donors, political activists, and ordinary people whose imaginations were
sparked by Goldman’s daring. The unique and intrepid City of Berkeley has honored Emma Gold-
man “as a major figure in the history of American radicalism and feminism . . . early advocate of
free speech, birth control, women’s equality and independence, union organization” and com-
mended the Project for its “perseverance” and for inspiring the “collaboration of scholars,
archivists, activists, students, and volunteers, both in Berkeley and around the world.” In 1998, the
city council proclaimed May 14—the day of Emma Goldman’s death—as Emma Goldman Papers
Project Day. With the publication of these volumes, we hope to mark a rebirth of interest in Gold-
man as “a voice crying out against injustice and oppression, wherever it has existed”—and we
honor all those who helped make our work possible.
with appreciation and respect,
candace falk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 613
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 INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations; page numbers immediately followed by the abbre-
viation Ger. indicate documents in the German language; other abbreviations used include EG
(Emma Goldman) and AB (Alexander Berkman).

Abbott, Leonard, 549 509; handbill for, 363; newspaper on, 58 –

abolition movement, 551 59, 362 – 65
abstentionism, 542. See also political The Alarm (Chicago and New York): composi-
participation tor for, 543; contributors to, 520, 526, 535,
Académie Française, 419 550; dates of, 493; demise of, 234; descrip-
Adam, Paul, 239n1 tion of, 563; editors of, 535, 549; founding
Adam and Eve story, 211–12, 245– 46, 322 of, 491; IWPA’s role in, 572; suppression of,
Adams, James W., 514, 565 492
Addams, Jane, 539, 559 Aleinikoff, Nicholas, 104
Addis, Henry: arrest and imprisonment of, Alexander II (tsar of Russia): assassination of,
312n33, 392 –93n2, 502, 551–52, 565; associ- 14, 15, 51, 424n4, 427, 491, 545, 550; Corps
ates of, 536, 544; biographical summary on, of Pages of, 538; liberalization by, 121n7;
516; on de Cleyre, 399; ethics debate and, Most on, 120n3
402n6; mentioned, 398n11; on political par- Alexander III (tsar of Russia), 121, 495
ticipation, 53, 334–36; on publicity about Allegheny City (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504
speakers, 236n1; speeches arranged by, 506, Altgeld, John Peter: biographical summary on,
508; written contributions of, 565 516; friends of, 526; Haymarket anarchists
The Adult (London), 533, 556, 563 pardoned by, 27, 265, 497, 516, 530, 546,
AFL. See American Federation of Labor 555; praise for, 552
Africa: colonialism in, 230, 553. See also Anglo- Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel
Boer War (1899 –1902) Workers, 106 –7n13, 531. See also Home-
agents provocateur: Coulon as, 223, 524, 527, stead (Pa.) strike
547; Czolgosz as possible, 460n1, 468, 512; Amalgamated Wood Workers Union, 507
use of term, 221 American Federation of Labor (AFL): alterna-
Age of Thought, 264 tive to, 528; EG on, 37; mentioned, 229 –
L’Agitazione, 541 30n1; officers of, 280n1, 280n3, 280n7,
agrarian workers: miseries of, 314 281n8, 532; as opposed to convention,
“The Aim of Humanity” (EG): delivery of, 508, 288n1; possible appeal via, 251–53; resolu-

615
 American Federation of Labor (AFL) of, 27, 48, 140, 234, 500; description of,
(continued) 563– 64; editors of, 106n11, 529, 530, 542,
tion on AB’s sentence by, 251n5, 561; speak- 548, 558; EG’s opinion of, 192 –93; founding
ers for, 99n14; support for, 535, 578; trade of, 493; letters to (EG), 116 –18Ger., 119 –21;
unions in, 98n11, 571 location of, 495; masthead of, 117; publisher
Americanization: argument for, 48; EG’s Euro- of, 520
pean travels and, 62 – 63; pattern of EG’s, 21 The Anarchist (London), 556, 561, 564
American Journal of Eugenics, 533 Anarchist American Group of New York, 237n5
“American Justice” (EG): text of, 183– 85Ger., anarchist collectivism: anarchist communist
186 – 89 strand vs., 17, 101–2n3. See also Bakunin,
American Labor Union, 37, 499 Michael; Most, Johann
American Railway Union (ARU): Altgeld’s anarchist communism: anarchist collectivism
support for, 516; defense of, 526; officers of, vs., 17, 101–2n3; definition of, 490 –91; eval-
281n9, 344n3, 497, 527; SDA’s formation uation of progress in U.S. of, 64; focus of,
and, 501, 575. See also Pullman strike 8 –9; interest increased in, 393; newspaper
American Revolution: Kropotkin on, 538; men- for, 551; possible representative of, 399;
tioned, 145– 46n6, 164, 179 – 80 tensions in, 16. See also Kropotkin, Peter;
American Secular Union, 528, 530, 572 Peukert, Joseph
American Single Tax League, 575 Anarchist Labour Leaf, 547
American Socialist Federation, 548 “Anarchist Laws” (EG): text of, 209 –10Ger.,
Am Olam (Eternal People) colonization move- 211–13
ment, 104n9 anarchist movement: appeal of (EG), 8, 20,
anarchism: class’s intersection with, 72 – 70; conferences of, 368n3; culture of, 18 –
73, 357–59; colors symbolic of, 144– 45n3, 19, 62 – 63, 357– 61, 397; debates in, 40 – 41;
208n7, 275, 449; EG’s definitions of, 20 –21, development of, 392 –94; divisions in, 17–
77, 100 –101, 173, 402; EG’s influences on, 18, 25–27, 40 – 41, 53, 76 –77; first national
8 –9, 39; EG as spokesperson for, 42, 57– association in U.S., 491; lethargy in, 264;
59, 79 – 80; EG’s trial as test of, 207– 8; and need for English speaking, 258; in relation
historians, 2; liberty as central to, 355–56; to socialists, 54–55; solidarity lacking in,
misinformation about, 481– 82; as philoso- 397–98; traditions of, 2; in western states,
phy of life, 426 –27, 431, 434–35, 477, 479; 338. See also international anarchist move-
single tax linked to, 574–75; social science ment; Pittsburgh Manifesto (1883); press,
linked to, 576 –77; terrorism equated with, anarchist
79 – 80; themes and goals of, 153n6, 181– anarchists: appearance of, 283– 84; characters
82, 225–26, 360, 394, 453; theory vs. prac- of, 13–14, 336; definition of, 57–58, 402 –3,
tice of, 437; U.S. receptiveness to, 236 –37, 431; EG on being, 29; EG’s communication
357–59, 428, 429, 441; women’s freedom as with, 32 –33; ethics of, 400 – 403; European
precursor to, 273; women’s role in, 42 – 45, influences, 13–14; influential, 396; Italians
289 –92. See also anarchist collectivism; an- as, 348; immigrants as, 13–14; on sexual is-
archist communism; anarchist movement; sues, 12 –13; socialists’ break with, 39 – 40,
anarchists 397, 501; socialists compared to, 41, 453;
Der Anarchist (St. Louis and New York): AB’s socialists’ conflict with, 54–55, 96 –99. See
prison letters in, 124Ger., 125–26; appeal also Haymarket anarchists; political prison-
for AB in (EG), 122Ger., 123, 496; demise ers; Walsall anarchists (England)

616 INDEX
anarcho-syndicalism, 550. See also syndicalism Der arme Teufel (The Poor Devil, Detroit): de-
Andrews, Stephen Pearl, 559 mise of, 509; description of, 564; founding
Andreyev, Leonid, 566 of, 492, 553; as influence, 315; mentioned,
Angiolillo, Michele: assassination of Cánovas 261; subscribers of, 305– 6, 307, 308
by, 55, 274n1, 284n4, 341– 42, 347, 501–2, Armour (company), 385n3
521; biographical summary on, 517; men- Aronstam, Elias A., 106
tioned, 396, 456 Aronstam, Modest. See Stein, Modest (Fedya)
Anglo-Boer War (1899 –1902): Chamberlain Arrango, Alfredo, 277
and, 522; EG on, 60 – 61, 384– 88, 509; op- art: authority in, 355; preference for modern
position to, 382, 394, 395; outbreak of, 508, (EG), 413, 415. See also beauty
543, 553; stakes in, 383n7 ARU. See American Railway Union
Anthony, Susan B., 186n1 Asch, Sholem, 46
Anthropological Society, 511 Ashbridge, Samuel Howell, 440n2, 442,
anti-anarchist laws: in France (lois scélérates), 446n1, 447– 48
66, 418 –19, 498, 522, 532, 534, 560; in Ger- Ashorn, J. B., 344
many, 212; proposed in U.S., 80, 212 –13, assassinations: as acts of individuals, 427–28;
471–72n4, 513 anti-anarchist hysteria as response to, 471–
Anti-Authoritarian International: beginning of, 72n4, 485; attitudes toward, 14–16, 103; de-
489; division leading to, 65, 398n12; final nunciation of, 346 – 48; fears of, 63– 64, 75;
congress of, 490; participants in, 526 history of, 79; influences on, 68 – 69; moti-
Anti-Coolie League, 561 vations for, 132 –33n3, 223–25, 246, 249,
anti-foreign labor campaigns, 229 –30n1 341, 427–28, 463, 476; natural phenomena
Anti-Imperialism League (New York), 525 compared to, 475; responses to, 55–56, 66,
antimilitarism: EG’s support for, 60 – 61, 384– 274–75, 342. See also propaganda by the
88. See also specific wars deed (attentats); specific people
Anti-Poverty societies, 529, 575 Associated Labor Press, 535
anti-Semitism: Dreyfus case and, 324n2, 499; Associations Law (1901), 561
persistence of, 243– 44; question about, L’Associazione, 541
372n6; aversion to, 62 AT. See Der arme Teufel
Anti-Slavery Society, 551 Atlantic Monthly, 539
anti-statist tradition in U.S.: influences on, attentats. See assassinations; propaganda by
145– 46n6; mentioned, 248n4, 332, 426n8; the deed
representatives of, 536, 549, 551 L’Aube, 239
appearance and clothing (EG): in Chicago ar- L’Aurora (Spring Valley, Ill.), 60, 77, 80, 478n
rest, 466; height of, 155n2; interest in, 158; L’Aurore (Paris): founding of, 560; Paris con-
newspapers on, 22, 35–36, 58, 111–12, 155, gress and, 421; Zola on Dreyfus case in,
243, 247, 283, 289, 290, 318, 331, 362, 423, 324n2, 421n18, 503, 528
441; phrenological view of, 35, 214–16, 526; Austin, Kate: biographical summary on, 517;
in prison, 197; on release from prison, 201 Czolgosz defended by, 77, 475n6, 478n;
Appel, Theodore, 503 EG’s praise for, 71; ethics debate and, 402n6;
Arbeter Fraint, 367, 562 location of, 314n39; mentioned, 46, 340n1,
Arbeiterstimme, 578 428; report of, 509; speeches arranged by,
Arbeiter Zeitung, 534, 564 503, 508; written contributions of, 565, 567;
Arden (Del.): single-tax colony in, 575 works: “The Question of the Sexes,” 13

INDEX 617
 Austin, Sam, 314n39, 503, 508 Ballantine, Stella (Cominsky) Comyn, 160n10
Austria: anarchism in, 238; EG’s visit to, 500; Baltimore Critic, 95
minorities in, 407n6 Baltimore (Md.): EG’s speeches in, 95, 494,
Austro-Prussian War (1866), 530 496, 499, 501
authority: EG’s definition of, 57, 353 Balzac, Honoré de, 419n16
“Authority vs. Liberty” (EG): delivery of, 505, Barondess, Joseph: arrest of, 168n12; bio-
506, 507, 509; excerpt from, 353–56; popu- graphical summary on, 518; testimony
larity of, 57 of, 168; union of, 425n7, 493; warrant for,
Die Autonomie (Autonomy, London): contribu- 497
tors to, 127–28Ger., 129, 539; description of, Barre (Vt.): EG’s speeches in, 57, 353–56, 507;
564; focus of, 9; founding of, 551; support EG’s visit to, 276n5
for, 17, 519, 543; violent rhetoric in, 15, 101 “The Basis of Morality” (EG): delivery of,
autonomists: use of term, 101; mentioned, 103, 382n3, 505
111, 119n1, 317, 551, 555, 530, 563, 564 Bastiat, Frederic, 559
Autonomy Group (American), 192n2, 494, Battola, Jean, 223, 495, 519
543– 44. See also Gruppe Autonomie Bauer, Henry: AB’s defense and, 369, 520,
Avant Courier, 549 570 –71; arrest and imprisonment of, 26,
Aveling, Edward, 578 138 –39, 258, 262, 501, 520; associates of,
543; attorney of, 125n1; biographical sum-
Bacon Society, 556 mary on, 519; code-name for, 254n2; de-
Baginski, Max: biographical summary on, fense of, 549; editorship of, 566; EG’s re-
517; editorship of, 564, 566, 568, 569; EG’s union with, 307–9; EG’s speeches and, 504;
meetings with, 359n8, 505, 513; mentioned, escape plan and, 502; Homestead strike
257n3, 312n33, 497, 507; speeches of, 499, and, 106 –7n13, 495–96; mentioned, 188n3,
503; on Stirner’s egoism theory, 558; as sus- 449; research material on, 265, 266; suspi-
picious of Czolgosz, 512 cions about, 113n4; visitors for, 255; written
Baginski, Richard, 251n1, 261n5, 262, 517 contributions of, 567
Bailey, David G., 146n7 Bax, Ernest Belfort, 578
Bailey, Warren Worth, 575 Beall, Edgar C., 214n1
Bakers’ and Confectioners’ Unions, 505, 561 Beaver Falls (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504
Bakers’ Journal, 97, 561 Beccaris, Gen. Fiorenzo Bava, 505
Bakunin, Michael: associates of, 526, 538, 541; Bedborough, George, 537, 556, 563
on authority, 57, 355n5; biographical sum- Bell, Thomas H., 62, 509, 560
mary on, 518; economic collectivism of, 16; Bellamy, Edward, 528, 544
First International and, 398n12, 489, 540; Bemis, Edward W., 265– 66
on god, state, and religion, 273n7; as influ- Benek, A., 382 – 83n4
ence on EG, 8, 13, 212n1, 273n7; as influ- Bennett, D. M., 151n1, 490
ence on others, 548, 552, 559; influence of Berger, Victor: associates of, 518, 527; coloniza-
Marx on, 518; Marx’s opposition to, 542; tion project and, 339n2; leadership of, 501,
mentioned, 42 – 43, 50, 68, 483, 490, 559; 579; SDA convention and, 506; socialism
Nettlau’s biography of, 412, 414, 547; on of, 575; and Socialist Party, 512
propaganda by the deed, 15; written contri- Berkman, Alexander (Sasha): arrest, trial, and
butions of, 566; works: God and the State, sentencing of, 23, 129, 217–18, 223, 249n7,
57, 273n7, 355n5 251n5, 496; associates of, 519, 527, 548; at-

618 INDEX
 tempted killing by, 16, 22 –23, 25–27, 220, for, 491; European pamphlets on, 66, 509;
318 –19, 496; on attentats, 76, 78, 132 –33n3, Neo-Malthusian groups interested in, 64
434n3; biographical summary on, 519 –20; Bismarck, Otto von, 212, 484, 543
birth of, 489; and depression, 26; EG’s loy- black, as symbol of anarchism, 144– 45n3,
alty to, 25–27; finances of, 109; and Freiheit, 208n7
18; on Homestead, 106 – 8; illustrations of, Black International. See International Working
101, 104; influences on, 7n14, 101, 156 –57n4; People’s Association
legal appeals of, 218n3; letters from (gen- Blacksmith Helpers Union, 511
eral), 26 –27, 42; letters from (1892 –1893), Blackwell, James, 565
124Ger., 125–26, 127–28Ger., 129, 132 –39; Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary: daily activi-
letters from (1896 –1900), 254–56; letters ties in, 198 –200; description of, 196 –98;
from (1901), 457–59, 484– 88; living ar- horrors in, 200; mentioned, 95; Most’s
rangements of, 21–22, 493, 494; member- sentences to, 275n2, 492 –93, 494–95;
ships of, 574; mentioned, 57, 212, 389; mo- Women’s Insane Asylum at, 520. See also
tives of, 132 –33n3, 223–25, 246, 249, 341; imprisonment (EG’s)
names for, 106n12, 341n4, 471n3; newspa- Blatchford, Robert, 576
per articles on, 100 –110; pardon denied for, Blissert, Robert, 99
254–55; on personal transformation, 83– “Bloody Sunday” deaths (Trafalgar Square),
84; on Peukert-Most conflict, 17; relation- 205n3, 541
ship with Anna Minken, 21, 24 (See also Bly, Nellie: biographical summary on, 520; EG
Goldman-Berkman relationship); research interviewed by, 29 –30, 155– 60; illustration
material on, 265, 267– 68; suicidal thoughts of, 156
of, 136; support for, 37–38, 123, 125 (See also Bodansky, Julius, 497
Berkman Defense Association); suspicions Boerne, Ludwig, 401
about (Most’s), 113n4; on violence, 477n12; Boersma, Douwe, 510
works: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, 26 – bohemianism, 58, 63. See also anarchist move-
27, 60, 414n1, 488n12. See also imprison- ment, culture of
ment (AB’s) Bonfield, Capt. John “Black Jack,” 248
Berkman, Joseph, 267 Bookbinders Union, 555
Berkman Defense Association: accusations Borland, Wilfred P., 399, 520, 576
concerning, 40 – 41, 240 – 42; active people Boston (Mass.): EG’s speeches in, 285– 87,
in, 349 –52, 369, 519, 520, 532, 548; appeals 305, 502, 504, 506, 510; social science club
of, 217–18, 237, 242n, 246, 251–53, 496, in, 577. See also Liberty: Not the Daughter but
500, 501, 506, 508; description of, 570 –71; the Mother of Order; The Rebel
efforts of, 56 –57, 217–18; funds for, 40 – 41, Boston Daily Globe, 559
227n, 249, 250, 258, 260, 262, 312, 325, 535, The Boston Index, 559
570; treasurers of, 241, 243n1 Boston Investigator, 528
Berman, Nahum H., 401, 520, 537, 567 Boston Revolutionists, 491
Bernhardt, Sarah, 331 Brady, Edward: AB’s defense and, 520, 570;
Biedenkapp, Georg, 262, 262n3 appeal for AB’s release and, 351n3, 352, 506;
Bienowitch, Yegor (EG’s uncle), 424n5 biographical summary on, 520; businesses
Bierce, Ambrose, 555 of, 74, 467n11, 500, 504, 512; EG’s relation-
Bimberg, Harry, 422 ship with, 24, 34, 63, 169n15, 194n1, 201,
birth control: alleged obscene advertisement 496, 499, 500, 506, 510; EG supported by,

