Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets 0742523004, 9780742523005

Citation preview

Emma Goldman

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20th Century Political Thinkers Series Editors: Kenneth L. Deutsch and Jean Bethke Elshtain John Kenneth Galbraith: The Economist as Political Theorist by Conrad P. Waligorski Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy by Ronald J. Tercheck Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets by Kathy E. Ferguson Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical–Political Profile by Martin J. Beck Matuštík Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Post-Modern Age by James F. Pontuso Martin Heidegger: Paths Taken, Paths Opened by Gregory B. Smith Alexandre Kojeve: Wisdom at the End of History by James H. Nichols John Macmurray: Community beyond Political Philosophy by Frank G. Kirkpatrick Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics by Bernard P. Dauenhauer Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision Christopher J. Voparill Carl Schmitt: The End of Law by William E. Scheuerman Yves R. Simon: Real Democracy by Vukan Kuic Aleksandr Solzenhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology by Daniel J. Mahoney Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity by Mark Redhead Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality by Thomas W. Heilke Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion by Richard H. Bell

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Emma Goldman Political Thinking in the Streets

Kathy E. Ferguson

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ferguson, Kathy E. Emma Goldman : political thinking in the streets / Kathy Ferguson. p. cm. — (20th century political thinkers) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7425-2300-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-1048-6 (electronic : alk. paper) 1. Goldman, Emma, 1869–1940. 2. Anarchists—United States—Biography. 3. Feminists—United States—Biography. I. Title. HX843.7.G65F57 2011 335'.83092—dc22 [B] 2010053529

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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For Gili, Oren, and Ari, who have lived with Emma Goldman for a long time.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America

21

2

Anarchist Spaces

67

3

The Anarchist Apprentice

129

4

Gender and Genre

177

5

How Could She Miss Race?

211

6

Emma Goldman’s Women

249

7

Political Thinking in the Streets

277

Bibliography

313

Index

337

About the Author

349

vii

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Acknowledgments

When you take fifteen years to write a book, you incur many debts. So many teachers, colleagues, students, and friends have assisted and supported this work, it humbles me to try to reconstruct the intellectual trail that led me here. I apologize to those whom I have overlooked, and hope they will accept my thanks nonetheless. My greatest intellectual debts are to Candace Falk and Barry Pateman at the Emma Goldman Papers Project (aka the Goldman archive) at the University of California at Berkeley. The remarkable historical range and intellectual perspicuity of their documentary collection, editing and analysis have raised the bar on Goldman scholarship. I have also benefited greatly from the wealth of resources in radical literature at the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University. My oldest intellectual debts are to Michael Weinstein and the late Mulford Sibley, my first political theory teachers who inspired and challenged me to think the world as they could think it. Fittingly, along with my first teachers, my first political theory students, Jane Bennett and Chris Robinson, have also become my teachers; they generously gave the sort of close, careful and critical reading that makes productive revision possible. Davide Panagia’s insights into the usefulness of the anarchist sensorium, Avi Soifer’s timely help with anarchism’s legal context, and Michael Weinstein’s provocations about the concept of habitus have been exceptionally helpful. Elizabeth Wingrove picked me up when I had fallen into considerable confusion about the project and helped me find my way, both intellectually and personally. Greg Robinson generously shared his knowledge of the African American press. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, William Conix

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nolly, Lisa Disch, Catherine Holland, Sylvia Law, Rela Mazali, Kirstie McClure, Kathy Phillips, Michael Shapiro, and the late Lillian Robinson were consistently supportive of the project and helpful in their readings and comments. My editor, Jon Sisk, and series editor, Kenneth Deutsch, offered needed support, chose an excellent anonymous reviewer, and have above all been patient. My old friend and comrade, the late David Wieck, helped nourish my interest in anarchism, as did others in the Albany, New York area, including David Porter, who participated in the anarchist gathering we called Free Association. My knowledge of theater has been enhanced by my conversations with playwright Mary Baldwin, director and performer Elizabeth Ripley, and puppeteer Clay Martin. Bruce Kayton and his delightful book Radical Walking Tours of New York acquainted me with many sites of Goldman’s life and work. I thank Carolyn Eichner for the remarkable day we spent at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, visiting the graves of Goldman, the Haymarket men, and other radicals gathered there in eternal solidarity. The graduate students in my anarchism seminars have engaged and provoked my ideas for many years. Thanks especially to Jason Adams and Brianne Gallagher for the summer reading group at the beach on anarchism; to Brianne Gallagher, Ashley Lukins, and Sharain Naylor for our Butler reading group that often turned into an anarchism discussion; and to the Theoryheads discussion group for keeping things lively. Carolyn DiPalma, Kennan Ferguson, Dorrie Mazzone, and Judy Rohrer participated as graduate students in this project, and have continued their interest and support since those early years. Undergraduate students Alyssa Simbahon, Heidi Junge, and Nicole Waugh gave timely assistance with research. Much of the rich detail on the website is due to Alyssa’s determined searching. The Department of Political Science and the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i have provided me with intellectual stimulation, personal friendships, and a conducive home for critical thinking as well as radical politics. I particularly thank Debbie Halbert, Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Sankaran Krishna, Mire Koikari, Deane Neubauer, Noenoe Silva, Michael Shapiro, and Phyllis Turnbull for their collegial engagements. Grants from the University of Hawai‘i Office of Research Relations, support from Dean Richard Dubanoski of the College of Social Sciences, and unfailing assistance from several department chairs have made travel money and research time available. My thanks to the students and colleagues who translated the titles of anarchist journals into English: Marlene Booth (Yiddish), Manfred Henningsen (German), Igor Nikitin (Russian), Lorenzo Rinelli (Italian), and Jan Stelovsky (Czech). The remarkable investment by University of Hawai‘i’s Hamilton Library in the microfilm edition of materials from the Emma Goldman Papers Project, especially during a dismal time of diminishing resources, has been invaluable to me.

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Acknowledgments

xi

My department chair, Nevzat Soguk, has been unfailingly supportive both administratively and intellectually. He and our departmental assistant Storm Stoker have made this book’s website possible. On the website, readers will find lengthy lists of the radical women, journals, and labor actions that shaped Emma Goldman’s world. Lists are odd intellectual artifacts— they do not readily fit into the narrative expectations, not to mention the limited space, of a printed book, yet I have found them essential in my effort to capture some sense of the political habitat of Goldman’s anarchism. The website’s unlimited space enables the lists to sprawl with minimal discipline. Its endless capacity for amendment and extension allows the book to continue to grow. Please visit the website at http://www.politicalscience .hawaii.edu/lists/emma_goldman.html. My thanks to Nevi and Storm for enabling this unusual supplement. I am indebted to many family members and friends. My husband, Gilad Ashkenazi, and my two sons, Oren and Ari Ashkenazi, are my abiding companions. I notice that “abide” means both to remain constant and to put up with, a useful ambiguity of which I have taken full advantage. My mother, Mrs. Laura Rinker, did not live to see the end of this project, but she always used to inquire solicitously about “that lady” I was researching. My brother Steve Ferguson and my sister-in-law Jean Vernet are a constant, loving presence. My late sister, Diane Bourbon, and her children, Laura Bourbon and Spencer Emerson, always inquired about my work and supported me when I came to San Francisco for my research. My friend and former neighbor Suzanne Tiapula and her son Ruy Tiapula de Alencar cheerfully made Goldman research part of our lives as our boys grew up together. My dear friends Cindy Carson and Peggy Cox have patiently read drafts, accompanied me to museums, and generously shared my interests in Goldman and her places and times. Steve and Donna Sherlock arrived in the nick of time to provide all manner of assistance. The Friday night beach crowd can always be counted on to cheer successes, mourn failures, and provide good food as well as nourishing conversation. Thank you, everyone.

PERMISSIONS The photography of Goldman on the cover is courtesy of the Emma Goldman Papers, International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. My thanks to Rebecca Carey for permission to use her map “The Influential Whirl of Emma Goldman.” Parts of the introduction are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, “Theorizing Shiny Things: Archival Labors,” Theory & Event 11:4 (2008). Parts of chapter one are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, “Discourses of Danger: Locating Emma Goldman,” Political Theory 36:5

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(October 2008): 735–761. All rights reserved. Copyright 2008 by Sage Publications Ltd.. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd. Parts of chapter two are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, “Anarchist Counterpublics,” New Political Science 32:2 (June 2010): 193–214. Copyright 2010 Caucus for a New Political Science. Parts of chapter three are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, “Religion, Faith, and Politics,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, Penny Weiss and Loretta Kensinger, eds. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press: 2007): 91–109. Copyright 2007 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Parts of chapter four are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, “Gender and Genre in Emma Goldman,” in Signs 36:3 (Spring 2011). Copyright 2011 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Parts of chapter seven are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, “E.G.: Emma Goldman, For Example,” in Feminism and the Final Foucault, Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 28–40. Copyright 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

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Introduction

“We think back through our mothers, if we are women.” —Virginia Woolf

A popular chant among young feminists in the 1960s and 1970s was, “Emma said it in 1910; now we’re going to say it again.” This book encounters Emma Goldman as a particularly compelling and sometimes disturbing “mother” for contemporary feminist political thinking. I am interested in what she said a century ago that so stirred both her generation of radicals and my own, and whether, or how, we want to say it again. Goldman came to the United States from Russia in 1885 at the age of 16, part of an early wave of mass immigration of Eastern European Jews. At first she went to Rochester, New York, to join the family of her sister who had preceded her to the United States. Soon disillusioned by oppressive labor conditions and the confinements of immigrant social life, and radicalized by the resistance of the Haymarket martyrs, Goldman went to New York City to join the ranks of the city’s garment workers and to find the anarchist movement, which became her lifelong home. She was active in feminist debates, anti-war campaigns, labor struggles, free speech movements, agitation on behalf of political prisoners, and cultural critique. She founded and edited the anarchist periodical Mother Earth, which was published for over a decade in the early twentieth century and reached as many as 10,000 readers annually. She wrote five books (one unpublished), hundreds of articles and pamphlets, and many, many thousands of letters.1 She helped organize free schools and contributed to the development of European and American theater. Among the first in the United States to give public lectures and 1

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demonstrations on specific birth control methods, she was arrested so often she carried a book with her to her speeches so she would have something to read in jail.2 She helped to found numerous branches of the Free Speech League, an early forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union. Imprisoned from 1917–1919 for opposing conscription, she was subsequently stripped of her U.S. citizenship and deported to the nascent Soviet Union. At first enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution, the bloody repression of the Kronstadt rebellion turned her into an early and relentless critic of the communists. She lived mostly in England, Canada, and France for the next twenty years, continuing to speak and write for anarchist causes, until the outbreak of revolution in Spain drew her into the struggles of the Spanish anarchists. She died in Toronto in 1940, still working to prevent the deportation of political prisoners who would have been executed had they been returned to fascist Italy. Emma Goldman was a public intellectual. In the United States and Europe, “Red Emma,” “the anarchist queen,” was a household word. Alix Kates Shulman calls her public persona “demonic”; she was known as the “enemy of God, law, marriage, the State.”3 Roger Baldwin reported in a 1933 letter to Goldman that Eleanor Roosevelt read and admired her autobiography.4 Notorious in some circles, revered in others, Goldman acted herself out on a very public stage. She was both an entertainer and an educator: her courtroom appearances, books, essays, journal, regular Sunday night talks in New York City, grand cross-country lecture tours in the United States, imprisonments, abundant correspondence, radio addresses—all are textual sites where Emma Goldman wrote herself. While Goldman scorned the political hoopla through which states roused citizens to loyalty—she characterized it as anti-individualist “mass psychology which needs flagwagging, speeches, music and demonstrations”—she nonetheless trod on some of that same territory in her own performances.5 She was a master at addressing a crowd, engaging a hostile jury, charming or outraging journalists, provoking authorities, berating opponents, redirecting an angry mob. She had charm; she had flair; she was the best show in town. Perhaps because her personal presence was so engaging, commentators seldom apprehend her as a political thinker.6 Instead, attention has been deflected to her political activism (often defined in opposition to theorizing) or her sexuality. While activism and sexuality are certainly key components in Goldman’s political repertoire, I would like to push their relevance into a different frame, one that provokes conversations between Goldman’s anarchist feminism and contemporary ideas about how we do political theory. Taking Goldman seriously as a political thinker allows us to contest the problematic opposition between theory and practice and to relocate political thinking in an activist context. Goldman did her thinking “in the streets,” that is, intimately engaged in overlapping sets of struggles and in

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the creation of the political space within which struggles could take place. For over fifty years Goldman articulated an uncompromising radical vision of a just, free, and joyful society. How did she do it? What did it allow her to accomplish? What good is it for us today? Other feminist writers have echoed Woolf’s injunction to “think back through our mothers.” Lori Marso acknowledges our “debts to feminist foremothers” as a vehicle “to recognize common struggles across and through time.”7 Rosi Braidotti suggests that “[s]omething of the feminist countermemory is in excess of convention, it is transgressive of canonical knowledge.”8 Yet, how do we go about this recovery? Gail Griffin points out a lurking ambiguity in the epigraph from Virginia Woolf. Is the qualifying clause meant only to clarify the initial “we,” as in “we who are women think back through our mothers”? Or is it a more political qualification, “a test, a thrown gauntlet: ‘We think back through our mothers, if we are really women.’” Griffin accepts the latter interpretation, the challenge: “We are not really women until we have done that subversive research, unearthed that alternate family tree.”9 I take this challenge to mean, not that we should reject thinking through our fathers, nor that there is some privileged state of mind that qualifies us to be real women, but, more modestly, that there are some uniquely valuable anchors available to us in the words of radical women who have gone before. By “us” I mean contemporary feminists and our fellow travelers, political thinkers looking for modes of affirmation for emancipatory political ideals that do not simply reproduce the processes of exclusion and denial against which we struggle. The alternative family tree does not replace our more established inheritances, but it may unsettle and extend them, in the end expanding and complicating the available menus from which we take our intellectual and political sustenance. The purpose of this book is to encounter and assess Emma Goldman as a political thinker. I see this goal as respectful of Goldman’s own selfunderstanding, as she frequently stated her own goal was getting people to think. “It is hunger of the mind which I consider more lasting and a much more dominant factor of greater force [than bread and butter] . . .” she commented in a letter to Ben Taylor.10 A few months before, in a bleaker and more sardonic state of mind, she wrote to her friend Emily Holmes Coleman, “. . . you know that I never mind house keeping and cooking. I should have never done anything else than that. It would have meant so much less pain in my life and by far more useful work than trying to help people to think.”11 While I want to return to the significance of house keeping and cooking later in this book, here I want to focus on the labor of thinking that Goldman embraced. Many in Goldman’s circle emphasized her successes in the field of thinking: Freida Diamond, recalling her years growing up in an anarchist family

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close to Goldman, said, “She was a unique force—different from anyone else, not like any other person you met. She opened your mind and made you think about things you never thought about before. That was her outstanding characteristic. She made people think!”12 Concetta Silvestri, a comrade of Sacco and Vanzetti’s, similarly remembered Goldman: “She was a woman who made you think. Her words went into your brain and you couldn’t forget them.”13 Young Roger Baldwin, who became one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, attended a lecture of Goldman’s out of curiosity, and recalled, “It was the eye-opener of my life.”14 Can a person who clearly tried, and often succeeded, in making people think, herself have been an uninteresting thinker? Goldman has frequently been praised for her effective political organizing and her eloquent public speaking. Yet, even Goldman’s admirers have been dismissive of her theorizing about politics, claiming that she was more of an activist than a theorist. Biographer Alice Wexler comments, “she was never an original thinker.”15 Alix Kates Shulman, whose collection of Goldman’s essays has reached its third edition, remarks, “She was more of an activist than a theoretician.”16 David Porter offers a similar observation in his introduction to Goldman’s letters on the Spanish Revolution, Vision on Fire: “Needless to say, her commentary as well as her commitment in these texts is as fully emotional as intellectual and as such needs no apology. She never posed herself as a deeply philosophical writer.”17 Ahrne Thorne, editor of the anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime, agreed: “Emma was a woman of action. She was not a theorist, not a deep thinker.”18 Martha Solomon recognizes Goldman’s influence but concludes that “she was not, however, an original thinker,” as does Richard Drinnon, whose 1961 biography praises “her life of unique integrity” while concluding that she was “by no means a seminal social or political thinker.”19 This is a heavy load of faint praise. Candace Falk, biographer and director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, objects that these critiques overlook Goldman’s achievements, yet she too finds that Goldman “strove less for originality than for synthesis.”20 While Falk goes on to credit Goldman for “her own distinct pattern of thinking,” she worries that “this quality of incorporating and transforming the work of others into her own may have contributed to doubts among traditional political theorists about the merits of her individual contribution.”21 In her last concern, Falk is no doubt correct. But do we ask that question of all theorists, or do we, as Bernice Carroll has suggested, tend to reserve our anxiety about originality for women writers?22 How does the dismissal of Goldman as a theorist work? I suggest that there is a kind of displacement going on, one that has predictable consequences for Goldman’s claim on a contemporary readership. For instance, after denying her originality, Wexler credits her with “Sum[ming] up her

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ideas on politics, art, and sex with her characteristic boldness.”23 Drinnon suggests, “She made her ideas an integral part of her life.”24 Solomon credits her with “fervor” and “commitment” but “her ideological sincerity” does not make up for weak ideas.25 Goldman clearly is interesting, these writers implicitly suggest, but why? We have already set aside her ideas, so there must be something else that attracts us—what could it be? The wellmeaning apologies for her alleged lack of originality deflect our inquiry to other places—her intimate life, her activism (taken to be the opposite of theory), her personality, her life story—anywhere but her thinking, which we have already dismissed. I want, instead, to contest the implicit dualism between theory and practice that the above statements endorse in order to articulate a different manner of political thinking, one that is located specifically in a radical political space, articulated passionately amidst intense personal relationships in response to an immediate set of questions about oppression and possibility. The theory/practice dyad implicitly calls on a rather formal understanding of political theory as a systematic, abstract philosophy integrating metaphysical, epistemological and political questions into a coherent whole. Aristotle, Hobbes, Marx, and Hegel are often taken as representatives of such systematicity. Yet some thinkers who are pivotal to modern political theory, notably Machiavelli, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin, do not work under this umbrella, suggesting that there are other significant ways to do political thinking. In the field of political science, questions about a writer’s status as a political thinker often raise the issue of whether that person belongs in the canon. Goldman is manifestly not usually included in the canon, as a glance at the syllabi for required courses in the history of political theory at nearly any college or university in the country will attest. Some writers, best exemplified by Weiss and Kensinger’s collection of essays on Goldman published in Nancy Tuana’s series called Re-reading the Canon, have usefully contested that exclusion. Yet it is difficult to take up this question of her membership in the most heavily trafficked tradition of political theory without becoming apologetic or insistent: claims that, “Yes, she does” vs. retorts that, “No, she doesn’t” tend to confine inquiry to a defensive posture. I plan instead to duck that question, or at least to approach it indirectly, by exploring how she did the work of political thinking and leaving open the question of where she should be located in our intellectual and political histories. Since theory conventionally takes its meaning in opposition to practice, it is difficult to articulate some other kind of theory without recapitulating the terms of the original dyad. Rather than retread that path, and either claim Goldman really was a theorist, or else defiantly (or defensively) claim moral privilege for practice, I want to use the resources of contemporary political theory to reframe Goldman’s political thinking,

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to apprehend her, not within the dualism of philosopher vs. activist, but within a different register of political thinking. Goldman’s political thinking flourishes in what we might call a located register: it is situated, event-based, and concrete. She was most insightful when she was thinking in the streets, immersed in ongoing struggles, talking them over with friends and comrades, reflecting on their dynamics and possibilities. Thinking and acting were not separate political moments for Goldman; her thinking was intertwined with acting, it was a kind of acting. Goldman’s political reflections emerged best in response to particular political challenges, such as the assassination of McKinley, the patriotic jingoism surrounding World War I, the widespread moral panic over the “white slave traffic,” and the intense tragedies of the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. She wrote from her location as an engaged actor, sifting through the available mix of relevant historical and political factors, articulating an analysis that connects events and processes in a network of significance. Contradictions that more distant observers could ignore, or evade with facile resolutions, provoked complex reflections from her as an engaged, critical participant. Apprehended as a theorist in the streets, I hope to show that she is a vigorous and useful political thinker who helps us see beyond the persistent and problematic dualism between thought and action. Continuing with my spatial metaphor, we might think of Goldman’s as ectopic political theory, theory that is “out of place.”26 Here we can come back to the earlier mentioned labor of housekeeping and cooking, along with other labor such as that of striking workers, defiant political prisoners, rebellious playwrights, and unconventional women. Goldman’s political thinking encourages us to imagine, not only universities and the libraries of advisors to those who rule, but union halls, kitchens, neighborhoods, unemployment lines, prisons, brothels, and other less conventional sites as spaces of political thinking. British writer G. K. Chesterton, in his intriguing 1908 novel about anarchists and government spies, The Man Who Was Thursday, portrayed anarchism as “the borderland of thought.”27 In addition to physical borders between states and institutions, anarchists address another borderland, that which French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “a rupture in the logic of arche—that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it.”28 Anarchists disrupt the relation between those who rule and those who are ruled, not by switching places but by opting out of the relationship entirely. Rancière talks about the “an-archy” resulting when people act to make their unqualified opinions matter.29 “Unqualified” here means lacking the usual credentials to speak authoritatively, such as a governmental or academic post. “Matter” means both to become important and to materialize, take shape in space, reconfigure zones of perception in order to give rise to a new shared world.

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The “borderland of thought” also suggests an equivalent temporal marginality; we might, then, think of her work as untimely in Nietzsche’s sense, that is, out of joint with the prevailing conceptions of history and thus open to new thinking about how things might happen. This may seem ironic, since I have just stressed that her thinking always took place in the thick of confrontations and struggles, yet it is untimely in that she repositioned events within an anarchist narrative of revolutionary possibility. Temporal practices such as the pacing and tempo of addressing a crowd, the periodicity of publication, and the ritual recognition of formative events created processes we could call anarchist time. Anarchist temporalities were crucial for Goldman and her comrades in their struggle to both disclose and create political worlds.30 My own approach to Goldman looks to contemporary critical theory for tools with which to apprehend her ideas. Readers who are anarchists will likely find my use of what is often called “high theory” suspicious, fearing that once again anarchism’s gritty radicalism will disappear, dressed up to be respectable in the academy. Barry Pateman, associate director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, speaking at a major anarchist conference in 2009, expressed concern about political theory’s distance from events: theory can easily go off-track if it is not tested by experience.31 Anarchist feminist Lynn Farrow has written that “theoretical over-articulation” lets “vague notions” overwrite the implications we might find if we were more open to direct political experience.32 While respecting these concerns, I argue that the work of bringing contemporary critical theory to bear on Goldman’s political thinking is necessary and exhilarating. Political theory does its work by putting an event or an idea into a different language, conceptualizing it outside the given dimensions in which the idea or event initially appeared so as to highlight new possibilities for thinking its significance. If we keep ideas entirely in their initial formats, or hold events completely within their prevailing contexts, we stabilize their meaning too quickly and silence other possibilities that might lie underarticulated in previous frames. While Goldman often expressed utter contempt for the work of academics, castigating the “predigested food [that] is dished out in most colleges,” she aspired for anarchism to be a catalyst for growth.33 Bringing the tools of critical theory to bear on Goldman’s ideas is one way to nurture such growth. Returning to Falk’s observation that Goldman’s genius was synthesis, I suggest (and I believe Falk would agree) that we are all patchwork thinkers, pulling together the bits we find and adding as we can. Don’t we all struggle to create, out of the intellectual streams in which we swim, a voice? Additionally, we might raise questions about the very notion of synthesis, which could suggest a too-smooth reconciliation of elements into a harmonious whole. Rather than frame our inquiry as one of synthesis vs. creativity, we

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could acknowledge that most interesting thinkers both pull together inherited elements while also weaving their own insights into the mix. While we can still look for Goldman’s finest contributions, a better question than “was she original?” could be, “is her thinking useful?” Rather than apologizing for her as less than a real theorist, we could follow Goldman’s encounters with beloved ideas and formative events . . . and see where the trail takes us, whether it allows us to end up somewhere worthwhile. Barry Pateman characterized Goldman this way: “She’s a synthesizer: she had a great ability to put down the ideas—the drama, anarchist communism—to put them in this blender, and come out with a way forward.”34 “Synthesis” is starting to sound more attractive—not a “close-but-no-cigar” dismissal of her thinking, but an opening up of the very work of thinking. Agreeing with Falk that Goldman was “open to a rich variety of ideas, within and beyond anarchist theory,” I want to return to the question of the worth of her political thinking.35 What did it allow her, then, to accomplish? What about us, now? Goldman’s friend Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, remarked, “Emma Goldman’s genius is not so much that she is a great thinker as that she is a great woman.”36 This could be interpreted as yet another devaluation of her political thinking in favor of her personal life. Yet, in the context of Margaret Anderson’s other comments about Goldman, I think it has another, more insightful resonance. Hannah Arendt remarked about Rosa Luxemburg that she was an excellent candidate for biography because in that genre history is not the “inevitable background of a famous person’s life span” but the active, vital context of her daily lifework, “as though the colorless light of historical time were forced through and refracted by the prism of a great character so that in the resulting spectrum a complete unity of life and world is achieved.”37 Arendt distinguishes the legacy of someone whose contribution was “her daily lifework,” in contrast to “the lives of artists, writers, and, generally, men or women whose genius forced them to keep the world at a certain distance and whose significance lies chiefly in their works, the artifacts they added to the world, not in the role they played in it.”38 Arendt’s observations on Luxemburg help us understand why scholars are so often drawn to Goldman’s life story; my point is not that we should avoid biography, but that our gaze on Goldman should encompass the broad range of her daily lifework, including her political ideas. In an effort to grasp the role Goldman played in her world, including but not limited to the written texts she left behind, I approach Goldman within the context of the anarchist movement of her lifetime. I want to apprehend her political thinking within the context of anarchism, to understand how she did her thinking within anarchist spaces and how those spaces contributed to her capacity to think.39

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Privileging her relation to anarchism has certain consequences. Goldman’s readers have sometimes relocated her closer to feminist, free speech, or educational reform movements, all struggles that Goldman entered at different times and has influenced in multiple ways. Linking her with these historical contexts is not wrong—that is, it is neither historically inaccurate nor hermeneutically unhelpful—but repositioning her as primarily a feminist, educator, or civil libertarian has the subtle consequence of deradicalizing her politics, folding her into a more familiar and less threatening context. For example, Goldman is often referred to as “the most dangerous woman in America.”40 This characterization of Goldman has been so oft-repeated that two recent authors on Goldman’s years in Canada named their book after this appellation, and felt no need to identify their source.41 Yet the most famous person labeling Goldman as dangerous was J. Edgar Hoover, and he did not say Goldman was the most dangerous woman in America. He said that she and Alexander Berkman were “the most dangerous anarchists in America.”42 The shift from anarchist to woman subtly repositions Goldman within a feminist rather than anarchist trajectory. In that shift, the revolutionary agenda of anarchism falls to the background, while the more reform-oriented practices of mainstream feminism come to the fore, and a specifically anarchist feminism, a self-consciously revolutionary feminism, can fall out of sight. Listeners in both Goldman’s time and our time are likely to hear “dangerous woman” and “dangerous anarchist” in distinctly different registers. Suggesting that J. Edgar Hoover was afraid of a woman subtly positions him as slightly ridiculous, clearly overreacting to the threat Goldman allegedly posed. On the other hand, framing Hoover’s statement within an anarchist context mobilizes more alarming images, suggesting greater political potency to Goldman’s presence and perhaps even indirectly legitimating the state’s harsh policies toward her and other dissidents.