INDEX 619
 Brady, Edward (continued) Brotherhood of the Kingdom, 525
514; name of, 383, 408; testimony of, 30, Brothers War. See Bruderkrieg.
169 –70 Brown, George: associates of, 528; living ar-
Die Brandfackel (The Torch of War, New York): rangements of, 575; in social science club,
on anarchist laws (EG), 209 –10Ger., 211–13; 577; speeches of, 446n4, 448n, 507
cover of, 152; demise of, 48, 234, 499; de- Brown, J. O., 250
scription of, 564; editor of, 558; founding Brown, John: associates of, 558; biographical
of, 497; on free speech (EG), 28 –29, 149 – summary on, 521; as influence, 10; men-
50Ger., 151–54; on judicial system (EG), tioned, 145, 166, 174, 456
183– 85Ger., 186 – 89; location of, 111–12n1; Bruderkrieg (Brothers War), 16 –18, 101–2n3,
on trial verdict (EG), 182n6, 183– 85Ger., 382 – 83n4, 526
186 – 89 Bruno, Giordano, 247, 521, 567
Brave, Barnet, 145 Brutus: use of name, 341n4, 471
Brazil: bombings in, 549 Bryan, William Jennings, 245, 249, 533
bread as sacred right: anarchist/unemployed Buffalo (N.Y.): EG’s speeches in, 316, 493,
demonstration for, 145– 46; argument for, 503; EG’s visit to, 466; McKinley’s assas-
151–52, 171–72, 205, 331; call to take, 174– sination in, 460n1, 461– 62; Pan Ameri-
175; as central tenet of anarchism, 153n6; can Exposition in, 461– 62, 512, 525, 542;
mentioned, 27–28, 30; EG’s testimony on, strike in, 231. See also “The Tragedy at Buf-
174; Manning on, 205n3, 541; Paris demon- falo” (EG)
strations of, 543, 552; strikes and, 285; trial Buffalo Commercial, 471–72n4, 513
testimony on, 162 – 64, 167, 168, 169 –70 Buffaloer Arbeiter-Zeitung: editors of, 260n3,
Bresci, Gaetano: assassination of Umberto by, 261n5; founding of, 492; possible appeal
66, 422n5, 427–28, 463, 509; biographical via, 251–53; publication of, 251n1, 543; sup-
summary on, 520 –21; death of, 455n1, 511; plement to, 566
EG’s admiration for, 68 – 69; EG’s eulogy Buffalo Herold, 260n3
for, 74, 455–56; as influence on Czolgosz, Bulletin International du Mouvement Syndical-
525; mentioned, 482; widow of, 514 iste, 524
Breshkovskaya, Catherine, 537 Bulletin of the Social Labor Movement, 578
Brewers’ and Malters’ Union, 37, 505, 511 Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mining Company,
Briceville (Tenn.) strike, 231 386n7, 476n11
Bricklayers’ Union, 507 Bureau of International Correspondence (or
British Association for the Advancement of International Federation), 66, 420, 433
Science, 69 Burmin. See Berman, Nahum H.
Brocher, Gustave, 491 Burns, William E., 576
Brockway, Z. R., 200 Byington, Steven T., 565
Bronze Workers, 420
Brooklyn (N.Y.): EG’s speeches in, 323n, 503, Cafiero, Carlo, 489, 523, 532
504; strike in, 232 Cahan, Abraham, 565
Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine, Cailes, Victor, 223n6, 495, 521
520, 527 Calhoun, WIlliam J., 279n10
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, 527 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio: assassination
Brotherhood of the Cooperative Common- of, 55, 274–78, 284n4, 347, 501–2, 517; bio-
wealth, 339n2, 575 graphical summary on, 521; French response

620 INDEX
 to assassination of, 281; motivation for as- Central Labor Federation (CLF), 98n7, 98n11,
sassination of, 341 571
Cantwell, Thomas Edward, 380, 396n4, 521 Central Labor Union (CLU): alternative to, 561;
capitalists and capitalism: anarchism feared by, anarchists vs. socialists in, 96 –99; appeal
195, 416; as basis of society, 364– 65; com- for AB via, 251–53, 537, 570; delegates to,
mercial theft and, 29; development of in- 540; description of, 571; EG’s link to, 37; offi-
dustrial, 79; EG’s opinion of, 157, 174–75, cers of, 280n7, 524; single-tax movement
181; as enemy, 333, 354–55, 474–76; ex- and, 531; SLP and, 577; speakers for, 236,
ploitation by, 228 –32, 283, 488; humanity 495, 503; unions affiliated to, 546
of, 485; imperialism linked to, 384– 88; Century (magazine), 537
justifications of, 316, 453; religion as ally of, CGT. See Confédération Générale du Travail
320; repression by, 244– 46; role in Home- Chaikovsky, Nikolai: biographical summary
stead, 223–25. See also police; private prop- on, 522; EG’s meeting with, 508; mentioned,
erty; ruling class 376, 395, 396, 509; Paris congress and,
Caplinger Mills (Mo.): Austins’ farm near, 517; 394n11
EG’s speeches in, 314–15, 503, 508 Chaikovsky Circle of Russian revolutionaries,
Carlyle, Thomas, 60 – 61, 384, 387 18n37, 519, 522, 538, 550
Carmeaux glassworkers, 239 Challeroi (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504
Carmen’s Union, 540 Chamberlain, Edward, 490, 558, 573, 574
Carnegie, Andrew: AB’s appeal and, 349 –52, Chamberlain, Joseph, 387, 394, 395, 522
506, 570; biographical summary on, 521– Champney, Adeline, 577
22; mentioned, 56; partner of, 531; philan- Charles, Fred, biographical summary on, 522;
thropy of, 246n7; responsibility of, for mentioned, 223, 394, 495, 521
Homestead strike, 224–25, 246, 318 Chartism, 530
Carnegie (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504 cheirognomy, 216
Carnegie Steel Company, 521, 531. See also Chemnitzer Freie Presse, 545
Homestead (Pa.) strike Cherkesov, Varlaam N.: biographical summary
Carnot, Marie François-Sadi: assassination of, on, 522 –23; journal founded by, 568; men-
55, 206n5, 207n6, 275, 342n6, 427, 498, tioned, 372n6, 395, 396, 509; Paris congress
554; biographical summary on, 522 and, 393n10; speeches of, 62, 509; written
Carpenter, Edward, 239n1, 466 contributions of, 568
Caserio, Sante: assassination by, 55, 206n5, Chernoe Znomia (The Black Banner), 144n3
207n6, 275, 342, 427, 498; associates of, Chernyshevsky, N. G.: influence on EG and
554; biographical summary on, 522; execu- AB, 13; mentioned, 559; works: What Is to
tion of, 499; mentioned, 225–26, 238, 267, Be Done?, 14, 21, 51, 138n3, 519
396 Chicago: EG arrested in, 464–70, 513, 514;
Catholic Church, 53–54 EG’s speeches in, 37, 288, 312 –13, 502, 503,
“The Cause and Effect of Vice” (EG): delivery 505, 507, 510, 511; national labor conven-
of, 451n2; description of, 453–54 tion in, 288n1, 310 –12; Philosophical Soci-
Cavendish, Lord, 382 – 83n4 ety in, 552; Progressive Labor Organization
Cecil (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 511 of, 505; SDA convention in, 338 –39, 344–
censorship: opposition to, 573–74; in prison, 45, 506, 576; Social Revolutionary congress
132n1; protest of, 505; symbol of, 271, 334. in, 368n3, 491, 555; social science club in,
See also free speech, suppression of 577. See also The Alarm; Freedom; Free Soci-

INDEX 621
 Chicago (continued) class justice: EG’s use of term, 33
ety; Lucifer, the Lightbearer; Pullman strike; Clemenceau, Georges, 421n18, 503
Revolt Clemens, G. C., 576
Chicago Debaters’ Club, 551 Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), 564
Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago Labor Cleveland (Ohio): Czolgosz at EG’s speech in,
News): contributors to, 555; description of, 460 – 63, 511; EG’s speeches in, 73–74, 316,
564; editors of, 517, 557; IWPA’s role in, 572; 451, 452 –54, 493, 503, 504, 507, 510; police
printer of, 530; publisher of, 546; weekly statement in, 513
edition of (Der Vorbote), 265 Cleveland, Grover: biographical summary on,
Chicago Labor Union Exchange, 575 523; EG’s opinion of, 245; extradition treaty
Chicago Liberal League, 530 and, 245n5; mentioned, 171n19; Pullman
Chicago Single Tax Club, 575 strike and, 232n3, 498 –99, 516, 527
Chicago Times, 498 Cleveland Herald, 533
Chicago Trade Union and Reform Club, CLF. See Central Labor Federation
549 –50 cloakmakers: strikes of, 168n12, 425n7, 518
Chicago Tribune, 75, 288, 471–72n4, 513 CLU. See Central Labor Union
Chicago-Virden Coal Company, 476n10 Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) strike, 386, 476
child labor, 246 Cohn, Annie, 523
childrearing: EG on, 29, 44, 159, 291–92; Cohn, Michael Alexander, 95, 494, 523, 565, 570
woman’s equality needed for, 322. See also Collinsburg (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 508
education colonialism (English), 230, 553
Chimay, Jeanne-Marie-Theresa de, 272 colonization project, 104n9; members of, 520;
China: missionaries killed in, 230 SDA’s acceptance of, 339, 576
Church: anarchist opposition to, 181, 196; as Cominsky, Lena Zodikow (EG’s half-sister),
authority, 353–55, 360, 364; EG on words 160n10, 492
and deeds of, 53–54; oppression by, 171– commercial theft: EG’s use of term, 29
72; as responsible for vice, 453–54. See also Commins, Saxe (Isidore Cominsky), 160n10
Adam and Eve story; Jesus Christ; religion The Commonweal (London): on agents provoca-
churches: EG’s speeches canceled in, 507; EG’s teur, 527; contributors to, 524, 539, 544, 547;
speeches held in, 315–16n40, 316, 330n5, 503 demise of, 546; description of, 564– 65; edi-
Ciancabilla, Guiseppi, 60, 478n tor of, 538, 544, 547, 578; printer for, 521
Cigar Makers International Union, 280n6 communism: critique of, 559 – 60; theory vs.
Cincinnati (Ohio): EG’s speeches in, 330, 505, practice of, 412. See also anarchist commu-
507; EG’s visit to, 512; workingmen’s society nism; Marx, Karl Henrich
in, 489 Communist Club (London), 561
Cipriani, Amilcare, 241, 523 Communist League, 529
civil liberties. See free speech Communist Workers’ Education Association
Civil War (U.S.), 166, 549, 558 (Kommunistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein),
Claflin, Tennessee, 559 101–2n3
class: anarchism’s intersection with, 72, 357– Commutation Act (Pa., 1901), 458, 511
59; crossing boundaries of, 50 –52; judicial Comstock, Anthony: arrests by, 490, 491, 492;
differences in, 320; university education biographical summary on, 523–24; criticism
and, 364. See also middle class; ruling class; of, 494; EG’s opinion of, 342; obscenity de-
working class fined by, 55–56

622 INDEX
Comstock Acts (1873, 1876): arrests and prose- Crocker, Richard, 422
cutions under, 42, 151n1, 312 –13, 392 –93n2, Crosby, Ernest Howard: appeal for AB’s release
490, 514, 533, 551–52, 565; Beall’s book sup- and, 352n5, 570; biographical summary on,
pressed under, 214n1; challenges to, 9, 490, 525; mentioned, 481– 82; Tolstoy’s popular-
505; free speech crushed by, 342; organiza- ity and, 559
tion in opposition to, 573–74; passage of, Cuba: insurrection in, 245; Spain’s repression
489, 523–24; political violence linked to, of, 278 –79n9; U.S. occupation of, 436;
55–56. See also censorship war’s impact on, 385– 87. See also Spanish-
Comstockery, 55 American War (1898)
“The Conditions for the Workers of America” Cuban Liberation Army, 385n2
(EG): text of, 228 –32 Cultura Obrera, 529
Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), 552 Cupid’s Yokes (Heywood), 151n1, 489, 490, 491,
Congress of La Chaux-de-Fonds, 491 573
Congress of Social Revolutionary Groups Czolgosz, Leon: anarchists’ defense of, 77,
(1881), 368n3, 491 475n6, 476 –77, 478n, 479 – 80, 517; anar-
Conscription Act (1863), 164n9 chists’ denunciation of, 76, 78, 475n6, 482,
Cook, John H.: biographical summary on, 524; 484– 85, 487– 88, 520; assassination of Mc-
as CLU leader, 571; meeting chaired by, 502, Kinley by, 74–75, 78 –79, 460n1, 512 –13,
504; speeches of, 282, 303n8, 501, 507 542; biographical summary on, 525–26; citi-
Cooper, Catherine. See Austin, Kate zenship of, 474–75; confession by, 460 –
Cooper, Charles B.: biographical summary on, 63; EG linked to, 73–76, 452n1, 460 – 63,
524; editorship of, 329nn1–2, 568; EG criti- 464n1, 471–2 EG on interaction with, 466 –
cized by, 502; as possible delegate, 399 68, 511; execution of, 477, 514; mentioned,
Cooperative College of Citizenship (group), 505 342n5; name for, 471; possible charges
The Co-operator, 576 against EG and, 469 –70; trial of, 514. See
Cores, George, 565 also “The Tragedy at Buffalo” (EG)
Corna, Joseph, 369n9
Cornelissen, Christianus Gerardus, 433n7, Daily People (SLP), 528, 578
510, 524 Daily Record (Stockton, Calif.), 35
Cornelissen, Lily, 510, 524 Darrow, Clarence Seward, 516, 526
“The Corrupting Influence of Politics on Man” Dave, Victor: anarchism of, 518; at anarchist
(EG): delivery of, 353n1 congress, 491; associates of, 382 – 83n4, 547,
Coulon, Auguste, 223, 524, 527, 547 551; biographical summary on, 526; corre-
Courier (Fairhope, Ala.), 575 spondence from, 482 – 83; EG defended by,
Cox, Jesse, 575 510; EG’s visit with, 406; mentioned, 407;
Coxey, J. S., 245n4 Most-Peukert split and, 101–2n3, 545; writ-
Cramer, Johanna Greie, 7, 156 –57n4, 492 ten contributions of, 566
Crane, Walter, 222 David, Marie Louise: background of, 204n2;
crime and criminals: cause of, 453–54; elimi- biographical summary on, 526; at gathering
nation of, 158, 175, 182; ruling class’s perpe- after EG’s release from prison, 203, 204,
tration of, 244; society’s responsibility for, 208; phrenological view of, 214; sketch of,
187, 197, 249, 341, 426 –28, 434, 476. See 204; speeches of, 579; written contributions
also judicial system (U.S.) of, 568
Crispi, Francesco, 53, 335n4 Davies, Ann A.: biographical summary on,

INDEX 623
 Davies, Ann A. (continued) Denver Educational Club, 505
526 –27; mentioned, 380; on Nettlau’s essay, deportation: of EG, 4, 49; of Malatesta, 558; of
375; praise for, 396 nihilists, 245
Davis, Henry, 547 Desmoulins, Camille, 417
Davis, Vernon M., 161 El Despertar, 529
Dawson, Oswald, 563 Detroit (Mich.): EG’s speeches in, 315–16,
Deakin, Joe, 223n6, 495, 527 360 – 61, 503, 507; EG’s visit to, 357– 60. See
Debs, Eugene Victor: arrest and imprisonment also Der arme Teufel; Der Herold
of, 499, 500; associates of, 518, 520; biogra- Detroit Evening News: on anarchists’ character-
phical summary on, 527; colonization proj- istics, 57–58; interview of EG in, 357– 61
ect and, 339n2; EG’s criticism of, 47– 48, 54; Detroit Sentinel: EG’s letters to, 55–56, 340 –
EG’s opinion of, 311–12, 344; at EG’s speech, 43; on political violence, 55–56
502; electoral strategy criticized, 47– 48; Devery, Capt. William S., 144
Hazleton (Pa.) massacre and, 288n2; law- Dietzgen, Joseph, 569
yer of, 526; leadership of, 497, 501, 575–76, Discontent (Home Colony and Lakebay, Wash.):
579; mentioned, 45, 281; national labor con- alleged obscene material in, 514, 515; con-
vention and, 310, 311; presidential candidacy tributors to, 517, 548; description of, 565;
of, 69, 510; SDA activities of, 506, 530, 550, editor of, 544; funds for, 538
576; and Socialist Party, 512 Ditchfield, William, 223n6, 495, 528
Declaration of Independence: authorship of, documentary editing: approach to, 1–5; context
536; Kropotkin on, 538; mentioned, 145– of, 25; significance of, 82
46n6, 476 Douras, Benjamin F., 161
de Cleyre, Voltairine: AB supported by, 26, Drayton, Henry S., 214n1
500; at anarchist convention, 498; associ- Drescher, Martin, 564, 571
ates of, 517, 539; biographical summary on, Dress and Cloakmaker’s Union, 168n12, 425n7
527–28; on bread as sacred right, 205n3, Dreyfus, Alfred: arrest of, 324n2, 499; bio-
541; EG’s praise for, 71; groups organized by, graphical summary on, 528 –29; pardon for,
432n4, 577; illustration of, 195; as influence, 561; retried for treason, 508
305n11, 305n13, 329n3, 573; influences of Dreyfus Affair: criticism of (EG), 47; dramatic
Haymarket on, 7n14, 156 –57n4; lover of, performance of, 357; EG on, 324, 325, 369;
520; on McKinley’s assassination, 77; men- events of, 324n2, 499, 500; mentioned, 552;
tioned, 65, 72, 399, 497; proposed tour of, Michel on, 543; Zola on, 324n2, 421n18, 503,
400 – 401; speeches of, 428 –29, 445n12, 528, 560, 562
498, 511; written contributions of, 563, 565, Le Droit Social, 532
567, 568; works: In Defense of Emma Gold- Drury, Victor, 491
man, 196, 205n3 Dumon-Wilder, Louis, 566
Decoration Day (1901), 511 Duquesne (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504
De Leon, Daniel: AFL /SLP dispute and, 98n11, Duse, Elenora, 500
535, 571; biographical summary on, 528; lead- Dutch Social Democratic Party, 548
ership of, 578; mentioned, 303 Dyck, Marie. See Isaak, Mary (mother)
Delesalle, Paul, 568
Democratic Review, 561 “Eastern and European Propaganda” (EG): text
The Demonstrator, 565 of, 236 –38
Denver (Colo.): EG’s speeches in, 505, 508; Eastman, George J., 360 – 61
Holmes’s move to, 535 Economy, 575

624 INDEX
Eddy, Mary Baker, 486 empathy: documents as evidence of, 82. See
Edelmann, John H.: associates of, 526, 542, also emotions
548; biographical summary on, 529; death Engel, George: associates of, 530; on attentats,
of, 399n14, 432; editorship of, 329nn1–2, 15; biographical summary on, 529; execu-
568; mentioned, 399; opposition to, 98; as tion of, 7, 492; as influence on American
Socialist League founder, 98 –99n12, 537, radicals, 156 –57n4
579; speeches of, 208, 237, 495, 496, 499, Engels, Friedrich, 9, 43, 383, 529, 542
500; written contributions of, 568 England: EG’s reception in, 221–27, 237–38;
Edelstadt, David, 16, 556, 566, 574 EG’s speeches in, 60 – 62, 358; free speech
Edelstadt, Sarah, 208n8, 499 absent in, 395, 545; Haymarket remem-
education: anarchism’s intersection with, 357– brances in, 358; imperialism of, 230, 553;
59; as class system, 59, 159; compulsory, 54, police in, 204, 223; potential for anarchist
340 – 41; free speech and, 31; possibilities in, women in, 429; proposed importation of
57–58, 443, 453; pursued in prison, 33; as re- speaker from, 400; single-tax organizations
sponsible for vice, 453–54; university, 364, in, 575; war protests as focus in, 394
374 English, Abraham Lincoln, 440n3, 446n1,
Education and Defense Society (Lehr-und- 447– 48
Wehr Verein), 530 English language: EG’s use of, 237n7, 325, 428,
“The Effect of War on the Workers” (EG): de- 504; German usage vs., 165, 168 – 69; ne-
livery of, 382n1, 383n8, 509; description of, cessity of using in U.S., 48, 317; need for
60 – 61; transcript of, 384– 88 propaganda in, 258, 429 –30, 499, 558;
egoism: EG on, 29; as rationale for being an- newspapers in, 568; strikers’ lack of, 287n2
archist, 157; Stirner’s definition of, 557–58, Ensor, James, 413n2
560; as term for anarchist individualism, equality: basis for, 364– 65; false notion of,
125 474–75; gender, in Russia, 424–25; neces-
egoist, 125n2 sity of gender, 43– 44, 322 –23; racial, 52,
Ehrhart, F. J., 382 – 83n4 246
Eiffel, A. Gustave, 561 El Esclavo, 529
Eliot, George, 33 Esteve, Pedro: biographical summary on, 529 –
Elizabeth (empress of Austria): assassination 30; marriage of, 554; McKinley’s assassina-
of, 55, 346 – 48, 427n9, 506, 531, 540 tion and, 463n5, 513; speeches of, 208,
Elizabeth (N.J.): EG’s speech in, 494 422n1, 496, 499, 507, 510
Elkin, John P., 459nn2 –3 ethics: debate on, 400 – 403
Elliott, James B., 305n13, 329n3, 573 Europe: anarchist propaganda in (EG), 236 –
Ellis, Havelock, 556, 563, 566 38; EG’s medical training in, 38, 59, 63,
Elmira Reformatory, 200n4 366 – 67; knowledge of American anar-
Ely, Robert Erskine, 438n1, 539 chism limited in, 398
L’Émancipation, 560 European tours: departure for (EG), 370n1; de-
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 33, 145– 46n6, 426, scription of, 59 – 67, 430n15; events of, 500,
553 508 –10; illness during, 374; isolation felt in,
emotions: expressed through deeds, 301; limi- 406 –7, 413; motivations for, 38 –39; plans
tations of words to express, 45; maturity of, for, 366 – 67; reflections on, 337–39, 392,
486 – 87; power of, 485– 86; reason juxta- 395; surveillance during, 389 –91. See also
posed to, 83; sorrow as, 485– 86. See also London; Paris
happiness; love Evening Bulletin (Providence, R.I.), 36

INDEX 625
 Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1900): architec- First International. See International Working
ture of, 413n2; art exhibits of, 413, 415; con- Men’s Association
gress in conjunction with, 59, 65, 430; hous- Fischer, Adolph: associates of, 549, 557; on at-
ing needed during, 370, 372n6, 379; size of, tentats, 15; biographical summary on, 530;
397n8 execution of, 7, 492, 529; family of, 114n6;
as influence, 156 –57n4
Die Fackel, 517, 546 Fischer, Lena, 114
“The Failure of Christianity” (EG): context of, Fiske, John, 557
53–54 Flaubert, Gustave, 419n16
Fairhope (Ala.): single-tax colony in, 575 Flores Magón, Jesús, 511
Fair Play, 533 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 511
Fatti di Maggio (Italy), 427n9, 505, 509 Foote, Edward Bliss, Jr., 567, 573, 574
Faure, François-Félix, 277–78, 281 Foote, Edward Bond, 490, 567
Faure, Sébastien, 379 – 80n3, 560, 566 Forverts (Forward, New York), 565
Fayette City (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 508 Fox, Jay: arrest of, 464n2, 485n4, 513; associ-
Fédération Nationale des Bourse du Travail ates of, 550; biographical summary on, 530;
(National Federation of Labor Exchange), at EG’s speeches, 502, 503; Hazleton (Pa.)
417n8, 550 massacre and, 288n2; written contributions
Fellowship for Ethical Research (Philadelphia), of, 565
507 France: anarchism’s progress in, 238, 406; an-
femininity, 444– 45 archists arrested and tried in, 494, 495; anti-
feminism, 374n2. See also gender anarchist laws in, 418 –19, 498, 522, 532,
Ferm, Elizabeth, 577 534, 560; corruption in, 226 –27, 369; EG’s
Ferrer, Francisco, 278 –79n9 extradition from, 64, 439; free speech sup-
Fichte, Johann G., 518 pressed in, 417–21, 422; imperialism of,
Fielden, Samuel: associates of, 549, 557; bio- 226; Marxist party in, 550; political prison-
graphical summary on, 530; pardoning of, ers in, 181; potential for anarchist women in,
497, 516; sentencing of, 492; speech of, 429; striking miners killed in, 418. See also
248n5 French government; Paris
Finance, Isidore, 264 Francis Ferdinand (heir), 531
The Firebrand (Portland, Oreg.): accusations Francis Joseph I (emperor of Austria), 346n5,
against EG in, 40 – 41; appeals for AB in, 347, 530 –31
570; banned from mails, 552; contributors Franco, P., 240 – 41
to, 517, 520, 528, 531, 535, 548, 549; defense Franco-Merian War (1883-1885), 226n10
of, 241– 42n5; demise of, 502; description Frank, I., 576
of, 565; distribution of, 519; editors of, Franklin Liberal Club, 73–74, 451n2, 452n1,
jailed, 12, 312 –13, 392 –93n2, 503, 506, 550, 460n2, 504, 511
565; founding of, 500, 536, 544; funds for, freedom: anarchy as path to, 153–54; author-
21, 551; letters to (EG’s), 217–18, 240 – 42; ity’s impact on, 353–56; as basic human de-
location of, 516; on marriage (EG), 42 – 43, sire (EG), 31, 181; indifference to, 436; inner
269 –73; masthead of, 238; praise for, 48; on and outer balanced in, 11–12; justice linked
propaganda (EG), 236 –38; seized by author- to, 435; necessity of women’s, 273; as oppor-
ities, 392 tunity to develop as anarchist, 429; spirit of,
First Centennial Congress of Liberals, 489 355–56; U.S. vs. Russian, 243– 44; women’s

626 INDEX
 role in, 71. See also “Authority vs. Liberty” (EG), 392 –94; readers of, 535; on SDA, 576;
(EG); free speech; free love; liberty on social science clubs, 577; success in west-
Freedom (Chicago), 528, 544, 550 ern states, 338. See also “The Tragedy at Buf-
Freedom (London): AB on attentat in, 521; on falo” (EG)
Brady, 24; compositor for, 521; contributors Free Soil Society (N.Y.), 574, 575
to, 519, 522, 523, 526, 527, 528, 534, 535, free speech: as basic human desire, 31; barring
537, 538, 539, 547, 549; description of, 565; of radical journals and, 21; demand for, 29;
founding of, 516, 538; funds for, 538; men- defense of, 179 – 82; demand for, 29; early
tioned, 355n6, 380, 396; Nettlau’s essay in, battles of, 30 –32, 75; education and, 31; EG’s
375n9; publisher of, 560; on war and work- essay on, 149 –50Ger., 151–54; EG’s trial tes-
ers (EG), 384– 88 timony on, 176; EG’s trial as test of, 194–95,
Freedom Discussion Group (London), 509 207; in England, 61, 395; in Paris, 413; sup-
freedom of the press, 442 – 43. See also free pression of, 61, 72 –73, 225, 353–56, 395,
speech 413, 416 –19, 430, 440, 445, 446 – 47; sup-
Free Exchange, 556 pression of workers’ rights to and defense
free love: Austin’s report on, 517; convention of, 151–54, 179 – 89, 194–95, 225; tensions
on, 489; EG’s demand for, 43; opposition to, over interpretation of, 40 – 41; threats to,
12, 312 –13, 507, 517, 550. See also sexual 442 – 43; in U.S. vs. Europe, 318; in U.S. vs.
freedom Russia, 28 –29, 285– 87, 318, 440, 447– 48;
Free Press, 518 women’s freedom linked to, 51
Free Press Defense Committee, 537 Free Speech Defense Committee, 556
Free Religious Association, 489 Free Speech League, 574
Free Review, 533 “Free Speech Suppressed in Barre, Vt.” (EG):
Free Society (San Francisco, Chicago, and New text of, 353–56
York): on American anarchism (EG), 65; ar- Free Thinkers Magazine, 528
rests of comrades associated with, 75–76; freethought principles, 572. See also Liberal
on authority vs. liberty (EG), 57; baptism Clubs
story in, 369n9; on Bresci (EG), 74, 455– Free Trade, 556
56; contributors to, 517, 519, 523, 524, 528, Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor, New
535, 537, 544, 548, 550, 552; Czolgosz and, York): articles on EG, 97n6; contributors to,
468n14, 511–12, 514, 525; description of, 518, 523, 528, 532; demise of, 495; descrip-
565– 66; distribution of, 466n9, 519, 520, tion of, 566; editors of, 540, 556; escape
524, 554; editor of, 544; EG’s response to plan and, 59; finances of, 562; founding of,
trial verdict in, 182n6; founding of, 503; on 494, 574; Haymarket anarchists defended by,
free speech (EG), 61, 353–56; funds for, 21, 16; police raid of, 80, 475n6, 514; predeces-
538; on ideas and men (EG), 334–36; impor- sor of, 18
tance of, 392; on lecturing (EG letter), 67; Freie Gesellschaft (Free Society): demise of,
letters to (EG’s), 334–36, 344– 45, 395– 403, 509; founding of, 500; mentioned, 257; pub-
434–37; location of, 392, 432 –33, 510, 536; lication of, 257n2; readers of, 263
masthead of, 323; on McKinley’s assassina- Freiheit (Freedom, London and Paris): AB and,
tion (EG), 471–78; mentioned, 329, 370, 17, 102n4, 121, 519; on AB’s attentat, 119 –
380, 396; on New Woman (EG), 322 –23; 20n1, 496; compositor for, 543; contributors
origins of, 516, 536, 565; on Paris congress to, 517, 520, 539, 542, 547, 554; criticism of,
(EG), 416 –21; praise for, 48; on propaganda 101–2n3; description of, 566; distribution

INDEX 627
 Freiheit (Freedom, London and Paris) gress, 420; for speaking engagements, 68,
(continued) 400 – 403, 444; for travels, 300, 302, 379,
of, 519, 555; editors of, 382 – 83n4, 538; on 407, 426
EG’s lecture tour, 335n3; EG’s response to
trial verdict in, 182n6; founding of, 491; “Gaetano Bresci” (EG): text of, 455–56
manager of, 555; mentioned, 64, 257, 493; Galleani, Luigi, 507
on Paris congress, 393n5, 407n3; persist- Gallifet, Gen. Gaston, 397, 417
ence of, 48; on SDA, 576; violent rhetoric in, Garfield, James, 79, 422n3
15, 16 –17, 80, 513, 546, 579 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 523
Freiheitiener (freedomites): use of term, 260 Garland, Mahlon Morris, 280
French, Santiago Salvador, 498, 499 Garment Dyers Union, 538
French government: communiqué of, 64, 389 – Garrison, William Lloyd, 525, 551
91; corruption of, 226 –27; disappointed in Garson, Leopold, 537
socialist, 417–19; extradition order of, 64, Gary, Joseph E., 516
439; intelligence report of, 408 –9 La Gazette de Hollande, 560
French Interior Ministry, 64, 389 –91 Gelfman, Gesia, 427n10
French language: newspapers in, 566, 567, gender: EG’s incorporation of, 11–12, 43– 44,
568; study of, 374–75 322 –23; in Russia, 424–25; separatism and
French Revolution: legacy of, 416 –17; men- essentialism and, 44. See also sexuality and
tioned, 145, 164, 166; participants in, 549 sexual desire, “The New Woman” (EG)
Freud, Sigmund: as influence on EG, 11–12, George, Henry: biographical summary on, 531;
38, 77; EG attends lectures of, 500 as influence, 548, 574–75; support for, 528,
Frick, Henry Clay: attempt on life of, 16, 22 – 529, 571. See also Single Tax (movement)
23, 25–27, 76, 109, 267– 68, 496; biograph- Gephardt, Paul, 110
ical summary on, 531; Homestead strike German Anarchist Society (Philadelphia), 504
and, 106 –7n13, 217, 521; motives for attack German Communistic Workingmen’s Club,
on, 132 –33n3, 223–25, 246, 249, 341 545. See also Freiheit
Friedman, Joseph, 125n1 German government: communiqué from, 64,
Friendship Liberal League (Philadelphia): as 389 –91; official circulars of, 220; warning
open venue, 573; speeches for, 305, 329, 502, about EG by, 38
504, 507 German language: EG’s use of, 32 –33, 46, 86,
Friends of Russian Freedom, 525 87, 243, 325, 415n5; English usage vs., 165,
FS. See Free Society 168 – 69; newspapers in, 564, 566, 567, 568
Fuchs, Jacob, 260 – 61, 571 German Painters Union, 511
Fulton, Edward H., 264, 531, 567 German Social Democratic Party, 517
funds and fund-raising: for AB’s legal ex- Germany: anarchist movement in, 101–2n3;
penses, 40 – 41, 227n, 249, 250, 258, 260, anti-socialist law in, 212; culture of, 46; pos-
262, 312, 325, 535, 570; for anarchist press, sible housing in (Munich), 379, 380; poten-
21, 27, 40, 257, 263, 376n10, 438n3, 538, 551; tial for anarchist women in, 429; repression
for anarchist propaganda and meetings, in, 14, 401n5; single-tax organizations in,
125–26, 237, 277; for EG’s legal expenses, 575; student unrest in, 364. See also German
187, 498; for medical training, 366 – 67n2; government
newspaper on, 203; for Paris congress, 393– Gide, André, 239n1
94, 399; for publishing report on Paris con- Girard, André, 568

628 INDEX
Glass Blowers’ Union, 37, 330, 504 Goldman, Morris (Moe; EG’s brother), 445,
Gold, Jacob, 151–52n3 445n11, 503
Goldman, Abraham (EG’s father), 489 Goldman, Taube Bienowitch (EG’s mother),
Goldman, Emma: aesthetic sensibility of, 50 – 489
51, 73, 444– 45; arrests of, 23, 28 –29, 75– Goldman-Berkman relationship: autobiogra-
76, 153, 165, 170, 303–5, 464–70, 496, 497, phy on, 3, 557; beginning of, 493, 519, 556;
513–14; projected autobiography of, 4, 481; as influence, 74; as lifelong, 81– 82; mutual
birth and early life of, 6, 29, 70, 160, 442, attraction in, 18; newspaper on, 108 –10, 113;
489, 492; character of, 25–27, 46, 82 – 83; testimony on, 173
citizenship of, 159n8; demonization of, 75– Goldsmith, Isidor, 531
76; despondency of, 482; on essentialism, Goldsmith, Marie: biographical summary on,
44; finances of, 68, 130, 187, 257, 366 – 531–32; EG defended by, 510; EG’s meeting
67n2, 498; frustration with gradualism, with, 38, 432n1; letter to, 432 –33, 442n6
47– 49; handwriting of, 252, 259; illnesses of Goldsmith, Sofia, 433n7, 531, 532
(1890-1895), 140n1, 199, 493, 497; illnesses Golli. See Angiolillo, Michele
of (1896-1900), 265, 374, 501, 504, 509; il- Gompers, Samuel: on AB’s sentence, 251n5;
lustrations of, 112, 164, 204, 286, 290, 461, anarchist/unemployed demonstration and,
465, 473, 480; languages of, 86, 158, 430; li- 147n; biographical summary on, 532; criti-
brary of, 158; living arrangements of, 21–22, cism of, 37; efforts to unseat, 310n28; on
194n1, 493, 494; marriage of, 159n8, 175, Hazleton, 541; mentioned, 45, 280; national
492, 493, 537; names for, 132n1, 459n6, 514; labor convention and, 311; trade union divi-
optimism of, 441– 43; political emergence sions and, 98n11, 571; United Mine Work-
of, 81– 84; restlessness of, 300 –301, 379, ers’ strike meeting and, 47
412; on separatism, 44. For influences on, Goodwin, Roy M., 288n2, 344, 576
see: Bakunin, Michael; Chernyshevsky, Gordin, Jacob, 46
N. G.; Freud, Sigmund; Haymarket anar- Gordon (mayor of Barre, Vt.), 353n1
chists; Kropotkin, Peter; Lingg, Louis; Lu- Gordon, Henry: AB’s defense and, 243n1, 369,
cifer; Malatesta, Errico; Marx, Karl Henrich; 520, 537, 570 –71; AB’s visited by, 459; arrest
Most, Johann; Nietzsche, Friedrich; nihilists of, 513; biographical summary on, 532; EG’s
and nihilism; Perovskaya, Sophia; Peukert, stay with, 307, 501; speeches of, 243, 504
Joseph; Pittsburgh Manifesto; Spies, Au- Gori, Pietro, 397n9, 501, 568
gust; Stirner, Max; Whitman, Walt. See Gorky, Maksim, 43, 566
also appearance and clothing; Goldman- Govan, Charles L., 514, 565
Berkman relationship; imprisonment gradualism, 47– 49
(EG’s); Living My Life (autobiography; EG); Grand Palais des Beaux Arts, 413, 415
occupations (EG’s); People vs. Emma Gold- Grant, Rev. Stickney, 572
man (trial, 1893) Grave, Jean: associates of, 550, 552; biographi-
Goldman, Fredrika (EG’s grandmother), cal summary on, 532; as delegate, 234n2,
182 397n9, 407, 501; editorship of, 568; men-
Goldman, Helena. See Hochstein, Helena tioned, 379 – 80n3, 413; publishing of, 407n7
Goldman (EG’s half-sister) Great Northern Railroad, 527
Goldman, Herman (EG’s brother), 159 – 60 Great Railway Strikes, 490, 557
Goldman, Lena. See Cominsky, Lena Zodikow Greenan, Hugh, 99
(EG’s half-sister) Greenback Labor Party, 577