THE ARCHIVE EFFECT This book could not have been written without the fertile resources of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, the Goldman archive at the University of California, Berkeley. The Goldman archive offers endless fascinating opportunities that both facilitate and hinder analysis. Archives are inexhaustible: they are full of shiny things. Thomas Osborne comments, “Archive reason is a form of reason that is devoted to the detail.”43 There is always one more dusty file to read, one more surprising government document to investigate, one further historical connection to another unanticipated figure. Antoinette Burton notes that “the face-to-face encounter with archival

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collections can raise the intellectual stakes of a project,” locating the specific material within charged contexts of larger struggles.44 The Goldman archive has clearly raised the intellectual stakes of Goldman scholarship by assembling a rich collection that moves thinking in unpredictable directions. Even if one has read every document and record (which is highly unlikely), they can be read again, anew, in a different context, against a revised historical backdrop or within a different chain of signifiers. Tug on the civil liberties thread and a chain of signifiers unfolds linking Goldman to Roger Baldwin, the Free Speech League, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Follow the birth control path and track the links to Margaret and William Sanger, the early eugenics movement, and the contested medicalization of reproduction. Unravel the educational thread and take up a chain of associations connecting Goldman to Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School movement. Archives, consequently, are full of distractions. They are sites hosting chains of sliding signifiers that disrupt a scholar’s focused gaze with the promise of new affiliations and fresh insights. The Goldman archive, in particular, nurtures distractions: it supports a documentary history/editing project encompassing other anarchist publications as well as the broader social context of radical thought and action, in addition to most available public and private documents concerning Goldman herself. Distractions can divert and disturb us, as well as amuse and gratify; distractions work like metaphors, using unexpected proximities to bridge previously unlike things to one another. I have enjoyed some charmed moments of chance associations and unexpected, brain-turning stimulations from my wanderings in the Goldman archive. While I sometimes have puzzled the staff by lacking a clear direction for my inquiries, they have facilitated my meandering with insight and good humor. Three examples come to mind, illustrating the “earthquakes of renewal” Ronald Roberts finds in his archival work on South African novelist Nadine Gordimer.45 First, a chance encounter with Bernard Smith’s 1939 book on literary criticism provided fresh context for Goldman’s work on theater by sketching the forces of romanticism and realism within which she worked. Smith’s book opened up other, more standard sources such as Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America, explaining the crucial role Walt Whitman played for Goldman and clarifying the political significance of the unconventional characters peopling the plays with which Goldman worked. Second, casually picking up a book on labor from the early 1900s led me down an interminable dark path of violence against workers, which in turn led me to re-hear Goldman’s language about police in a different register. Goldman regularly referred to the police as Cossacks and compared their tactics to the Russian pogroms, a rhetorical strategy I had unthinkingly dismissed as mere exaggeration. Once I realized, viscerally, the extent of violence against strikers and their families; once it sunk in that Goldman’s

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circles contained significant numbers of people who had been beaten up or killed at strikes and demonstrations; once the story of vigilante violence against her manager Ben Reitman was put within the larger context of private armies and self-appointed defenders of capitalism and the state—then I finally understood the significance of her language about law and order for her audience. Third, the accidental juxtaposition of Paul Avrich’s book on anarchist education, The Modern School Movement, with Alan Antliff’s Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde opened a whole new direction of thinking stimulated by Goldman’s complex relation to modernism and anarchism’s remarkable role in fostering radical change in the American art world in the early twentieth century. In each of these felicitous moments, a small intellectual earthquake shook old and new pieces of my landscape into a new relationship, and fresh possibilities ensued. The amazing quantity of materials in the archive is a reason to privilege its collections; beyond the Goldman archive’s particular framing of its subject, the sheer weight and density of Goldman-related material is unmatchable elsewhere. Yet radical archives have their own kinds of partiality, beyond the inevitable incompleteness of any conceptual ordering. The federal government destroyed many of the papers and files seized when agents raided the offices of Mother Earth, creating unknowable lacunae. Fighting the deportation of several Italian anarchists from Canada in the 1930s, Goldman condemned “the War Measures Regulations by which police acquire the right to invade people’s homes, confiscate their libraries and keep them in jail for weeks without reasonable bail.”46 Anarchists frequently destroyed their own materials in anticipation of government raids: Goldman’s secretary, Millie Desser, recalled such an incident in the late 1930s: “After the war started, there was a burning session in our basement to get rid of the ‘seditious literature.’ I remember that furnace going in August! All the archives and papers were burned.”47 These painful losses emphasize the partiality of the most devoted anarchist archives while highlighting the subversive power of anarchism’s marks and traces. The weight of particulars in archival wealth is countered by the need to generalize, to make arguments and tell a story. The excess of material produces a scarcity of time—there is always more work to do, not enough time to do it. “You know,” Carolyn Steedman muses, “that you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed.”48 There is so much . . . some material always gets away. One tries not to lose what one has painstakingly gathered, but in the end, one wants a book about Goldman, not a reproduction of the Goldman archive. An implicit or explicit theoretical apparatus has to accompany the researcher into the archive, or the forest of detail would never take any shape; yet it is that screening process itself that the archive throws into question. Theory tirelessly mediates relations between the general and the particulars; as Foucault noted in a

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different context, theory is for cutting. Theory is a filter, allowing one to move from the scale and detail of the archive to the condensed, focused space of a book or article. Theory selects, eliminates, highlights, and in the process inevitably creates and distorts. Theory is the price we pay to bring order to the archive, to make the archive speak. My effort to honor the details—not just their facticity, but the power of their aggregations—while theorizing them has led me to making lists. Not appendices safely secreted at the end of the text, where only the driven will read them, but lists of critical events and actors placed within the text, or gathered on the accompanying website, to contextualize my analysis while retaining some of the spirit and intensity of proliferating examples. By listing the best known attentats (political assassinations by anarchists) alongside a much longer list of documented acts of violence against labor, I aim to immerse the reader in something like the archive’s realm of particulars, to contextualize the widespread belief that anarchists were violent in light of the much greater violence against striking workers and their families. By listing the dozens of documented anarchist journals published during Goldman’s lifetime, I hope to offer readers a sense of the dense networks of anarchist texts that circulated within and helped to create anarchist counterpublics. By calling attention to a small army of anarchist printers, I seek to highlight the material as well as ideological production of anarchist texts in radical communities. By listing the hundreds of women who were active in Goldman’s circles, who took part in anarchist and related political spheres, I invite readers to rethink the common claim that Goldman was “ahead of her time” and instead show her as very much of her time. “Her time” was not one thing, but, like any time, a textured, layered web of multiple times; we have forgotten, are seldom provoked to remember, the hardy and enthusiastic presence of women in radical politics during Goldman’s lifetime. What can a list—which interrupts the flow of the text, makes unaccustomed demands on readers, and in any case is never complete—what can a list accomplish? My hope is that a few well-placed lists can convey a bit of the archive effect while challenging what Jacques Rancière calls the prevailing “distribution of the sensible,” “the system of divisions and boundaries that define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime.”49 I want to use the density and weight of the lists to interrogate the “conditions of intelligibility” within which generalizations can be made and accepted as legitimate.50 In other words, lists, despite their clunkiness, marshal the myriad shiny things from the Goldman archive to put pressure on the received orthodoxies in what Foucault has called the general archive, the dominant social mileau within which particulars get brought to order and “sense” that can be “common” gets made. “Politics,” Rancière tells us, “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”51 Po-

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litical theorist Michael Shapiro has argued that established expectations of clarity and precision in our inquiries can normalize the prevailing modes of authority which implicitly produce what counts as clear, while “writing peculiarly [can] disclose that what has made for intelligibility and coherence in our analysis is not the intelligible world but an intelligibility-producing practice.”52 Feminist theorist Trihn Minh-ha succinctly remarked, “clarity is always ideological.”53 Lists of forgotten women, little-known journals and printers, selectively repressed or celebrated acts of violence employ a peculiar kind of writing to challenge not just specific generalizations, but the very act of generalizing itself. A similar transgression against the conventions of inquiry takes place in my map of Goldman’s speeches and travels. Both maps and lists respond to what literary theorist Franco Moretti calls “the challenge of quantity.”54 In some ways they are opposites: maps articulate patterns while lists seem to deny or overwhelm patterns; maps invite lengthy scrutiny while lists are likely to receive preemptory skimming; maps are fun to look at while lists can be tiresome. Yet they are similar in the sense that they are rhetorical gestures of respect toward the density and abundance of one’s material. By organizing the space of the page differently, they also reorganize the temporality of reading. They try to change the readerly experience on a sensory level, give the eye something different to look at. They break the rhythm of reading, slowing down or speeding up the pace. On one level, following Moretti’s suggestions, maps let me look at Goldman in space: the physical markers of her speeches in the United States suggest both her sustained presence in parts of the country often written off by progressives as “red states,” and her absence from others. On another level, again following Moretti, maps get at space in Goldman: her years of journeying were not just external movements of a person who was already Emma Goldman; they are spatial practices helping to produce Emma Goldman. An archive is an inexhaustible “contact zone.”55 In the Goldman archive, contact ensues between a lively, influential anarchist past and the present and future which need that past in order to explore radical possibilities that have been largely set aside. By making these lesser known people, publications, and events visible to readers, by letting them speak or at least noting that they did in fact speak, I am locating my theorizing about Emma Goldman within the specific set of dense particulars and interpretive possibilities that are the gift of the archive.

MAPPING THIS BOOK One ongoing dilemma in writing about Goldman is the degree to which her relation to her lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman should be included. Their relationship was formative for her in many ways, and their

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accomplishments generally shared. Yet Berkman was not just an extension of Goldman—he made his own mark, both by his astonishing capacities for leadership and his lucid writing. No account of Goldman’s political thinking could omit him, yet folding him into a discussion focused on her can have the unfortunate effect of demoting him to secondary status. I have tried to find a middle ground, one that recognizes his contributions while retaining my focus on his more famous comrade. At the turn of the twentieth century, anarchism performed a function similar to that which terrorism enacts at the turn of the twenty-first century: representing that which was foreign, ominous, and filthy, anarchists were the constitutive outside of American politics, the needed outside against which the proper inside could take shape. Yet the insides and outsides of political spaces usually leak, enabling a mutually influential commerce across borders. Chapter 1, “The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America,” contrasts the claims in media, medical discourse, and law concerning Goldman’s alleged danger to society with the much greater danger posed by the authorities toward striking workers and their families. Here I look at the alleged dangers Goldman posed to national security, while also opening up a second level of inquiry directed at interrogating the question itself: Why did so many people spend so much time asking that question? What other questions, what other dangers, disappeared into the seemingly endless inquiry into the threat to society allegedly posed by Emma Goldman? Chapter 2 investigates the production of “Anarchist Spaces.” To do this, I investigate the anarchist social imaginary, the symbolic landscape of images and metaphors within which anarchism can become intelligible. I imagine an anarchist habitus, a way of thinking about the embodied experiences available in an anarchist lifeworld. To understand how anarchism happened, how it was put into circulation, this chapter focuses on the production and circulation of anarchist ideas through a variety of forms. Journals and the people who printed them are key examples of sites of circulation, as are the physical spaces that produced or sheltered anarchist life worlds. These sites include Goldman’s own physical body, plus exemplary places such as Schwab’s anarchist tavern, the Ferrer Center, and Mable Dodge’s Greenwich Village salon. Following anarchist words and texts as they move through times and places illuminates the dynamic relationship between the social imaginary and the bodily habitus within which anarchism came to be in the United States. Chapter 3, “The Anarchist Apprentice,” follows Goldman’s intellectual heritage, utilizing Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of signs to trace the components out of which her ideas emerged. Goldman apprenticed herself to anarchism, learning how to read the signs emitted by anarchist lifeworlds. Anarchism came to her through her absorption in the violence and drama

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of the Haymarket events; her intimate, formative, lifelong relation with Alexander Berkman; her education with Johann Most and Ed Brady; her time in prison. Through these intimate relations and encounters, she met the writings generally regarded as anarchist classics—Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Stirner, Landauer—as well as a wide field of literature, radical history, and anarchist writings. Her education in nursing and midwifery in Vienna exposed her to Nietzsche, whose ideas she vigorously recruited for anarchism. Following as well as producing anarchism’s various signs, Goldman created her own “anarchism without adjectives.”56 A considerable amount of attention has been paid to Goldman’s sexuality and her struggle to live up to the standards of personal liberation that she embraced. In Chapter 4, “Gender and Genre,” I suggest that we approach Goldman’s erotic life differently, looking not for consistency between her ideals and her behavior but for the consequences of her parallel loves for her partners and her revolutions. Goldman’s practices of gender and sexuality can be usefully framed by interpreting them in the context of her practices of genre and media, which set her self-understanding and her political thinking within certain temporal patterns. Goldman’s love of theater vs. her dismissal of film, as well as her enthusiasm for romanticism and realism in contrast to her contempt for modernism, suggest an affinity for some chronological practices over others. Rethinking relations between love and politics in light of relations between genre and media can help us let go of our need for Goldman to be a role model for women and instead see the attraction of Goldman’s radical vision of personal and collective transformation for feminist politics. While Goldman was exceptionally bold in thinking the intersections of class and gender, she was largely inattentive to race. This puzzling lacuna in Goldman has sometimes been attributed to a lack of moral outrage on her part over the oppression of blacks, but I urge a re-reading of her silence: rather than a personal failing, it is a weak analysis that we need to probe. While Goldman was scrupulously attentive to the histories of class and gender, she took race to be a static indicator rather than a dynamic historical practice. The drawback to grounding her political thinking within specific struggles was her subsequent inattention to politics that appeared elsewhere, in spaces not tapped by anarchist engagements. Hers was an implicitly Jewish, explicitly class/state analysis; taking race as fact rather than history, she failed to examine the particular legacy of slavery and its subsequent implications for African American political struggles. In Chapter 5, “How Could She Miss Race?” I contrast her significant involvement with radical Mexican and Mexican American politics and with global anti-colonialism to her lack of attention to African American politics, thus putting pressure on her distinction between revolutionary transformation vs. “mere” reform.

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Chapter 6, “Emma Goldman’s Women,” turns to Goldman’s strongest essays, those analyzing prostitution, marriage, love, sexuality, and birth control, to explore her particularly anarchist feminism. Goldman’s feminism focused largely on women’s bodies, and her analysis anticipated a number of later feminist arguments, including critique of sexual dualism, insistence on an intersectional analysis, and search for a kind of equality that enables difference. This chapter also contests the common assumption that anarchism was a male-dominated political space, with Goldman an unusual and rare female figure; instead, I aim to recover the female presence in anarchism’s habitus, the gendered landscape through which Goldman moved. My goals are both to re-create the density of this largely forgotten female presence in radical politics and to facilitate our ability to claim anarchist movements, not just isolated individuals, for contemporary political struggles. The final chapter, “Political Thinking in the Streets,” returns to my initial focus on the kind of thinking that Goldman offers. I speculate on directions of thought that she could have developed, including work on women in prison, relations between reform and revolution, and her intended book on Spain. I explore her public speaking as a kind of prophecy, and her prodigious letter writing as a technique of self-production. In particular, her letters on the revolution in Spain express a maturing of her thinking “in the streets,” in the midst of incompatible urgencies and compelling political struggle. In the end, Goldman left us with an acknowledgement that “life is stronger than theory,” while she continued to work toward a free, just, and beautiful society.57 It is an example we cannot afford to forget.

NOTES 1. While unpublished, Foremost Russian Dramatists: Their Life and Work served as the basis for several of her lectures in exile. See chapter 4 for further discussion. 2. Goldman, Living My Life (NY: Dover Publications, 1970; originally Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 191. 3. Alix Kates Shulman, “Biographical Introduction,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, third edition, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 26, 27. 4. Baldwin to Goldman, December 27, 1933, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 29. 5. Goldman, “Political Persecution in Republican Spain,” Spain and the World (December 10, 1937): 5, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 53.

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6. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (with Bernice Carroll), “Digging for Goldman: What We Found,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 3–18. 7. Lori J. Marso, “Feminism’s Quest for Common Desires,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (March 2010): 264. 8. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 208. 9. Gail Griffin, Calling: Essays on Speaking in the Mother Tongue (Pasadena, CA: Trilogy Books, 1992), 40. 10. Emma Goldman to Ben Taylor, February 1, 1936, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey Inc., 1990), reel 36. 11. Goldman to Emily Holmes Coleman, June 5, 1935, in the Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 34. 12. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 54 (italics in original). 13. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 108. 14. Roger Baldwin, cited in Alix Kates Shulman, “Biographical Introduction,” 27. 15. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 11. 16. Alix Kates Shulman, “Biographical Introduction,” 36. 17. David Porter, “Introduction,” in Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter (New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983), 17 (italics in original). 18. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 81. 19. Martha Solomon, Emma Goldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 38; Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 314. 20. Candace Falk, “Forging Her Place: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, volume I, Made for America, 1890–1900, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 8. 21. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 8. 22. Weiss and Kensinger, with Carroll, “Digging for Goldman,” 4. 23. Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 11. 24. Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise, 314. 25. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 59. 26. My thanks to Jason Adams for the conversation that produced this idea and for many other insights into anarchism. 27. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Headline Publishing Group, 2007), 67. 28. Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001), Thesis 4, accessed November 27, 2010, doi: 10.1353/tae.0027. 29. Rancière, “Ten Theses,” par 15.

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30. For insights into the politics of untimeliness, see Christopher Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory: The View from Somewhere (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 141–143. 31. Barry Pateman, “Anarchism and Anarchy: A Historical Perspective,” North American Anarchist Studies Network (Hartford, CT: November 21, 2009); and personal conversation with Barry Pateman, September 28, 2010. 32. Lynne Farrow, “Feminism as Anarchism,” in Quiet Rumors: An AnarchaFeminist Reader (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002), 17–18. 33. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, March 2, 1919, in the Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 11. 34. Barry Pateman, personal communication, July 22, 2002. 35. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 8. 36. Margaret Anderson, “Emma Goldman in Chicago,” Mother Earth IX, no. 10 (December 1914): 322. 37. Hannah Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg, 1871–1919,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), 419. 38. Arendt, “Luxemburg,” 419. 39. I am following the lead of The Emma Goldman Papers Project in contextualizing Goldman primarily within the anarchist tradition. See Candace Falk, “Archival Code-Breaking: The Editor’s Dilemma,” Documentary Editing 27, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 4–6. 40. To give just one example, Robert Siegel stated on National Public Radio, “Goldman was once considered the most dangerous woman in America.” “Commentary: New Perspective on Current Times from Powerful Female Figure of the 20th Century,” National Public Radio, March 5, 2002. 41. Theresa and Albert Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman (Toronto: Subway Books, 2001). 42. J. Edgar Hoover, “Memorandum for Mr. Creighton,” U.S. Department of Justice (August 23, 1919): 2; The Emma Goldman Papers Project, accessed November 27, 2010. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/deportation.html. My thanks to Barry Pateman for pointing out the shift in language from “dangerous anarchist” to “dangerous woman.” 43. Thomas Osborne, “The ordinariness of the archive,” History of the Human Sciences 12, no. 2 (1999): 58 (italics in original). 44. Antoinette Burton, “Introduction,” in Archive Stories: Fact, Fiction, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 45. Ronald Suresh Roberts, “Keeping the Self: The Novelist as (Self-)Archivist,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, et al. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 303. 46. Goldman, “To: The Editor of the Canadian Forum, Toronto,” draft letter prepared by J. L. Cohen and Goldman, J. L. Cohen Papers, vol 14, cited in Moritz and Moritz, Dangerous Woman, 190. 47. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 79. 48. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001), 18 (italics in original).

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49. Gabriel Rockhill, “Introduction,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum Publishing, 2006), 1. 50. Rockhill, “Introduction,” 10. 51. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum Publishing, 2006), 13. 52. Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), xii–xiii. 53. Trihn Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 84. 54. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 5. 55. Jeff Sahadeo, “‘Without the Past there Is No Future’: Archives, History, and Authority in Uzbekistan,” in Archive Stories, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 60. 56. “Anarchism without adjectives” was an expression shared by several of Goldman’s generation of anarchists, including Voltairine de Cleyre and Tarrida del Mármol, to indicate a retreat from the prior generation’s internecine struggles in favor of integrating individualist, mutualist, and communist anarchism. 57. Goldman to Tom Bell, July 1, 1937, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: ChadwyckHealey, Inc., 1990), reel 40.

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1 The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America

“Make no peace with a lie.” —Emma Goldman

Imagine that, today or tomorrow, a young working class immigrant woman from a despised racial group succeeds in galvanizing a significant component of Americans around a radical political agenda. She makes the respectable classes shudder because she appears to break all the rules, yet (or perhaps, therefore) there is something unaccountably fascinating about her. She advocates tirelessly for the oppressed, both in the United States and globally. Huge crowds gather to hear her speak, while the reading public eagerly consumes news of her whereabouts. Her name is used to scare little children, and governments hound her. While it may overburden our imaginations to visualize a contemporary version of Emma Goldman, her time was in many ways similar to ours. Both time periods, as political scientist Noel Kent has observed, sustained rapid globalization, “overwhelming revolutions in business, technology and communications,” extensive monopolies and mergers, urbanization, migration and its backlash, and several “splendid little wars.”1 In both times, a relatively small group of obscenely wealthy persons could/can live completely apart from the poverty, unemployment, and homelessness of the have-nots, while those in the middle cling to the national “mythomoteur,” The American Dream, as they imagine joining the former group while laboring to stay out of the latter.2 During Goldman’s lifetime, anarchists were the boogiemen of America and Emma Goldman was the best-known anarchist of all. Overseeing the 21

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deportation of Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other radicals from the United States to the U.S.S.R. in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover pronounced Goldman and Berkman “two of the most dangerous anarchists in America.”3 He was not alone: Goldman was persistently framed as a “dangerous individual” during her lifetime, and current engagements with Goldman often continue that line of inquiry. Goldman often came to represent anarchism, which in turn came to represent, to the general public, that which was foreign, dirty, and dangerous. Anarchism worked as the constitutive outside for government officials and the general public; it was the entity that must be excluded from the nation so that the “inside” can remain familiar, clean, and safe. As is often the case with the “outside,” it becomes paradoxically important to those still on the “inside,” who need their outside so they can reject it, over and over again, in order to sustain their self-understanding. Further, as political theorist Bonnie Honig explains in her analysis of foreigners, the anarchist outsider can sometimes invert, or be utilized by others to invert, the whole relation between insides and outsides, and can be brought in to symbolize fresh energy and a new beginning.4 This chapter inventories some key elements of the discursive network articulating Goldman’s public presence in the United States during her lifetime and sketches Goldman’s responses to those authoritative judgments. Goldman’s responses can be seen as examples of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of fearless speech, a kind of political speech that challenges the predominant political logic in some ways while being contained by it in others. By looking at the discourses of danger surrounding Goldman, I aim both to assess those fears and to attend to the process by which radical political critique is collapsed into the alleged traits of an individual personality. The goal of the chapter is to interrogate the production of danger around Goldman—I want us to ask why so many people asked that question, why the question of her dangerousness dominated the political landscape, and at what price. I encourage us to look beyond the question of whether Goldman was dangerous in order to ask how other violence, far more murderous state and corporate violence, has been rendered less visible by the prevailing frame. The dominant grammars of intelligibility make some aspects of Goldman’s politics hypervisible, while throwing others into shadow. By problematizing the danger-laden context for apprehending Goldman, making it strange and thus in need of explanation, I want to account for and contest the neglect of violence against labor in U.S. historical awareness and enable us to see how other dangers—structural, systemic dangers—become unintelligible within that frame. Investigating public constructions of danger and the curtailment of radical political critique in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resonates in the early twenty-first century as well. Within the context of heightened official security, Americans are regularly characterized as

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endangered by irrational, unaccountably violent Others. Now, as then, authorities construct and deploy figures of danger they then claim merely to have discovered; now, as then, possibilities of radical critique are curtailed by acute over-reading of individuals’ intentions and personae; now, as then, prevailing discursive regimes make hegemonic ways of thinking seem obvious while more critical perspectives remain underarticulated. Analyzing the productive work done by discourse networks, and the struggles within those networks to contest or sustain state and corporate power, suggests theoretical tools for loosening the hold of power on meaning and making greater space for fresh critical insights.

DISCOURSE NETWORKS Discourse networks entail material and semiotic preconditions for making and circulating meaning. By discourse I do not simply mean talking; rather, following Foucault, discourse refers to the conditions of possibility within which statements can be made and regarded as intelligible. Several discourse-generating networks converged to articulate Goldman as a dangerous individual: an intensified legal and police apparatus; an expanding national and international press network; and an array of medical and psychiatric technologies identifying potential abnormalities and their attendant deficiencies of character and citizenship. Discourse networks are made up of “linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks, and bodies.”5 These networks produced a hermeneutic of danger rendering Goldman monstrous (or, sometimes, not monstrous) and society, imperiled. Discourse networks are best understood as layered sites of struggle, where hegemonic understandings are produced, contested, and reproduced. While the prevailing practices of intelligibility are pervasive, connecting overlapping audiences, they are also contradictory and incomplete, offering opportunities to contest or evade dominant meanings. The expanded reach of law enforcement and judicial investigation enabled, as Foucault notes, “a new mapping and closer surveillance of urban space,” producing enhanced information about radical political movements and rendering them in terms indistinguishable from criminality.6 Reporters and editors entertained readers and sold newspapers by engaging the potentially salacious zone of indiscernability among politics, sex, and crime. Medical experts mined the external appearance of individuals to explain and predict their dangerous tendencies. The historically specific machineries organizing information about what counted as danger and who was rendered unsafe worked overtime on Goldman, singling her out for a discursive spotlight that few other radicals, certainly no other immigrant radicals, achieved.

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Allies of Goldman’s from various progressive movements sometimes contested this ominous characterization and defended her controversial public speech by appeal to constitutionally guaranteed individual freedoms. For many of Goldman’s supporters, she was a necessary supplement to the liberal tradition they cherished, a foreigner who could reinvigorate their democratic self-understandings. By citing the founders and beloved American literary figures such as Whitman and Emerson, Goldman tried to claim a place in that heritage, to embody the return of repressed democratic values and revolutionary practices. As Honig explains with regard to foreigners who come from far away to found or re-found a political system, Goldman wanted “to return a wayward order to its forgotten first principles.”7 Yet these defenders were unsuccessful, at least during Goldman’s lifetime, in folding Goldman into the prevailing national terms of discourse; fidelity to freedom of speech, press, and assembly was trumped by the exaggerated urgencies of national security. Especially after the assassination of President McKinley, when media and law enforcement scurried to find a mechanism to hold Goldman accountable for the assassin’s act, her demonic legend prevailed. More sympathetic views on Goldman sometimes surfaced in mainstream assessments, especially in the later years; Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, liked her autobiography and probably contributed to the legal process through which Goldman returned to the United States for a ninety-day speaking tour in 1934.8 Yet the Emma Goldman who could be known outside the circles of anarchist counterpublics was largely a product of the dominant intersecting systems of criminal, medical, and media technologies; her presence in public life was construed primarily within the discourses of danger they generated. Goldman responded to the charges of danger by denying, confronting, and redirecting the alarmed gaze toward greater risks left underarticulated in hegemonic accounts. The dominant gazes on Goldman scrutinized her for signs of the peril they already knew she posed to their rule, while she reversed their gaze and located danger within the claims of sovereignty and the ruling practices of economy, interpretation, and law. Goldman’s bold confrontations with authorities constituted a kind of anarchist parrhesia, fearless speech, a relentless truth-telling practice that risked her own security in pursuit of her “beautiful ideal.”9 Foucault identifies parrhesia as “a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself).”10 While frank and courageous criticism of authorities, guided by fierce political and ethical commitment to anarchism, was Goldman’s stock-in-trade, her strategic parrhesia combined frontal assault with carefully calculated rhetorical arts and tactical silences. By examining Goldman’s responses, I take seriously the question “was she dangerous?” yet in the end I move

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past that query to ask why so many people spent so much time asking that question, and with what consequences. Analyzing discourse networks requires attention to the preconditions for making and circulating meaning. To map such networks is to trace fluid webs of power, marking their sites of concentration, their practices of exchange, their interruptions and interventions, as well as the possibilities of resistance they both enable and corrode. Discourse networks do not determine people’s ideas and actions, but they do shape the context, articulating or withholding needed opportunities for making meaning and communicating intelligible ideas. From “the noisy reservoir of all possible written constellations, paths, and media of transmission, or mechanisms of memory,” the agents of law enforcement, medicine, and media consistently selected those that organized her meaning around the central spindle of danger.11 How did discourses of danger achieve such vigorous circulation? What other questions failed to reach the needed threshold of articulation? Law and Order When J. Edgar Hoover was overseeing Goldman’s deportation, he insisted on the “undue harm” Goldman and Berkman would inflict on American society.12 As head of the newly established General Intelligence Division of the Department of Justice, Hoover had been recruited by Woodrow Wilson’s new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, to be his special assistant. Together they utilized the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to launch an assault on radical individuals and organizations, arresting many thousands of people during the largely illegal crackdowns that became known as the Palmer Raids.13 The Draft Act and the Espionage Act criminalized opposition to military recruitment, the charge on which Goldman and Berkman were convicted in 1917, while the Sedition Act made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government.14 Socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit defended many anarchists and socialists who were charged under these bans, including the editors of The Masses and Pearson’s Magazine. Hillquit recalled in his autobiography, “By the spring of 1918 it was reported that about one thousand indictments had been found and more than two hundred convictions obtained under the Espionage Law.”15 Anarchism became the first and only ideology to serve as grounds for exclusion from the United States. This body of law seamlessly joined ideology with accusation, criminalizing the idea of overthrowing the government by unlawful means. The Comstock Laws, begun in 1873 and continuing well into the 1930s, also contributed to the criminalization of anarchism by defining obscenity so broadly that it included birth control, sexuality, erotic

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literature, and radical ideas in general. The ideology of anarchy became a crime, a crime that is an idea, an idea that is a crime.16 While Hoover was obsessed with Goldman’s case and had her bail set prohibitively high ($15,000), he had plenty of company.17 In an internal government memo in 1917, Francis Caffey, U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, wrote, “Emma Goldman is a woman of great ability and of personal magnetism, and her persuasive powers are such to make her an exceedingly dangerous woman.”18 Government agents eager to prove that she advocated violence, encouraged the poor to steal from the rich, or peddled obscenity tailed her and reported to various authorities. Two decades earlier, on October 17, 1893, New York Judge Martine sentenced her to one year’s imprisonment for “unlawful assembly,” saying “I look upon you as a dangerous woman in your doctrine.”19 At different times, the governments of France, Britain, Germany, the United States, and the former Soviet Union watched and reported on Emma Goldman. In fact, international police cooperation was largely an artifact of efforts “to control the international spread of people and organizations that were held to be opponents of established political systems, such as socialists, democrats, liberals, and anarchists.”20 Although global cooperation in anti-anarchist efforts was hampered by national rivalries, international anti-anarchist conferences in Rome (1898) and St. Petersburg (1904) facilitated direct communications among police and intelligence-gathering agencies in Europe, Russia, and the United States for purposes of tracking the “wild beasts without nationality” who, in the words of one state official, posed a threat “to all persons.”21 While the United States did not sign the 1904 St. Petersburg Protocol on international anti-anarchist police measures, President Roosevelt was no less adamant than his European counterparts in condemning anarchism as “a crime against the whole human race.” 22 The French government concluded that Goldman’s presence would “compromise public security” and issued an extradition order enjoining her to exit France in 1901.23 A report from the German government called her “an exceedingly dangerous person.”24 While some of these communications were for internal eyes only, others were pronounced in courtrooms and legislative chambers, circulated through chains of command, and publicized in interviews, contributing to a critical mass of official words about society’s vulnerability to the threat of Emma Goldman. At the same time, despite national and international coordination of governments’ anti-anarchist efforts, the apparatus of surveillance and enforcement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was uneven and its effectiveness, inconsistent. There was a certain “wild west” air in U.S. law enforcement, allowing Goldman and others to evade or contest the suppression of written and spoken words.25 For example, in January 1909, a San Francisco judge dismissed charges against Goldman and her

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manager Ben Reitman because the judge declared that it was not unlawful to denounce the government or preach anarchist doctrines.26 In numerous localities, Goldman’s birth control lectures went on unscathed, despite the law’s confinements. Specific locales, especially in Goldman’s home base of New York City, might have more sympathetic authorities or enthusiastic audiences, giving Goldman a temporary advantage in her game of cat-andmouse with the police, courts, and prisons, but in the end government authorities stripped her of her citizenship and, utilizing the 1918 Immigration Act, sent her into exile. The anti-anarchist hysteria or Red Scare mentality that periodically appears to grip the American public is better understood, anarchist philosopher David Wieck explains, as “the work of repression.”27 Labor historians Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais observe, “the red scare made more money than speed-up [and] increased profits faster than new machinery or labor-saving devices. It was ageless and forever new.”28 Biographer Alice Wexler documents J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to use Goldman’s exile “to stir up public support for draconian legislation designed to limit admissible dissent.”29 The departure of the Buford, intended to be the first of several “Soviet Arks,” was orchestrated by the Justice Department, the Immigration Bureau, the military, and the press, “to dramatize the government’s determination to quell labor and radical militance by branding it ‘foreign.’”30 The day the Buford sailed, the Justice Department released a report alleging (falsely) that Goldman had been involved “directly or indirectly” with “nearly a score” of murders.31 Dutifully publicized by The Washington Post, the Justice Department report rather astonishingly portrayed the anarchists as radical profiteers: Goldman and Berkman had “carried off thousands of dollars,” according to the report: “While the rest of us work for a living and are satisfied with our form of government, these anarchists accumulate comfortable fortunes by denouncing the very country which makes them prosperous.”32 Further, the detachment of marines posted to the Buford, the ship’s armed crew, the difficulties deportees faced in contacting their families or securing resources for their forced journey, the secrecy surrounding the precise date and time of departure—all these factors, Wexler shows, were orchestrated to heighten the sense of drama and danger surrounding Goldman and Berkman, who were the stars of the deportation proceedings. Goldman and Berkman understood that the political theater being played out by the authorities also gave them an opportunity to address their audience; during their incarceration on Ellis Island, they wrote a pamphlet, Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace, explaining the attacks on radicals as part of state and corporate attacks on organized labor in general. The production of public hysteria and demonization of anarchists was not manufactured out of whole cloth by authorities; as Honig points out, the bomb plots, a coordinated series of mail bombs sent in 1919 to various

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public officials perceived as anti-labor and anti-immigrant, “had induced in most Americans a real and not unwarranted sense of vulnerability.”33 Nor was there a seamless, faceless institution called the state that automatically churned out assaults on radicals; on the contrary, a great deal of coordinated effort by a variety of agencies over a substantial period of time was required to rid the country of Emma Goldman. Other perspectives were voiced within the government: for example, some years earlier the U.S. Strike Commission report to President Cleveland in 1894 commented that it was “bad precedent” to put deputy marshals under control of railroad officials and blamed the government “for not adequately controlling monopolies and corporations, and failing to reasonably protect the rights of labor and redress its wrongs.”34 The assistant Secretary of Labor during the Palmer raids, Louis Freeland Post, was a lone and determined opponent of the deportation of radicals, insisting that accused anarchists were entitled to legal protections, fairness, and even a degree of human sympathy. Post and his two assistants freed several thousand detainees in his “insurrection against Palmer.”35 Goldman and Berkman, however, were not among them. The authorities selectively and ruthlessly publicized and amplified the alleged dangers they claim merely to have discovered in order to produce what Post came to call the “deportations delirium.”36 Legal scholar Aviam Soifer calls our attention to the misleading rhetorical work done by the metaphors of hysteria and delirium. The reigning imagery “portrays the World War I era and the period of the Palmer Raids as a sort of national fever, a pathological reaction that broke abruptly and then went into remission for several decades.”37 Yet, Soifer shows, legal decisions regarding the rights of labor well before and well after the Palmer raids regularly disqualified union organizers as bearers of rights of free speech, regularly endorsed the use of violence against strikers, and regularly convicted I.W.W. members by “putting the entire I.W.W. on trial with stale evidence presented by police informers and by notorious professional turncoat witnesses.”38 The language of hysteria and paranoia hides the politics behind the Red Scare, thus unintentionally bolstering anti-radical forces today. The government’s concerted attack on radicals becomes framed as a past psychological blunder rather than an ongoing policy. They were hysterical; while we, today, enacting laws and policies that inhibit dissent, are simply reasonable people protecting national security. Since we don’t feel hysterical, just appropriately concerned, then we are nothing like them. Also, the psychological language hides the malicious destruction of lives, careers, and families entailed by the Palmer raids: the officials were not simply frightened; rather, they set out a rational plan of action designed to eliminate opponents and hide the trail in flames of righteous public indignation. Labor historians Ed Delaney and M.T. Rice, writing in the 1920s, reported that the Palmer raids “had a sort of anesthetic effect on the

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people, especially the working class, who were stunned in every great city by the wholesale scope of the raids and the brutal methods employed in handling prisoners.”39 Those arrested were led away in shackles, often paraded down the streets in a brutal display of public humiliation. Anarchist Jacques Rudome recalled that time: “You have no idea what mayhem they committed, intellectual mayhem too. They frightened a lot of people.”40 The Red Scare was not simply a psychological malady; it was a political and economic investment. Media Reporters enthusiastically joined the jeopardy chorus. The New York World followed Goldman to “Anarchy’s Den” where she “rules with a Nod the Savage Reds.”41 The Spokane Spokesman-Review reported that the “woman terrorist” frightened her listeners who cast “fearful glances” when she “let drop some telltale word that revealed her true significance.”42 In contrast, William Marion Reedy’s sympathetic interview in the St. Louis Mirror in 1908 objected that “she is simple and not violent” and dangerous only to slavery, pretense, and greed.43 The New York Times in 1909 ridiculed “the average newspaper reader” who saw Goldman as “a wild-eyed inciter of violence” and claimed instead that she was “a well-read, intellectual woman with a theory of society not very different from that entertained by a lot of college professors who can talk without danger of police interference.”44 These two kinds of press reports are the opposite ends of the same conceptual ground. The alternative to labeling her as dangerous was to protest that she was not dangerous, a denial that confirmed the relevance of the category. The only other dimension of Goldman’s presence so consistently evoked by reporters was, predictably, her appearance. Public expectations of large, masculinized, uncontrolled females, tastelessly attired, merged with antiSemitic presumptions about “dirty Jews” and nativist prejudices against “unwashed foreigners.” Over and over, reporters were surprised that she was not hideous, and took care to reassure readers that she was small (4 feet, 10½ inches, according to her Philadelphia police report), attractive, intelligent, well-dressed, soft-spoken, earnest.45 Several noted that she was clean. One commented on her small feet, noting that they remained primly on the floor during the interview. Other news accounts, particularly those after 1901, portrayed Goldman literally as the devil herself, surrounded by the flames of hell.46 As Goldman aged, reporters’ accounts of her appearance emphasized her grandmotherly exterior disguising hidden dangers: the Spokesman-Review commented that she “looked more like a farmer’s wife on a shopping tour than a bombthrower.”47 Anticipating the theme of sin and danger, an 1892 account in the New York World

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informed the public that she had an ugly smile, “her lips wreathed into lines” like “the mouths of some snakes.”48 The press’s gaze on Goldman looked for danger in her body and her self-presentation. Whether journalists and editors accepted or rejected the charge that Goldman was dangerous, they all accepted the question “Is she dangerous?” as the relevant question to ask. A few of the better interviews, such as those with Nelly Bly in the New York World in 1893 and Miriam Michelson in the Philadelphia North American in 1901, also considered her ideas, looking for danger there as well. The American public became increasingly engaged with Goldman as the press “hooked the public on daily news of her whereabouts.”49 Her volumes of hate mail peaked around the assassination of McKinley in 1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. After McKinley’s assassination, Falk explains, The newspapers’ portrayal of the assassin as an immigrant anarchist incited by Emma Goldman’s radical ideas unleashed a public thirst for revenge against these “dangerous” outsiders. Overnight, the press transformed Goldman, a slight woman in her thirties, who was developing a following as an intelligent critic of law-and-order politics and an eloquent spokesperson for anarchist ideas, into a she-devil who had inspired an act of terror.50

Yet this seemingly rapid transformation of Goldman’s persona was set in the context of a much longer process of anarchism’s demonization; the post-McKinley red scare was a particularly lethal move in the ongoing “othering” of radical ideas, but it took its momentum from earlier episodes, particularly the Haymarket events of 1886. Haymarket, historian Paul Avrich writes, left an imprint on America that was never completely eradicated. Thereafter anarchism, in the public mind, was inseparably linked with terrorism and destruction. The image of the anarchist as a wild-eyed, foreignlooking maniac with a dynamite bomb in one hand and a pistol or dagger in the other became so firmly embedded in the popular consciousness that the passage of one hundred years has failed to alter it.51 The day before the Haymarket explosion, the New York Sun published a story about anarchists associated with Goldman’s mentor, Johann Most, who torched their tenements to collect insurance money, presumably for the anarchist cause. A woman and two children reportedly died.52 The firebug story intertwined with the Haymarket story to focus the media’s alarmed gaze on anarchists. Economic and racial anxieties intertwined among the “old stock folks” who feared that the country was being inundated by “foreign anarchists, paupers, and criminals.”53 In his study of representations of the “anarchist beast” in U.S. magazines prior to the 1903 tightening of anti-anarchist laws, Nathaniel Hong found anarchists widely represented as “antithetical to the best instincts of humanity, as morally adrift, intellectually illogical, religiously unacceptable, medically anoma-

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lous, and dangerously unpatriotic.”54 The demonization of anarchism bled into and reflected the murderous rage provoked by labor activists: historian Tom Goyens notes, “Advocacy of the use of grenades and bullets against striking workers had been common in the popular press since the 1870s.”55 Anarchists were thus already available to be found dangerous and thrown out of acceptable society, becoming the needed outside against which others could claim to be on the inside of proper order.56 Science and Medicine Medical authorities played a small but notable role in the construal of Goldman as a dangerous individual. A phrenological exam of the shape and size of her skull, along with that of fellow anarchist Marie Louise, was performed by experts from the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health after her 1893 conviction for inciting unemployed workers to “take bread.” The scientific study of the skull to establish individual and racial personality types was enormously popular in the United States; while in retrospect we can see it was a racist pseudo-science, phrenology was also an energetic center for several reform movements, including temperance, suffrage, women’s dress reform, vegetarianism, hypnotism, and hydrotherapy.57 The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health lasted over 70 years, making it the “longest-lived phrenological magazine in the country.”58 From a relatively small base of 1500 paid subscribers in 1838, it expanded rapidly to 20,000 subscribers by 1848 and more than 50,000 by the mid-1850s.59 While phrenology’s popularity was waning by the end of the nineteenth century, it still maintained a foothold in the criminalproducing discourses and the popular culture of Goldman’s time. According to Madeline Stern’s history of the phrenology movement, the Journal “had a surprisingly respectable reputation among the cognoscenti of the day.”60 Its chief attraction was its reports on presidents, artists, writers, political activists, and others in the public eye. Part science, part entrepreneurship, part social crusade, part show business, the Journal engaged a wide variety of issues through the lens of “the new science of the mind that promised to liberate humanity.”61 While earlier in the century anarchists Stephen Pearl Andrews and Josiah Warren had received sympathetic treatment in the Journal, by the 1890s phrenology’s relation to anarchism had cooled.62 The Journal’s account of Goldman contributed to the dispersed, incremental process by which alarming images of her were created and circulated. The editor assured readers that “however dangerous they may be in person and at short range,” the two women could not harm the readers from “the shadows we print.”63 In the interests of fairness, the author acknowledged that “both these women, especially Marie Louise, repudiate the commonly accepted idea that they

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advocate violence as a means of reform,” then nonetheless went on to read his subjects as fundamentally alarming.64 The Journal opined that Goldman did not look Jewish, but that her appearance indicated “an ineradicable instinct to hold an opinion.”65 Among her “pathological stigmata,”66 the writer named the length of the back of her head, revealing “friendship, domestic attachment and love of the opposite sex”; the width just over her ears, revealing “destructiveness and appetite for food”; the rear of the crown, indicating a “habit of willfulness”; and the overall “signs of quality and temperament which account for the woman’s disposition to attack the present social fabric.”67 The writer paused to admire her “beautifully developed” upper forehead, showing a “familiarity with the vocabulary of philosophy which is ordinarily expected only among cultivated professional men,” before plunging back into the peril indicated by her eyebrows, which revealed “scarcely a trace of order” and “little fondness for words or fluency in speech.”68 The article concluded with some professional jostling between phrenologists and their competitors the cheirognomists, who read character from examining the hands. Evidently the two subdisciplines of early eugenics disagreed on their reading of the signs of willfulness marked on Goldman’s body, yet they fully concurred that relevant stigmata were present and offered themselves to be read. Other medical authorities contributed to the demonization of radical bodies. The new science of the mind was also a science of the surface, based on data about physical appearance collected by statisticians, phrenologists, and law enforcement officials to create “types.” Paul Avrich writes that in 1891, “The well-known Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, published a two-part article in the Chicago journal The Monist placing the anarchists among an hereditary ‘criminal type’ distinguished by facial asymmetry, cranial deformities, skin discoloration, anomalies of the ears and nose, and the like.”69 These caricatures were well known to anarchists: Berkman called Lombroso a “learned donkey” and Kropotkin named him “a make-believe savant.”70 Medical fables about criminal types helped reassure the white middle class of their monopoly on normality by coding all other bodies as deviant.71 Discourses of danger converged to crystallize their representations of Goldman and her fellow anarchists around a tried and true set of referents virtually guaranteed to provoke revulsion and fear. Tracing the constitution of the dangerous individual in Goldman’s time, Foucault finds medical, psychiatric, and juridical institutions combined to issue a “perpetual act of summoning” individuals considered “intrinsically dangerous.”72 “Little by little, an image was built up of an enemy of society who can equally well be a revolutionary or a murderer—since, after all, revolutionaries do sometimes kill.”73 This perpetual act of summoning Goldman as dangerous shapes the Goldman that we can readily retrieve

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while undermining the force of her political critique. As geographer David Campbell has pointed out, “the ability to represent things as alien, subversive, dirty, or sick has been pivotal to the articulation of danger in the American experience.”74 Dangerous individuals and parrhesia are logical mirrors of one another, linked positions within discursive networks of power and resistance. Goldman was considered dangerous by authorities because of her fearless speech; her political critique was, in the end, intolerable because she had so consistently been identified as a dangerous individual. After considering Goldman’s response to the semiotics of jeopardy, I want to rearticulate some of the pivotal events and constitutive relations that were invoked by authorities to establish the anarchist peril. Since, as Campbell insists, “representations are taxed when they confront new and ambiguous circumstances,” reframing selected historical materials from anarchist and labor struggles offers the chance to rethink the aura of menace around Emma Goldman.75

GOLDMAN’S RESPONSE Goldman responded on several levels to her persistent discursive location as dangerous: first, she engaged the charge in order to deny it; second, she insisted that political violence was an understandable response to oppression; and third, she reversed the gaze, redirecting the discourse of danger. The stakes were high: her ability to keep herself and her comrades out of jail, and her publications out of the hands of the censors, while maintaining her connections with anarchism’s insurgent factions as well as with the array of liberal and radical supporters who eschewed armed resistance, required complex negotiations around questions of political violence.76 The period from 1878 to 1932 has been characterized by historian Mike Davis as “the ‘classical age’ of terrorism: the half-century during which the bourgeois imaginary was haunted by the infamous figure of the bombthrowing nihilist or anarchist.”77 From the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia by Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) in 1881 to the unsuccessful effort by Italian anarchists to assassinate Mussolini in 1932, a series of attentats against political leaders and class enemies rocked the political establishments of the industrializing nations and infused prevailing public discourse with the language of danger. An attentat is an assassination intended to eliminate an oppressor of the people, demonstrate the vulnerability of the elite, and rouse the masses to revolt. Also called “propaganda of the deed,” attentats were often acts of revenge for prior assaults on protestors or last desperate acts of defiance “in the wake of defeated hopes for popular uprisings.”78 Attentaters often planned to use their own arrest and trial as a platform from which to explain their act to the multitude and

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galvanize revolutionary sentiment; they accepted their own imprisonment or execution as heroic acts of martyrdom. Political assassination was relatively common in the turbulent setting of late nineteenth to early twentieth–century Russia; the Russian revolutionaries characterized their relentless campaign against the state as “smert za smert,” “death for death,” a strategy parodied by Trotsky as the murder of state functionaries, “Ivan after Ivan.”79 The strategy was much less frequent in Europe and “largely hypothetical” in the United States.80 Goldman was among the small number of European immigrants who tried to import the technique to America, with spectacularly unsuccessful results. In 1892 Goldman, Berkman, and at least two other young anarchists attempted an attentat against Henry Clay Frick, the man responsible for the violence against striking workers at the Carnegie steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania.81 Not only did Frick live, but the trial was a travesty of stymied communication—Berkman’s inability to speak English thwarted his efforts to explain his act, which in any case were sabotaged by a hostile judge and a blind translator—and the American working class showed little receptivity toward the act. Goldman’s role in the attentat on Frick was not discovered at the time; only with the publication of her autobiography in 1931 did she tell that story. Denial Goldman’s refutations took the form of argument plus ridicule, a typical Goldman combination. She parodied official alarm to highlight the authorities’ fear of critical ideas. “I have come back to you after having served ten months in prison for talking,” she said to her welcoming committee after her first stint in prison for encouraging unemployed workers to “take bread.” Lampooning the authorities’ fear of words, she joked that “they will never stop women from talking.”82 The authorities, she insisted, were simply paranoid. The New York Sun attributed this comment to Goldman: “‘It’s all too absurdly silly,’ she said, with a quiet little laugh, ‘this talk about my being dangerous.’”83 Goldman took official persecution and harassment— including numerous arrests; confiscation of correspondence, mailing lists, and publications; suppression of lectures and meetings; at least one beating; and three jail terms—as evidence that “Nothing is more dangerous than the truth.”84 Upon her release from prison in 1894, her article in the New York World claimed, in the third person, “It was not Emma Goldman that was tried in the Court of General Sessions, but the ideas she expressed.” The authorities, she argued, feared that she would “open the eyes of the oppressed and show them a way to a better condition.”85 In her address to the jury at her 1917 trial for conspiring to oppose the draft, she derided