INDEX 629
 Greene, William B., 559 Harman, Moses: biographical summary on,
Greie, Johanna. See Cramer, Johanna Greie 533–34; editorship of, 567; EG’s meetings
Grinevetsky, Ignaty, 427n10 with, 505; imprisonment of, 151n1; as influ-
Grossman, Rudolph, 515, 577 ence on EG, 9; mentioned, 312n33; on sex-
Grundy, Mrs. (symbol), 271, 334 ual freedom, 42; speeches of, 503, 505, 550;
Gruppe Autonomie (Autonomy Group), 101– written contributions of, 563, 565
2n3, 111–12n1, 496, 551. See also Autonomy Harriman, Job, 69, 510
Group (American) Harris, Frank, 12, 424n4
Guédy, Pierre, 239n1 Harrison, Benjamin, 245n5
Guérineau, Lucien Louis, 379 – 80n3, 413 Harrison, Carter H., Jr., 466, 468 – 69
Guesde, Jules, 550 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 555
Guffrey Hollow (Pa.): raid of, 514 Harvey, Michael, 95, 494
Guillaume, James, 538 Haskell, Burnette C., 548 – 49, 561, 572
Gunderson, R., 564 Hauptmann, Gerhardt, 517
gymnastic clubs, 309 –10, 312, 502, 505 Havel, Hippolyte: arrest and imprisonment
of, 389, 464n2, 485n4, 512; as John Havel,
Hall, Abraham Oakey: biographical summary 408n2; biographical summary on, 534; as
on, 532 –33; as EG’s defense attorney, 161, delegate, 391, 407; EG’s meeting with, 508;
176n28, 178, 182, 498 EG’s travels with, 62, 509, 510; letters to,
Hall, Bolton, 574, 575 466 – 67; surveillance of, 64, 66 – 67, 389,
Hamon, Augustin: anti-Semitism and, 62; as- 408; on violence, 477n12; written contribu-
sociates of, 550; biographical summary on, tions of, 566
533; EG’s meeting with, 38, 500; letters to Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 33, 481– 82
(1896), 233–35, 239, 257; letters to (1897), Hay, John, 223
263– 66, 280 – 81; letters to (1899), 370 –72; Hayes, Rutherford B., 490, 573
research material requested by, 265, 266 – Haymarket affair: anarchism’s upsurge after,
68; written contributions of, 567; works: 156 –57n4, 320 –21; corrupt judiciary evi-
Psychologie du militaire professionnel, 234, denced in, 188 – 89, 223; description of, 6 –
235n5, 239, 263, 281; La socialisme et le con- 7, 492; George’s reversal on, 531, 575; men-
grès de Londres, 263. See also L’Humanité tioned, 167, 212, 264, 281, 310, 327; protests
nouvelle of, 538, 561, 574; research material on, 265
Hamsun, Knut, 239n1 Haymarket anarchists: defense of, 16, 247– 48,
Hanna, Marcus Alonzo (Mark): biographical 481n2, 553, 558; denunciation of, 531; as in-
summary on, 533; as influence, 245n4, 249, fluence on EG, 6 –7, 19, 80, 128n4, 145n6,
542; mentioned, 422; possible fears of, 274, 332n7, 425, 460n1; as influence on AB, 519;
278 as influence on others, 523, 527, 560; legacy
Hansen, Mary, 575, 577 of, 249; mentioned, 41, 75, 95, 174, 325; par-
Hanson, Albert, 153n7 don for, 27, 265, 497, 516, 530, 546, 555; re-
happiness: differences in concept of (EG), membrances of, 2, 77, 266n8, 313–14, 315,
362 – 63 358, 497, 499, 501, 503, 546
Harlem Liberal Alliance, 573 Haywood, William (“Big Bill”), 7n14, 156 –
Harman, Lillian: biographical summary on, 57n4, 386n7
533; editorship of, 567; as leader, 563; mar- Hazleton (Pa.) massacre: anarchism’s upsurge
riage of, 269n1; as political prisoner, 186n1; after, 320 –21; events of, 285n1, 287n2,
written contributions of, 563 310n29, 311, 502, 541; fatalities in, 305n9;

630 INDEX
 mentioned, 332, 476; resolutions in re- speeches arranged by, 505; written contribu-
sponse to, 288n2, 550; SDA’s response to, tions of, 509, 565, 568
576; EG’s speeches on, 47, 285– 87, 305, Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 557
327, 328 Holmes, William T.: biographical summary
Hearst, William Randolph, 325n3 on, 535; at convention, 498; on ethics,
Heath, Frederic, 575, 576 401–2; friends of, 517, 530; mentioned, 393;
Hegel, Georg W. F., 518 speeches arranged by, 505, 508; written con-
Heiber, Peter, 570 tributions of, 482, 509, 563, 565– 66, 568
Heine, Heinrich, 401 Home Colony (Wash.), 508, 544
Heinzen, Karl, “Murder against Murder,” 513, Homestead (Pa.) strike: AB on, 106 – 8; con-
514, 546 ditions evidenced by, 224; description of,
Henderson Bay colony (Wash.), 576 106 –7n13, 495–96, 531; failure of, 265– 66;
Henry, Agnes, 240n1 manifesto on, 543, 558; mentioned, 151n2,
Henry, Émile: biographical summary on, 534; 217, 231, 337, 386
execution of, 498; mentioned, 193n4, 226, Hope Church (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 508
238, 418n11 Hopkins, L. L., 576
Henry George Lecture Association, 575 Horr, Alex, 524, 577
Der Herold (Detroit), 261n5, 571 hours. See wages and hours
Herschdorfer, F., 145 Howells, William Dean, 245n5, 481– 82, 481n2
Herzen, Alexander, 483 Hugo, Victor, 559
Heywood, Angela, 42, 489, 494 L’Humanité nouvelle (New Humanity, Paris and
Heywood, Ezra: arrests and imprisonment of, Brussels): contributors to, 263, 526; descrip-
151n1, 490, 491, 492, 493–94, 573; associ- tion of, 566; founding of, 533; readers of,
ates of, 559; at free-love convention, 489; on 370, 372n6.
sexual freedom, 42; works: Cupid’s Yokes, humanity: of capitalists, 485; division of, 487;
151n1, 489, 490, 491, 573 interdependence of, 59, 83– 84, 365; pur-
Hicks, Henry E., 99 pose of, 362 – 63
Hill, David Bennett, 212, 534 Humbert. See Umberto (king of Italy)
Hillkowitz, M. See Hillquit, Morris Huneker, James, 555
Hillquit, Morris: biographical summary on, Hungarian uprising (1848), 347n7
534–35; mentioned, 37; organizations and, Hungary: independence of, 530; minorities in,
509, 527, 528, 576, 578, 579; speeches of, 407n6
147n8 Hunter, Robert G., 459n5
Hinton, R. J., 576 Hus, Jan, 247
Hochstein, David, 160n10, 535 Huxley, T. H., 538
Hochstein, Helena Goldman (EG’s half-sister): Hyndman, Henry Mayers, 382, 578
biographical summary on, 535; children of, hypnotism, 361
160n10; EG’s stay with, 140n1, 493; immi-
gration of, 4–5, 492; mentioned, 466 Ibels, André, 239n1
Hochstein, Hyman, 535 Ibsen, Henrik, 239n1
Hodel, Max, 15 Ibsen. See Morton, Eric B.
Hoffmann, Julius, 120 ice cream parlors, 22, 495, 500, 519
Hogan, James, 576 Idaho: strike in, 386, 476
Holmes, Lizzie: biographical summary on, “Ideas and Men” (EG): text of, 334–36
535; editorship of, 563; mentioned, 393n3; Il Grido degli Oppressi, 542

INDEX 631
 ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Work- 557–58. See also individualism; Tucker, Ben-
ers’ Union), 518 jamin R.
Illustrated American, 155n3 Industrial Union of Direct Actionists, 546
immigrants and immigration: as audience, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
21, 46; culture of, 357– 61; of EG, 492; isola- 477n12, 551
tion of, 48; laws on, 496, 526, 534, 558; vio- Ingalls, Joshua K., 567
lence against, 20; workers as, 229. See also Ingersoll, Robert, 52n57, 315–16n40, 330, 343n
Americanization intelligentisia: appeal to, 71–72; revolutionary
imprisonment (AB’s): censorship in, 132n1; potential of (EG), 50 –52. See also education;
comrades in, 139, 258; conditions of, 132 – middle class
35, 256; escape plan during, 59 – 60, 65– 66, International Anarchist Convention (Chicago,
138, 373n2, 414, 484, 485, 502, 508, 509, 1893), 498
520, 544, 570; injury during, 373; men- international anarchist movement: AB sup-
tioned, 307; physical effects of, 138; raffles ported by, 38 –39; communication channel
during, 258, 260, 262; sentence reduction in, 420; progress of, 236 –38; solidarity lack-
in, 458 –59, 511, 514–15, 571; solitary con- ing in, 397–98, 406 –7, 413. See also specific
finement in, 74, 77, 80, 373n2, 457, 484, anarchists
514; studies during, 486, 564; surveillance International Anti-Anarchist Conference (Italy,
in, 255; visitors during, 130 –31, 136 –37, 1898), 506 –7
459, 484, 496, 512, 532, 543. See also Penn- International Association of Machinists, 281n8
sylvania Board of Pardons International Carpenters and Joiners Union,
imprisonment (EG’s): descriptive account of, 540
34–36; effects of, 193, 200 –202; EG’s let- International Club Freiheit, 103n8
ters during, 33–34, 190 –91Ger., 192 –93; International Conference for the Defense of
gathering to celebrate release from, 203– 8, Society against the Anarchists, 346n2
499, 546, 554; as influence, 23–24; inter- International Conference of Neo-Malthusians,
view during, 155– 60; length of, 160n12; oc- 64, 66, 509
cupations during, 430, 445, 498; reflections International Criminal Police Organization
on, 194–201; release from, 34–35, 201–2, (Interpol), 506
499; studies during, 33; visitors during, Internationale Arbeiter Liedertafel (Interna-
498, 499, 527, 558 tional Workers’ Song Circle): fund-raising
incitement to riot: EG’s testimony on, 172, 174; and, 260n2, 262n1, 498; leader of, 555;
sentencing for, 177–79; trial testimony on, Paris Commune remembered by, 262n2
162 – 64, 167, 169 –70. See also People vs. Internationale Bibliothek (International Library,
Emma Goldman (trial, 1893) New York), 566
Indians: slaughtering of, 230, 244 International Federation of Commercial Em-
individualism: attentat’s cause and, 476; beliefs ployees, 560
of, 402 –3, 434; free associative action and, International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union
552; as influence on EG, 10 –11, 425–26, 453, (ILGWU), 518
549; men and women’s equality and, 323; re- International Revolutionary Congress of the
sponsibility of, 431; Spencer on, 556 –57 Working People (Paris, 1900): delegates to,
Individualist, 526 375n6, 391, 393, 523, 526, 527, 534, 548, 553;
individualist anarchism: egoism linked to, EG’s participation in, 59, 62; EG’s prepara-
125n2; ideas of, 10 –11; influences on, 355n4, tion for, 64– 65, 66, 367– 68, 396, 509;

632 INDEX
 housing needed during, 370, 372n6, 379; 464n2, 467, 502, 512, 526, 551–52, 565; as-
importance of, 397–99, 415; mentioned, 9; sociates of, 516; biographical summary on,
reports on and for, 416 –21, 433, 482, 509, 536; editorship of, 565; EG’s stay with, 505;
517, 528, 535, 568; secret meetings in place ethics and, 402n6; mentioned, 393n3, 434;
of, 419 –21, 430, 510; sexual issues and, 12 – publishing by, 57, 380n8, 518; Simons’s de-
13; suppression of, 66, 416 –21, 510; timing bate with, 579; as suspicious of Czolgosz,
of, 370n5 468, 525; written contributions of, 509, 567.
International School, 240n1, 524, 543 See also The Firebrand; Free Society
International Social Revolutionary and Anar- Isaak, Abe, Jr., 467n12, 475n6, 512, 536
chist Congress (London, 1881): on attentats, Isaak, Mary/Marie (daughter), 467n12, 468,
15; delegates to, 538; description of, 491; 512 –13, 536
mentioned, 368n3, 398n12; resolutions of, Isaak, Mary (mother): activities of, 380; arrest
555 of, 464n2, 467, 468, 512 –13; biographical
International Sunday School (London), 240n1, summary on, 536; mentioned, 393n3
524, 543 Issak, Peter, 536
International Typographical Union, 280n4, 543 Italian Typographical Union, 276
International Working Men’s Association Italy: anarchist conference in, 523; anti-
(IWMA): EG’s speeches for, 37, 95, 494; anarchist conference in, 506 –7; coalition
founding of, 572; mentioned, 327; merger suggested in, 335n4; conditions in, 455–56;
of, 489; participants in, 526, 539 – 40, 541, Fatti di Maggio in, 427n9, 505, 509; poten-
542, 560; schism of, 398n12, 489, 518 tial for anarchist women in, 429; repression
International Working People’s Association in, 427n9, 506
(IWPA): affiliates of, 571, 574; description of, IWMA. See International Working Men’s
571–72; EG’s speeches for, 493, 494; forma- Association
tion of, 578; journal of, 563; meetings of, IWPA. See International Working People’s
109n17, 491; members of, 16, 529, 530, 535, Association
540, 549, 555, 557, 561; mentioned, 108n14; Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
Pittsburgh Manifesto adopted by, 545 477n12, 551
International Workmen’s Association, 548
interviews (EG): in Detroit Evening News, 357– Jablinowski, Ludwig, 98n7, 147n8
61; in New York Sun, 69 –70, 71, 423–31; in Jablonowski, A., 98, 147
New York World, 29 –30, 111–15, 155– 60, Jacobs, Charles: associates of, 166; bribery
172n21, 464–70; in Philadelphia North by, 153n8, 161– 62n7; police affadavit of,
American, 72 –73, 440 – 45; in Pittsburg 148n1; testimony of, 30 –31, 161– 66, 169,
Leader, 324–26, 366 – 69; in St. Louis Post 170, 175
Dispatch, 44, 289 –92; in San Francisco Call, Jacobsen, S. H., 99
331–33; in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 424n4 Jaffa, Joseph, 574
L’Intransigeant, 560 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 309n25
invasion: EG’s use of term, 434–35 James, C. L.: at anarchist convention, 498; on
Iowa Icarians, 491 Czolgosz’s act as propaganda, 475n6; as in-
Irish World, 559 fluence, 528; written contributions of, 563,
Isaak, Abe: on Addis’s “Ideas and Men,” 334; 565, 566, 567
alleged correspondence of, 240 – 41; arrest Jaurés, Jean, 419
and imprisonment of, 312n33, 392 –93n2, Jefferson, Thomas: biographical summary

INDEX 633
 Jefferson, Thomas (continued) Kelly, Henry May “Harry”: AB’s defense and,
on, 536; individualist tradition of, 10; men- 251n3, 277, 520; as anarchist emissary, 39,
tioned, 41, 145, 174, 248, 332, 458 399; associates of, 520, 539; biographical
Jeffries, Jack, 364n2 summary on, 536 –37; on Brady, 24; as dele-
Jeffries, James J., 364 gate, 397n9, 501; editorship of, 567; EG’s
Jesus Christ, 247, 342 stay with, 508; as influence, 96 –97n3, 571;
Jewish Daily Forward, 518 influences on, 236n2, 546; London address
Jewish anarchists: as activists, 432; antireli- for, 370; on McKinley’s assassination, 77;
gious organization of, 574. See also Pionire mentioned, 62, 65, 380, 482; praise for,
der Frayhayt; specific individuals; Yom Kippur 396; speeches of, 276, 305n11, 382n1, 502,
“balls” 509, 573; on violence, 477n12; written con-
Jewish experience: Goldman in context of, 46; tributions of, 566, 568. See also The Rebel
and persecution, 243– 44; and restlessness, Kelly, John F., 563
300 –301, 379. See also Zionism Kennan, George, 245n5, 256, 537
Johnson, Theodore, 577 Kentucky Resolution (1799), 536
John Swinton’s Paper, 558 Kenworthy, John Coleman: associates of, 548;
Joint Anarchist Groups of New York, 499 biographical summary on, 537; as Socialist
Journeymen Bakers’ and Confectioners’ Inter- League founder, 98 –99n12, 529, 579; writ-
national Union, 561 ten contributions of, 567
judges: as anarchists, 401–3 Kershner, Jacob A. (EG’s husband), 159n8,
judicial system (U.S.): Adam and Eve as anal- 492, 493, 537
ogy to, 211–12; authority of, 353–54, 360; Kibalchich, Nikolai I., 427n10, 491
EG’s criticism of, 33, 221–27; EG’s essay on, The Kingdom, 525
183– 85Ger., 186 – 89; injustice of, 195–96, Kinsella, Vella, 64, 414n1
211–13, 217–18, 255; ruling class supported Kinzel, Theodore, 145
by, 187– 89, 197, 205, 207– 8, 227, 320 –21; Kitz, Frank: at anarchist congress, 491; associ-
self-representation in, 125, 161n6; U.S. vs. ates of, 536; biographical summary on, 538;
Russian, 187– 88; in western vs. eastern editorship of, 547; written contributions of,
states, 338. See also crime and criminals; 569
laws; People vs. Emma Goldman (trial, 1893) Klimt, Gustav, 413n2
Jura Federation, 491, 538 Knauerhase, Gustav, 382 – 83n4
justice: class linked to, 33; freedom linked to, Knights of Labor, 99nn15–16, 280n2, 552, 561
435; impossibility of political (EG), 221–27, Knights of Liberty (Philadelphia), 507, 574
321, 500 Koenigstein, François-Claudius. See Ravachol
Justice (London), 539, 578 (pseud.)
Justice (single tax newspaper), 446, 575 Kommunistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein
(Communist Workers’ Education Associa-
Kahan, Zelda, 376 tion), 101–2n3
Kampffmeyer, Bernhard, 569 Koreshanity, 486
Katz, Moishe, 257n2, 556, 566, 574 Kovalevskaia, Sofia, 306
Keell, Thomas, 565 Kropotkin, Peter: arrest of, 532; associates of,
Keliher, Sylvester, 576 522, 526, 528, 531, 536, 537, 541, 543, 546,
Kelly, George A., 325 547, 549, 550, 561; on attentats, 15–16, 56,
Kelly, Gertrude B., 563 226n8; biographical summary on, 538 –39;