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the dramatic entrance of the U.S. marshal into Mother Earth’s offices, where the police discovered “the two dangerous disturbers and trouble-makers, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, in their separate offices, quietly at work at their desks, wielding not a sword, nor a gun or a bomb, but merely their pens!”86 Freedom of speech and expression was a central issue for Goldman for both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. Intrinsically, Goldman held freedom of expression to be central to the development of creative, liberated human consciousness. While some European anarchists were puzzled by this peculiarly American version of anarchism, Goldman’s merger of classical anarchist theory with radical American individualism converged around the importance of free speech. Extrinsically, free speech fights served as the scaffolding for a variety of other struggles: workplace organizing, reproductive education, anti-war agitation, sexual liberation, and cultural critique all required talking and writing to pursue their ends. Goldman pursued forbidden ideas and advocated outlawed practices; many of her less radical allies had no interest in actually embracing these ideas or engaging in these practices, but they nonetheless supported Goldman’s right to speak and write about them. Her radical ideas could fit at least partially into a liberal agenda by cultivating a focus on process: objections to censorship could be more broadly provoked and sustained than more taxing arguments against capitalist exploitation, militarism, or sexual repression. Goldman, in short, denied that she was dangerous in order to mock the authorities for regulating words. Explanation Well aware that any word other than condemnation would provoke retribution, Goldman nonetheless sought to understand and explain the attentaters by articulating what Mike Davis calls “the moral architecture of their universe.”87 In “The Psychology of Political Violence,” published in Anarchism and Other Essays in 1910, Goldman insisted on sympathetic understanding of political assassins.88 She quoted literary and psychological authorities, as well as the court speeches of several attentaters, to support her argument that “it is their supersensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes.”89 “Goaded and desperate individuals” turn to assassination in a “violent recoil from violence.”90 Ideologies do not make people into killers of the powerful, she insisted; an acute inability to tolerate human suffering does. Anarchism may act as a “leaven for rebellion” by advocating for the conscious political agency of individuals and by blaming structures of power, rather than inexorable fate, for injustice, but the

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turn toward violence is the last desperate act of sensitive souls unable to reconcile themselves to misery. Even in Berkman’s case, she insisted, “not Anarchism, as such, but the brutal slaughter of the eleven steel workers [at Homestead] was the urge” for his act.91 In “An Open Letter” in Free Society on February 17, 1901, soon after the assassination of McKinley, she stated her position on the attentat: “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.”92 Goldman insisted on finding the capacity to resist in every person, while the extraordinary few can neither find solace elsewhere nor reconcile themselves to the slow pace of change: there are men and women whose whole beings rebel against injustice, whose social instincts are so strongly developed that they feel every blow which the present economic and political system strikes at society. . . . 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 the one side, and greed on the other.93

When Berkman was released from prison, Goldman wrote in Mother Earth, “his deep sensitive nature would not endure the barbarisms of our time.”94 In her address to the jury at her final trial for opposing conscription, when she might have avoided the subject, she instead declared, “It is organized violence at the top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice which drives the political offender to his act. To condemn him means to be blind to the causes which make him.”95 Those who profess their opposition to injustice yet take no action against it have more to answer for, in Goldman’s ethical universe, than do the attentaters. Reversal Beyond explaining the dynamics of political violence, she also reversed its terms, disputing its constructions of sites of danger and refocusing attention onto the state, capitalism, religion, and empire as origin points for far vaster dangers than Goldman and her fellow anarchists could possibly pose. “Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean.”96 Reversing the terms allowed Goldman to contest the legitimacy of state and corporate violence while claiming some ethical footing for virtuous assassins. One way that she accomplished this reversal was to make available the words of those who killed for the people. Goldman quoted extensively in

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“The Psychology of Political Violence” from the final courtroom speeches of Vaillant, who threw a bomb into the Paris Chamber of Deputies, and Caserio, who killed the president of France to protest Vaillant’s execution, to share not only their emotional state of mind but also their critique of capitalism and the state. Addressing the court, Vaillant said, “I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to have confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people’s claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered our voices by imprisonment, the rope, rifle volleys.”97 Caserio, condemning the wretched living conditions of the many compared with the privileges of the few, concluded his speech with this warning: “Gentlemen of the Jury, you are representatives of bourgeois society. If you want my head, take it; but do not believe that in so doing you will stop the Anarchist propaganda. Take care, for men reap what they have sown.”98 It is likely that American readers would find these speeches reproduced only in publications by Goldman or other anarchists, where they are treated as reasonable political analyses rather than the rantings of madmen. Another strategy of reversal entailed traveling to sites of state or capitalist violence against labor in order to give voice to strikers’ issues. Goldman put her own body and voice into circulation to publicize radical ideas. She called attention to the vulnerability of workers and the ready availability of militia, private security firms, and vigilantes to quell strikes. This strategy worked on two levels: first, Goldman gave voice to labor’s demands, and reported on workers’ resistance and the violence with which it was met, putting this information into circulation via her cross-country lectures, books, monthly issues of Mother Earth, and multitudinous letters. Workplace organizing and subsequent violence against strikers and their families was seldom reported in the mainstream press, while the ever-elastic definition of “obscenity” under the Comstock laws barred many radical publications from the mails. She built solidarity and articulated workers’ grievances to themselves and the larger public.99 Second, because it was Goldman speaking, the press more often paid attention. Goldman was the advance woman for the anarchist movement: she had contacts in respectable liberal circles that few other immigrant radicals could claim; she had celebrity status, so whatever she did was news; she was an effective fundraiser; and she could gain, if not a fair hearing, at least a degree of publicity for workers’ struggles. The militant politics of radical labor and of anarchism were mutually constitutive: Goldman spoke to standing-room-only crowds on the merits of direct action, for example, while the Wobblies were filling the jails and jamming the courts during their free speech fights.100 While her comrade Alexander Berkman worked more steadily with grassroots labor organizing, Goldman was the better spokesperson for radical labor to the larger American public.

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WAS SHE DANGEROUS? Many commentators on Goldman since her reemergence as feminist icon in the 1970s have celebrated her commitment to a radical vision of human freedom, not her participation in revolutionary violence. Alix Kates Shulman, for example, praised Goldman because “she dared to attack every authority that tried to put fences around the human spirit” and encouraged her own generation of radicals to take up Goldman’s struggle.101 Falk’s early curriculum guide for middle and high school classes stresses Goldman’s views on immigration, freedom of expression, women’s rights, antimilitarism, and social change through art and literature.102 Many commentators take Goldman at her word in her autobiography, where Goldman stressed that she turned away from violence after the disastrous attentat against Frick. For example, Leslie Howe states that after Goldman’s “willing, if somewhat inept” participation in the attentat against Frick, “she eventually became more convinced of the value of Kropotkin’s limited pacifism.”103 Wexler also concludes that Berkman’s failed attentat “turned her away from such acts forever.”104 Goldman famously notes in her autobiography that, while she defended Czolgosz’s motives for his attentat against McKinley, she also offered to nurse the dying president, an act Berkman applauded from prison.105 In these renditions, it was Goldman’s ideas that were dangerous: her ideal of a just and beautiful society inspired struggles for social change, and her uncompromising presence in public life exposed the hypocrisies of allegedly democratic governance. She had a unique ability to generate coalitions among liberal and radical groups, and among immigrants and native-born citizens, by articulating their common struggles for freedom of speech (including freedom to organize the workplace), right to a fair trial, availability of birth control, right to travel, and an overall spirit of individual freedom. Looking back at Goldman’s time from within this gaze, the authorities look extreme, if not paranoid and even ridiculous, for their fervent efforts to silence her rather than simply accept her words as a protected form of speech in American society. In volume II of their documentary history of Goldman’s work during her time in the United States, Falk, Pateman, and Moran contest this iconic history. They emphasize Goldman’s likely involvement in the less innocent side of international anarchism: she ran guns to and laundered money for the militant Social Revolutionaries during the early years of the Russian revolution; she helped raise money for Berkman’s attempted prison breaks; she and her comrade Max Baginski advocated a strategy of political violence against “the most brutal and hated agents of despotism” in Russia at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907; she may have raised money in support of Mexican guerrilla resistance, along with funds for their

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legal defense; she likely knew about, if she did not participate in, Berkman’s conspiracy with other militant anarchists to assassinate John Rockefeller, a planned attentat which ended when three anarchists blew themselves up in the 1914 Lexington Avenue explosion.106 Anarchist historian Paul Avrich supported this line of interpretation, commenting to Barry Pateman that Goldman “never met a bomber she didn’t like.”107 Like the editors at the Goldman archive, Avrich was concerned that the full force of Goldman’s anarchism would be defanged by the popular image of Goldman as freespirited crusader for a revolution in which we could all dance. Falk points out that Goldman’s autobiography should be read as performance, a story selectively told: “Encoded allusions and unnamed accomplices in sub-rosa political activities left hints with no answers, impressions easily erased by time; yet the emotional intimacy of the narrative style and content of her autobiography seduced most readers into believing that Goldman told all and hid nothing.”108 Foucault’s gloss on parrhesia contrasts its straightforwardness with rhetoric’s calculations: “the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”109 Yet of course earnestness and self-revelation require effective use of grammatical and rhetorical devices; as Don Herzog notes, Goldman was “an accomplished prose stylist” who knew how to move her audiences.110 Her version of parrhesia is complicated, although certainly not negated, by her careful calculations of how much truth to tell, under what circumstances, to what end: for example, she often danced around the censors by advocating birth control in the pages of Mother Earth without actually explaining how conception could be prevented. During a lecture tour in Toronto in 1927, she weighed in on a local controversy concerning the conviction of a religious free-thinker, Ernest Victor Sterry, on charges of ‘blasphemous libel” against God. While she supported Sterry’s fight for freedom of speech, she kept her distance from the case, confiding to Berkman that she had “no desire to go to prison for the Lord.”111 Goldman’s was a tactically informed parrhesia, carefully calibrated to challenge the authorities effectively while avoiding jailors and censors when possible. Based on the enormous and rich array of primary resources collected by the Emma Goldman Papers Project, Falk, Pateman, and Moran “challenge previous interpretations, displaying the shadowy edges of a new montage of light and dark that suggest she may have harbored more violent sentiments during the first decade of the twentieth century that many historians previously assumed.”112 Rather than a forerunner of contemporary feminism or an individual nonconformist, the archive’s documentary history places Goldman within the historical context of the international anarchist

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movement. Falk sketches a persuasive picture of the complexity of Goldman’s political situation: The capacity to be present in different worlds is to some degree critical to many who engage in public life. Meetings that address strategy are often secret, separating the organizers from the organized. Trust among those in the inner circle creates its own closeness and intensity. When backroom planning sessions included discussions of violence, Goldman’s ability to divide her expressed and covert loyalties had to be refined to a high art. The consequences, if she failed, would be dire: imprisonment or worse. She protected her comrades and left few paper trails that could be used as evidence in their prosecution. Secrecy, by necessity, became a way of life—often used to wield power, specifically the power of knowledge over those not engaged in clandestine activity. By separating her worlds, Goldman stepped outside the conspiratorial tenets of anarchism while at the same time advocating its causes.113

While the evidence for Goldman’s participation in violent acts is uncertain, her proximity is suggestive. “Whether she herself was engaged directly in acts of retaliatory violence or simply played a supporting role to a covert movement,” Falk concludes, Goldman was never far from “those who believed that only with the destruction of the old was the construction of a new order possible.”114 Both the stories portraying Goldman as a daring critic and those stressing her role as an underground militant have merit. Goldman’s compelling political vision, extraordinary powers of communication, and effective coalition-building with more respectable, middle class, non-immigrant critics of American politics did indeed make her ideas dangerous to a status quo contained firmly by the interests of the dominant classes. Goldman consistently pushed against the boundaries of what Foucault calls “the parrhesiastic contract,” the implicit arrangements by which sovereigns accept criticism and agree to hear unwelcome truths.115 While some anarchists belittled free speech struggles as insufficiently radical, Goldman saw them as effective opportunities to expand the purview of unpunishable communication, including speech needed to organize workplaces, spread birth control information, and oppose war. Given that there were no more than a handful of instances of armed resistance by anarchists in the United States (compared to a considerable number of high profile attentats in Europe and a virtual free-for-all in Russia), the authorities’ professed fear of violent subversion was clearly exaggerated; yet they were not wrong to see Goldman’s ideas and passions as a threat to their stability and legitimacy. At the same time, accounts of Goldman’s politics that make her into a pacifist, or that separate her completely from anarchism’s armed adherents, overlook her enduring connections with insurgents. Interpreting the claims to danger Goldman may have posed to established authority requires at-

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tention to the larger context of political violence as well as to the meaning that has subsequently been made of Goldman’s political effects. As Honig points out, the actual severity of material threat posed by subversives does not determine the regime’s or the public’s response; rather, we need to know what the threats came to mean for authoritative interpreters. We need to know “how they were lived.”116 Heroes from Hell Goldman’s own participation in the attempted attentat against Frick occurred during the “Decade of Regicide,” the final ten years of the nineteenth century when “alleged anarchist incidents led to 60 killings and the wounding of some 200 people.”117 This period was an intense node of violence within the larger time period Davis characterizes as the halfcentury of classical terrorism. Robert Jensen estimates that during the entire “golden age” of classical anarchism, 1880–1914, about 150 people were killed and over 460 were injured.118 During the 1880s, luminaries of international anarchism including Peter Kropotkin, Louise Michel, Errico Malatesta, and three of the Haymarket martyrs (Louis Lingg, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer) at least temporarily advocated both armed insurrection and individual political assassination. While by 1894 Kropotkin had moved away from the attentat and toward education as the vehicle for social change, the use of violence against violence was frequently on the table in anarchist circles. While the full historical story of those women and men whom Davis characterizes as “avenging angels who stalked kings and robber barons with bomb or dagger in hand” has not been told, the following list contains the most widely recognized attentats around the world (not only in the United States):119 • 1878—Max Holding and Carl Nobiling attempted to kill German emperor Wilhelm I. • 1878—Vera Zasulich tried to kill Russian General Trepov. • 1878—Alexander Xolovev tried and failed to kill the Russian tsar. • 1878—Juan Olivia Moncasi tried to kill Alfonso XII of Spain. • 1878—Giovanni Passanante stabbed the king of Italy. • 1881—Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) killed Tsar Alexander II. • 1884—an attempt was made on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm. • 1886—Haymarket bomb, Chicago; 8 police officers died. • 1892—Ravachol bombed 2 homes in Paris to avenge arrest of anarchists; no injuries. • 1892—Theodore Meunier bombed a Parisian restaurant to avenge Ravachol.

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• 1892—Léon Leautheir stabs the Serbian minister, also to avenge Ravachol. • 1892—Félix Fénéon bombs a Parisian café to protest Henry’s arrest; 1 injured. • 1892—Santo Caserio stabbed French President Carnot to avenge Vaillant & Henry. • 1892—Alexander Berkman wounded Henry Clay Frick for Homestead massacre. • 1893—Vaillant bombed French Chamber of Deputies to avenge Ravachol; no injuries. • 1893—Paulino Pallás attacked Catalonian general; 2 killed and 12 wounded. • 1893—Santiago Salvador French bombed a Barcelona opera house; 22 killed, 50 injured. • 1894—Emile Henry bombed a Parisian café and office; 1 killed, several injured. • 1894—Sante Caserio killed French President Carnot to avenge Vaillant’s execution. • 1896—bomb exploded during a parade in Barcelona, killing 11, wounding about 30. • 1897—Michele Angiolillo killed Spanish prime minister to avenge executions. • 1898—Austrian empress Elizabeth killed by Luigi Luccheni. • 1900—Gaetano Bresci killed King Umberto of Italy to avenge the 1898 bread riots. • 1901—Leon Czolgosz killed President McKinley in revenge for Lattimer massacre. • 1902—Genaro Rubino attacked King Leopold of Belgium to avenge violence in Congo. • 1905—Former Idaho Governor Frank Stuenenberg killed to avenge murdered workers. • 1905—Maria Spiridinova killed a police officer in Russia. • 1906—Mateo Morral missed King Alphonso XIII of Spain, but killed 20, wounded 100. • 1907—Giuseppe Alio shot Father Leo Henrichs in Denver. • 1907—Spanish anarchist tried to kill General Renard to avenge Chilean nitrate miners. • 1908—Selig Silverstein tried to bomb police in Union Square, NY; 2 killed. • 1908—Alfredo Costa and Manual Buiça shot the king and prince of Portugal. • 1909—Simon Radowitzky blew up Col Ramón Falcón, the police chief of Buenos Aires.

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• 1910—James & John McNamara bombed the Los Angeles Times building; 23 killed. • 1912—Spanish anarchist Manuel Pardiña Serrato assassinated Prime Minister Canalejas. • 1914—bomb intended for John Rockefeller exploded in New York tenement; 4 killed. • 1916—Frederich Adler killed Austrian President Count Karl von Sturgkh. • 1916—bombing at the Preparedness Day Parade, San Francisco, killed 10 bystanders. • 1919—mail bombs sent to U.S. state and corporate leaders to avenge deportations; no one killed. • 1920—Mario Buda bombed Wall Street; killed 33, injured 200, for Sacco & Vanzetti. • 1922—assassination of General Varela, “The Butcher of Patagonia.” • 1923—Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso killed Spanish Cardinal Soldevila. • 1926—Gino Lucetti, Leandro Sorio, and Stefano Vatteroni tried to kill Mussolini. • 1926—Sholom Schwartzbard shot General Petlura to avenge Ukrainian pogroms. A few patterns stand out in this alarming list and the broader context within which this violence transpired. First, despite official claims that anarchist violence menaced “all persons,” attentats were usually tightly targeted at class and state enemies. The classical terrorists were not, with a few notable exceptions, indiscriminate, and were usually not attempting to terrify a public or a people, although some were attacking representatives of a class. Second, attentats frequently came in clusters, a cycle of state or capitalist atrocities and anarchist retribution. The solitary, disturbed nihilist lashing out at the world is, Davis argues, “pure phantom.” Instead “revolutionary terrorism was complete embedded in decadal cycles of class struggle and repression, and in cultures of plebian anger.”120 Third, most anarchist assassinations took place in Eastern or Western Europe; only a handful occurred in the United States. Fourth, the identities of the murdered persons and of the killers are usually known, as every effort was made by law enforcement to track down and punish the perpetrators. Fifth, attentaters were “pariahs of the left,” their deeds eschewed by most anarchists and nearly all other radicals, not to mention the broader working class who were “repeatedly victimized for the ‘heroic’ deeds of a few.”121 While some anarchists, including Goldman, publicly defended Leon Czolgosz’s motives, if not his action, in assassinating President McKinley, most radicals tried to avoid the devastating backlash against the Left that Czolgosz’s attentat provoked.

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There was ample understanding among progressives that anarchist assassinations provided the pretext to repress even moderate social critics, such as Bismarck’s moves against the “utterly innocent German social democrats” after the attempts on the Kaiser’s life.122 Beyond self-defense, many radicals objected strenuously to the attentaters’ strategy of substituting “the messianic role of the self-sacrificial individual—or the magical totemism of the attentat—for the conscious movement of the masses.”123 Terror on the left may actively discourage the development of that critical consciousness, as Alexander Berkman found to his dismay when the very workers for whom he attempted to assassinate Frick condemned his act. Acts of classical terrorism were committed during times in which severe economic crises provoked massive unrest, and struggles between labor and capital over what Alan Trachtenberg calls “the meaning of America” had not yet been settled in favor of owners.124 Goldman weighed in on the side of the masses, combining covert support for armed insurgents with extensive public efforts to educate and persuade. She was both a radical thinker who challenged power at the level of ideas, beliefs, and passions, and a participant in an international anarchist movement that selectively accepted the necessity of violence. Her political thinking and acting operated as both a real challenge to the legitimacy of state and corporate authorities and a convenient distraction invoked by those authorities to direct attention away from the ruthless repression of striking workers. Constructions of Goldman as a dangerous individual are not the opposite of the “real” Goldman, but are rather elements that help to create the Goldman effect, to constitute the prevailing meaning of Emma Goldman in discourse. We might push our investigation of Goldman’s politics into the challenging area of First Amendment legal debate, asking when words become deeds; we might even ask whether and when violence is acceptable in political struggle. Yet those are not my questions here, not because they are unimportant but because they distract us from investigating the discursive deployments of security and danger identifying Goldman, but not the agents of capital and the state, as dangerous. Before we can draw conclusions about Goldman’s status as a dangerous individual, we need to ask why this question recurs.

WHY THIS QUESTION? In violent times, the juridical, medical, and journalistic apparatuses worked overtime to mark the murders that mattered—the victims of attentats, not of strikebreaking; the anarchists’ bombs, not the Pinkertons’ guns; the wealthy at their leisure but not the poor in their distress. The deployments of discourse-producing institutions precede and make possible the meanings discernable within them. Interconnecting discursive practices within

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law, medicine, and media made it possible to claim that Goldman was dangerous—or to deny that she was dangerous—while resisting alternative inscriptions of danger. The discourses of danger surrounding Goldman and anarchism enabled a strategic non-seeing, a diminishing of other possible ethical and political engagements with other calculations of threat. Focus on Goldman’s danger/nondanger in contemporary commentaries may indirectly allow the historic alibi for anti-labor violence to continue operating. Interrogation of Goldman as a dangerous individual both reflects and contributes to the readily available image, as Foucault remarked, of “an enemy of society who can equally well be a revolutionary or a murderer.”125 Already historically challenged, U.S. readers can take refuge in soul-searching questions about the actual or potential or imagined danger posed by opponents of state and corporate power, while continuing to forget the overwhelmingly greater menace of federal troops, state militias, law enforcement, private security agencies, and vigilantes toward workers and their families. I am not suggesting that Goldman’s involvement with armed insurgents was insignificant, nor am I discounting the value of the recent historiography complicating her mythic standing in American radical history; rather, I am looking for the questions that might be obscured in these readings, not to provide ready answers but to open up further lines of thinking. While there were many more acts of “propaganda of the deed” in Europe than in the United States, America’s half-century of intense violence against labor gave the United States “the world’s deadliest industrial history.”126 It is impossible to locate a reliable accounting of all the violence against labor during Goldman’s time; while labor historians have studied the more infamous killings such as Homestead and Ludlow, no one, it seems, has done for murdered workers the meticulous, brutal arithmetic that Ida B. Wells, the Tuskegee Institute, and others have performed to document the lynching of African Americans. Yet it is safe to say that, of all the active sites of political struggle in Goldman’s time, only the terror against blacks and the genocide against Native Americans fell into the same murderous category as state and corporate violence against strikers and their families.127 It was virtually open season on labor, with few penalties for killing workers and their families. Industrialist Jay Gould notoriously bragged, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”128 Immigrants killed in labor battles were often simply not counted, “not given the dignity of a name or number” or their deaths were reported as heart attacks or suicides.129 Between 1881 and 1905, there were 37,000 wildcat strikes in the United States, not counting those called by a central union.130 In the turbulent decade of 1890—1900 alone, there were over 16,000 strikes and lockouts involving over four million workers.131 Between 1887 and 1903, there were 500 “interventions by state and federal troops on behalf of the

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owners against the strikers, with untold numbers of fatalities.”132 Regular army troops and National Guards of several states, particularly Colorado and Idaho, were sent to put down strikes “at least a dozen times in a dozen years.”133 Outlook magazine reported in 1904 that, in the previous thirtythree months, 198 strikers and their supporters were killed, 1,966 were wounded, and 6,114 were arrested.134 Historian Richard Hofstadter reports that even the most diligent efforts to record deaths and injuries in labor disputes seriously underestimate the casualties.135 Federal troops and state militias, bolstered by increased resources after the 1877 railroad strike, were mobilized against striking workers with such frequency that labor journalist Joseph R. Buchanan observed that “they were as much a part of the corporations as their accounting departments.”136 Violence against labor, in Goldman’s analysis, is connected in numerous fundamental ways to the violence of war. Sending armed troops against strikers and sending armed troops into other countries were “streams from the same source.”137 Analyzing the economic interests generating and benefiting from war, she concluded, “The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.”138 Beyond that, she looked at the human landscapes of labor confrontations and of battlefields, and she saw a grim mirror: the ruling classes using some workers to control and destroy other workers, and to protect themselves. The bodies of soldiers, who are also workers, are the vehicle used by the state and capital to control the bodies of workers, who may well become soldiers: “when the soldiers will refuse to obey their superiors, the whole system of capitalism will be doomed.”139 The coming of war was always bad for anarchists because they would always speak out against war at the very times in which governments curtailed critical speech. Anti-militarism was Goldman’s non-negotiable “bottom line,” according to archivist Barry Pateman, because war brought together so many aspects of “the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.”140 Even more resources were available to quell worker activism with private armies, most notably the Pinkertons, who specialized in espionage, provocation, and strike-breaking. In his 1878 book Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives, Allan Pinkerton boasted that his “perfected detective system” could properly discipline the working class: “Hundreds have been punished. Hundreds more will be punished.”141 Mr. Pinkterton underestimated: thousands of striking workers and their families were killed, and thousands more injured, across the country. The violence continued through the 1930s, when heads of corporations piously invoked “law and order” while spending millions of dollars per year on industrial spies and armaments to use against strikers.142 In the 1930s, the largest private army in the world, numbering 3,500–6,000 men, belonged to Ford Motor Company. 143 Like blacks and Indians, workers, especially immigrant workers,

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were what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls bare life, politically unqualified life. They could be killed with impunity, their deaths failing to register as legally sanctioned homicide. Goldman was a pariah for the authorities, eventually included in their political arrangements through the forced exclusion of exile, in part because she kept telling people, in English, all over the country, about the war against labor. Some of the recorded instances of violence against labor in the United States (not worldwide) during Goldman’s lifetime include the following:144 • 1874—Tompkins Square Riot; hundreds of casualties as mounted police charged crowd. • 1875—unknown numbers killed and injured in a 5-month miners’ strike in Pennsylvania. • 1877—20 Irish members of the Molly Maguires hanged in Schuylkill County, PA. • 1877—the Great Railroad Strikes, including ° 12 killed, 18 injured in Baltimore; ° 20–30 killed and 30–70 injured in Philadelphia; ° 42 killed and 40 injured in Pittsburgh; ° 30–50 killed, many more injured in Chicago; ° 10 killed and 40 wounded in Reading, PA; ° 8 killed in Buffalo, NY; ° 6 killed in Scranton, PA. • 1885—7 workers killed at Southwestern Railroad Strike, Missouri. • 1886—4 workers killed, several wounded at McCormick Harvester strike in Chicago. • 1886—the Haymarket incident in Chicago; unknown numbers killed and injured. • 1886—7 striking workers killed by state militia in Milwaukee. • 1887—Thibodaux Massacre; 2 strike leaders lynched, 35 wounded, LA. • 1891–1892—coal miners’ strike in Briceville, TN; casualties unknown. • 1892—Coeur d’Alene, ID, coal miners’ strike; 5 strikers killed, 14 wounded. • 1892—Homestead, PA steel strike; 11 workers and 3 Pinkerton detectives killed. • 1892—militias attack striking railroad switchmen in Buffalo, NY; casualties unknown. • 1892—Cripple Creek, CO mining strike; casualties unknown. • 1894—cloak makers strike in Buffalo; casualties unknown. • 1894—25 killed and 60 wounded in Pullman railway car strike in Chicago. • 1894—Coxey’s Army of unemployed marched on Washington, D.C.; casualties unknown.