634 INDEX
 as delegate, 234n2, 397n9, 490, 491, 501; Land Reform League (Germany), 575
EG’s tribute to, 51n56; EG’s visits with, 38, Land Reform League of California, 575
39, 62, 500, 508; on freedom, 354; illustra- Land Restoration Society (Scotland), 575
tion of, 396; as influence on EG, 8 –9, 13, 51, Land Values League (England), 575
153n6, 157n7, 226n8; as influence on Peuk- Lang, Hattie, 466
ert, 551; journal founded by, 565, 568; letter language: differences in, 398, impact on politi-
from, 438; manifesto of, 153n6; mentioned, cal message, 31–32. See also specific languages
81, 395, 396, 456, 509; on mutual aid, 59; Lapine (chair of meeting), 98
on Paris congress, 65, 393, 397; on red, Larkin, James E., 514, 565
144– 45n3; social class of, 72; Solidarity Lassallean Social Democratic Working Men’s
supported by, 329n1, 568; speeches of, 509; Party of North America (SDWMPNA), 489
translations of, 539, 564; U.S. tours of, 69, Lassallean Working Men’s Educational Society,
438, 441, 503, 510, 529, 556, 558; written 540
contributions of, 566, 567, 568; works: An- Latin language, 374–75
archist Communism, 157n7; Appeal to the Lattimer Massacre. See Hazleton (Pa.) massacre
Young, 73; The Conquest of Bread, 30; “The Latzer, Jacob, 99
Spirit of Revolt,” 226n8; The State: Its His- Lavrov, Peter L., 539 – 40
toric Role, 354n3 Lawrence, G., 221, 227
Kropotkin, Sophie, 559 Lawrenceville (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 508
Kuirim, J., 493 laws: anti-socialist (in Germany), 490, 543, 545;
equality as impossible with, 364– 65; immi-
Labadie, Joseph: on anarchist communism, gration, 496, 526, 534, 558. See also anti-
343n; associates of, 539; on Czolgosz’s act, anarchist laws: in France; judicial system
475n6; on EG’s speech in church building, (U.S.); specific laws and acts (e.g., Comstock)
315–16n40; meeting arranged by, 503; writ- lawyers: as anarchists, 401–3
ten contributions of, 565, 567 Lazare, Bernard, 239n1, 324n2, 528
Labor Day, 571 leadership: aversion to union and manage-
The Labor Enquirer, 535, 549, 550 ment, 36 –37; EG’s rejecting role of, 425–26
labor organizing: AB supported by interna- League for Amnesty for Political Prisoners, 26
tional, 37–38; anarchist/unemployed dem- LeCompte, M. P., 491
onstrations and, 144– 47; Bly on, 160n; EG’s lecture tours: EG’s diaries of, 45– 47; extent of,
attitude to, 36 –38, 69; free speech rights 48 – 49, 60, 337; funds for, 300, 302, 379,
and, 32; leadership of, 283; national conven- 407, 426; mentioned, 264, 266; planning
tion of, 288n1, 310 –12; tensions in, 20. See for, 46, 130, 260; reflections on, 300 –302,
also strikes; trade unions (general) 317, 337–39, 392; reports on, 43, 45– 47, 55,
Labor Party (Britain), 382n2 293–99Ger., 300 –317. See also European
The Labor Standard, 578 tours; speaking engagements (EG’s); U.S.
labor violence, 19 –20. See also strikes tours; specific places
Ladies’ Liberal League (Philadelphia): forma- Lederer, Jos., 147
tion of, 527; members of, 432n4; as open legal self-representation, 125, 161n6
venue, 573; speeches for, 305, 323n, 501, 502, Leggatt, Ted, 221, 234n2, 396n4, 540
504, 507 Legitimation League, 533, 556, 563
Land and Labor clubs, 575 Lehr-und-Wehr Verein (Education and Defense
Landauer, Gustav, 234n2, 376n10, 524, 539, 546 Society), 530

INDEX 635
 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 486 cover of, 222; description of, 566 – 67; on
Leishmann, John, 249n7 EG’s lecture, 221–27; founding of, 558
Lenin, V. I., 13n31 Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Or-
“Letters from a Tour” (EG, series in Sturm- der (Boston and New York): appeal for AB’s
vogel): description of, 43, 45– 47; text of, pardon and, 349 –52; contributors to, 526,
293–99Ger., 300 –317 528; description of, 567; distribution of, 555;
letters to the editor (EG’s): on AB’s sentence, editor of, 10; founding of, 491, 559; as influ-
217–18; on assassinations, 346 – 48, 479 – ence, 264n9; location of, 495; masthead of,
80; on funds for AB’s defense, 240 – 42; on 350; Most criticized in, 545; readers of, 549
ideas and men, 334–36; on lecture tour, Liberty Library Monthly, 531
337–39; on Most, 116 –18Ger., 119 –21; on Lieble, Otto H., 153n7
payment for speakers, 400 – 403; on Pitts- Liess, Emil, 337n1, 505, 506
burgh anarchists, 329 –30; on political vio- Lincoln, Abraham, 79, 145, 164n9
lence, 55–56, 340 – 43; on propaganda by Linden, Mauritz, 544
deed, 434–37; on speaking out, 344– 45; on Lingg, Louis: arrest of, 464n4, 554; biographi-
striking tailors, 219; Tucker/EG exchange cal summary on, 540; as influence on EG,
as, 349 –52 156 –57n4; mentioned, 313–14; sentencing
letter writing: importance to imprisoned AB, statement of, 31; suicide of, 7, 136, 492
134–35, 254, 458; promptness of EG’s, 481 literature: as authority, 355; celebration of Ger-
Levy, David, 145, 162n8 man, 553; as effective propaganda, 412
Levy, Ferdinand, 147n Lithuania: EG’s birth in, 489
Lewis, Jacob. See Kershner, Jacob A. Livesey, Francis Buck, 54, 340, 343n, 565
Lewis, Roman: biographical summary on, 540; Living My Life (EG): on AB and Freiheit, 102n4;
editorship of, 566, 574; Haymarket anar- on article in New York World, 194n1; on Czol-
chists defended by, 16; mentioned, 486; op- gosz’s act and her subsequent arrest, 78,
position to, 98; in Pioneers of Liberty, 574; 464n2; on Debs, 312n32; on AB’s escape
speech of, 495 plan, 60; on EG’s 1893 illness, 140n1; on
Liberal Alliance, 572 EG’s extradition from Philadelphia, 153n8,
Liberal Clubs: description of, 572 –73; focus of, 170n17; focus and context of, 3–5; on Havel,
53–54; EG’s speeches for, 305, 330, 479, 501, 534; identity of Yegor in, 445n11; on influ-
505, 510 ence of Johanna Greie Cramer, 156 –57n14;
liberal democracy: pros/cons of, 42; seduction on loving two men, 557; on marriage, 537;
of reform in, 52 –55 on obtaining legal services, 161n6; on
Liberal Progressive Society (Providence), prison confrontation, 255n7; on Statue of
322 –23 Liberty, 5; on visit to AB in prison, 255n3;
The Liberator, 551 on wealthy sponsors, 366 – 67n2 –
Le Libertaire (The Libertarian, Paris), 421, 543, Lloyd, George K., 96 –97, 109
566 Lloyd, Henry, 251n5
Libertarian Lecture Society, 527 Lloyd, J. L., 344, 345
Libertas. See Davies, Ann A. Lloyd, John F., 576
liberty: ideals of, 364– 65; Paris as city of, 416 – lois scélérates. See anti-anarchist laws: in France
17; spirit of, 355–56. See also “Authority vs. Lôme, Enrique Depuy de, 325, 332
Liberty” (EG); freedom London: “Bloody Sunday” deaths in, 205n3,
Liberty (London): contributors to, 523, 537; 541; EG’s response to, 379; Russian exiles

636 INDEX
 in, 395n2; EG’s speeches in, 221–27, 371, Maguire, James G., 574
374n5, 382, 390, 500, 509; surveillance of Mainwaring, Sam, 382n1
EG in, 389. See also Die Autonomie; The Malatesta, Errico: associates of, 524, 529, 532,
Commonweal; Freedom; Freiheit; Interna- 536, 542, 543, 546, 547; biographical sum-
tional Social Revolutionary and Anarchist mary on, 541; as delegate, 234n2, 397n9,
Congress; Liberty; Second International, 491, 501, 523; deportation of, 558; EG’s meet-
London congress of ing with, 38, 500; First International and,
London, Jack, 505 489; on heartaches, 44; as influence on EG,
Los Angeles (Calif.): EG’s speeches in, 330n7, 9, 13; written contributions of, 569
506 Malthusian League, 66
Lo-Scalpellino (Barre, Vt.), 276n5 Manhattan Liberal Club, 479, 510, 514, 572 –73
Louvre, 406, 413 Manhattan Single Tax Club, 237n5, 575
love: EG’s belief in power of, 12, 42 – 44; EG’s Manhood Suffrage League (London), 561
definition of, 292; EG’s, for two men, 557; manifestos: on Homestead strike, 543; Michel
labor of, 49; marriage’s impact on, 29, 159; and Kropotkin’s, 153n6; of Socialist League,
role in sexual freedom, 322; social class and, 578; on suppression of congress, 420, 421;
43, 270 –72. See also free love on suppression of lecture, 355n6. See also
Luccheni, Luigi: assassination by, 55, 427n9, Pittsburgh Manifesto (1883)
506; biographical summary on, 540 – 41; Mann, Tom, 62, 382n1, 509
EG’s denunciation of, 346 – 48; mentioned, Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, 205, 331,
482 424, 541
Lucifer Circle, 13, 502, 511 Marcellus, Percy, 446
Lucifer, the Lightbearer (Valley Falls, Kans., and Marquette Club (N.Y.), 471–72n4
Chicago): alleged obscene material in, 151n1; marriage: alternative to, 113, 158 –59; EG’s cri-
contributors to, 517, 524, 528, 535, 542, 544, tique of, 29, 42 – 44, 309; as foundation of
554; dating of, 521; description of, 567; dis- private property, 9, 43, 269; inequality in,
tribution of, 572; editor of, 42; founding of, 44, 269; pamphlet on abolition of, 151n1,
491; as influence on EG, 9; letters to (EG’s), 489, 490, 491, 573; EG’s rejection of, 272 –
479 – 80; location of, 500; on McKinley’s as- 73, 289 –90, 342
sassination, 77; as model, 563; publication “Marriage” (EG): text of, 269 –73
of, 533; readers of, 535 Marron, John, 570
Ludwig, Gen. William, 386n7 Marsh, Alfred, 396n4, 536, 565
Lum, Dyer D.: editorship of, 492, 535, 563; Martin, Charles, 575
Haymarket anarchists and, 540, 553; men- Martin, James L.: acquittal of, 285n1; biograph-
tioned, 577; speeches of, 496, 551; written ical summary on, 541; killings by, 287n2,
contributions of, 567, 568 305, 321; mentioned, 332
Lusitania, 562 Martine, Randolph B.: biographical summary
Le Lycéen républicain, 552 on, 541; as judge in People vs. Emma Gold-
lynching, 52, 61, 386 man, 161, 177–79, 182, 207
Lynn (Mass.): EG’s speeches in, 506, 510 Martínez de Campos, Arsenio, 498, 549
Marx, Eleanor, 578
Madagascar: French occupation of, 226 Marx, Karl Henrich: associates of, 529, 558;
Madison, James, 536 biographical summary on, 541– 42; First
Maguire, George, 574 International and, 398n12; as influence on

INDEX 637
 Marx, Karl Henrich (continued) Metzkow, Max: biographical summary on,
EG, 9; as influence on others, 382n2, 518; 542 – 43; escape plan and, 60; Homestead
mentioned, 408; support for, 540 strike and, 106 –7n13, 519; letters to (1892 –
Maryson, J. A., 257n2, 566, 574 1895), 130 –31, 140; letters to (1896 –1900),
masses: appeal to (EG), 41, 320 –21; fickleness 251–53, 258 – 62, 373
of, 443– 44; indifference of, 435; individuals Michel, Louise: associates of, 536, 546, 560;
vs., 431. See also public opinion biographical summary on, 543; as delegate,
Masur, Carl, 106, 130, 192n2, 542, 563 234n2, 397n9, 491, 501; in demonstrations,
The Match, 520, 537, 546 144– 45n3, 552; at EG’s London speech, 221;
Matchett, Charles H., 496 EG’s meeting with, 38, 500; exile of, 181n5;
May Day: celebrations of, 96 –97, 99, 108 –9, illustration of, 226; manifesto of, 153n6;
120, 494; speakers for, 236, 495 newspaper of, 566; school of, 240n1, 524,
Mayers, J., 99 543; speeches of, 30, 62, 226, 500, 509;
McCormick Harvester (company), 492, 555 written contributions of, 567, 569
McCowan, Rev. H. S., 315–16n40, 330n5, 503 Michelet, Victor Émile, 566
McDonald (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 508 Michelson, Miriam: career of, 440n1; EG inter-
McGlynn, Father, 574 viewed by, 72 –73, 289 –92, 440 – 45
McGuinness, Edwin, 284n3 middle class: EG’s appeal to, 71–72; EG’s hopes
McGuire, Peter James, 280, 303 for, 72 –73; revolutionary potential of, 50 –
McIntyre (detective in England), 223 52, 429, 443
McIntyre, John F., 161n3, 176n28, 207, 426 Mikhailov, Alexander, 427n10, 491
McKeesport (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504 Milch, Jac., 147
McKinley, William: AB on assassination of, Mill, John Stuart, 33
73–79, 484– 85, 487– 88; assassination of, Miller, Herman, 366 – 67n2
68 – 69, 73–79, 460n1, 461– 62, 471n2, Millerand, Etienne-Alexandre, 397n10, 417n6,
512 –13, 525; biographical summary on, 542; 418 –19
campaign of, 533; criticism of, 41; death of, Milner, Alfred, 387, 394, 395, 543, 553
514; EG on assassination of, 68 – 69, 73–79, Milwaukee (Wis.): EG’s speeches in, 505; SDA’s
467, 471–78, 479 – 80; EG’s opinion of, 245, candidates in, 576
249, 325, 332, 471, 476; gold standard and, miners: conditions for, 338, 366, 368; national
257; possible fears of, 274, 278, 422; public labor convention and, 310 –11; as patriots,
opinion of, 485; second inauguration of, 510; 327; Spanish-American War and, 61; strikes
state troops used by, 245n4; treaty signed by, of, 386, 476. See also Hazleton (Pa.) mas-
506 sacre; Homestead (Pa.) strike; United Mine
McLeod, Pearl, 577 Workers
Mechanic, Julia, 464n2, 468n13, 485n4, 512 –13 Minkin, Anna, 21, 24, 493, 494, 519
Melba, Nellie, 331 Minkin, Helen, 21, 114n6, 493, 494, 519
Merlino, Francesco Saverio: accusations minorities: in Austro-Hungarian politics,
against, 241; at anarchist congress, 491; 407n6; repression of, 229 –30. See also
associates of, 526; biographical summary immigrants and immigration; Native
on, 542; editorship of, 329n1, 568; on politi- Americans
cal participation, 53, 335–36; speeches of, Mirbeau, Octave, 559, 569
496, 579 Mitchell, Seward, 573
Il Messaggero (Rome), 53 Modell, David A., 577

638 INDEX
“The Modern Phase(s) of Anarchy” (EG): as- tentats, 15, 25, 119 –20n1, 496; biographical
sassin’s attendance at, 73–74; delivery of, summary on, 544– 46; confrontations with
451n2, 460n2 EG, 39, 41, 121n8, 267, 496, 501; criticism
Modern School movement, 54 of EG, 119 –21, 482, 510; death of, 42; EG
Moiseev, Lev (pseud. M. Leontieff ), 257n2 criticized by, 406 –7; on EG’s lecture tour,
Molière, 419n16 335n3; EG’s relationship with, 18 –19, 102n4,
Mollock, Frank, 113, 543– 44 114, 493, 545– 46; EG’s testimony on, 173;
Mollock, Josephine, 113, 544 illustration of, 97; as influence on EG, 9,
Monaca (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 309 –10, 330, 156 –57n4, 571; May Day demonstration and,
502, 504 96 –97, 99, 108 –9, 120n4; mentioned,
Le Moniteur industriel, 560 208, 250, 251n1, 444, 579; names for, 133n4,
Montjuich Prison (Barcelona), 256, 501, 517 258n2; on Paris congress, 393n5, 407n3;
Moore, E. D., 125n1 Peukert’s conflict with, 17–18, 101–3, 545,
Morant, Amy C., 221, 221n4, 227 547, 551; Pittsburgh Manifesto and, 491; as
Morong, G., 514 Pope Hannes, 258n2, 407; raffle tickets and,
Morossi, Benedict, 170 –71n18 260, 262n1; relationships of, 21; on SDA,
Morris, J. H.: associates of, 516, 536, 561; bio- 576; speeches of, 555; works of, 19; written
graphical summary on, 544; on fund collec- contributions of, 566. See also Freiheit
tion for AB, 240n2, 241– 42n5 Mostler, Joseph, 260n3
Morris, William: associates of, 549, 558, 560; Mother Earth, 533, 558, 572, 577
biographical summary on, 544; editorship Le Mot pour rire, 560
of, 564; Haymarket protest of, 538; in Social- Mount Olive (Ill.): EG’s speeches in, 507
ist League, 578 Mowbray, Charles Wilfred: AB supported by,
Morrison, Frank, 280 251n3; accusations against, 241; arrest of,
Morton, Arthur, 145 499; associates of, 520; biographical sum-
Morton, C., 221, 227 mary on, 546; on bread as sacred right, 541;
Morton, Eric B.: biographical summary on, as delegate, 234n2, 397n9, 501; editorship
544; EG’s travels with, 510; escape plan and, of, 537, 567, 578; as influence, 96 –97n3,
63– 64, 414n1, 509, 520; Hazleton (Pa.) mas- 571; mentioned, 202, 254; sketch of, 204;
sacre and, 288n2, 576; surveillance of, 67 speeches of, 204– 6, 237, 305n11, 305n13,
Morton, James F., Jr.: biographical summary 499, 500, 536, 573; U.S. tour of, 236; written
on, 544; influences on, 549; mentioned, contributions of, 568
337n1, 340n1, 393; publishing by, 565; Moyer, Charles, 386n7
speeches of, 504; U.S. tour of, 400, 554; Müller, John, 566
written contributions of, 563, 566, 567 Murray, Andrew, 99
Morton, Thomas, 271n4, 334n2 “My Year in Stripes” (EG): editor’s comments
Moscoso, Abelardo A., 276 on, 194, 201–2; payment for, 194n1; publica-
Moses (biblical), 243– 44 tion of, 499; text of, 194–201
Most, Johann: AB’s attentat criticized by, 23,
103, 133, 496; as anarchist collectivist, 518; Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will): assassination
arrests and imprisonment of, 80, 95n2, 114, of Alexander II by, 14, 15, 427n10, 491;
120n3, 275, 491, 492 –93, 494, 513, 514, 520; members of, 18, 550
associates and followers of, 131, 382 – 83n4, Natanson, Mark Andreyevich, 18n37, 139n4,
406n2, 517, 526, 538, 542, 546, 548; on at- 519, 522

INDEX 639
 Nation, Carry Amelia Moore, 444 New Free Popular Theater (Berlin), 517
Nationaal Arbeids-Secretariaat, 524 New Haven (Conn.): EG’s living arrangements
National Amalgamated Association of Iron in, 21–22, 110, 493, 494; EG’s speeches in,
and Steel Workers, 280n3 305, 494, 502
National Amalgamated Union, 560 New London (Conn.): EG’s speeches in, 510
National Association of Merchants and Travel- newspapers. See press, anarchist; press,
ers, 80, 471–72n4, 513 mainstream
National Civic Federation, 518 Newton (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504
National Defense Association, 490, 558, New University of Brussels, 370
573–74 new woman: new man as necessity for, 43, 322
National Free-Love Convention, 489 “The New Woman” (EG): delivery of, 353n1,
National Geographic Society, 69 503, 504, 505, 507; text of, 322 –23
National Guard: Homestead strike and, 106 – New York American Craftsman, 315–16n40
7n13, 224; Pullman strike and, 498 –99, New York Anti-Militarist League, 525
523, 527; use of, 232n3 New York Arbeiter-Zeitung, 97n6
Nationalist, 549 New York Central Labor Federation (CLF),
National Liberal League, 489, 490, 572. See 98n7, 98n11, 571
also Liberal Clubs New York City: as anarchists’ center, 54; Broad-
National Secular Society, 556 way cable car line in, 157; census of anar-
National Workingmen’s Advocate, 542 chists in, 80; EG’s arrival in, 493; EG’s living
Native Americans: slaughtering of, 230, 244 arrangements in, 21–22; gathering after
Neebe, Oscar W.: associates of, 549, 555, 557; EG’s release in, 203– 8, 499, 546; EG’s
biographical summary on, 546; pardoning speeches in, 68, 96 –99, 108 –9, 305, 422,
of, 497, 516; sentence of, 492 493, 494, 496, 497, 499, 502, 506 –7, 510,
Netlow, Max, 374. See also Nettlau, Max 514, 515; gathering places on Lower East
Nettlau, Max: associates of, 526, 527, 528; bio- Side, 7– 8; Yiddish anarchist congress in,
graphical summary on, 547; EG defended 368n3, 494. See also The Alarm; Der Anar-
by, 510; EG’s visit with, 62; illustration of, chist; Die Brandfackel; Free Society; Freie Ar-
375; letters to (1900), 63, 374–76, 377– beiter Stimme; Liberty: Not the Daughter but
78Ger., 379 – 80, 381Ger., 382 – 83, 404– the Mother of Order; People vs. Emma Gold-
5Ger., 406 –7, 410 –11Ger., 412 –15; letters man (trial, 1893); Social Science Club (New
to (1901), 77, 481– 83; lifestyle of, 68; men- York); Solidarity; Sturmvogel; Union Square
tioned, 65, 569; written contributions of, New York City Draft Riots (1863), 164n9
375n9, 380, 566 New York City Federation of Labor, 561
Neve, Johann: at anarchist congress, 491; ar- New York Debating Club, 310n26
rest and death of, 17, 101–2n3, 545, 551; as- The New Yorkers (musical comedy), 513–14
sociates of, 382 – 83n4; biographical sum- New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung: on anarchist/unem-
mary on, 547 ployed demonstrations, 141– 43Ger., 144–
Newark (N.J.): EG’s speeches in, 493, 499 47, 170, 175; biases of, 28; reporters of, 168
New Caledonia (France): political prisoners in, New Yorker Volkszeitung, 98n7, 108, 523, 578
181 New York Journal, 281, 325n3, 332n5, 514
New England Free Love League, 490 New York Sun: as capitalistic paper, 432; con-
New England Labor Reform League, 559 tributors to, 98n9, 558; interview of EG in,
New England Zeitung, 542 69 –70, 71, 423–31

640 INDEX
New York Times: on anarchist/unemployed 520; associates of, 130 –31, 496, 517, 519,
demonstration, 144n1; on Cánovas’s assassi- 543; attorney of, 125n1; biographical sum-
nation, 276n6; contributors to, 558; on Czol- mary on, 548; code-name for, 254n2; de-
gosz (EG), 466n6; on EG’s speech, 422; on fense of, 549; EG’s reunion with, 307–9; es-
EG’s trial, 173nn22 –23; on gathering after cape plan and, 502; Homestead strike and,
EG’s release from prison, 208n11 106 –7n13; illustration of, 139; mentioned,
New York Tribune, 542 188n3, 373, 393, 401; EG’s research material
New York World: on anarchists, 36, 274–79; on on, 265, 266 – 67; speeches of, 504; visitors
attentats, 100 –110, 496, 540 – 41; barred for, 255; written contributions of, 567, 568
speech in (EG), 32; contributors to, 98n9, Norris, Charles Goldsmith, 464, 468, 470,
520; on Czolgosz and EG, 471–72n4; on 513
EG’s speech at anarchist/unemployed dem- Notkin, Natasha: associates of, 527; EG’s
onstration, 96 –99, 146n7; on EG’s trial, speech and, 510; as influence, 305n11, 573;
177– 82; focus of, 85; on gathering after EG’s mentioned, 428n13; in social science club,
release from prison, 34–35, 203– 8; on Ha- 577
zleton, 541; illustration of EG in, 480; inter- Nowak, John, 462
views of EG in, 29 –30, 111–15, 155– 60, Nowak, Walter, 462n3, 512
172n21, 464–70; letters to (EG’s), 219, 346 – Der Nußknacker, 545
48; on prison conditions (EG), 34, 194–202,
499; on violence, 477n12 Oakland (Calif.): EG’s speeches in, 58 –59,
Nicholas I (tsar of Russia), 518 362 – 65, 508
Nicoll, David: biographical summary on, 547; Oakland Enquirer, 58 –59, 362 – 65
editorship of, 538, 564– 65, 578; mentioned, obscenity: Comstock’s definition of, 55–56;
396n4, 524; on Walsall anarchists, 546; writ- distaste for, 51, 73. See also Comstock Acts
ten contributions of, 567 (1873, 1876); vulgarity
Niedermann, Claus, 111–12n1, 564 occupations (EG’s): garment and dressmaking,
Nietzsche, Friedrich: EG’s reading of, 38 –39, 21, 27, 140n1, 158, 173, 425, 492, 493, 494;
500; as influence on EG, 10; as influence on ice cream parlor, 22, 495, 500, 519; knit-
Ruedebusch, 554; written contributions of, ting and crocheting, 376, 379, 380; medical
567 training, 38, 59, 63; nursing, 77, 291, 366 –
Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Domela: associates 67, 430, 432, 444, 445, 482, 483, 500, 510;
of, 524; biographical summary on, 547– 48; photography studio, 22, 495; in prison,
mentioned, 368; newspaper of, 510; Paris 198 –99, 430, 445; salesperson, 467, 504,
congress and, 417–18; written contributions 512; tutoring, 406
of, 566 O’Connell, James A., 281
nihilists and nihilism: definition of, 100n1; Oerter, Friedrich Joseph (Sepp), 192n2, 220,
deportation of, 245; as influence on EG and 389n4, 548, 563
AB, 51, 267; AB’s uncle’s link to, 18n37, 424; Oerter, Joseph Friedrich (Fritz), 548
Zola on, 562 Office du Travail (Paris), 264
The Nineteenth Century, 539 Ogarev, Nicholas, 483n14
Nobiling, Carl Eduard, 15 Ohio: state troops used in strikes in, 245n4.
Nold, Carl: on AB’s attentat, 132 –33n3; AB’s de- See also Cincinnati; Cleveland
fense and, 520, 570 –71; arrest and impris- Ohio Liberal Club, 330, 505, 507
onment of, 26, 138 –39, 258, 262, 501, 513, O’Mara (Pittsburgh police chief ), 113–14

INDEX 641
 Operators’ and Cloakmakers’ Union, 168 552; petroleuse in, 145n5; remembrances of,
Oppenheimer, Moses, 579 2, 144– 45n3, 262, 504, 546, 556; support
Orchard Street: use of term, 133n5 for, 560
d’Orleans, Henri (prince), 346 “The Paris Congress” (EG): text of, 416 –21.
Ouida, 33 See also International Revolutionary Con-
Ouray (Colo.): EG’s speeches in, 508 gress of the Working People (Paris, 1900)
Our New Humanity, 533, 534, 535, 544. Parris, Thomas Collins Touzeau, 221, 227,
L’ouvrier des deux Mondes, 550 333n8
Owen, William C.: biographical summary on, Parsons, Albert: associates of, 555, 557; bio-
548 – 49; editorship of, 329nn1–2, 568; op- graphical summary on, 549; blacklisting of,
position to, 98; as Socialist League founder, 490; editorship of, 535, 563; execution of, 7,
98 –99n12, 529, 537, 579; speech of, 99; 492; as influence on EG, 156 –57n4, 181n4,
written contributions of, 565, 567, 568 283n2; and IWPA, 571; mentioned, 396,
456, 566; Pittsburgh Manifesto and, 491;
pacifism, 81 RSP and, 577–78; at Social Revolutionary
Paine, Thomas: biographical summary on, congress, 491; speech of, 283n2
549; individualist tradition of, 10; men- Parsons, Lucy E.: address of, 281; arrest of,
tioned, 41, 145– 46n6, 174, 248; on state 494; associates of, 530; biographical sum-
and society, 354 mary on, 549 –50; editorship of, 563; ethics
Painters and Decorators Union, 37, 505 and, 402n6; on free love, 12, 312 –13; Hazle-
Paita, Joseph, 449 –51 ton (Pa.) massacre and, 288n2, 576; on lec-
Pallás, Paulino, 226, 275, 497–98, 549 ture tour, 319; mentioned, 266; at SDA con-
Pallavencini, Salvatore: death of, 510; EG’s stay vention, 345n5; speeches of, 493, 503, 550;
with, 507; speeches of, 276 –77, 502; textile written contributions of, 568
strike and, 506 Parti Ouvrier Français, 550
Panama Canal company, 226n9 Paterson (N.J.): anarchists in, 463n5
Pan American Exposition, 461– 62, 512, 525, patriotism: commercialism of English, 395;
542 EG’s speech on, 327–28; intolerance and,
Panic of 1893, 151n3, 496 –97 332; perversion of, 474–75; of prisoners,
Paris: address in, 383, 408; anarchist culture 485; in Spanish-American War, 383
in, 62 – 63; bombings in, 193n4, 281, 498, Patton, Susan, 402n6, 509
534; bread riot in, 543, 552; EG’s speeches in, Pawson, John, 536
64, 408, 500, 509; EG’s hopes disappointed Peddie, R., 221
in, 416 –19; EG’s isolation in, 406 –7, 413. Pelloutier, Fernand Léonce Émile: associates
See also L’Aurore; Exposition Universelle of, 524, 552; biographical summary on, 550;
(Paris, 1900); Freiheit; L’Humanité nouvelle; as delegate, 234n2, 417; written contribu-
International Revolutionary Congress of tions of, 568
the Working People (Paris, 1900); Le Père Pennsylvania: EG’s speeches in, 309 –10, 330,
Peinard; Le Révolté; La Révolte; Les Temps 502, 504, 508, 511; Western Penitentiary in,
Nouveaux 80, 457n1, 459n5. See also Hazleton (Pa.)
Paris, 239 massacre; Homestead (Pa.) strike; Philadel-
Paris Commune (1871): legacy of, 417; men- phia; Pittsburgh
tioned, 175, 204, 493, 555; Most on, 120n3; Pennsylvania Commutation Act (1901), 458, 511
participants in, 181n5, 431n17, 523, 532, 543, Pennsylvania Board of Pardons: appeals to,

642 INDEX
 251n5, 255n6, 307, 349n2, 350 –51, 352n5, 73, 305, 445n12, 446 – 48, 502, 504, 511; so-
500, 506, 570; hearing postponed, 503; par- cial science club in, 432n4, 445n12, 510, 511,
don denied by, 254–55; refusal to hear case, 528, 577; EG’s speeches in, 305, 432, 440,
368 442, 445–51, 501, 502, 504, 507, 510 –11. See
Penrose, Boies, 251n5, 532 also Friendship Liberal League; Ladies’ Lib-
Pentecost, Hugh O., 494 eral League
People, 98n7 Philadelphia North American: on EG’s speech,
People’s Party (Populist Party), 98n9, 99n13 446 – 48; interview of EG in, 72 –73, 440 –
People vs. Emma Goldman (trial, 1893): at- 45; on police tyranny, 446 – 48; threats
torney in, 32, 161; bail issue in, 166n10; de against, 442n7
Cleyre’s response to, 196, 205n3; description Philippine Islands: independence movement
of, 30 –31; EG’s essay on, 183– 85Ger., 186 – in, 476, 507; U.S. annexation of, 386, 436
89; events preceding, 497; legal doctrine Phillips, Wendell, 10, 145– 46n6, 174, 332, 551
underlying, 31–32; mentioned, 423–24; po- Philosophical Society (Brooklyn), 504
lice affadavits in, 148; sentencing in, 177– Philosophical Society (Chicago), 552
79, 443n8, 498; transcript excerpted from, philosophy: anarchism as (EG), 426 –27, 431,
161–76, 163; unfairness of, 194–95; verdict 434–35, 477, 479
in, 31, 179 – 82. See also imprisonment (EG’s) photography studio, 22, 495
Le Père Peinard (Cool Daddy, Paris): contribu- Phrenological Journal and Science of Health: on
tors to, 534; cover of, 319; description of, EG’s phrenology, 35, 214–16, 526; publica-
567; editor of, 552; on EG, 318 –21. See also tion of, 214n1
La Sociale Pierrot, Marc, 510
Perkins, George W., 280 Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 22, 106 –
Perovskaya, Sophia: associates of, 522; bio- 7n13, 217, 224, 318, 531
graphical summary on, 550; execution of, Pinski, David, 46
427n10, 491; as influence on EG, 51; men- Pionire der Frayhayt (Pioneers of Liberty): de-
tioned, 396, 456 scription of, 574; founding of, 102; Haymar-
Persky (Perski), Lottie, 219 ket anarchists defended by, 16; meeting
petroleuse (firebrand): use of term, 145 place of, 133n5; members of, 18, 519, 540,
Pettibone, George, 386n7 556, 562. See also Varhayt; Jewish anarchists
Peukert, Joseph: at anarchist congress, 491; as- Pittsburgh: anarchist congress in, 368n3, 491;
sociates of, 382 – 83n4, 519, 546; biographi- EG’s speeches in, 243–50, 324, 325, 327–30,
cal summary on, 551; editorship of, 106n11, 366 – 67, 368, 499, 501, 502, 504, 508, 510,
564; imprisonment of, 101; as influence on 511; EG’s visit to, 307–9, 512
EG, 9; mentioned, 192n2, 505; Most’s con- Pittsburgh Manifesto (1883): description of,
flict with, 17–18, 101–3, 545, 547; opposition 12n28, 15, 491; EG on, 494; as influence on
to, 526; speeches of, 494, 496; written con- EG, 19, 545, 571
tributions of, 563. See also Der Anarchist Pittsburg Leader: contributors to, 519; on EG’s
Pfuetzner, Clemens, 464n2, 485n4, 512 speeches, 41, 243– 46; interviews of EG
Philadelphia: corruption in, 442n7; EG ar- in, 324–26, 366 – 69; on rumors about
rested in, 153nn7– 8, 165, 170, 497 (See also EG, 60
People vs. Emma Goldman [trial, 1893]); Pittsburg Post: on EG’s speeches, 247–50, 327–
free-speech fight in, 72 –73, 442 – 43, 546; 28, 449 –51
Liberal congress in, 572; single tax group in, Platt, Thomas Collier, 422

INDEX 643
 Platt Amendment (1902), 386n5, 436n6 Pope, Abner J.: arrest and imprisonment
Pleydell, Arthur, 305n12, 446, 448n, 574 of, 312n33, 392 –93n2, 502, 565; associates
police: AB investigated by, 100; anarchist/ of, 516, 536; biographical summary on,
unemployed demonstrations and, 144; anti- 551–52
anarchist hysteria of, 471–72n4, 485; atti- Populist Party (People’s Party), 98n9, 99n13
tudes toward, 248; authority of, 355, 360; Portland (Oreg.): EG’s speeches in, 330n7, 506,
brutality and tyranny of, 153, 181, 223, 446 – 508. See also The Firebrand
48; as capitalist force, 162 – 64, 167, 171, Pouget, Jean Joseph (Émile): arrest of, 543; as-
205– 6; confrontations with, 46 – 47, 97; sociates of, 524, 550; biographical summary
EG beaten by, 80 – 81; EG’s baiting of, 319 – on, 552; as delegate, 234n2; in demonstra-
20; EG’s opinion of, 174, 452, 467; fear of, tions, 144– 45n3; editorship of, 567; men-
422; free speech suppressed by, 440, 441, tioned, 368; Paris congress and, 417. See also
442, 443, 447– 48, 501, 502, 510; French Le Père Peinard
gatherings suppressed by, 419 –20; at poverty: extent of, 231; increased activism in
gathering after EG’s release, 203– 4; statue response to, 231–32; miseries of, 151–52,
commemorating, 313n35. See also National 171–72, 174, 224; EG speaking on causes of,
Guard; Pinkerton National Detective 27–29. See also working class
Agency; surveillance Prescott, William Blair, 280
police records: affadavit, 148; on EG’s arrest, press, anarchist: attacks on, 80; EG’s correc-
28, 165; intake report, 473; mug shot, 472 tions in, 70 –71; EG’s first writing in, 116 –
political participation: debate on, 52 –54, 334– 18Ger., 119 –21; EG’s role in, 40 – 41, 48 –
36, 542; Debs’s focus on, 312; EG on limits 49; EG’s tone in, 33; European circulation
of, 52; organizations supporting, 575–76, of, 238; funds for, 21, 27, 40, 257, 263,
578, 579; as prostitution, 398 376n10, 438n3, 538, 551; influence on west-
political prisoners: anarchists as, 187– 89; ern states, 338; limits of, 398; role in anar-
books on, 263– 64; coining of term, 26; in chist movement development, 392 –93. See
Russia/Siberia, 139, 181, 424, 522, 550; also specific periodicals
woman as, 186 press, mainstream: anti-anarchist hysteria in,
political violence: acceptance of (EG), 70 –71, 471–72n4, 485, 575; biases of, 28, 47; credi-
432; appeal for AB’s release and, 350 –52; bility of, 434, 436, 467; criticism of, 58 –59,
discourse on, 14, 29, 83, 340, 341; EG’s testi- 281; EG’s appeal to, 31, 44– 45; limitations
mony on, 175; Hazleton (Pa.) massacre and, of, 364. See also specific periodicals
288; individual acts of, 341– 42; EG on in- Pressburg, Joseph, 565
evitability of, 55–56, 81; as means to social Press Writers Association, 340n1
revolution, 226 –27; predicted demise of, Price, George M., 251n1
76 –77; refusal to advocate, 426 –28; and re- Price, William L., 446n4, 575
taliation concept, 55; against workingmen, Prison Blossoms: contributors to, 434n3, 519,
181. See also assassinations; propaganda by 520, 548; description of, 567; creation of,
the deed (attentats) 26; on motives for AB’s attentat, 132 –33n3;
politics: EG’s early years in, 5– 6; of electoral production of, 254n2
reform, 47– 49; hypocrisy in, 52 –54, 283; prisons: conditions in, 33–34, 194–202; food
impossibility of justice via, 221–27, 321, in, 304–5; free speech advocates in, 151; pa-
500; personal issues and, 12 –13; rejec- triotism in, 485; and self-education, 33; sen-
tion of, 244– 45, 249 –50. See also liberal tence reduction in, 458; U.S. vs. other coun-
democracy tries’, 196 –97, 256. See also Blackwell’s