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• 1895—streetcar employees strike in Brooklyn; casualties unknown. • 1895—general strikes in New Orleans and Homestead, PA; casualties unknown. • 1896—troops sent against striking miners in Leadville, CO; casualties unknown. • 1896—over 1000 striking miners held for months in Coeur d’Alene, ID; casualties unknown. • 1897—19 striking Slavic mine workers killed, between 35–50 injured, in Lattimer, PA. • 1898—guards killed 7 striking coal miners at Virden, IL; 4 guards also died. • 1899—several strike sympathizers beaten in Cleveland’s streetcar strike. • 1899–1901—1 striker & 1 opponent killed, 5 miners captured, in Cripple Creek strike, CO. • 1899—coal miners strike in Salt Lake City and Coeur D’Alene, ID; unknown casualties. • 1900—unknown numbers killed and injured in the St. Louis streetcar strike. • 1901—4 killed, 6 wounded when deputies attacked striking miners in Telluride, CO. • 1902—14 strikers killed, 42 badly injured, at anthracite strike near Hazleton, PA. • 1902—unknown casualties in the New Orleans streetcar strike. • 1902—Branwood, West VA coal strike; 1 killed, numerous others beaten. • 1902—14 miners killed, 22 wounded, Pana, IL. • 1903—unknown casualties in the Chicago streetcar strike. • 1903—unknown casualties in the Richmond, VA streetcar strike. • 1903–1904—42 killed, 112 wounded, miners’ strikes in Telluride, Idaho Springs, Cripple Creek. • 1904—unknown casualties in riots after mine explosion in Pennsylvania. • 1905—unknown casualties in New York subway strike. • 1905—unknown casualties in Bay City, MI streetcar strike. • 1905—21 killed and over 400 injured in Chicago teamsters’ strike. • 1906—striker Peter J. Cramer killed, 200 injured, in a molders’ strike in Milwaukee. • 1906—coal miner’s strike, Mt. Carmel, PA; casualties unknown. • 1907—4 sympathizers killed, 20 wounded, San Francisco streetcar strike. • 1909—11 killed, 40 wounded at steel car strike at McKee’s Rocks, PA.

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• 1909, 1910—Philadelphia streetcar strike; widespread beatings, casualties unknown. • 1909–1911—I.W.W. free speech fights; hundreds incarcerated, unknown casualties. • 1910–1913—4 killed, unknown injured in lumber strikes in Longview and Bogalusa, LA. • 1911–1912—1 I.W.W. man killed, many beaten in San Diego free speech fight. • 1912—2 children, 1 striker killed in textile strikes, Lawrence, MA. • 1912—police attacked striking textile workers, Little Falls, NY, unknown casualties. • 1912–1913—13–16 striking coal miners killed, 15 injured, in Holly Grove, WV. • 1912–1913—2 striking textile workers killed at Patterson, NJ. • 1913—74 adults and children of striking copper miners killed in a fire, Calumet, MI. • 1913—1 striker named Macderocobi killed in I.W.W. labor action in Hopedale, CA. • 1913—at least 17 people died in a miners’ strike at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, WV. • 1913—2 hop pickers and 2 officials killed at hop ranch in Wheatland, CA. • 1913—1 woman killed, 7 injured, when police fired in textile strike in Ipswich, MA. • 1913—4 strike sympathizers killed by scabs in Indianapolis streetcar strike. • 1913—strikers attacked at Akron, OH rubber plant; unknown casualties. • 1913—private agents attacked the Ludlow, CO, tent colony; 5 miners killed, one child injured. • 1913—1 killed, other casualties unknown, strike at United Fruit Company, New Orleans. • 1913–1914—2 strikers killed by deputies in Upper Michigan copper strike. • 1914—2 strike breakers killed in Coronado Coal strike, AR. • 1914—7 coal strike sympathizers wounded in Trinidad, CO. • 1914—22–32 strikers and their families killed in the Ludlow Massacre, CO. • 1914–1915—miners strike in Hartford Valley, AK; casualties unknown. • 1915—28 wounded, 6 died, in strikes at New Jersey fertilizer factories. • 1915—Shingle Weavers strike, Everett, WA; casualties unknown. • 1915—I.W.W. organizer Joe Hill executed, having been framed for murder in Utah.

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• 1916—5 I.W.W. members killed, 31 workers wounded, in a lumber strike, Everett, WA. • 1916—4 miners killed in miners strike, Mesasba Iron Range, MN. • 1916—at least 3 killed, many injured in labor conflict in Aurora range, MN. • 1916—8 killed, 17 injured, Tidewater, Bergen Port, and Standard Oil plants, Bayone, NJ. • 1916—2 steel workers killed, 23 wounded, at East Youngstown, OH. • 1917—17 striking oil workers kidnapped and beaten, Tulsa, OK. • 1917—130 copper miners “deported” (forced out of state), Jerome, AZ; casualties unknown. • 1917—1,200 striking copper miners “deported” into the desert, Bisbee, AZ. • 1917—Frank Little, I.W.W. leader, murdered in Butte, MT by vigilantes. • 1917—G. J. Bourg, I.W.W. organizer, badly beaten by police, Aberdeen, SD. • 1917—Franklin, N.J. police try to lynch I.W.W. organizer John Avila. • 1917—5 miners beaten in Red Lodge, MT. • 1918—a dozen I.W.W. members beaten and “deported” in Centralia, WA. • 1918—5 I.W.W. organizers died in jail in Sacramento, CA. • 1918–1919—38 I.W.W. members jailed and tortured in Kansas. • 1919—22 striking steel workers killed, hundreds wounded, in 10 states. • 1919—2 killed, 40 injured, in May Day Riot in Cleveland, OH. • 1919—I.W.W. organizer Wesley Everest beaten, castrated, and lynched, Centralia, WA. • 1919—police raided meeting of shipyard workers, Seattle, WA; casualties unknown. • 1919—Seattle General Strike; one worker beaten. • 1919—2 killed, unknown injured in strikes in West Natrona and Brackenridge, PA. • 1919–1920—Pittsburgh, PA, steel strike; casualties unknown. • 1919–1920—numerous deaths, probably in the hundreds, in the Matewan Massacre, WV. • 1920—thousands of striking miners evicted, unknown killed and injured, Birmingham, AL. • 1920—2 striking copper workers killed, 5 seriously injured, in Butte, MT. • 1920—1 striker, Martinus Petkus, killed, many beaten, in sugar mill strike in PA. • 1920—5 killed, 220 injured in longshoreman’s strike in Philadelphia, PA.

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• 1920—I.W.W. member Joe Badgley killed by railroad agent. • 1920—7 killed, 81 injured (some strikers and some scabs), Denver, CO streetcar strike. • 1921—unknown numbers killed and injured in miners action, Blair Mountain, WV. • 1922—25 killed in coal strike in Herrin, IL. • 1922—12 miners killed marching from Pennsylvania to West Virginia to support strikers. • 1923—unknown numbers trampled during shoe workers strike, Brockton, MA. • 1923—1 striker, William McCay, shot in the back in lumber strike in Aberdeen, WA. • 1924—7 children maimed, 7 adults tarred and feathered, in I.W.W. hall in San Pedro, CA. • 1924—unknown number beaten and “deported” during Seattle hydroelectric plant strike. • 1925—Thomas Dovery, editor and leader of lumber workers, killed in Longview, WA. • 1926—1927—unknown casualties in Fur and Leather Workers’ strike, New York City. • 1926—mounted police injured unknown number of textile strikers in Passaic, NJ. • 1927—300 miners injured, Cheswick, PA, protesting execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. • 1927—6 killed, scores injured in Columbine, CO, coal strikes. • 1929—unknown casualties in textile strikes in Gastonia, NC. • 1931—3 auto industry organizers flogged by the Black Legion, Pontiac, MI. • 1932—4 marchers killed, 38 wounded, in the Dearborn Massacre, Dearborn, MI. • 1932—federal troops attacked unemployed veterans & families, Washington, D.C. • 1933—steel strike in Pennsylvania; casualties unknown. • 1933—2 killed, many wounded, in cotton strike, Pixley and Arvin, CA. • 1933—strikes by California fruit and vegetable workers; casualties unknown. • 1933—2 auto unionists murdered by the Black Legion, Hudson, MI. • 1934—2 strikers killed, scores wounded, in San Francisco General Strike. • 1934—2 striking auto workers killed, 25 injured, Toledo, OH. • 1934—1 striker, 1 supporter killed, 35 injured, Kohler Co., Kohler, WI. • 1934—1 union leader killed, 2 aides beaten, in textile strike, Alabama. • 1934—2 killed, 24 wounded in textile strike, Georgia.

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• 1934—7 killed, unknown number injured, in textile strike, South Carolina. • 1934—3 shot and killed, 8 wounded, 132 more injured in Saylesville, RI textile strike. • 1934—2 strikers killed, many injured, in San Francisco Longshoremen’s strike. • 1935—6 strikers’ homes and UAW headquarters bombed, Detroit, MI. • 1935—7 killed, unknown number injured, in Pennsylvania anthracite strikes. • 1935—1 striker killed, 6 others wounded in anthracite strike, St. Clare County, AL. • 1935—10 strikers wounded in anthracite strike, Mannington, KY. • 1935—2 strike sympathizers killed, many wounded in Omaha streetcar strike. • 1935—unknown numbers killed and injured in textile strike, Rossville, GA. • 1935—unknown casualties at Callaway Mills strike, La Grange, GA. • 1935—1 striking clay worker killed, Toronto, OH. • 1935—1 striking brewery worker killed, Stockton, CA. • 1935—4 picketing lumber workers killed, Eureka, CA. • 1935—1 picketing ornamental iron worker shot and killed, Minneapolis, MN. • 1935—unknown numbers of striking maritime workers killed, LA and TX. • 1935—2 striking iron miners killed in AL. • 1935—1 picketing coal miner killed, Pikeville, KY. • 1935—1 striker killed at Motor Products Corp, Detroit, MI. • 1936—2 deputies killed in clash with strikers, Samoset Mills, Talladega, AL. • 1936—1 striker killed, Acme Braid Co., Closter, NJ. • 1936—1 guard killed, 4 strikers wounded, Wheeling Steel Co., New Boston, OH. • 1936—5 pickets wounded in gun battle, Tennessee Coal and Iron Co., Birmingham, AL. • 1936—2 picketers killed in logging strike, Williamette, OR. • 1936—1 striking seaman killed, Houston, TX. • 1936—1 striking worker and 1 spectator killed, Sun Shipbuilding Co., Chester, PA. • 1936–1937—many beaten or met with “accidents” during GM sitdown strike, Flint, MI. • 1937—numerous strikers beaten in GM sit-down strike, Anderson, IN. • 1937—16 dead, 283 injured, at the Republic Steel Strike, Chicago, IL.

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• 1937—14 strikers shot at the Fisher Body Plant #2, Flint, MI. • 1937—4 women strikers hospitalized at Yale & Towne Lock Co., Detroit, MI. • 1937—at least 26 labor organizers and supporters beaten, Dallas and Memphis, TN. • 1937—many UAW organizers, including Walter Reuther, beaten in Dearborn, MI. • 1937—1 picketer run over by strikebreaker, Cleveland, OH. • 1937—2 killed, 28 wounded, Aluminum Co. strike, Alcoa, TN. • 1937—1 picketer killed, Moltrop Steel strike, Beaver Falls, PA. • 1937—1 picketer killed, Phillips Packing Co. strike, Cambridge, MD. • 1938—50 strikers injured during the Federal Screw strike in Detroit, MI. • 1938—1 striker killed at Del Prado Hotel, Chicago, IL. • 1938—1 striker killed at Oscar Nebel Hosiery Co., Hatboro, PA. • 1938—unknown casualties at strike of Maytag Washing Machine Co., Newton, IO. • 1938—unknown casualties at Swift Packing Co. strike, Sioux City, IO. • 1940—1 picketer killed, 2 wounded during coal strike in Ohio. As with the previous list, a few patterns stand out in this sanguine account. First, most of these attenuated descriptions lack accurate numbers, or any numbers at all, because often few records were kept. Second, few of the dead or the killers have names. Some of the murdered workers might be named in labor publications—Mother Earth remembered Louis Tikas as one of the victims at Ludlow and Annie LoPizzo at Lawrence, and publications of the I.W.W. or the United Mine Workers often named their dead and injured—but many go unrecorded.145 The killers are seldom caught and less often punished. Third, the misleadingly precise dates, the impression of a beginning and an end, obscure the continuing fabric of violence and leave unnoticed the death and injury that both preceded and followed the events listed here. Fourth, the carnage against striking workers and their families in the rest of the world is unmarked in this list; only deaths and injuries in U.S. labor actions are gathered here. Fifth, these numbers would be even higher, had not the militias often refused to fire on the workers or the strike-breakers sometimes joined the strikers.146 Sixth, the larger structural violence against labor—the semi-starvation of workers during strikes and lock outs, their removal from their homes, their deaths and injuries from unsafe industrial and mining conditions, and their overall poverty and suffering—far exceeds the weight that my puny list can generate. Goldman’s journal also publicized this kind of violence against workers. For example, the January 1910 issue of Mother

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Earth drew on data from the U.S. Geological Survey to inform readers that more than 30,000 miners had been killed in industrial “accidents” since 1889.147 The April 1911 issue carried Max Baginski’s analysis of the utter failure of the law to protect 145 murdered workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.148 Then there is the accumulated heft of lynching, race riots, Indian wars and relocations, land struggles with Mexico; the relatively subterranean but enduring violence against women across classes and colors; the violence of strikers against strike breakers, often blacks, Asians, and the most recent immigrants. And finally there is the global context of wars among nations and wars of imperial conquest, which justify expanding militaries while corrupting people with what Goldman called “the sickening idea of patriotism,” “dividing the workers against themselves and helping the masters to the spoils.”149 Militarism and union busting fed each other: strikes were condemned as treason, attacks on workers were often justified by accusations that workers were not sufficiently patriotic, and strikers were often accused of being enemy agents.150 Labor historian Louis Adamic estimates that World War I “produced over 20,000 new millionaires and multi-millionaires” who had a new interest in controlling the working class.151 Reflecting on the heightened violence following World War I, Adamic wrote, “To kill a wobbly was a more patriotic deed than to kill a German.”152 Memory of this bloody ledger has been sidelined in mainstream American histories. The problem isn’t only that the data are neglected (although they are); the bigger problem lies in the selective workings of discursive networks within which events come to count as relevant data in the first place. Goldman tried, and to some degree succeeded, in bringing an analysis of violence against working people to the American public, but she was hampered by a rhetorical cycle of danger that circled back to her own person and reputed activities. Goldman tried to change the subject from her alleged or actual dangerousness to the much greater violence of the state and capital. She had considerable success: her fearless speech reached many thousands of people, stimulating the creation of free speech leagues, free schools, campaigns on behalf of political prisoners, and other concrete legacies of her activism. She not only challenged the authorities directly, but also contested the terms of “the parrhesiastic contract.” Prominent liberals including Roger Baldwin, John Dewey, John Haynes Holmes, and many others concurred with Don Herzog’s argument that liberals “should be willing to tolerate, and even embrace,” Goldman’s ruthless opposition to capitalism and the state because it provokes moderates to consider perspectives they might not otherwise entertain.153 They agreed with Herzog that Goldman “deserv[ed] a place in the putative liberal democracy that excoriated and deported her.”154

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Yet, in fact, she was not in the end accorded that place: Goldman herself tried the approach that Herzog suggests, arguing at her deportation trial that there are different kinds of patriotism and hers, while annoying to authorities, should be accorded a place within the parrhesiastic contract.155 It didn’t work. To understand why simply urging the mainstream to tolerate its fringe was (and often still is) ineffective, we need to move outside such exhortations and focus on the discursive context within which meaning could be made and arguments rendered intelligible. Goldman’s political work was constrained by a negative feedback loop that was difficult to evade: Goldman was scrutinized for signs of danger; she tried to reverse the charges of danger, pointing them back at the authorities; but she had been established to be dangerous, so her accusations of danger were themselves dangerous; her accusations then bounced back to her, becoming more evidence that she herself was the source of peril. Falk rightly resists the idea that there were two Emma Goldmans: the outspoken free spirit and the militant revolutionary. Instead, she stresses Goldman’s consistent merger of “her shadowy engagement with the violent edge of the revolutionary anarchist movement” with “her less fearsome role as a luminary of women’s freedom and free expression.”156 Falk amply documents the constitutive linkages connecting the iconic feminist Goldman, of “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution” fame, with the Goldman who wrote in jubilation to Margaret Sanger that, “the only way the workers can command respect is when they are ready to fight.”157 Falk writes: “Emma Goldman’s political world encompassed the dark and the light, the violent and the peaceful, with no apparent sense of inherent contradiction.”158 Yet, why should we expect her to see this as a contradiction or to make it primary in her understanding? The state and corporate authorities did not seem troubled by it. Certainly Goldman refused “to disavow the tactics of retaliatory violence” but neither did her adversaries decline to utilize their much greater resources in killing, maiming, and intimidating workers and their families.159 Goldman neither fully endorsed nor completely renounced revolutionary violence because to do either was to capitulate to her assigned role in the authoritative discourses of danger. Instead, she endorsed anarchism and worked on the relation of violence to that struggle on many levels. The opposition between violent and peaceful protest was neither the central spindle around which Goldman’s anarchism moved, nor the primary distinction made by the state and corporate institutions that persecuted her and the many thousands of workers killed and injured in labor struggles. People who believed in the ideas of anarchism were, to the authorities, as dangerous as those (few) who planted bombs or assassinated the powerful; anarchists were “potential sources of acts,” provoking alarm for what they might do based on what they were.160 Goldman was dangerous in that she

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tried to change this calculation, to make the public as aware, and as outraged, by the killing and wounding of workers and their families as by the murder of the wealthy and powerful. She cultivated the discursive resources Americans needed to recalibrate capitalism’s bloody price. Absent such rethinking, both in her time and in our own, several significant political consequences ensue. First, we decontextualize contemporary violence against trade union activists, making current examples appear to be isolated incidents or far-away acts by third world governments.161 The International Trade Union Confederation’s 2007 report condemns repression of union activists in Columbia, the Philippines, Guinea, Iran, China, Nepal, and many other nations.162 The AFL-CIO charges that in Columbia alone, 1,165 union members have been murdered between 1994 and 2006.163 Many of these governments train their militaries, paramilitaries, and other security forces largely with U.S. aid, while U.S.-brokered free trade agreements bolster repressive state and corporate policies. When placed within the context of the previous centuries’ violence against labor in the United States, current repression can be reconceptualized as the global displacement of ongoing economic injustice rather than the isolated actions of backward nations. Second, the disremembering of America’s violent anti-labor history shrinks the available political imaginary through which we might create alternative visions of political life. As Alan Trachtenberg noted, during Goldman’s time, the struggle between labor and capital had not yet been decided, and the terms of the relation were widely contested. The beautiful ideal toward which Goldman and other radicals struggled sought not merely reform but transformation of society toward justice, freedom, and beauty. If we lose sight of those bloody confrontations, ironing out our national narratives so that state and corporate culpabilities are whitewashed while labor activism loses its radical dimensions, we also diminish our ability to imagine or appreciate the visions and analyses that animated those struggles. Third, the labor of remembering America’s history of class violence focuses our attention on the complex discursive processes by which some historical facts come to count in prevailing narratives, while other facts fade into obscurity. Understanding how they are facts is critical to seeing how power works. The discursive practices by which meanings are created and circulated, as well as interrupted and contested, reveal the process by which the facts that matter are elevated to prominence while contrary evidence is minimized or rewritten. What, for example, would it take for us to use a similar language to talk about the killing that goes on at official hands as we use for the acts of the attentaters? Can we talk about McKinley as a murderer? Henry Clay Frick? Anarchists insist that we ask these questions. In fact, anarchists have to ask these questions because, as legal scholar Aviam Soifer

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points out, they “must come to grips with violence as a possible technique as they determine how and when to advance or suppress their interpretations and their actual deeds.”164 Governments, ordinarily, do not—they execute criminals, order soldiers to die and to kill others, intervene in labor disputes on the side of capital, and in thousands of ways protect wealth and power without significant reflection on the legitimacy of their techniques. Anarchists withhold the prior legitimacy by which the state claims exception to the general prohibition on killing: “the state,” Goldman declared, “is nothing but a name,” and private property is “robbery.”165 If workers’ lives mattered as much as those of state officials and robber barons, it would be easier to provoke and sustain anarchist questions. Goldman not only provided neglected information; more importantly, she tried to shift the prevailing networks of discourse so that less familiar accounts could be incorporated into ordinary ways of living. Imagine if she had succeeded: What if the historically literate public were as aware of, say, the massacre of nineteen miners in Latimer, Pennsylvania, the murders which Leon Czolgosz was avenging, as it is of Czolgosz’s subsequent assassination of McKinley? What if accounts of violence against labor were as central in most U.S. high school history texts as are triumphal details about the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II? What if the modest American Labor Museum in Haledon, New Jersey were instead featured in the Smithsonian complex in Washington, D.C., readily available for tourists to absorb as part of the history everyone is supposed to know? Most Americans are abjectly ignorant of the litany of violence against workers, and perhaps that is the most dangerous circumstance of all.

NOTES 1. Noel Kent, America in 1900 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), xi, 13. 2. Kent, America, 25. 3. J. Edgar Hoover, “Memorandum for Mr. Creighton,” U.S. Department of Justice (August 23, 1919): 2; The Emma Goldman Papers Project, accessed November 27, 2010, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/deportation.html (accessed July 19, 2007). 4. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3. 5. David Wellbery, “Foreword,” Discourse Networks 1800/1900 by Friedrich A. Kittler, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), xiii. 6. Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in Nineteenth Century Legal Psychiatry,” in Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, in Essential Works of Foucault, vol 3 (Paul Rabinow, series ed.) (New York: The New Press, 2000),192.

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7. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 55. 8. Candace Falk, “Let Icons Be Bygones!” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 48. 9. Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 56. 10. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001), 19. 11. Wellbery, “Foreword,” xii. 12. Hoover, “Memorandum,” 2. 13. Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 214. Estimates vary substantially as to the number of arrests. 14. Candace Falk, “Introduction to Reels 57 through 60,” in Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources, eds. Candace Falk, Stephen Cole, and Sally Thomas (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1995), 246. The draconian federal laws were accompanied by a series of criminal anarchy laws at the state level, with New York leading the way in 1902 and 34 other states following suit by 1921. 15. Morris Hilquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 221. 16. This is a paraphrase of Foucault, “Dangerous Individual,” 182. 17. Mocking the $15,000 bond as “preposterous” in a deportation case, Goldman wrote from prison to her friend and attorney Harry Weinberger that “Kate [Richards O’Hare] suggests that I would be as easy to lose as a circus bandwagon.” Goldman to Harry Weinberger, September 13–14, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 11. 18. Falk, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources, eds. Candace Falk, Stephen Cole, and Sally Thomas (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1995), 15. 19. “The Law’s Limit,” The New York World, October 17, 1893, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, Made for America, 1890–1901, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 179. 20. Mathieu Deflem, “‘Wild Beasts Without Nationality’: The Uncertain Origins of Interpol, 1898–1910,” in The Handbook of Transnational Crime and Justice, ed. Philip Reichel (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 275. As part of an international clampdown on an anticipated worldwide anarchist conspiracy, twentyone European governments met in Rome in 1898 for an International Conference for the Defense of Society against the Anarchists. A second conference in March 1904 brought ten European governments to St. Petersburg where they produced “A Secret Protocol for the International War on Anarchism.” See also Goldman vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 346, fn 2. 21. The Austrian foreign minister, in 1898, after the assassination of Empress Elisabeth, quoted in Deflem, “‘Wild Beasts Without Nationality,’” 281. The anarchists were well aware of these international conferences called on their account: in January 1899, Goldman spoke at a large meeting of approximately 3,500 New York anarchists and sympathizers of various ethnicities and nationalities who gathered at Cooper Union in New York “to protest the International Anti-Anarchist Confer-

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ence held in Rome a month earlier.” (Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 47.) Goldman was joined on the platform by Spanish anarchist Pedro Esteve, then editor of the Paterson, New Jersey journal La Questione Sociale, and Saul Yanovsky from the Yiddish anarchist journal Freie Arbeiter Stimme. (See Goldman vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman and Moran, 506–507, 530, 562.) 22. In his first presidential message to the Congress in December, 1901, Roosevelt likened anarchists to pirates, pickpockets, highwaymen, wife-beaters, and sex traffickers. See Richard Bach Jensen, “The United States, International Policing, and the War against Anarchist Terrorism, 1900–1914,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 19, passim. 23. “Extradition Order from the French Government,” Paris, March 26, 1901, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 439. Goldman evidently was never served this order, having left France before it was issued. 24. “Official Circular of the German Government,” Dusseldorf, September 25, 1895, in Goldman vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 220. 25. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” in Goldman vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 76–77. Jensen points out that until around 1913, the only national police force in the United States was the understaffed Secret Service, which only had 50–60 agents in the field. By 1913, the growing Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice had taken over the task of policing anarchists (“The United States,” 20, 26, 36). 26. “Chronology,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 499. 27. David Wieck, “What Need Be Said,” from Sacco-Vanzetti: Developments and Reconsiderations (Boston: Boston Library, 1979), 71. 28. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: Cameron and Associates, 1955), 210. 29. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 15. 30. Ibid., 15. 31. Carl W. Ackerman, “Emma Goldman Mentor of Czolgosz, McKinley’s Slayer, Declare U.S. Investigators,” The Washington Post, December 22, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 64. 32. Ibid. 33. Bonnie Honig, “Bound By Law? Alien Rights, Administrative Discretion, and the Politics of Technicality: Lessons from Louis Post and the First Red Scare,” in The Limits of Law, eds. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 224. Goldman suspected that the bombs were planted by government officials, not anarchists; see Goldman to Stella Ballantine, June 18, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 11. 34. Boyer and Morais, Untold Story, 127, fn 8. 35. Honig, “Bound by Law?” 217. 36. Ibid., 224. Post entitled his book on these events The Deportations Delirium. 37. Aviam Soifer, Law and the Company We Keep (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 61.