644 INDEX
 Island Penitentiary; imprisonment (AB’s); La Protesta Humana, 517
imprisonment (EG’s); Tombs; Western Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph: as influence, 518,
Penitentiary 530, 552, 556, 559, 560; translations of, 539;
private property: criticism of, 171–72, 354–55, written contributions of, 567
554; marriage as foundation of, 9, 43, 269; Proust, Marcel, 419n16
opposition to, 181, 196. See also Single Tax Providence (R.I.): Cook’s role in, 524; EG’s ar-
El Productor, 529 rest in, 303–5; EG’s speeches in, 282 – 84,
Progressive Labor Organization of Chicago, 505 302 –3, 322 –23, 501, 502, 504; mentioned,
progressive reform, 52 36; threats against EG in, 284n3
Proletarian Club (N.Y.), 556 psychology: EG’s interest in, 479. See also
Proletarier aus dem Eulengebirge, 517 Freud, Sigmund
propaganda: appeals for AB as, 26, 38, 40, “The Psychology of Political Violence” (EG):
258; Czolgosz’s act as, 475n6; development influences on, 478n
of (anarchist), 236 –38; EG’s arrest as, 304; public opinion: EG in Philadelphia and, 440n2;
EG’s lecture on, 392 –94; EG’s role in, 318; fickleness of, 49; free speech suppressed by,
funds for, 125–26, 237, 277; importance of, 395; McKinley assassination’s impact on,
260; need for English language, 48, 258, 79 – 81; in U.S. about Russia, 447– 48. See
317, 429 –30, 499, 558; need for women also masses
speakers in, 428 –30; question of force Pullman strike (Chicago): arrest and imprison-
for, 340, 341; role of women speakers in, 5; ment after, 500; defeat of, 232n3, 523; events
speeches’ effectiveness as, 412; suppression of, 498 –99; leadership of, 527; mentioned,
of speech as, 416, 443– 44; in western 231; support for, 516, 526
states, 338 Purdy, Lawson, 575
“The Propaganda and the Congress” (EG): Pyat, Felix, 559
transcript of, 392 –94
propaganda by the deed (attentats): AB on La Questione Sociale: editors of, 529, 541;
meaning of, 76, 78, 132 –33n3, 434n3; con- founding of, 500; police search of, 463n5,
cept of, 9, 14–16; consequences of, 132 –33; 513; support for, 521
defense of, 19, 129, 452 –54, 549, 551, 552, Quinn, T. Putnam, 288n2, 344, 552, 576
553; description of AB’s, 16, 22 –23, 25–27,
267– 68; efficacy of, 119 –21, 265– 66, 341– racial equality, 52, 246
42; EG’s clarification of position on, 434– racism: dispute about, 199n3; ignored in EG’s
37, 453; EG’s endorsement of, 225–26; speeches, 52, 61. See also anti-Semitism
by European anarchists, 38, 274–79; in The Radical Review, 559
individualist anarchism, 10 –11; interview Radikaler Arbeiter-Bund (Radical Workers’
on, 160; justification for, 274–79; manual League), 102, 494, 507, 542, 563
for, 545; motivations for, 132 –33n3, 223–25, Rahkmetov. See Berkman, Alexander
246, 249, 341, 427–28, 463, 476; prediction Rasnick, Martin, 464n2, 485n4, 513
of, 422; EG’s refusal to judge, 70 –71, 434– Ratchford, Michael D., 280
37; selflessness of, 245– 46; use of term, 15; Ravachol (pseud. of François-Claudius Koenig-
valorization of, 73–74, 422, 455–56. See also stein): biographical summary on, 552;
assassinations, political violence bombing by, 495; execution of, 496; men-
prostitutes and prostitution: ethics and, 402; tioned, 238, 418n11, 482
married women as, 272; political participa- Rawson, A. L., 490, 573
tion as, 398 The Rebel (Boston): contributors to, 528, 550;

INDEX 645
 The Rebel (Boston) (continued) respectability, 448, 479
cover of, 229; description of, 567– 68; edi- Reuss, Karl Theodor, 101–2n3, 545
tors of, 520, 537; founding and demise of, Revolt (Chicago), 577
500, 546; mentioned, 396 Le Révolté (The Rebel, Geneva and Paris): con-
Der Rebell, 101–2n3, 551 tributors to, 552; description of, 568; editors
Recht voor Allen (Justice for All, Dutch), 524, of, 532, 538. See also La Révolte
548 La Révolte (Rebellion, Paris): on attentats, 15–
Reclus, Jean-Jacques (Élisée): associates of, 541, 16; closure of, 407n7; contributors to, 534;
547, 560; biographical summary on, 552 – description of, 568; name change of, 532.
53; as delegate, 234n2, 397n9, 501; men- See also Les Temps Nouveaux
tioned, 368, 532; university of, 370n3; writ- revolution. See social revolution
ten contributions of, 564, 568 Revolutionary Review, 556
red as symbol of anarchism, 144– 45n3, 208n7, Revolutionary Socialistic Party (RSP), 491,
275, 449 577–78
Red International. See International Working La Révolution Sociale, 543
Men’s Association Rhode Island. See Providence (R.I.)
Red Queen: use of term, 366 Rhodes, Cecil, 387, 394, 395, 402, 553
Reed (prison inspector), 255 Richards, Robert (“Horsethief Bob”), 254n1
Regeneracíon, 511 “The Right of Free Speech in America” (EG):
Reifgraber, Joseph, 491 delivery of, 499; text of, 149 –50Ger., 151–54
Reitman, Ben, 477n12 right of the first night (jus primae noctis), 186
Reitzel, Robert: biographical summary on, 553; rights: arms justified in defense of, 286 – 87;
death of, 505; editorship of, 564; EG’s meet- limits to workingmen’s, 152 –53. See also
ing with, 496, 504; mentioned, 306, 308; bread as sacred right; free speech
Stein’s stay with, 557; support from, 315. See “The Right to Be Lazy” (EG): delivery of, 493
also Der arme Teufel Rimbaud, Arthur, 431n17
religion: analogies from, 211–12, 243– 44, Rinke, Otto, 106n11, 192n2, 382 – 83n4, 551,
245– 46; as capitalist ally, 320; critique of 563
(EG), 53–54; freedom of, 363; hegemony of, Robb, James, 567
58; hypocrisy in, 52 –54, 283; marriage up- Robinson, John Beverly, 567
held in, 273; protests of, 572; rejection of, Roche, John A., 313n36
29, 158, 172, 244, 292, 360, 559, 574; war’s Rochefort, Henri, 560
link to, 332 –33. See also Adam and Eve story; Rochester (N.Y.): EG’s family in, 466, 492,
Church; Jesus Christ; Jewish experience 497, 512; EG’s speeches in, 316, 493, 503;
Rémy, Léon, 419, 433, 510, 553 mentioned, 74; unemployment demonstra-
Representative Council of the Federated Trades tion in, 153n3
and Labor Organization, 561 Rockefeller, John D., 402, 553
repression: of antimilitarism, 60 – 61, 384– 88; Rocker, Rudolf, 133n4, 509, 547, 566. See also
assassinations’ caused by, 55–56, 80; by cap- Arbeter Fraint
italism, 244– 46; in Germany, 14, 401n5; in Roda, Maria, 206, 206n5, 499, 530, 554
Italy, 427n9, 506; in marriage, 42 – 43; of Roosevelt, Theodore, 386n8, 436n6, 525
minorities, 229 –30; of Paris congress, 66, Roscoe (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504, 508
416 –21, 510; religious analogies to, 211–12. Rosenberg, Wilhelm, 262n3
See also Russia; Spain Rosenfarb, Abraham, 151–52n3

646 INDEX
Rossetti, Arthur, 569 Salvochea, Fermín, 495
Rossetti, Helen, 569 Samuels, Henry B., 565
Rossetti, Olivia, 569 Sand, George, 33
Rossetti, William, 569 San Diego (Calif.): vigilantes in, 477n12
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 248, 364n3, San Diego and Arizona Railroad, 402n7
419n16, 554 San Francisco: social science club in, 577; EG’s
Royal Prussian Police: communiqué from, 64 speeches in, 330n7, 505– 6, 508. See also
Roz, Michael, 464n2, 513 Free Society
RSP. See Revolutionary Socialistic Party San Francisco Call: on Goldman’s success, 51,
Ruedebusch, Emil F., 406n1, 407n8, 554, 563, 52; interview of EG in, 331–33
567 San Francisco Chronicle: on EG’s speeches,
Ruedebusch, Julie, 406n1, 407, 408 460 – 63; on McKinley’s assassination, 75,
Ruiz de Ugarrio y Salvador, Ricardo, 279 471–72n4
ruling class: condemnation of (EG), 71, 129, San Francisco Evening Post, 531
151–54, 228 –32, 474–76; education of, 57– San Francisco Examiner, 471–72n4
58, 59; EG’s testimony on, 174; fears of, 211– San Francisco Single Tax Club, 574
12, 248; judicial system in support of, 187– San Francisco Tageblatt, 337n1
89, 197, 205, 207– 8, 227, 320 –21; love as Sanial, Lucien, 303, 303n6
out of fashion for, 270; oppression by, 171– San Jose (Calif.): EG’s speeches in, 506, 508
72, 180 – 81. See also capitalists and capital- Scandinavian Painters Union, 37, 511
ism; police; private property Schauwecker, Charles L., 166 – 67, 169
Ruskin, John, 387– 88 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 172
Ruskin Colony, 575 Schilling, Emil: biographical summary on,
Russell, Charles Edward, 572 554; Czolgosz’s visits to, 511; as suspicious
Russia: attentat’s effects in, 488; EG’s birth in of Czolgosz, 460n1, 468n14, 512, 525
(Lithuania), 489; nostalgia about, 69 –70; Schmidt, Johann Caspar. See Stirner, Max
pogroms in, 491; political prisoners in, 139, Schmidt, Sarah, 208
181, 550; prison conditions in (See Siberia); Schneider, Alfred, 464n2, 485n4, 512
repression in, 14, 121, 495; revolutionary tra- Schneider, Charles, 218, 241, 570
ditions of, 13–14, 424–25; student unrest in, Schreiner, Olive, 270
364; tsarism in, 14, 518; U.S. compared to, Schroyer, Russell, 457
41, 95, 187– 88; U.S. extradition treaty with, Schuettler, Hermann, 464, 466, 468, 469, 554
245n5, 523 Schulder, Fred, 503
Russian language, 414, 432 Schumm, Emilie (Millie), 517
Rysakov, Ivanovich, 491 Schurz, Carl, 121, 121n6, 307
Schwab, Justus H.: AB’s defense and, 349n2,
Sablin, Nikolai, 427n10 351n3, 352, 506, 570; biographical summary
Saint-Imier International. See Anti- on, 555; books loaned to EG by, 33; death of,
Authoritarian International 431; as editor, 260n1, 566; EG’s release from
St. Louis (Mo.): EG’s speeches in, 289n1, prison and, 203; EG’s sentencing and, 179;
315, 320 –21, 503, 505, 507, 510; EG’s visit to, Most’s immigration and, 545; raffle tickets
512; labor convention in, 310. See also Der and, 262n1; saloon of, 237n8, 423, 431, 558;
Anarchist sketch of, 204; speeches of, 499
St. Louis Post Dispatch, 44 Schwab, Michael: biographical summary on,

INDEX 647
 Schwab, Michael (continued) Seymour, Henry: associates of, 561; biographi-
555–56; death of, 506; as editor, 564, 569; cal summary on, 556; editorship of, 563,
illness of, 505; pardoning of, 497, 516; sen- 564; at EG’s London speech, 221; speech of,
tencing of, 492; at Social Revolutionary con- 223; written contributions of, 567
gress, 491 Shakespeare, William, 553
Schwartz, Morris, 148n1 Sharkey, Tom, 364
science: as authority, 355 Shaw, George Bernard, 533, 538, 559, 566, 567
Scio (Oreg.): EG’s speeches in, 508 Shearman, Thomas, 575
Scotland: EG’s reception in, 227n, 237–38, Sheffield Anarchist, 522
379 – 80, 383; EG’s speeches in, 9, 500, 509; Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), 523
free speech absent in, 395; single-tax organi- Sherman Silver Purchase Act (1890), 151n3,
zations in, 575 171
SDA. See Social Democracy of America Shirt Makers Union, 510
SDF. See Social Democratic Federation Shop Assistants’ Union, 560
(England) Siberia: political prisoners in, 139, 181, 424,
SDP. See Social Democratic Party 522; prison conditions in, 256, 537
SDWMPNA. See Social Democratic Working- Sieger, Pauline, 486, 497
Men’s Party of North America Simon, Abram, 151–52n3
Seaman, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. See Bly, Simons, Algie M., 579
Nellie Sinclair, Upton, 575
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 424n4 Single Tax League of the United States, 575
Seattle (Wash.): EG’s speeches in, 507 Single Tax (movement): description of, 574–
Second International: London congress of: an- 75; EG’s speeches for, 73, 237n5, 305, 445n12,
archists’ explusion from, 39, 65, 234n2, 397, 446 – 48, 502, 504, 511; mentioned, 99n15;
501, 536, 539; participants in, 221n2, 234, support for, 571
522, 524, 532, 533, 538, 540, 553; Zurich con- Single Tax Review, 575
gress of, 497, 546 Single Tax Society of Philadelphia, 73, 305,
Seldes, George, 305n12, 574 445n12, 446 – 48, 502, 504, 511
Senate Committee on Immigration, 212n6 Skinner, Otis, 359
Sendlein, August, 289n2 Slabs, Ezekiel, 536
separatism, 44 Slaughter, F. C. See Charles, Fred
sex radicalism: concept of, 533 slavery (U.S.): marriage as, 269; mentioned,
sexual freedom: demand for, 42 – 44, 272 –73; 145; as women’s condition, 291; as workers’
love’s role in, 322; women’s freedom linked condition, 152 –53, 172, 228, 283, 332. See
to, 51. See also free love also racial equality
sexuality and sexual desire: alleged obscene SLP. See Socialist Labor Party
material on, 491, 493–94, 514, 515; anar- Social Democracy of America (SDA): conven-
chism’s importance compared to, 429, 517, tion of, 338 –39, 344– 45, 506; description
550; belief in power of, 12; EG’s incorpora- of, 575–76; divisions in, 339n2, 527, 535,
tion of, 11–12; ignorance about, 270; image 550; EG’s opinion of, 345n5; founding of,
of self (EG), 45; journals concerned with, 501, 530; Hazleton (Pa.) massacre and,
563, 567; as metaphor for freedom, 82 288n2; leadership of, 47– 48, 54, 281n9;
Sexual Physiology (Trall), 490 members of, 344n1, 344n3, 520, 552; men-
sexual varietism: concept of, 407n8, 554 tioned, 311

648 INDEX
Social Democrat, 576 of America; Socialist Labor Party; Socialist
Social Democratic Federation (SDF, England), Party of America
382n2, 544, 578 Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, 99n16, 528,
Social Democratic Herald, 518 535, 578
Social Democratic Party (SDP): formation of, Socialist Unity Convention (Indianapolis),
339n2, 506, 509, 527, 576; members of, 518, 489, 512
555; merger of, 512 social order and society: capitalism as basis of,
Social Democratic Workingmen’s Party, 364– 65; crime fostered by, 187, 197, 249,
280n7 341, 426 –28, 434, 476; political mainte-
Social Democratic Working-Men’s Party of nance of, 249; Rousseau’s critique of, 554;
North America (Lassallean, SDWMPNA), State distinguished from, 354; vision of, 1.
489 See also capitalists and capitalism; class
La Sociale (Social Affairs, Paris), 238. See also Social Democratic Working-Men’s Party of
Le Père Peinard North America, 489
Social Gospel, 525 Social Political Workingmen’s Society of Cin-
The Socialist, 578 cinnati, 489
Socialist Labor Party (SLP): candidates of, 496, Social Reform Club of New York, 525
558; description of, 577–78; as influence, social revolution: call for, 145– 46, 171–72;
571; members of, 528, 529, 534–35, 536, 555; force as means to, 341; individual efficacy
merger of, 527; newspaper of, 168n14; oppo- in, 314; inevitability of, 181– 82, 196, 201,
sition to, 98n11, 518, 576; origins of, 490; 342n5, 486 – 87; precursors to, 226 –27,
representatives of, 491; speakers for, 237n5, 278 –79; as sole solution, 328; trial testi-
303, 529, 548; Spies expelled from, 557 mony on, 167
Socialist League (Dutch), 548 Social Revolutionary Club of New York, 491, 555
Socialist League of England: description of, Social Science Club (Boston), 577
578 –79; founding of, 382n2, 544; members Social Science Club (Brooklyn), 323n, 503
of, 521, 522, 538, 540, 543, 546, 547, 558, Social Science Club (Chicago), 577
560; as model, 98 –99n12, 529; speakers Social Science Club (New York): activities of,
for, 549. See also The Commonweal 577; EG’s speeches for, 510, 515; founding of,
Socialist League of New York: founding of, 98, 80, 483; members of, 432n4
495, 529, 537, 579; speakers for, 526 Social Science Club (Philadelphia), 432n4,
Socialist Party (England), 533 445n12, 510, 511, 528, 577
Socialist Party of America (SPA): description social science clubs: description of, 576 –77;
of, 579; EG’s criticism of, 54; formation of, EG’s speeches for, 323n, 445n12, 503, 510,
512, 527, 535, 576, 578; members of, 550; 511, 515
political support for, 69 Social Science Club (San Francisco), 577
Socialistic Publishing Society, 546, 564 Social Study Group (Paris), 532
socialists and socialism: analogy to, 246; anar- Society for the Suppression of Vice, 523
chism compared to (EG), 41, 453; anarchists’ Society of Ethical Research (Philadelphia), 504
break with, 39 – 40, 54–55, 397, 501; anar- solidarity: among political prisoners, 139;
chists’ conflict with, 25, 96 –99; EG dis- needed in movement, 397–98, 406 –7, 413
avowed by, 501; hopes disappointed in Solidarity (New York): contributors to, 520,
French, 417–19; as reform, 360 – 61. See 524, 527, 535, 549; demise of, 497; descrip-
also Central Labor Union; Social Democracy tion of, 568; difficulties of, 175n26; editor of,

INDEX 649
 Solidarity (New York) (continued) preparation for, 170, 173; as priority over
529; on EG’s travels, 48; founding of, 495, studies, 63, 374–75; programs for, 371, 390;
542; funds for, 499, 538, 568; letters to shift to English language in, 48; style of, 41,
(EG’s), 329 –30, 337–39; mentioned, 396; 47, 67– 68, 331–32, 443, 452; venues for, 52.
praise for, 48; reestablishment of, 254, See also lecture tours; specific locations and
329n1; on SDA (EG), 576 organizations
Solotaroff, Hillel: biographical summary on, Speed the Plough (Thomas Morton), 271n4,
556; editorship of, 566; escape plan and, 334n2
570; Haymarket anarchists defended by, 16; speech. See free speech
mentioned, 257n2, 493, 494; in Pioneers of Spencer, Herbert: biographical summary on,
Liberty, 574; speeches of, 432n4 556 –57; challenges to, 538; EG’s reading of,
Sotheran, Charles, 98 33; as influence, 486, 548; mentioned, 355,
South Africa. See Anglo-Boer War (1899 –1902) 559
Southern Railway scandal (France), 226 Spies, August: associates of, 549; biographical
Southworth, Victor E., 401 summary on, 557; editorship of, 564, 569;
Sovereign, James R., 280 execution of, 7, 492; as influence on EG,
Der Sozialist, 376n10, 407, 539 156 –57n4, 247n3, 342n5, 475n7; mentioned,
Sozialistische Monatshefte, 383 41, 456; Pittsburgh Manifesto and, 491, 571;
SPA. See Socialist Party of America on revolution, 342n5, 475n7; RSP and, 577–
Spain: anarchist newspaper in, 529; anarchists 78; at Social Revolutionary congress, 491;
executed in, 256n9, 274n1; Barcelona bomb- speeches of, 145– 46n6, 247n3, 248 – 49
ing in, 498, 501; Corpus Christi Day bomb- Spooner, Lysander, 559
ing in, 256n9, 274n1, 341n3, 347, 501, 521; Spreckles, Claus, 402
Cuba’s insurrection against, 245n6; Jerez Springfield (Mass.): EG’s move to, 495
uprising in, 495, 497–98, 549; May Day cel- Spring Valley (Ill.): anarchists attacked in,
ebrations in, 494; New York meeting about 80; baptism story about, 60, 368 – 69; EG’s
anarchist activities in, 274–79 speeches in, 508, 510; EG’s visit to, 507; Ital-
Spanish-American War (1898): criticism of, ian anarchism in, 60, 478
49, 61; declaration of, 324n1, 505; imperial- Squire, Mary, 536
ism of, 542; incidents preceding, 279n10; The Standard, 531, 575
opposition to, 324–25, 328, 332 –33; patriot- Standard Oil Company, 553. See also Rockefel-
ism in, 383; tainted beef in, 385; treaty to ler, John D.
end, 506, 507; workers affected by, 384– 85 State: as absolutist, 180 – 81; anarchism
Spanish Civil War: anarchist colors symbolic feared by, 195, 416; as authority, 353–55,
in, 144– 45n3 360; Brown’s challenge to, 521; crime sanc-
speaking engagements (EG’s): at anarchist/ tioned by, 448; opposition to, 181, 196, 333;
unemployed demonstration (incitement to oppression by, 171–72; violence of, 386 – 87,
riot), 145– 47; Czolgosz’s attendance at, 73– 477. See also anti-statist tradition; police; sur-
74; disruption of, 39; effectiveness of, 5– 6, veillance; wars
412; at gathering after release from prison, Statue of Liberty, 5
34–35, 206 – 8; handbills and posters an- Stedman, Seymore, 575
nouncing, 358, 363, 367; importance of, 21; Steffens, Lincoln, 572
motivations for, 301–2; observations about, Stein, Modest (Fedya): AB’s attentat and, 22 –
67; payment for, 67– 68, 400 – 403, 444; 23; biographical summary on, 557; EG’s rela-