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38. Ibid., 63. 39. Ed Delaney and M. T. Rice, The Bloodstained Trail: A History of Militant Labor in the United States (Seattle, WA: The Industrial Workers, 1927), 20. 40. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 271. 41. “Anarchy’s Den,” New York World, July 28, 1892, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 111. 42. “Goldman Traces Anarchy to 1776,” Spokesman-Review, May 31, 1908, in Goldman, vol II, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 327. 43. Falk, “Raising Her Voices: An Introduction,” in Goldman, vol II, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 71. 44. Charles Willis Thompson, “An Interview with Emma Goldman,” New York Times, May 30, 1909, in Goldman, vol II, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 431. 45. “Nellie Bly Again,” The New York World, September 17, 1893, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 155, fn 2. 46. “Assassin’s Trail of Crime from Chicago to the Pacific Coast,” The San Francisco Chronicle, September 8, 1901, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 461. 47. “Goldman Traces Anarchy to 1776,” 323. 48. “Anarchy’s Den,” 112. 49. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 34. 50. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 2. 51. Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 428. 52. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 119–121. 53. Kent, America, 96. 54. Nathaniel Hong, “Constructing the Anarchist Beast in American Periodical Literature, 1880–1903,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9, no. 1 (March 1992): 113. 55. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 99. 56. For insightful discussion of later debates over Goldman’s alleged dangerousness, especially during her 1934 return to the United States, see Oz Frankel, “Whatever Happened to “Red Emma”? Emma Goldman, from Alien Rebel to American Icon,” The Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (December, 1996): 903–942. 57. Brothers Lorenzo and Orson Fowler popularized phrenology in the United States, becoming prominent as the “heads of a phrenological empire based at the Phrenological Institute in New York City,” (Madeline B. Stern, “Mark Twain Had his Head Examined,” American Literature 41, no. 2 (May 1969): 207). They published a substantial array of books and self-help manuals linking phrenology with health, fitness, and other progressive movements of the time. The Phrenology Institute boasted its own museum, nicknamed “the Golgotha of Gotham—a veritable House of Skulls,” (Stern, “Mark Twain,” 207) which served as a site of research and a popular tourist attraction. 58. Stern, “Mark Twain,” 208. 59. Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880– 1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 26, 68, 138. 60. Madeline B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 211.

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61. Ibid., 258. 62. Ibid., 154–155. 63. “Character in Unconventional People,” Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, February 1895, in Goldman vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 214. 64. Ibid., 214. 65. Ibid., 215. 66. Foucault, “Dangerous Individual,” 189. 67. “Character in Unconventional People,” 215. 68. Ibid., 215–216. Stern reports that the editors of the Journal saw their treatment of Goldman as “charitable,” since it was a “violation of professional ethics” to emphasize perceived faults of the subjects in published readings (Headlines, 233). 69. Compared to the depravity and danger written onto anarchist bodies, Karl Marx, by contrast, allegedly had “‘a very fine physiognomy,’ with his ‘very full forehead, bushy hair and beard, and soft eyes.’” (Avrich, Haymarket, 428.) It is likely that Johann Most, whose face was disfigured from a botched surgery in childhood, served as the model for the stereotype of anarchists. 70. Avrich, Haymarket, 428. 71. Romeyn, Street Scenes, 28. 72. Foucault, “Dangerous Individual,” 199. 73. Ibid., 192. 74. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 2. 75. Ibid., 6. 76. One might speculate that Goldman and other anarchists benefited from their ominous image, since being thought dangerous might be an advantage to those battling the status quo. However, the concrete consequences for Goldman—lectures prohibited, publications seized, meetings broken up, numerous arrests and imprisonments—interfered with her work considerably, perhaps outweighing possible benefits such as attracting more media attention, inspiring workers to revolt, or intimidating authorities. 77. Mike Davis, interviewed by Jon Wiener, “Mike Davis Talks about the ‘Heroes of Hell,’” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 227. 78. Ibid., 227. 79. Ibid., 231, 233. 80. Ibid., 236. 81. Goldman’s correspondence in the 1920s reveals that anarchist editor Claus Timmerman knew about the plot against Frick, and Modest Stein, Berkman’s cousin, had planned to finish Frick after Berkman failed to kill him (Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 6, fn 7). 82. “Hailed Emma Goldman,” The New York World, August 1894, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 207. 83. “Talk with Emma Goldman,” The New York Sun, January 1901, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 431. 84. “Tyranny of Policy Publicly Denounced,” Philadelphia North American, April 1901, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 447. 85. “My Year in Stripes,” New York World, August 1894, in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 195.

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86. Goldman, “Address to the Jury,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, third edition., ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 359. 87. Davis, “Heroes of Hell,” 228. 88. The day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, this essay was posted anonymously on the web. 89. Goldman, “The Psychology of Political Violence,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 80. 90. Ibid., 83. 91. Ibid., 92, 93. 92. Goldman, “An Open Letter,” in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 434. 93. Ibid., 435. Czolgosz’s assassination of McKinley created a complicated situation for the anarchists. In her autobiography Goldman recounts the isolation she felt during the time after the McKinley assassination, when other radicals scrambled to distance themselves from Czolgosz (Living My Life, 311–317). While several other well-known radicals agreed with her position, including Voltairine de Cleyre, Harry Kelly, Kate Austin, and Jay Fox, Goldman’s high profile made her a more available target for both official harassment and popular anger, as anarchism was “equated with terrorism in the collective mind of the mainstream public” (Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 79). At the same time, she was by no means the only anarchist to be targeted: comrades at Freie Arbeiter Stimme were attacked by a mob, and the editors of L’Aurora in Springfield, Illinois were driven out of town (Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 11 fn 21). Berkman, writing to Goldman from prison, expressed reservations because he saw the president as the wrong target. The real enemy in the United States, he argued, was “the popular delusion of self-government and independence,” and “it cannot be reached with a bullet” (Berkman, Life of An Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, ed. Gene Fellner (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 82). My thanks to Barry Pateman for his clarification of these complex relations. Personal communication, September 28, 2010. While she went into partial hiding as E. G. Smith during this difficult period, she continued to participate in public meetings. Falk points out that her psychological interpretation of attentaters was somewhat one-sided, allowing for “only simple one-dimensional positive perceptions: the portrayal of a sensitive soul colliding with a cruel world” (Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 7). Miles Davis notes that some of the well-known attentaters were beautiful souls, others less savory characters. My focus here is on her strategy toward discourses of danger rather than the accuracy of her descriptions in each case. In later chapters I take up her arguments for recognizing the speech of political prisoners and for rethinking revolutionary violence. 94. Goldman, “Alexander Berkman,” Mother Earth I, no. 3 (May 1906) in Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, ed. Peter Glassgold (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 16. 95. Goldman, “Address to the Jury,” 364. 96. Goldman, “The Psychology of Political Violence,” 107. 97. Ibid., 96. 98. Ibid., 100.

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99. While Goldman did not always travel to prominent sites of labor struggles, she addressed the silk workers in Patterson, New Jersey; United Mine Workers in Springfield, Illinois; American Labor Union in Newark, New Jersey; Glass Blowers’ Union in Monaca, Pennsylvania; Brewers’ and Malters’ Union, Painters and Decorators Union, and Scandinavian Painters Union in Chicago; United Labor League in Philadelphia; Working Women’s Society of the United Hebrew Trade Organization in New York; the anarchist branches of the Central Labor Unions, especially those in Boston and Detroit; International Working Men’s Association (I.W.M.A.) and Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) around the country. See “Chronology” in Goldman, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 489–515, and “Chronology,” in Goldman, vol II, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 469–506. 100. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 56–57. 101. Alix Kates Shulman, To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1971), vii. 102. Candace Falk, Lyn Reese, and Mary Agnes Dougherty, The Life and Times of Emma Goldman: A Curriculum for Middle and High School Students (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1992). 103. Leslie A. Howe, On Goldman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000), 48. Frederick C. Griffin, Six Who Protested: Radical Opposition to the First World War (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), vii, interpreted Goldman as a pacifist. 104. Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 11. 105. Goldman, Living My Life, 305–306. 106. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 59, 28–29. A fourth individual who was not one of the anarchist plotters was also killed in the blast. 107. This anecdote was shared with me by Barry Pateman, March 8, 2008. 108. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 31. 109. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 19–20. 110. Don Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism and Pedestrian Liberalism,” Political Theory 35, no. 3 (June 2007): 319. 111. Theresa Moritz and Albert Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman (Vancouver: Subway Books, 2001), 81. 112. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 1–2. 113. Ibid., 4. 114. Ibid., 79, 4. 115. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 33. 116. Honig, “Bound by Law?” 244, fn 62. 117. Deflem, “Wild Beasts Without Nationality,” 278. 118. Jensen, “The United States,” 16. 119. Davis, “Heroes of Hell,” 228. The interview with Mike Davis quoted here is part of his work in progress, “a world history of revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932” (227). Jensen argues that some of these attentaters were not anarchists but “revolutionary socialists or deranged persons” (“The United States,” 40 fn 6). I have included them nonetheless, since they were probably associated in popular accounts with anarchists, and used to fan anti-anarchist sentiments. No doubt the list is incomplete. For a fuller list, with more detail and sources, see this book’s website. 120. Davis, “Heroes of Hell,” 229.

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121. Ibid., 228, 235. Goyens notes that divisions among anarchists over the firebug plot split the movement (Beer and Revolution, 119–121). The same was true for the Lexington Avenue explosion. Most anarchists were not pacifists, but saw these events as reckless provocations. 122. Davis, “Heroes of Hell,” 227. 123. Ibid., 235. 124. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 73. 125. Foucault, “Dangerous Individual,” 192. 126. David Grimsted, “Violence,” accessed July 19, 2007. http://www.bookrags .com/history/americanhistory/violence-aaw-02.html. 127. It is arguable that, by limiting access to birth control information and technologies to several generations of women, authorities contributed to many thousands of women’s deaths in childbirth, botched illegal abortions, and the slow legal murder brought on by starvation and malnutrition. See Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 150, passim. 128. Louis Adamic, Dynamite! The Story of Class Violence in America, second edition (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1960, first published in 1934), 1. 129. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 4. 130. Ibid., 19. 131. Ibid., 20, citing Thomas Sewell Adams and Helen L. Sumner, eds., Labor Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1907), xx. 132. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 19–20. 133. Boyer and Morais, Untold Story, 142. 134. Sydney Lens, The Labor Wars: From the Mollie McGuires to the Sitdowns (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 127. 135. Richard Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” in American Violence: A Documentary History, eds. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (New York: Knopf, 1970), 19. 136. Boyer and Morais, Untold Story, 68. 137. Goldman, Living My Life, 534. 138. Goldman, “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty,” in Anarchism and Other Essays by Goldman (New York: Dover, 1969), 141. 139. Goldman, “Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 93–94. 140. Goldman, “Patriotism,” 143; also personal conversation with Barry Pateman, July 22, 2002. 141. Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., Pubs, 1878), x. Reprinted in Mass Violence in America, eds. Robert Fogelson and Richard Rubenstein (New York: Arno Press, 1969). 142. Boyer and Morais, Untold Story, 278–279. 143. Stephen Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 4. 144. For a fuller list with documentation of sources, see this book’s website. There are many scholarly difficulties in this list. First, there is, to my knowledge, no central, authoritative source for this information, so I have compiled this list from

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multiple books, articles, and websites, primarily from these sources: “Chronology,” in Goldman, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, vol I and II; Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: Cameron and Associates, 1955); Kevin Kenny, “Theory and Method in Labor History,” Graduate seminar, Department of History, University of Texas, Fall 1998, accessed March 1, 2008. ; History Matters, American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning (Graduate Center, CUNY) and the Center for History and New Media (George Mason University), accessed March 1, 2008. ; Michael Novak, The Guns of Latimer (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin Kelley, Three Strikes (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Sydney Lens, The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns (New York: Doubleday, 1973); Philip S. Foner, A History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, vol 1, 1937; vol 2, 1955; vol 3, 1963; vol 4, 1965); Ed Delaney and M. T. Rice, The Bloodstained Trail: A History of Militant Labor in the United States (Seattle: Industrial Workers of the World, 1927); Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles, 1877–1934 (New York: Monad Press, 1936); Louis Adamic, Dynamite! The Story of Class Violence in America [1934] (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008); Philip Taft and Philip Ross, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome,” in The History of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, eds. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Praeger, 1969). No doubt much has been left out and some information is imprecise. Sources conflict with regard to dates and the details of events; when there are multiple accounts, I have privileged the sources that are closest to primary material. I have focused on these specific instances of direct violence against labor to serve as a counter to the earlier list of attentats and to highlight critical events in the submerged history of labor. The challenge of assembling this list and confirming the numbers of deaths and injuries is itself evidence that this violence is largely invisible or underdocumented. It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate the effects of these labor actions; suffice it to say that some secured wage increases and eight-hour-day regulations (often subsequently violated) while others succeeded in challenging the authority of owners in the workplace and still others petered out or were suppressed. For debates among labor historians over the relative successes and defeats of unions, see Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 145. Julie May Courtney, “Remember Ludlow!” Mother Earth IX, no. 3 (May 1914), in Anarchy! ed. Glassgold, 346. 146. Lens, Labor Wars, 54–55, 57, 130; Foner, Great Labor Uprising, 72, 204; Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 70. 147. A report in the April, 1911 issue of Mother Earth VI, no. 2, painstakingly laid out the numbers: 2,061 coal miners killed, 4,800 injured in 1906; 3,125 killed, 5,800 injured in 1907; and so on. 148. Max Baginski, “Everlasting Murder,” Mother Earth VI, no. 2 (April, 1911) in Anarchy! ed. Glassgold, 312–314.

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149. Goldman, “Syndicalism,” 93. 150. Adamic, Dynamite! 271, 295. 151. Ibid., 278. 152. Ibid., 296. 153. Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism,” 314. 154. Ibid., 326. 155. Goldman, “Address to the Jury,” 369, passim. 156. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 3. 157. This famous line, which decorates many generations of activist t-shirts and buttons, is actually a misquote. See the website of the Emma Goldman Papers Project at the University of California, Berkeley, accessed November 27, 2010, for an explanation of how this inaccurate quotation entered into progressive legend,

In her letter to Sanger regarding Ludlow, Goldman argued, “the workers have again been misled” in that “they allowed the troops to come in and that will kill the strike,” but still “the beginning was made.” “As to sabotage,” she continued, “it would do your heart good to know the amount of property that has been destroyed. We are living in great times.” Goldman to Sanger, May 1, 1914, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 8. I have corrected the misspellings in the original. 158. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 77. 159. Ibid., 77. 160. Foucault, “Dangerous Individual,” 199. 161. See Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and South Asian Transnational Politics in the United States (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) for discussion of contemporary violence against immigrant domestic workers. 162. Guy Ryder, General Secretary, “Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights,” International Trade Union Confederation (2007), accessed March 1, 2008, http://survey07.ituc-csi.org/getcontinent.php?IDContinent=0&IDLang=EN. 163. James Parks, January 17, 2008, “Violence against Workers Still Rampant in Columbia,” AFL-CIO Web-blog, accessed March 1, 2008, (accessed March 1, 2008). 164. Soifer, “Covered Bridges,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 17, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 63. 165. Goldman, “The Individual, Society, and the State,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 113; “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Anarchism and Other Essays, by Goldman (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 53.

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2 Anarchist Spaces

“I admire your courage.” —John Dewey to Emma Goldman at her Columbia University speech, 1934

Anarchism is often dismissed with the airy declaration that it is great in theory, but it would never work in practice. Yet I find that the opposite is more the case: anarchist writings are sometimes underdeveloped, but anarchist activities are often remarkably successful. In chapter 3, I will look more closely at Goldman’s ideas and trace her intellectual development in relation to the people and writings that she encountered or sought. In this chapter I want to look specifically at the kinds of political spaces that Goldman helped create (and that in turn created her), the venues in which she did her anarchism, and situate her within the context of anarchism as a movement that creates publics. One difficulty with this plan is that I appear to be reintroducing the very theory/practice divide that the concept of located theory is designed to either deconstruct or sidestep. Yet, I think the idea of located theory can still do the work of interrupting or complicating the theory/practice dualism, while allowing distinctions (as well as relations) between words on pages and bodies in spaces. Goldman’s way of political thinking, I am arguing, illuminates mutually constitutive relations between specific material contexts and words used to comprehend those contexts; at the same time, different moments in this theory/practice relation can be identified and investigated. One of the advantages of ectopic theory, theory “out of place,” is that it can push our thinking toward the materiality of places, toward the sensory practices by which people inhabit places and create 67

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collective arrangements. Theory out of place, in other words, makes one think more about the places themselves and our ways of being in those places. Recall Hannah Arendt’s observation about Rosa Luxemburg, which could also have been about Emma Goldman: these women’s significance lies chiefly in the roles they played in their worlds, not so much the artifacts or texts they added to it.1 In order to understand the roles they played in their worlds, those worlds themselves must be theorized, their concrete political logic explored. There were of course multiple political logics available to and created by the participants in anarchist worlds, not a single given condition to be recovered. Nonetheless, there are patterns in these historical accounts that can be mined to take us beyond Goldman’s expressed arguments and into more opaque life worlds in which bodies and objects acted, reacted, and interacted. Located theory, in other words, invites analysis of the locations themselves. Yet located theory may paradoxically not be the best tool for examining its own locations, precisely because it is too tied to them; for that we can benefit from other kinds of theory. As Margaret Kohn suggests in her study of European radical spaces, “Theory is the mechanism through which sediments of past struggles over power and interpretation can transcend their immediate context to illuminate new conjunctures.”2 The weakness of located theory is the likely restriction of its range; other embodied political sites, located elsewhere, may not come into focus well through its lenses. Explicit links of thinking to context open up some materialities while closing down others. In chapter 5 I argue that Goldman’s lack of concrete material connections to African American political spaces hampered her understanding of slavery’s legacy; at the same time, her ahistorical understanding of race hindered her encounters with the practical spaces that could have expanded her thinking. In this chapter, I make use of tools from contemporary critical theory to investigate Goldman’s spaces and times, and the larger context of anarchist spaces and times that she both drew upon and helped to build. With Kohn, I am seeking to illuminate new conjunctures, mindful that the sedimentations of past struggles can serve as subject matter as well as lens, can elucidate as well as conceal. Nonetheless, by focusing on the bodily and organizational spaces within which Goldman’s anarchism happened, I aim to approach, insofar as possible, the everyday topography of her life world in order to suggest its relevance to our own. I want to understand the anarchist sensorium, as well as to build a bridge between sensorium and narrative, linking the sensorium’s discourseresistant materiality with the stories that can be told about it. By sensorium I mean, following political theorist Davide Panagia, the organization of sensations, “the heterology of impulses that register on our bodies without determining a body’s nature or residing in any one organ of perception.”3 The sensorium marks the world of the sensible, both “what makes sense”

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and “what can be sensed.”4 The distribution of the sensible, as Jacques Rancière explains, is basic to politics: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of times.”5 Anarchists’ lifeworlds made their resistance possible, and they had to be built by the people who needed them. Goldman was part of a network of activists laboring to create a space for anarchism in the United States. But what does it mean to create and address a radical public space? How did people participate in these spaces? What modes of constitution and address did these venues facilitate or require?

SOCIAL IMAGINARIES AND BODILY HABITUS Anarchist counterpublics take shape out of an energetic triangle of relations among political ideologies, social imaginaries, and embodied practices.6 Goldman’s realm of ideas is the subject matter of the next chapter; while the relation between her social imaginary and bodily habitus—the symbolic and material locations that made her ideas possible and responded to their interventions—is the subject of this one. By social imaginary I mean, following Dilip Gaonkar, Charles Taylor, and others, a “symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents.” Social imaginaries are both ways of grasping social life and part of the social life to be grasped. They generate the “implicit understandings that underlie and make possible common practices.” Gaonkar explains that these sources of our self-understandings are imaginary in two ways: “they exist by virtue of representation or implicit understandings, even when they acquire immense institutional force; and they are the means by which individuals understand their identities and their place in the world.”7 In any given space, multiple social imaginaries jostle or sustain one another and call upon differing temporalities for their momentum and pace. Carried largely in “images, stories, and legends,” social imaginaries precede and make possible social theories (as well as reflecting the impact of such theories) by providing common understandings shared by large groups of people.8 By making available a substantial repertoire of sense-making practices, social imaginaries map our social spaces, telling us “how things usually go” and also prescribing “how they ought to go.”9 Publics require social imaginaries; specifically oppositional publics, or counterpublics, tap as well as produce imaginaries that stretch toward resistance and transformation. By habitus I mean our embodied experience and our often inchoate understandings of that experience. Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” arising out of the “material conditions of existence” available in that time and place. Neither mechanical (reducible to

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stable cause-effect relations) nor teleological (moving toward a predefined end), Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations.” The habitus speaks directly to our motor functions, our postures, and our “schemes of perception.” A habitus is social, that is it “pass[es] from practice to practice” without necessarily becoming verbalized or even conscious.10 Following Judith Butler, I want to hold onto Bourdieu’s insights into the social construction and circulation of embodied social fields, while nudging his idea in a more temporal direction to recognize the constant reiterations as well as disruptions of sedimented corporeal practices. “The bodily habitus,” Butler explains, “constitutes a tacit form of performativity, a citational chain lived and believed at the level of the body.”11 There is always excess, always undecidability within the chains of dispositions authorized by as well as authorizing social imaginaries. Distilled habits by which we learn to be within our bodies and our communities are both formed and formative of our symbols and images; there is both durability and incongruity in the temporal emergence of bodies in spaces. Our habitus takes shape through our bodily emergence in a sensorium, a chain of sensing practices and temporalities that partitions the inchoate regime of sensory possibilities. To make sense, literally, of what William James called a “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion,” we must participate in some partitioning of the sensible so that representations can rise to the level of sense-making. Panagia, following Deleuze, explains, “With sensation we enter a world of contours, resonances, vibrations, attunements, syntonizations, hapticities, and impulses.”12 Looking closely at Goldman’s various spaces for the production of politics, I am seeking to theorize the distribution of the sensible that made anarchism possible and was in turn made possible by anarchism. Social imaginaries are embedded in our daily habitus, just as our habitus takes meaning from our surrounding social imaginaries. They feed off each other, in Bourdieu’s clever image, “like a train bringing along its own rails.”13 Yet they are not the same; the habitus is the homefield of bodily hexis (condition or habit)—the visuality, aurality, hapticity, olfactivity, and kinesthesiology of things—while the social imaginary is the larger context within which the bodily hexis (condition or habit) can be come sens (meaning). The awkwardness of my list of sensory practices suggests that we lack a felicitous language for discussing experience at the level of the habitus, not surprising in light of its ability to do its work without full recourse to language or consciousness. Further complicating this list is Panagia’s insight that the felt energies of the sensorium are often prematurely sorted by reference to five discrete senses, as though sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell were fixed and separate channels rather than dense and unclear networks of sensation. Out of the repertoires made available in our social imaginaries, our bodily habitus expresses or diminishes different linguistic or cultural com-

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petencies.14 Both the habitus and the social imaginary are realms in which history is readily turned into claims about nature, but the habitus resists representation to focus more on the implicit, lasting dispositions making it possible to perceive in certain ways and not others, while the imaginary attends more to the images and stories that make it possible for embodied action to have meaning. To oversimplify these ideas a bit, I’m suggesting that one’s embodied experience (habitus) takes its form by participating within a largely untheorized partitioning of the sensible (the sensorium) within the context of the images and stories made available in a society or subculture (the social imaginary). Goldman’s habitus, in relation to the formative sensorium and significations of social imaginaries, produced her anarchism, and was in turn produced by anarchism, in specific localities at particular social and historical moments. While the next chapter explores the conceptual arguments and intellectual trajectory of Goldman’s anarchism, here I am investigating the enabling practices of articulation and circulation themselves. Ordinarily one might expect to proceed in the reverse—first explore what she said, then look at how she put her ideas into circulation. By reversing the expected relation between the content and the form, I want to read the form itself as political, as part of the doing of political theory, rather than merely the passive vehicle for circulating it.

ARTICULATING COUNTERPUBLICS The triangle of social imaginaries, bodily practices and ideas is the context for the creation of counterpublics, which Margaret Kohn describes as “political sites outside of the state where the disenfranchised generated power.”15 Michael Warner provides a useful analysis of the circularity and layering of publics, including counterpublics: “Publics exist,” he explains, “only by virtue of their imagining.”16 A speaker or writer needs a preexisting public in order to have someone to address, yet it is the act of addressing that creates the needed public. Anarchism was an emergent site for this ironic process, calling forth and at the same time presupposing a vigorous counterpublic within the United States.17 Connecting radical immigrant communities, progressive labor, international radicals, and the more daring from the “native” (that is, non-immigrant)18 liberal and feminist circles, anarchism exemplified the discursive and social relationship Warner describes between counterpublics and subcultures: A counterpublic in this sense is usually related to a subculture, but there are important differences between these concepts. A counterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion and exchange;

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its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in principle indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography but mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like. . . . [T]his subordinate status does not simply reflect identities formed elsewhere; participation in such a public is one of the ways by which its members’ identities are formed and transformed.19

The constitutive relation between subcultures and anarchist counterpublics is intensified because these communities are largely subaltern, organized by racial/ethnic, religious/cultural, and class stratification to produce bonds of solidarity enabling radical social change through “imaginative act[s] of world-making.”20 Warner outlines three levels of public-ness in counterpublics, all of which are at work in anarchist social imaginaries. First, the public can refer to people in general, as in humanity, or Christianity, or all residents of a nation. Writing projects that include “literary criticism, journalism, theory, advertising, fiction, drama, most poetry” generally address this very broad public. As Warner explains, the available addressees are essentially imaginary, which is not to say unreal: the people, scholarship, the republic of letters, posterity, the younger generation, the nation, the left, the movement, the world, the vanguard, the enlightened few, right-thinking people everywhere, public opinion, the brotherhood of all believers, humanity, my fellow queers. These are all publics. They are in principle open-ended. They exist by virtue of their address.21

At this broadest level of publics, an implicitly or explicitly imagined universal category promises some sort of harmony or resolution of conflict by folding contingent or partial expressions into the satisfaction of a completed whole. At this level, Goldman’s public was “the People,” “the masses,” or “the oppressed,” that imagined universal in which the spirit of revolution could be created or found. Secondly, “public” can mean a more concrete and located audience, one that can witness itself gathering in physical space, as in the audience for a theater production, sporting event, or concert. These spaces might be more or less blurry, depending on their physical arrangements, but they still create an aggregate that, as Warner explains, “knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action.”22 Charles Taylor calls this the “topical common space” because particular people are assembled in a specific place for an identifiable purpose.23 At Warner’s second level, Goldman’s countless audiences for her lectures and speeches constituted something like a theatrical public, a crowd that could know itself by shared attendance at a public event. By my estimate, Goldman gave over 10,000 speeches during her political career. Like Wil-

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liam Jennings Bryant and other successful turn-of-the-century orators, her public speeches often drew thousands of listeners, combining political education, organizing, and entertainment. Goldman estimated that, during the years of touring in the first two decades of the twentieth century, she spoke to 50,000–75,000 people annually.24 Her lectures were often sites where the emergent anarchist counterpublic rubbed shoulders with other political dispositions, inciting conversations among radicals and liberals over shared agendas such as freedom of speech or access to birth control. For example, Ben Reitman reported a successful meeting in Portland at which “the most gratifying feature . . . was the great mixture of humanity that thronged to the hall: workingmen, tramps, hoboes, lawyers, judges, doctors, men of letters, women of society, teachers, students—in short, everybody.”25 Other renowned anarchist orators included Goldman’s mentor-turned-opponent, Johann Most, the ascetic Philadelphia anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, and fiery young Mollie Steimer. Other topical anarchist counterpublics include those gathered in the networks of taverns, salons, clubs, parks, and other sites where informal recreational encounters created spaces for people to assemble and implicitly recognize one another as anarchists. Yet another topical public could be found in prison, which became a kind of public space for the anarchists to read, write, and organize.26 Thirdly, publics can be textual: “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation—like the public of this essay.” These publics are text-based, either oral or written, and they are “autotelic . . . [they] exist by virtue of being addressed.” Not just a group of people, but a collectivity organized by discourse, textual publics are “capable of being addressed and capable of action.”27 Textual publics cohere with Taylor’s metatopical space, one that “knits a plurality of spaces into one larger space of nonassembly.”28 Text-based publics extend beyond friends to include strangers, combine both personal and impersonal modes of address, work on a temporal rhythm of publication, and help constitute a life world by circulating among readers/listeners whose attention is constitutive of “the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.”29 At this third level, the one that most concerns Warner, Goldman was instrumental in speaking into existence the anarchist counterpublic to which she addressed herself. Her addressees were to some extent projections, as Warner notes, “always yet to be realized.”30 Her anarchist counterpublic included friends, acquaintances, and identifiable groups (such as militant unions, alternative theatre companies, anarchist colonies, radical educators, and civil libertarians) while extending further into the realm of strangers and operating under the surveillance of the authorities. The Mother Earth family, as Goldman called it, included Goldman herself (nicknamed The Red Queen), Max Baginski (German journalist and the first editor), Alexander Berkman (the second editor, nicknamed The Pope), and others who

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published the journal for over a decade. The inner circle of Mother Earth also included colorful Czech anarchist Hippolyte Havel (often described as charming when sober); soulful American freethinker Leonard Abbott (nicknamed Sister Abbott); well-known art critic Sadakichi Hartmann; printer and trade unionist Harry Kelly, and Goldman’s flamboyant manager and lover, Dr. Ben Reitman.31 In later years, veteran manager M. Eleanor Fitzgerald (“Fitzie”), Stella Comyn Ballantine (Goldman’s niece and assistant), and Saxe Commins (Goldman’s nephew and well-known editor) did much of the labor to produce Mother Earth.32 In their capacities as writers, editors, and organizers, Goldman and her comrades maintained offices (which were periodically raided by the authorities), kept subscriber lists (sometimes confiscated), corresponded with readers who invited the anarchists to lecture in their communities (frequently prohibited by local authorities), and set up talks at which copies of Mother Earth, The Blast, and other anarchist publications would be available for purchase (when not seized and destroyed). Always there was an excess of possible readers, a combination of known individuals and groups along with a yet-to-be tapped reservoir of potential members and an alert constituency of enemies. The triangulated relationship of embodied practices, social imaginaries, and ideas can be seen in these three levels of public-making. The writing and circulating of books and letters, also public-making activities, are the subjects of later chapters; here I focus primarily on anarchist journals and the spaces in which they were produced and put into circulation. Taking the anarchists as the lens through which to examine the workings of counterpublics, the distinctions that Warner draws among levels of publics recede in significance while the interactions among the levels stand out. Goldman consistently spoke and wrote both about and to the broadest possible public, the People, even as she came to doubt the masses’ capacity to “wake up.” Speaking about her popular autobiography Living My Life, Goldman commented, “I am anxious to reach the mass of the American reading public, not so much because of the royalties, but because I have always worked for the mass.”33 She also criticized the mass, “the leaden weight of which does not let it move,” for people’s “willingness to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen”; yet she did not abandon this representation of universal humanity.34 Rather, she imagined, quoting Emerson, that she could “draw individuals out” of the mass through political action.35 Goldman directly addressed Warner’s third level, the specifically textual counterpublic, in her indefatigable production and circulation of written and spoken words. Candace Falk notes that there was “a strong written and oral tradition among anarchists” which Goldman entered and expanded.36 These traditions included a well-developed material circuitry by which texts were produced and distributed, social conditions of access were facilitated, terms of intelligibility were made available, and usable rhetorical practices

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of “genre, idiolect, style, address, and so on” were articulated and contested.37 Goldman flourished as a speaker and writer in part because a vigorous culture of circulation already existed, yet she also helped to materialize that culture by the act of addressing it. Goldman used Warner’s second level of public, the physical coming together of an audience for a public event, as a vehicle to draw more of the masses into the circle of comrades: that is, the second kind of public constituted their opportunity to recruit from the first level, “the People,” into the third, the focused textual counterpublic.38 To investigate the anarchist habitus, explore its sensorium, and link up the distribution of the sensible with the prevailing social imaginaries, I begin with the most intimate of physicalities, Goldman’s own body. Then I expand outwards to consider the face-to-face communities in which she participated—taverns, clubs, salons, schools, colonies, prisons, and neighborhood centers—and then to the mobile spaces created by the dense latticework of lectures and the temporal practices of life on the road. Each of these can be understood as sites for creating networks of topical counterpublics. Then I shift to a consideration of Goldman’s textual counterpublics, focusing specifically on Goldman’s journal and the larger context of the production and circulation of anarchist journals. The textual counterpublics put words into circulation through the physical and social sites of the topical counterpublics, creating relationships out of which Goldman and her comrades labored to both find and make the universal counterpublic, the People.

BODIES AND LABORS At the most immediate level, the life space within which Goldman participated in anarchist counterpublics was her own immigrant Jewish female body, a physical site so improbable for public discourse that it was heavily scrutinized by incredulous observers. The press was obsessed with the details of her physical appearance, commenting extensively on her wardrobe, and in her youth continuously surprised at her good looks. Newspaper accounts of Goldman’s speeches frequently began with the observation that she was clean. Nellie Bly’s sympathetic interview with Goldman on the front page of the New York World noted that Goldman loved her bath. Bly told readers they might imagine “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.” Instead, she found “a little bit of a girl, just 5 feet high, including her boot heels, not showing her 120 pounds; with a saucy, turn-up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes that gazed inquiringly at me through shellrimmed glasses.” The reporter further described Goldman’s “quiet little

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hands,” noting that her “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.” Thankfully, “the little feet were decorously upon the floor.”39 After the assassination of McKinley in 1901, Goldman was routinely demonized by the press. Later press accounts of Goldman abandoned their descriptions of the “fair little anarchist” and portrayed her as big, rawboned, loud, crude, and mannish.40 Yet Goldman was 4 feet 10¾ inches tall, according to her Philadelphia police report, with a slender build in her youth, becoming matronly as she aged.41 She dressed in stylish clothes; in one memorable letter to her niece Stella Ballantine, she carefully specified the hat, gloves, and collars she needed in order to properly dress for her release from prison.42 While no doubt personal vanity was one consideration, Goldman was well aware of the racial and sexual anxieties her public presence evoked. She spoke in public, she smoked cigars, she drank whiskey, she declined to participate in the conjugal domestic family, and she talked authoritatively about politics, religion, and sex. She negotiated a thicket of heteronormative expectations about bodies and publics, upsetting persistent stereotypes about unwashed immigrants, dirty Jews, and mannish unwomen. The persistent judgment of mainstream society against women who spoke in public offers some insight into the particular resistances and opportunities entailed in anarchist publics. Women’s bodies were so overcoded as sexual opportunities for men that even the most respectably clothed female person, when speaking in public, violated norms of modesty by being available to the eyes and ears of strangers. The anarchist movement boasted a substantial number of women orators—Goldman was the most famous, but Voltairine de Cleyre, Rebecca Edelman, Mollie Steimer, Louise Michel, and others were frequent speakers at anarchist events—so it is likely that anarchism itself became titillating, not only because of the content of anarchist speeches but because of the physicality of female bodies in public. Goldman and other anarchist women did more than represent the interests of women or workers; they expressed those interests, creating a version of the habitus they advocated. The tenacity with which the general public held onto their expectations that women speaking in public would be ugly and unfashionable is itself revealing, suggesting ideological investments not readily amenable to reevaluation based on evidence. If bold women are by definition unattractive, and immigrants by definition dirty, and Jews by definition untrustworthy, then a Jewish immigrant woman speaking in public provided an inexhaustible opportunity for reporters and audiences to be surprised, again and again, when Goldman turned out to be persuasive, attractive, and clean.

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Unlike the fetishized anarchist body fixated upon by the press, Goldman’s actual working class female body occupied a predictably subaltern position in the capitalist and patriarchal division of labor. Early in her life, Goldman supported herself by sewing ten to twelve hours per day, a demanding occupation that she re-entered during her two years in Jefferson City Penitentiary for opposing conscription during World War I. During her first stint in prison on Blackwell’s Island for encouraging the poor to “take bread,” she learned some rudimentary nursing skills, a profession she later studied in Vienna with the financial support of two sponsors. Employed as a nurse and midwife, she was exposed to poor women’s desperation over their inability to prevent conception, an experience that shaped her feminism in crucial ways. Her health was often compromised: she had tuberculosis, the tailor’s disease, in 1893, and problems with her back, jaw, and feet plagued her during her terms in dark, damp prison cells. During her years in the United States, Goldman’s places of residence were in Manhattan, typically on the lower East Side, the politically lively but not yet fashionable Greenwich Village neighborhood. She sometimes lived with other comrades, sometimes with lovers, occasionally by herself; for a time, after McKinley’s assassination, when no respectable person would rent to her, she lived in a brothel. While we don’t know the details of the interiors of her homes, a description of the fictional apartment created by Goldman’s friend James Huneker for his character, anarchist Yetta Silverman, in his 1916 novel Visionaries is likely based on Goldman’s home. In chapter 13, “A Sentimental Rebellion,” Huneker described his fictional anarchist’s apartment as crammed with significant images and artifacts: portraits of Herzen, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and the Haymarket martyrs; books or representations of Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Stirner, Ibsen, Thoreau, Emerson, Beethoven, Strauss, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Gorky, and Whitman; an etching of Makart’s proletarian Christ.43 We do know that Goldman’s home was usually also her office, and was inevitably a gathering place for other radicals; her friend Hutchins Hapgood fondly referred to her flat at 210 East Thirteenth Street as a “home for lost dogs.”44 Like her various New York homes, her student apartment in Vienna in the 1890s, the sparse lodging she shared with Berkman during their two years in the Soviet Union, and her temporary housing during her lecture tours of Canada in the 1930s were predictably magnets for radicals and potential radicals. Her private space was part of an anarchist network of private spaces where comrades could find welcome, making a paradoxical kind of quasi-public out of a global network of homes. She was widely regarded as an excellent cook—blintzes being a specialty—and Big Bill Haywood famously praised her coffee as “black as night, strong as the revolutionary ideal, sweet as love.”45 Friends recalled that she liked to drink wine, cook, and feed guests. Appropriately, she

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loved to dance.46 We know that her friend and supporter Bolton Hall gave her a farm in upstate New York, which she and Berkman used as a retreat and a place to write. During the last decade and a half of her life, her home base was her beloved cottage Bon Espirit in the south of France, donated by her benefactress Peggy Guggenheim so she could write her autobiography. We can surmise that, whoever else lived with her, Goldman did much of the cooking and cleaning in all these homes; she periodically refers to her labors, and apart from a couple of stays at the homes of friends who employed maids, she seldom mentions anyone else contributing to the needed work within the home. This is not surprising, given that, apart from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her followers, few feminists of her generation raised the distribution of domestic labor as a political issue.47 Like Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread, a handful of feminists advocated the collectivization of housework, but few seem to have considered, much less pursued, the possibility that men might share it.48 The raising of children was also exclusively women’s work. If Goldman had raised a child, as she periodically longed to do, she knew that it would spell the end of her political career. She writes in her autobiography that, while she longed for a child, she declined the surgery that could have rendered her fertile because she knew that, unlike men in the movement, women could not readily combine parenting and full time activism.49 Goldman’s immediate physical habitus was deeply embedded within working class and patriarchal social imaginaries and their attendant divisions of labor. This working class occupational, health, and housing profile locates Goldman within what Esther Romeyn calls “a physiognomy of the urban landscape” inhabited by urban “types” at whom the bourgeoisie were fond of gazing from a comfortable distance, but from whom they recoiled in close quarters. Readily mixing class and race metaphors, the bourgeoisie viewed the poor as “the unknown race.” The middle classes sought to “know” the poor by voyeuristic recourse to “sociological inquiries, detective novels, ghetto films . . . slumming tours, literary ‘ghetto’ sketches in popular magazines . . . ghetto types on the popular vaudeville stage, slide lectures presenting the photographs of Jacob Riis and other ‘flashes from the slum’”—and metropolitan tours and guidebooks charting “authentic” forays into poor immigrant neighborhoods. The meaning of Goldman’s physical body was folded into this “epistemology of the city,” identified with places that respectable persons would not visit, but that were reported to the respectable classes by way of the intrepid cross-class travels of female missionaries and social workers, male detectives, and journalists of either sex. Those representing Goldman to the general public needed for her to be a “type”—a “labor agitator,” a “bomb-throwing anarchist,” or a “Jewish garment worker”—to present a physical outside that would faithfully represent her anarchist inside. The new experts in the city’s scopic regimes had

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new technologies as well: “photography, the mug shot, and the fingerprint, along with such pseudosciences as physiognomy, phrenology, the Bertillon system of measurement, and Francis Galton’s ‘composite’ portraits of social and racial types.”50 Goldman’s physical presence was folded into these practices, her apprenticeship in anarchism articulated within the context of these technologies, interlocutors, and interpreters of truths written on the body. Small wonder that Goldman never smiled for the camera. In her life, the camera was an instrument of surveillance, gathering data to help the authorities organize criminals as well as criminalize dissent. Goldman gave nothing of herself to the camera; I know of only two photographs of her in which she is smiling. Her famous glower, in this context, suggests not a vituperative personality but a gesture of resistance against the data-gathering practices of the authorities. Following Romeyn’s insights into the importance of the production of ghetto “types” to the maintenance of bourgeois respectability, we can understand why, beyond the usual patriarchal license to evaluate women’s physical attributes, Goldman endured continued public scrutiny of her body. The respectable classes feared the con men and fakers who were able to pose successfully as bourgeois by mastering the manifestations of propriety indicated by dress, manner, speech, and bearing. The middle class’s faith that class differences were written in nature was paradoxically challenged by their own recognition that earnest students of upward mobility could consume or practice their way to propriety. Hence the importance of “types” in allowing for the needed decoding of the social body in order to establish authenticity, to the point that, when the needed types did not appear, they had to be produced. Jacob Riis’s famous photographs of the urban poor were often staged, as were the slumming tours for respectable ladies and gentlemen seeking dens of iniquity in Chinatown or Bohemian encounters in Greenwich Village. The lower classes were not slow to realize their opportunity, as attested by the instructions on “fitting in” available to the poor in “etiquette books, newspapers, the vaudeville theaters, and urban guidebooks” as well as the proliferation of opportunities for ghetto tourism organized by the poor themselves.51 Middle class “social masqueraders” who temporarily enter the ghetto to study its “types” went for the real by entering the sensorium of urban poverty—impersonating servants, workers, tramps, and beggars by emulating their clothing, manners, posture, walk, and speech. Young middle class ladies were already instructed in how to organize their facial expressions, to school their eyes and muscles as well as their posture and gait in proper lady-like self-presentation, so it was a ready shift to reverse the emulatory gaze and teach cross-class travelers to remake themselves within the habitus of the poor by learning to chew gum, hold a pipe, use certain slang, wear a cap, and in myriad other ways to write the marks of the working class

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on their bodies.52 While Goldman as a plump middle-aged woman was less titillating than Goldman as a shapely youth, the need for reporters, detectives, and other experts to interpret her appearance did not ebb. Given the ubiquity of opportunities for cross-class travel and the ease of passing, people might not be what they seem; yet their proper place in society was supposed to be written on their bodies for all to read. Therefore, reassurances needed to be offered at the same time that the source of the confusion was itself obscured. Goldman’s personal demeanor and presentation, always impeccably respectable, took place within the larger space of embodied danger in which anarchists lived. Anarchist spaces were filled with violence. Everywhere that Goldman went, she spoke and worked with people who were shot, clubbed, and trampled by public and private security forces during strikes and other protests.53 Most of the comrades working on Mother Earth and other journals had spent time in prison for political crimes. When the anarchists referred to security forces as Cossacks, they were not engaging in verbal extravagance; the uniformed, mounted men with clubs who had assaulted them in Russia were not so different from the uniformed, mounted men doing the same thing in the United States. Politically active radicals in the United States during this volatile time could not take for granted that they would be physically safe. Their bodies were not secure. Additionally, routine arrests, constant official harassment, ever-present and potentially fatal danger of spies and provocateurs—such conditions create a painfully disruptive personal and symbolic space while putting a high premium on friendship and loyalty.54 This level of violence strains the social imaginary: it fractures and at the same time binds the implicit understandings that enable common practices.

TOPICAL PUBLICS In New York, Goldman was part of a sprawling, lively net of anarchist organizations and relationships. When she was on the road, she generally visited those towns and cities where a sufficient community of anarchists and their fellow-travelers could organize, advertise, and support her lectures. The anarchist social imaginary flourished in these micro worlds, where a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand participants assembled in places they created to share or contest anarchist ideas, invent or participate in anarchist actions, and confirm or dispute anarchist identities. The beginnings of these spaces preceded Goldman, creating the presence that beckoned her to New York: of the two and a half million Germans who immigrated to the United States between 1851 and 1880, a few thousand radicals formed the bulk of the city’s socialist, social revolutionary, and

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anarchist communities.55 Goldman arrived in the United States in 1885, part of the first big wave of Russian immigration that enlarged the ranks of radical newcomers. “The Germans were inclined to be professorial,” historian Ronald Sanders writes in The Downtown Jews, “the Russians to be dashing and sentimental.”56 These anarchists formed a remarkable network of neighborhood-based clubs, which supported a significant number of radical journals (fifteen in New York alone), taverns, choral societies, orchestras, theaters, schools, festivals, parades, and a “picnic culture” in which hundreds or even thousands of anarchists and their families escaped the city’s sweltering tenements and dirty streets to gather in parks, flout the Sunday drinking laws with large quantities of union beer, and live their anarchism. Children’s games, raffles, skits, and fundraising appeals took place. Flags, banners, and insignia were displayed. Historian Tom Goyens records forty-two such societies in the New York/New Jersey area in the 1880s–1890s, each with twenty to thirty members; they elected temporary, rotating officers (including someone to procure the beer), organized weekly rehearsals for the music and drama performances, collected voluntary donations, and created a federated structure to coordinate their activities. The German groups named themselves in an orderly fashion by their neighborhood: Group College Point, Group Maspeth, etc.57 When Goldman arrived in the United States, anarchism was largely found in Chicago and other cities to the east with large immigrant populations. These cities doubled or even tripled in size between 1880 and 1900, largely due to the influx of immigrants.58 A contemporary of Goldman’s estimated in 1886 that there were 10,000 anarchists in the United States: 5000 in Chicago, 2500 in New York City, 700 in Milwaukee, 250 in Pittsburgh, 250 in Philadelphia, 200 in Cincinnati, 150 in St Louis, and 100 in Buffalo.59 Chicago police captain Michael J. Schaack, writing in the aftermath of the Haymarket events, estimated that there were 7,300 anarchists and fellow-travelers in Chicago in 1889.60 Until 1893, Goldman spoke and wrote mostly in German and Yiddish with communities Falk characterizes as “the formidable immigrant non-English-speaking subculture,” and she continued throughout her life to give two sets of lectures in most cities, one “English,” the other “Jewish.” In 1894, while Berkman was in prison for their attempted attentat against Frick, Goldman began to criticize the “flamboyant insularity” of the radical immigrant subpublics and began lecturing in English to wider audiences. As Goldman branched out to non-immigrant audiences, she cultivated some distance from immigrant communities; yet, Falk maintains, the immigrant Left remained “her loyal audience and refuge.”61 She and Berkman developed close ties to the Italian anarchist communities, and worked in exile for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti. They worked with immigrant groups such as the United Hebrew Trade Organization, the Chicago-based International Working People’s

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Association (I.W.P.A.), the Union of Russian Workers (a persistent thorn in the side of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer), the Central Labor Union (CLU) and some Italian and Irish immigrant trade unions.62 These unions and councils sponsored speeches, organized demonstrations, conducted strikes, published pamphlets, papers, and newsletters, and in myriad other ways put texts into circulation among immigrant workers. Reflecting the convictions of Kropotkin and later Landauer and Goldman that anarchism is a way of living in the present as well as a goal for the future, the anarchists cherished leisure time as a crucial element of a balanced life. Prominent socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit recalled in his autobiography that, after a hard day in the workshops, young radicals would gather on the rooftops of hot, stuffy tenement buildings to sing, play music, and talk politics.63 “Music was anarchism in practice,” Goyens concludes.64 Anarchists were, as one would expect, particularly fond of the Marseillaise and other revolutionary hymns—Johann Most wrote one—as well as poetry recitals and dramatic productions. Most also founded one of the theaters, the Free Stage of New York, which put on Gerard Hauptmann’s The Weavers in 1894, with Most’s own addition of some particularly incendiary lines. At the Commune Festival in Chicago in 1882, a play about the assassination of the Czar called Die Nihilisten, written by August Spies and acted by both Spies and Oscar Neebe, was performed. Other drama groups flourished in Manhattan and Newark.65 Goldman featured a discussion of Hauptmann’s play in her 1914 book The Social Significance of Modern Drama. The anarchists’ amateur dramatic clubs can be seen as the forerunners of the little theaters that Goldman helped to establish in her cross-country lecture tours. Two expressions of anarchist organizing that particularly concerned the authorities were unions and rifle clubs. Anarchist unions included bakers, cabinetmakers, tailors, typesetters, brewery workers, machinists, and cigar makers.66 The anarchists, reflecting Proudhon’s emphasis on artisan labor as part of the self-creating life, made what Goyens calls “a bid to reclaim the vanishing world of the independent craft tradition.”67 In 1918 a Rand School publication entitled The American Labor Yearbook noted that printing and bookbinding, a trade with large numbers of anarchists, was one of the five industries with highest rates of unionization at 34.3%. The other four highly unionized trades included: 88.8% of breweries, 45.4% of marble and stone workers, 34.2% of glassworkers, and 30.5% of miners.68 Stone, printing, and glass had relatively high percentages of skilled laborers, who were more likely to organize; breweries and mines had higher numbers of unskilled laborers, but they used an industrial form of organization to achieve relatively high unionization rates. Also, the brewery workers, many of whom were anarchists, unionized successfully, according to the Rand School report, because of “the effective use by the United Brewery Work-

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men of the boycott as an organizing device.”69 The rifle clubs seemed to be mostly for target practice, perhaps appealing to the more rowdy elements; Goyens found no evidence of any violent incident connected with such groups, although “they were feared as the stormtroopers of the coming revolution.”70 The clubs raised money for political prisoners—for example, $1000 was raised for Alexander Berkman’s Defense Fund in 1898—as part of the ferocious effort by radicals to decriminalize dissent and retrieve their comrades from incarceration.71 These fluid sites acted as a kind of supplement to the rest of the city— they were the anarchist extension, fragile yet durable chains of places and people claiming/making a place for anarchism. “Ideology, pleasure, and identity” were interwoven.72 As a working class immigrant woman, Goldman was one of those whom philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “the part with no part”—those whose bodies do not possess authority within the larger society, whose speech is considered noise rather than meaningful contribution to public life.73 The authorities worked overtime to maintain control over the urban spaces in which anarchism appeared, while the anarchists worked even harder to keep those spaces open, to evade official segmentations and prohibitions, to enact what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls “lines of flight,” mobile arrangements that escape the containments of the authorities.74 The possibility of becoming anarchist was enacted in these spaces, within what political theorist Michael Shapiro calls “loci of enunciation” that create “lines of flight from the symbolic tyranny of a majoritarian thinking that seeks to stabilize majorities and minorities.”75 This “mosaic of little worlds”76 created a kind of anarchist urban ecology, “a geography of resistance.”77 These places of articulation allowed anarchists to refigure their pasts, creating counter-memories and counter-narratives, nourishing their social imaginaries, and producing opportunities for embodied participation in anarchist lifeworlds. Among the anarchists’ greatest successes were their beerhalls. There were nearly 200 across the greater New York City area, hosting daily and weekly gatherings, along with larger halls rented for bigger events, including Cooper Union, the Germania Assembly Rooms, Clarendon Hall, New Irving Hall, and the Bowery theaters Thalia and Windsor. The owners of the halls were frequently members of the movement, a particularly important factor when the police tried to stifle anarchist speech by intimidating hall owners.78 The Criminal Anarchy Law, printed in Mother Earth in 1907, prohibited the gathering of two or more persons for the purpose of hearing anarchist ideas. In remarkably Deleuzean language, the law notified proprietors of halls that “permitting premises to be used for assemblages of anarchists” is punishable by ”imprisonment of no more than two years, fines of no more than $2000, or both.”79 Without supportive hall owners willing to take the risk, these spaces would have closed down.