650 INDEX
 tionship with, 24; immigration of, 104, 106; surveillance: of AB in prison, 42, 255; after
living arrangements of, 21–22, 493, 494, EG’s sentencing, 182; in Cleveland, 73–74,
519; mentioned, 254, 486; names for, 132n2; 452, 454; conference on, 506; in Europe, 38,
on Roman Lewis, 540; work in photography 63– 64; by French government, 64, 408 –9,
studio, 22, 495 419 –20, 430, 509, 510; of gatherings, 227,
Stephens, G. Frank, 305n12, 446n4, 574, 575 275, 278; by German government, 64,
Stepniak, 538 220n1, 389 –91, 500; international coopera-
Steunenberg, Frank, 386n7 tion in, 346n2; EG’s jokes about, 44; in Lon-
Stevenson, A., 305n12 don, 389; misinformation in, 389n2; in
Stirner, Max: biographical summary on, 557– New York City, 422n2; in Pittsburgh, 326;
58; egoism and, 125n2; as influence, 10, in Providence, 302 –3; in St. Louis, 289n1,
434–35n4; mentioned, 559; written contri- 503. See also police
butions of, 567 Swank, Lizzie May. See Holmes, Lizzie
Stockton (Calif.): EG’s speeches in, 508 Swinton, John, 199n3, 202, 499, 558
Stone, Carl, 366 – 67n2 Swinton, Orsena, 499, 558
Strasser, Adolph, 489 Switzerland: possible studies in, 59, 366 –
Straus, Oscar, 245n5 67n2, 375n7, 407
strikes: of cloakmakers, 168n12, 425n7, 518; in syndicalism: as influence on EG, 9, 538; leader
Coeur d’Alene, 386, 476; as context, 19 –21, in, 524, 552; Most’s return to, 546. See also
36 –37; in Cuba, 386; for eight-hour day, 492; anarcho-syndicalism
EG’s motives for, 285; in France, 418n10; of
glassworkers, 239n4; outbreak of, 22, 231– Tacoma (Wash.): EG’s speeches in, 507
32; series of railway, 490, 557; of tailors, 219; Tarentum (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 504
of textile workers, 506; in Virden (Ill.), 476. Tárrida del Mármol, Fernando, 62, 256n9,
See also Hazleton (Pa.) massacre; Home- 509, 510
stead (Pa.) strike; Pullman strike taxation, 385. See also Single Tax (movement)
Strindberg, August, 239n1 Teamsters Union, 530
Strunsky, Anna, 505 Teed, Cyrus Read, 486n9
Die Sturmglocken (The Alarm Bell, Chicago), temperance movement: EG’s disdain for, 43
234, 257, 500, 517, 568 Les Temps Nouveaux (New Times, Paris): on at-
Sturmvogel (Storm Bird, New York): address of, tentats, 14; circulation of, 238; clandestine
555; demise of, 48, 507; description of, 568; proceedings of Paris congress in, 66; con-
editor of, 558; founding of, 503; lecture top- tributors to, 523, 524, 538, 543, 550; descrip-
ics listed in, 503– 4; masthead of, 301; travel tion of, 568; editor of, 407n7, 532; Hamon’s
reports in (EG), 43, 45– 47, 293–99Ger., essay in, 239n3; reports for Paris congress
300 –317 in, 420 –21, 482n10, 517, 535, 553, 568
Süddeutschen Volksstimme, 545 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 194
suffrage movement: criticism of (EG’s), 71, Tfileh Zakeh (Pure Prayer), 556, 574
429; participants in, 527 theory. See anarchism; communism; egoism;
suicide: EG on Paita’s, 449 –50; EG’s eulogy individualism; nihilists and nihilism; social-
and, 511 ists and socialism; syndicalism
Sullivan, John L., 115n8, 194 theosophy, 486
Sullivan, Louis, 529 Thiers, Adolphe, 417
Sully-Prudhomme, M., 419 –20 Thimme, Edward John, 168 – 69, 170, 175

INDEX 651
 third sex: use of term, 374, 379 Travaglio, Enrico, 464n2, 485n4, 512
Thomas Paine National Historical Association, Treaty of Paris, 436n6
549 Trumball, M. M., 265
Thoreau, Henry David, 10, 33, 426 Trunk, Johann Sebastian, 382
Thorndale, Stella, 470 The Truth, 549, 561
Tillier, Claude, 559 The Truth Seeker, 151n1, 490, 544, 572
Tilton, Flora, 490 Tucker, Benjamin R.: associates of, 538; bio-
Timmermann, Claus: arrest, trial, and impris- graphical summary on, 559 – 60; at free-love
onment of, 111–12n1, 145n4, 161– 62n7, 167, convention, 489; on Henry George, 531, 575;
188, 196, 497, 498; biographical summary illustration of, 351; as influence on EG, 10,
on, 558; business of, 500; editorship of, 264n9, 549; influences on, 558; as interme-
106n11, 302n2, 563, 564, 568; EG’s testi- diary for AB, 56, 349 –52, 506, 570; mem-
mony on, 173; injury of, 192n1; letters to berships of, 490; Most criticized by, 545; or-
(1894), 190 –91Ger., 192 –93; mentioned, ganization founded by, 573, 574; publishing
383; pamphlet of, 262; speeches of (incite- by, 518; Tolstoy translations by, 559. See also
ment to riot), 145– 46; testimony of, 30. See Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of
also Die Brandfackel; Sturmvogel Order
Tochatti, James: biographical summary on, 558; Turgenev, Ivan, 100n1
editorship of, 566; EG’s meeting with, 38; Turner, John: associates of, 528, 536; biograph-
speeches of, 221, 223, 500. See also Liberty ical summary on, 560; editorship of, 565;
Tolstoy, Leo: biographical summary on, 559; as EG’s essay on, 236 –38; illustration of, 237;
influence, 525; mentioned, 456, 537; transla- mentioned, 254, 316; proposed tour of, 400;
tions of, 564; written contributions of, 566, speeches of, 237, 305n13, 501; U.S. tour of,
567 39, 67, 96 –97n3, 234, 236n3, 500, 573;
Tombs (jail): description of, 177n1; EG in, 182, written contributions of, 568
196; Most in, 514 Turner, Lizzie, 560
The Torch (London), 540, 569 Turner societies (Turnvereine, gymnastic clubs),
Torch of Anarchy, 228 –32 309 –10, 312, 502, 505
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 239n1 Turn-Zeitung, 542
trade unions (general): corruption of, 219, 315; Tweed, William Mercy “Boss,” 532
EG’s criticism of, 71; Gompers’s focus on, Twentieth Century Magazine, 523, 524, 526
311n30; McKinley assassination condemned Typographical Union, 530
by, 79; possible appeal via, 251–53, 258; so-
cialists vs. anarchists in, 96 –99. See also la- Uhly, G. C., 382 – 83n4
bor organizing; specific unions; strikes Umberto (king of Italy): assassination of, 66,
“The Tragedy at Buffalo” (EG): AB on, 487; 68, 74, 422, 427n12, 455n1, 463, 509, 521;
criticism of, 562, 566; description of, 16; hy- Fatti di Maggio and, 505; mentioned, 346
perbole in, 78 –79; mentioned, 479, 482; UMW. See United Mine Workers
publication of, 514; text of, 471–78 Unealt, Edith, 470
Trall, R. T., 490 unemployment: capitalists’ response to, 231;
Der Tramp, 262n3 demonstrations due to, 27–28; 141– 43Ger.,
tramps: definition of, 208 144– 47, 151–52n3, 497; EG’s essay on, 149 –
The Transatlantic, 559 50Ger., 151–54; miseries of, 151–52, 171–72,
Transport Union, 540 174, 224, 314, 338, 474–75. See also People
Transvaluation Society, 554 vs. Emma Goldman (trial, 1893)

652 INDEX
Union Cooperative Socety of Printers, 546 Vanderbilt, William Henry, 453
Union Cooperative Society of Journeymen Tai- Varhayt (Truth), 18, 540, 545, 556, 574
lors, 546 Vaughan, Ernest, 560
Union Square (New York), 96, 97n4, 108, Der Verbote (The Harbinger, Chicago), 517, 546,
120n4, 144, 146n7, 148n3, 153n7, 161n7, 569, 578
162, 166, 168, 170, 180, 205n4, 558 Verein Eintracht, 362, 362n1
United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Vereinigten Deutschen Gewerkschaften
of America, 280n7 (United German Trades), 251n1
United Brotherhood of Tailors, 219n1, 219n3 Verity, O. A., 565
United German Trades (Vereinigten Deutschen Verlaine, Paul, 431
Gewerkschaften), 251n1 Verral, Percival, 470
United Hebrew Trade Organization: EG’s link Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (Messenger of the Peo-
to, 37, 494; leaders of, 518, 534–35; SLP and, ple’s Will), 540
577 vice: cause of, 453–54. See also crime and
United Labor League, 37, 445n12, 511 criminals
United Mine Workers (UMW): convention of, Victims of Morality and the Failure of Christian-
288n1; EG’s speeches for, 37, 47; officers of, ity, Two Lectures (EG): contents of, 53n59
280n5; petition for AB’s release and, 570; Victoria (queen of England), 213
strikes of, 47, 310, 311, 576 Vienna (Austria): EG’s visit to, 500
United States: anarchy’s future in, 357–59, violence: as product of oppression, 435; EG’s
428, 441; attentats’ effects in, 488; imperial- rejection of, 29, 359, 360, 477; society’s re-
ism of, 384– 88, 542; potential for anarchist sponsibility for, 187, 197, 249, 341, 426 –28,
women in, 429; Russia compared to, 41, 434, 476. See also assassinations; political vi-
72 –73, 95, 187– 88. See also Americaniza- olence; propaganda by the deed (attentats);
tion, free speech repression
U.S.-Russia extradition treaty, 245n5, 523 Virden (Ill.) miners strike, 476
United States Steel Corporation, 521 Voice of Labor, 538
U.S. tours: in 1890, 493; in 1897, 502 –3; in La Voix du Peuple, 552
1898, 504– 6; in 1899, 507– 8. See also spe- Volks-Zeitung, 564
cific cities Volkszeitung (New York), 168, 169
universities, 364, 374 Voltaire, 33
University of Berne, 374, 375 Vorwaerts, 578
University of Chicago, 553 Vorwärts. See Forverts
Universology of Koreshanity, 486 Vorwärts der Pacific Küste, 337n1
unlawful assembly indictment. See People vs. Vose, Donald, 508
Emma Goldman (trial, 1893) Vose, Gertie, 508
Ury, Adolph, 144n1, 497 Vperëd! (Forward), 540
USS Maine explosion, 324–25, 504 De Vrije Socialist (The Free Socialist, Dutch),
368n4, 510, 548
Vaillant, Auguste: biographical summary Vuillard, Edouard, 239n1
on, 560; execution of, 275n4, 342n6, 498, vulgarity: distaste for (EG), 51, 73, 441. See also
522, 534; mentioned, 226, 238, 418n11, 554, Comstock Acts (1873, 1876); obscenity
562
Vaillant, Sidonie, 560 wages and hours: average in 1895, 231; of min-
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 402 ers, 338; Russia vs. U.S., 95; shortcomings

INDEX 653
 wages and hours (continued) 312n33, 392 –93n2, 491, 502, 516, 536, 565;
of fight for limited, 493; EG’s speech on, 19. EG’s reading of, 33; as influence on EG, 10,
See also strikes 466n5, 525; mentioned, 553; paraphrased,
Wagner, Richard, 500 5n9; works: Leaves of Grass, 214n1, 573
Wakeman, Thaddeus, 573 Wilde, Oscar, 471, 477n14
Wald, Lillian, 539 Wilhelm I (emperor of Germany), 15, 212n2
Waldeck-Rousseau, Rene, 417n6, 439, 561 Wilhelm II (emperor of Germany), 213
Waldeck-Rousseau law (1884), 561 Willard, C. F., 576
Walker, Edwin C., 269n1, 533, 549, 563, 567 Wilshire, H. G., 548
Walsall anarchists (England): arrest and impris- Wilshire’s Magazine, 535, 548
onment of, 394, 495, 546; defense of, 547; Wilson, Charles F., 98
as example of corrupt judiciary, 223; mem- Wilson, Charlotte, 565
bers of, 519, 521, 522, 524, 527, 528, 561 Wilzig, Paul, 103n8
Walsall Socialist Club, 521, 527 Winchevsky, Morris, 566
Warren, Josiah, 559 Wing, Simon, 496
War Revenue Act (1898), 385n4 Winn, Ross, 393n3, 502, 565, 566, 568
wars: criticism of, 49; Franco-Merian, 226n10; Wisconsin: book banned in, 554. See also
resistance in, 533; Spanish Civil, 144– 45n3; Milwaukee
U.S. Civil War, 166, 549, 558; workers af- Withington, Lothrop: biographical summary
fected by, 60 – 61, 384– 88. See also Anglo- on, 561– 62; speeches of, 237, 382n1, 500,
Boer War (1899-1902); Bruderkrieg; 509; written contributions of, 563, 564, 568
Spanish-American War (1898) Witkowski, B., 96 –97, 108
Washington, George, 332 “The Woman Question” (EG): advertisement
Washington (D.C.): EG’s visit to, 305–7 for lecture on, 367
Weekly People, 578 women: anarchy’s possibility for, 44– 45, 289 –
Weismann, Henry: on AB’s sentence, 251n5; 92; class differences among, 153; encourag-
biographical summary on, 561; opposition ing participation of, 71; equality for, 43– 44,
to, 98, 229 –30n1; speeches of, 97, 495 322 –23; freedom needed for, 273; marriage’s
Wendell Phillips Educational Club (Provi- repression of, 42 – 43; men emulated by,
dence), 524 322; needed as speakers, 428 –30; as politi-
West Coast: anarchist movement development cal prisoners, 186; as slaves, 291; society’s
on, 338, 392 –93; anarchist potential of, 55 roles for, 322; in U.S. vs. Russia, 424–25,
Western Federation of Miners (WFM), 386n7, 429. See also gender
476n11 Women’s National Liberal Union, 572
Western Penitentiary (Pa.), 80, 457n1, 459n5. Woodford, Stewart, 279n10
See also imprisonment (AB’s) Woodhull, Victoria, 559
West Hoboken (N.J.): EG’s speeches in, 499 Wood (police lieutenant), 441, 442, 443, 447
Westley, John, 223n6, 495, 561 Worcester (Mass.): EG’s business attempts in,
West Newton (Pa.): EG’s speeches in, 508 22, 495
Weyler y Nicolau, Gen. Valeriano, 278 –79, 385 The Word, 42, 151n1, 491, 493–94
WFM (Western Federation of Miners), 386n7, work: need for meaningful (EG), 29; prosper-
476n11 ity distinguished from, 366, 368. See also
The Whim, 525 occupations (EG’s)
Whitman, Walt: alleged obscene poem of, 12, workers: agrarian, 314; brutality against, 106 –

654 INDEX
 8; conditions for, 38, 228 –32; EG’s appeal denounced by, 475n6; editorship of, 566; es-
to, 496; EG’s opinion of, 436 –37; oppres- cape plan and, 59, 508, 570; Haymarket an-
sion of, 180 – 81; as slaves, 152 –53, 172, 228, archists defended by, 16; mentioned, 257n2;
283, 332; U.S. vs. Russian, 360; Anglo-Boer in Pioneers of Liberty, 574; speeches of, 507;
War’s effect on, 60 – 61, 384– 88. See also written contributions of, 569
cloakmakers; labor unions; miners; strikes; Yarros, Victor, 567
wages and hours Yiddish anarchist congress (1890), 368n3,
working class: Adam and Eve as analogy to, 494
211–12; EG’s embrace of, 36 –38; exploita- Yiddish language: attitude toward, 46; EG’s
tion of, 228 –32, 333n8; marriage in, 270 – use of, 367; newspapers in, 565, 566; trea-
72; miseries of, 151–52, 171–72, 174, 224, tises in, 562. See also Varhayt; Freie Arbeiter
314, 338, 474–75; obstacles for women in, Stimme
428 –29; plentiful goods within reach of, Yogic wisdom, 486
249 –50; Anglo-Boer War and, 60 – 61; star- Yom Kippur “balls,” 102n7, 556, 574
vation as limit on activism of, 50, 338, 444 Young, Charles R., 148
Workingmen’s Cooperative Association (Phila- Young, Ernest, 565
delphia), 510 Young Men’s Christian Association, 573
Workingmen’s Defense Association, 520 Young Men’s Liberal League (Philadelphia),
Workingmen’s Educational Society (Baltimore), 501
95, 494 Youth (Jungen, group), 539
Working Men’s Party of Illinois, 489, 557
Working Men’s Party of the United States, 489,
490, 577. See also Socialist Labor Party (SLP) Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom), 18,
Workingmen’s Rifle Club, 492 427n10, 519, 550
Working Women’s Society of the United He- Zhelyabov, Andrei Ivanovich, 427n10, 491
brew Trade Organization, 37, 494 Zibelin, Albert, 510
Workmen’s Advocate, 578 Ziegenhein (mayor of St. Louis), 289n1
World War I: EG’s criticism of, 49 Zionism, 413
World War II: French Resistance in, 533 Zola, Émile, 419, 559, 560, 562; on Dreyfus
Wright, E. S., 459 case, 324n2, 421n18, 503, 528
writing: lecturing vs., 68; by women anarchists, Zuchthausblüthen, 254n2. See also Prison
428. See also letter writing Blossoms
Zukunft (The Future), 551
Yanovsky, Saul Josef: associates of, 539, 546; Zum Großen Michel (saloon), 111–12n1,
biographical summary on, 562; Czolgosz 169n16, 496

INDEX 655