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A contemporary of Goldman’s described the saloons as “a clearinghouse for the common intelligence.” Goyens notes: “By stepping through the saloon door, the German anarchist entered the realm of political activism. He or she was no longer simply an employee, a parent, or a Prussian but also a member of a revolutionary movement. His or her local group constituted the basic unit of this urban movement.” The entire family went to the saloon or beer garden—although women often had to enter through a separate “ladies entrance”—which was an essential part of what Goyens calls “the workers’ daily struggle for bread and meaning.”80 A very successful example of such a place was Justus Schwab’s beer hall at 50 First Street in Manhattan. Schwab, his father a forty-eighter, was one of the German anarchists who immigrated to the United States in 1869, the year Goldman was born. Schwab was a well-known and respected man, charismatic, jovial, and generous. At his funeral, 2000 people followed the hearse down Second Avenue.81 Goldman was stricken by his death, and praised him as a “champion of freedom, sponsor of labour’s cause, pleader for joy in life.”82 Writer James Gibbons Huneker, a regular at Schwab’s, praised its intellectual breadth: “Before Nietzsche’s and Stirner’s names were pronounced in our lecture-rooms they were familiarly quoted at Schwab’s.”83 Schwab’s beer hall was a magnet for international radicals as well as a target for the growing temperance movement.84 Writer Ambrose Bierce, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, labor leader John Swinton and many other fellow travelers joined the anarchists at Schwab’s. Schwab’s was both a place to talk about anarchism, and a place to do anarchism. In his remarkable account of the German anarchists in New York, Goyens calls it “a place where the anarchist ideal could be lived presently, a place of defiance and a space of resistance and revolutionary consciousness—a miniature anarchist society.”85 The décor was quite similar to that attributed to the home of Goldman’s fictional doppelganger, Yetta Silverman: scenes from the French revolution, an old piano, a bust of Shakespeare, a collection of periodicals, pamphlets, flyers, and theater handbills, and a lending library where Goldman read Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Spencer, J. S. Mill, and others.86 A member of the best known of the anarchist singing groups, the International Workers’ Choral Society, Schwab often played the piano and sang along. Goyens concludes, “This international and decidedly proletarian atmosphere made Schwab’s one of the first urban left-wing bohemian spaces in New York, decades before the emergence of Greenwich Village.”87 An ad for Schwab’s nurtured this image: “Don’t open your mouth idly, say something witty or drink.”88 Another lively anarchist beerhall, as reported by journalist John Gilmer Speed in 1892, was Tough Mike’s on East 5th Street. Looking for a vicarious experience with the city’s lunatic fringe, Speed entered the “narrow, dark,

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and dingy bar-room” with the name printed in white letters on the window. He wrote the following in Harper’s Weekly: This is the basement under a tenement house, and there are two rooms. The bar is on one side of the front room. In front of it is a large table at which men were drinking beer and on which was a zither and a man thumping out the ‘Marseillaise.’. . . [B]eyond the table was a reading desk, upon which were files of anarchistic papers, and above them portraits of the anarchists that have been executed for their crimes. . . . Just beyond the bar, the table, and the reading stand was a pool table stretching nearly across the room, and leaving scant space at either hand for the handling of a cue. Several men stood about this table with cues in their hands, but they ceased playing when I entered. . . . Beyond the pool table was a smaller room, and in the center of this was a table at which half a dozen men sat drinking beer out of those large glasses known on the Bowery, I believe, as schooners. And still beyond, at a smaller table, and next to a window that looked out into a small dark court yard, sat a young woman [Emma Goldman] who, had she not seemed so entirely at home, would have appeared out of place in such surroundings. She was reading a book, with a glass of beer by the side of it on the table.89

Often called the era of the little magazine, Goldman’s time could equally be described as the era of the little club.90 Anarchism was both ascribed to these places, as Goyens notes, and inscribed upon them.91 The Dil Pickle Club in Chicago, Ben Reitman’s hangout, was a gritty “hobohemian” gathering place that hosted an array of speakers from Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Carl Sandburg to “a Spanish spiritualist who shaved her head and dyed it green.”92 Stansell describes the lively Liberal Club in Greenwich Village, where the highs and lows of the New York Bohemian world gathered, as “a speech collage, something of a verbal equivalent to the experiments in painting and affixing that Braque and Picasso were conducting in Paris in 1913–1914.”93 Goldman delivered some of her more sexually explicit lectures in the Greenwich Village Club, including those on free love and homosexuality.94 While other clubs were probably less bold or rowdy than these Bohemian sites, they offered a consistent audience for the consideration of radical ideas. There were numerous Liberal Clubs: the Manhattan, Sunrise, and Harlem Liberal Clubs advertised in the pages of Goldman’s journal, Mother Earth. A diffuse network of organizations attracting free thinkers, secularists, and civil libertarians, the liberal clubs were most active at the local level. They went by a variety of names, cohering around “free thought principles” and “protesting the role of organized religion in state affairs.”95 Goldman once joked that the Friendship Liberal League in Philadelphia “for twentyfive years have been killing God one night and reviving him the next.”96 For

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a time, Goldman attended weekly meetings of the New York Liberal Club, which sold copies of Lucifer and Mother Earth at its events. Resisting the rampant public hysteria about her at the time, the club invited Goldman to speak one month after the McKinley assassination. She spoke to meetings of the American Secular Union, Harlem Liberal Alliance, National Defense Association (which defended those accused under the Comstock Laws of “obscenity,” including Walt Whitman for Leaves of Grass), the Liberal Alliance, Friendship Liberal League in Philadelphia, and the Free Speech League. She addressed Single Tax clubs, Freethinkers, Social Science Clubs, philosophical societies, church congregations, and literary societies. Then there were the salons, those remarkable institutions tantalizingly crossing spaces: between domestic and public space; between Bohemian middle class and radical immigrant workers; between varieties of progressive ideologies and social oddities. Goldman was a guest at the salon of wealthy socialite Mabel Dodge, as was Big Bill Haywood, “burly, oneeyed, and truly big, spouting incendiary rhetoric and trailing the scent of dynamite.” The elegant apartment was “swathed in silks and brocades”; Margaret Sanger, another guest, worried about the radicals, “with uncut hair, unshaven faces, leaning against valuable draperies.”97 While, as Barry Pateman notes, Goldman kept a certain “wry distance” from Dodge’s salon, she maintained a relation with the celebrity-oriented hostess.98 Dodge was one of the “radical rich” and an “extraordinary organizer of conversational community.” In Dodge’s immaculate home, Stansell reports, she created a gathering place and entertained her selected types: “socialists, trade unions, anarchists, suffragists, poets, lawyers, murderers, psychoanalysts, IWWs, birth controlists, newspapermen” and others skilled in the exchange of opinions.99 About Goldman and Berkman, Dodge remarked, “They were the kind that counted. They had authority. Their judgment was somehow true. One did not want their scorn.”100 These sorts of hybrid spaces must have hosted a sensorium, some way of bringing order to the variety of impulses that can register on our bodies and that can be sensed, as well as make sense. In the salons, bourgeoisie sophistication and elegance mixed with gritty working class radicalism. People who would not otherwise meet frequently came together to engage one another’s ideas, and everybody had a good meal. Dodge performed herself as a maker of public speech, and she was quite good at it. At the various clubs, too, speech was facilitated, cross-class conversations took place, if not as colorful or luxurious as the salons. Cross-class travel was not particularly popular among anarchists. It was a source of contention in the anarchist movement when Goldman began participating in non-immigrant, English-speaking liberal political circles, those Falk characterizes as “the lively edge of the liberal reform mainstream.”101 While some anarchists feared that Goldman was diluting anarchism’s radi-

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cal edge, she and Berkman held, in his words, that “it will prove of more real & lasting influence in the long run, to win for our ideas Americans of the intelligent middle class.”102 Over the course of Goldman’s agitational career, her reception in this larger public waxed and waned. Prior to the assassination of McKinley in 1901, the capitalist press was fascinated; post 1901, it was generally horrified. Everyone with a tie to anarchism was suspect, and for a time “loose affiliations across the borders between liberalism and radicalism receded.”103 McKinley’s assassin, even though he was a “native,” had immigrant parents and an obviously Polish last name, contributing to heightened suspicions of Eastern Europeans. Yet the convergences and divergences of issues and counterpublics was ongoing, and by 1906, when Mother Earth made its début, this successful anarchist journal was able to reach a broad left/liberal audience of as many as 10,000 readers.104 Goldman looked for pregnant intersections, where partial interests converged, and built on them. She “crossed over” to speak with groups who often viewed anarchists as the lunatic fringe, yet entertained some partial convergence with anarchist ideas, especially ideas about free speech, birth control, and other individualistic causes which did not require a critique of capitalism. By pushing these audiences to consider a more fully radical critique of existing institutions, and to embrace anarchism’s vision of social transformation, Goldman’s coalition politics connected anarchist counterpublics with a variety of more conventional life spaces. The most ambitious of these gathering places was the Ferrer Center in New York City, created by Goldman, Berkman, and other anarchists as the anarchist equivalent of what Margaret Kohn calls, in a European context, a house of the people. The Aurora Turner Hall occupied a similar position in Chicago’s working class immigrant communities some years earlier, offering union organizing, drama and choral societies, alternative education, libraries, and reading rooms; “the Turners,” as their participants were called, raised funds for the defense of Haymarket martyr August Spies, who was a prominent member.105 New York’s Ferrer Center hosted a journal, a theater, a café, lectures and classes in art, drama, politics, and literature, and a Modern School, part of an international network of non-authoritarian, joyous learning environments based on the educational philosophy of martyred Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer. Stansell describes the Ferrer Center as “a pastiche of class politics, modern culture, and fin-de-siècle aestheticism: lecturers on birth control, a one act play by a Ferrer dramatist in which the characters remained immobile for its entirety, scent concerts emanating different perfumes, jaunts to Isadora Duncan performances, and reports on IWW strikes.”106 Writer and painter Manuel Komroff recalled lectures by Theodore Schroeder, free speech activist and friend of Goldman, and by radical lawyer Clarence Darrow.107 Foreign-born intellectuals and radicals mixed with their “native” (that is, non-immigrant) counterparts, and working class

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parents brought their children to educate themselves under the tutelage of middle class teachers. The Ferrer Association and the Modern School movement provided a key opportunity for connecting anti-authoritarian middle class liberals with immigrant, working class radicals. During World War I, the Ferrer Center attracted numerous expatriate draft resisters from France, England, and Italy, foreshadowing the anti-conscription campaigns that resulted in Goldman’s and Berkman’s imprisonment and exile. The Ferrer Center was a model, a foretaste of freedom, a place where anarchists could relate to one another as if they already lived in an anarchist society. It was also a place of organizing against existing constraints. While the movement had its greatest success in the United States, numerous Modern Schools were created in Spain, based on Ferrer’s original Escuela Moderna in Barcelona, before state suppression closed them down. Schools were founded in Brazil, Argentina, China, Japan, and much of Western and Eastern Europe. The schools also served as evening schools for adults and as community centers; the Ferrer Center was a vibrant source of anarchist art, drama, and literature until it was forced to close in 1918.108 Aging anarchists in the 1970s recounted their youthful involvement in the Ferrer Center with enthusiasm. Moritz Jagendorf, who founded the Free Theatre at the Center, recalled it as a “seething ocean of thought and activity, everybody working and creating.” Maurice Hollod, a student in the Ferrer school and later a successful chiropractor, said, “That’s where things were happening! I got to know people from all parts of the world and all parts of the radical spectrum.” Emma Gilbert, a child psychologist and graduate of Radcliffe, named by her anarchist parents after Emma Goldman (whom Gilbert found “repulsive”), appreciated the influence of the Ferrer Center educational philosophy on later education, psychology, and the arts. The movement to organize the unemployed, led by anarchists Frank Tannenbaum and Alexander Berkman, and entailing brutal confrontations with police, worked out of the Ferrer Center. Fine ladies, enjoying the “ghetto craze,” sometimes went slumming at Ferrer, no doubt looking for some vicarious thrills through encountering anarchist “types.”109 The schools were often the heart of anarchist communities; as educational philosopher Judith Suissa finds, anarchist schools were “at one and the same time a way of establishing the oral basis for a self-governing, decentralized society, and an experiment in creating such a society.”110 Will Durant, an early teacher at the Ferrer school and later a popular historian, summarized the educational philosophy as “free the child and the child will free the race.”111 The Modern Schools featured a hands-on curriculum integrating mental and manual aspects of learning, led by the children themselves, with rules that were functional and temporary.112 After the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, and the backlash against anarchism caused by the subsequent unsuccessful plan to assassinate mine owner John Rockefeller

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(the Lexington Avenue bombing), the students and teachers began to imagine relocating the school to the countryside by designing the new community within the old. “‘We laid out roads and community holdings and built orange crate houses,’ Emma Cohen recalls. ‘We built our own community and played ‘colony’ till the spring, when we moved out to Stelton to begin to live the game we had played.’”113 After the school was moved to Stelton, New Jersey, it lasted forty more years, becoming the longest lived of the approximately thirty Modern Schools in North America.114 The habitus created by the modern schools must have been a tangible expression of an anarchist sensorium. The nascent natural foods and vegetarian movements flourished at the anarchist schools: Dr. Benzion Liber, parent of Amour Liber, the first pupil enrolled in the New York Ferrer School, was a hygienist, a physician, and “author of a dozen books and scores of articles on diet, health, and the like.”115 At Stelton, “most were vegetarians,” a practice largely unheard of in the rest of society.116 Children and adults wore less restrictive clothing, sometimes no clothing at all; they made as much noise as they wanted to make, went in and out of classrooms as they desired, got as dirty as they wanted to get. Art classes at Ferrer employed nude models, and piano music accompanied the adults and children as they worked.117 Mary Rappaport, whose mother was the last principal of the Stelton school, recalled the creative, integrated curriculum: “We drew a big map of Greece on the floor—we were all on our hands and knees doing it. We were going a Greek play at the same time, which had to do with Greek history and which we ourselves made up. So we were learning theater, geography, history, reading and writing in one stroke.” Art and theater were central to a Modern School education: Magda Schoenwetter, daughter of Russian actor Pavel Orleneff (whose company Goldman managed), remembered seeing Maeterlinck’s Bluebird and Gorky’s Lower Depths as a student at Ferrer. Artist Hugo Gellert drew covers for The Masses and The Liberator, and helped direct the Children’s Theater at Stelton. Gellert organized a show of the children’s art at the City Club in New York, and recalled photographer Alfred Stieglitz asking him, “What did you do to them? Every one of them is a genius!”118 Other anarchist schools flourished: libertarian socialist Pryns Hopkins ran an experimental school called Boy Land in Santa Barbara (1912–1918) and later a school near Paris where Goldman visited in 1931 before Hopkins returned to the United States to teach at Claremont College. The Rand School of Social Science, an intellectual center of socialism, featured lectures by Jack London, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, and many other well-known radicals who crossed between socialism and anarchism. Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, was founded in 1923 by Goldman’s cellmate at Jefferson City Penitentiary, Kate Richards O’Hare, and other socialists. Camp Germinal in Pennsylvania, organized by Radical Library

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anarchists in Philadelphia, had a children’s theater organized by Richard Gilbert, as did the anarchist colony at Mohegan, whose active theater was part of their Modern School; Lakewood School, run by radical educators Nellie and Jim Dick, took children to Shakespeare’s plays in New York City.119 There was an anarchist school in the East End of London, and an anarchist Université Populaire in Paris, serving as “magnets for bookish poor people.”120 These remarkable places made a vigorous intellectual life available to working class families. Both Mother Earth and Berkman’s journal The Blast carried regular announcements of meetings of radical libraries, current events discussions, open fora, dances, concerts, dinners, and other social/political events at which audiences were constituted, printed and spoken anarchist texts were put into circulation, and unflagging efforts were made to constitute and sustain anarchist public spaces. The schools, community centers, colonies, and libraries were houses of the people, reminders that, as Margaret Kohn notes in her powerful analysis of radical space, “under adverse conditions, the subaltern classes created political spaces that served as nodal points of public life.”121 I am not insisting that these were all satisfactorily democratic spaces, only that they opened possibilities for producing lifeworlds out of which radical publics could emerge. One final site of emergence for topical anarchist counterpublics was prison. Anarchists had frequent occasion to explore the uncertain political and intellectual spaces of prison. Goldman served a year in Blackwell’s Island in 1893 for allegedly inciting unemployed workers to “take bread” from the wealthy, three weeks in the Queens County jail for illegally circulating information about preventing conception, and two years in Jefferson City Penitentiary, 1917–1919, for opposing conscription during World War I. Beyond her own incarceration, her life was fundamentally shaped by the fourteen grinding years Berkman served in a Pennsylvania state penitentiary for his attempted attentat on Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the Carnegie steel works in Homestead, Pennsylvania, who used private Pinkerton troops to brutally suppress a strike in 1892. Berkman also served two years in federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia, for opposing conscription. Each endured shorter jail sentences on several other occasions, and both were imprisoned on the ship Buford during their journey into exile. While prison was painful and degrading for both, Berkman’s time behind bars was far harsher and more damaging than Goldman’s. In the small world of imprisoned women, Goldman was a high-profile inmate and received relatively lenient treatment, while Berkman’s notoriety worked against him and he endured much more brutal incarceration. Like Rosa Luxemburg, whose prison guards bid her farewell with tears in their eyes because she had “insisted on treating them like human beings,” Goldman provoked similar loyalties: the Commissioner of Corrections for Jefferson City Penitentiary,

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when asked whether Goldman had given him any difficulties, replied indignantly, “I should say not; why, Emma Goldman is a lady.”122 Prison was a formative political space for Goldman and Berkman. Both anarchists considered themselves political prisoners; in their two-year incarceration for opposing conscription, they helped create the League for Amnesty for Political Prisoners, insisting that prison officials deliver mail addressed to them as political prisoners, in defiance of the government claim that there were none. The amnesty campaign was an organizing vehicle for pressing the distinction between ordinary crimes and political offenses, a difference widely recognized in other countries but largely unarticulated in the United States. Writing from prison to her niece Stella Ballantine on February 9, 1919, Goldman remarked: Political amnesty whether it fails or succeeds is really the first step ever made in this country to establish the distinction between common crime and political offenses. The whole social struggle depends upon that distinction, otherwise it will have to knock in vain at the door of the people. They will never listen with respect to the social rebel unless they cease seeing in him a criminal, a villain, a wild beast. So the campaign for political amnesty goes farther than the mere liberation of political prisoners.123

For Goldman and Berkman, prison was a potent node in the circuits of relations through which anarchist ideas circulated. Legitimizing the actions of those imprisoned for unauthorized political activities was crucial to amplifying the circulation of anarchist ideas. Prison was also school. They made use of their prison time to develop their intellectual breadth as well as their anarchist politics. They refined their ideas about their broadest and most general public, the People. Prison was the place where they met, perhaps for the first time, poor and working class people from outside their communities of eastern European Jewish immigrants. Both assumed leadership roles in prison, often at considerable cost to themselves; both were respected, even adored, by other inmates. They read expansively (assisted by sympathetic prison chaplains), rethought their views on revolutionary violence, protected and cared for other inmates, and found ways to continue their political work.124 Both anarchists recognized the imprisoned, like the unemployed and the homeless, as potential allies in the struggle for justice. While they objected to the exploitation of prison labor, they did not conclude that prisoners should not work. Rather, they should be paid a reasonable wage in order to prepare for life after release. Further, they are laborers and they should be organized. In “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” Goldman wrote: “If the workingman wants to avoid these effects [recidivism, creation of scabs, anti-social behavior], he should insist on the right of the convict to work, he should meet him as a brother, take him into his organization,

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and with his aid turn against the system which grinds them both.”125 Having labored under the harsh, health-destroying conditions of the prison shop, Goldman asked, “is it not high time for organized labor to stop its idle howl; and to insist on decent remuneration for the convict, even as labor organizations claim for themselves?”126 As with their campaign to organize the unemployed, the goal of organizing prison labor suggests an expansive understanding of the potential to bring those outside the usual ranks of the proletariat into the fertile spaces of anarchist counterpublics. The anarchist sensorium must have been significantly affected by the presence of so many people who had engaged in physical confrontations with authorities and had spent time, sometimes years or even decades, in prison. Political theorist William Connolly reflects on the consequences at the sensory level for his students who were bullied and provoked by police: “one’s approach to authority in general may be colored more darkly as this event merges into one’s implicit urban memory bank.”127 Goldman and her colleagues had these sorts of encounters, and much worse, all the time, perhaps explaining her contempt for people who refused to take comparable risks and do the needed labor to reprocess those traumas. Such interactions were formative at the sensory level. Goldman’s words were needed to reframe those experiences, to resist the affect-management apparatus of the state, to produce the sought-for counter-effects. Perhaps she even courted arrest or flirted with danger in order to bring about the circumstances in which she could produce the needed counter-effect, to reinterpret “the accumulated effects of such micropolitical events on the color of perception.”128 Her friend Margaret Anderson remarked, “she was always grim when distressed . . . she looked as if she would knock out the universe.”129 Perhaps sardonic invective was so often her rhetorical strategy in confronting authority because its rhetorical resources were useful in seizing the discursive ability to reframe hostile encounters. On the Road Goldman spent a great deal of her life on the road. For about twenty years, she traveled annually across the United States, sometimes entering Canada, on an exhausting schedule of lectures. In 1911, for example, she reported in Mother Earth that “In six months we visited 18 states and 50 cities, exploring a great deal of new territory. During that time we held 150 meetings and debates, and as we traveled about 10,000 miles, we had but few free evenings.”130 She spent thousands of nights in hotel rooms, which were sometimes inhospitable and even dangerous, as in the San Diego free speech fight in 1912 when Goldman was threatened by an angry mob and Reitman kidnapped and tortured.131 When there was no money for a hotel, she spent

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the night with comrades, often in crowded or embarrassing settings but also venues for utilizing and extending the anarchist networks of comrades’ private spaces employed in public practices. There were frequent comic incidents, such as the time in San Francisco when her friend Raney rented an apartment for her from an elderly lady, forthrightly telling the owner that the new tenant would be Emma Goldman, the anarchist. Evidently imagining an anarchist to be something like a violinist or a cellist, the lady replied, “Well, as long as she does not practice it in the apartment, it’s all right.”132 The map of her travels in the United States and Canada suggests several insights into her public presence in North America. First, the sheer weight of her presence: more than two decades of cross-country lecture tours virtually carved a path across the continent, moving her body, voice, and words in a cycle of voyage and return. The accumulated density of the lecture tours, glimpsed in this sedimented representation, provokes curiosity about how people with little money could secure all the train tickets, hotel and restaurant bills, short-term apartment rentals, taxis, and shipping costs that even the most frugal approach to travel must have entailed. Goldman sometimes charged a modest admission to her lectures, a source of funding for the tours and for the journal, but there was still a chronic shortage of money and a constant need to fundraise. Behind this question of anarchist management, one glimpses the enduring communities of anarchists and their fellow travelers in these towns and cities, hardy souls who often faced the opprobrium of their bosses, neighbors, parishioners, and law enforcement officials to host Emma Goldman, year after year. One can also sense the financial desperation when Goldman returned to New York from an exhausting tour, often to face crises of housing or publication for which the tours were intended to raise money. Second, the map reveals the unexpected prominence of anarchism in the Midwest and the Northwest. One expects the cosmopolitan cities in New York, Massachusetts, and California to have been relatively receptive to radical voices, but Goldman’s repeated visits to Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are less consistent with contemporary understandings of those states’ place in American political imaginaries. U.S. political history becomes a little more complex, less reducible to platitudes about red states and blue states, in light of the lively, robust presence of anarchism in America’s heartlands. Third, the map indicates Goldman’s near total absence from the South. Other than two brief forays into Texas, she did not go to the South because there were no communities of anarchists there to invite and host her. If we imagine that the repeated presence of this high-profile radical in one’s community, year after year after year, had an effect on the community’s self-understanding, then that effect would have been entirely missing in the

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Figure 2.1.

The influential whirl of Emma Goldman. Map by Rebecca Carey.

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South. I speculate that even people who never went to a Goldman lecture in, say, Denver or Indianapolis or St. Louis, were nonetheless effected in a subtle way by becoming used to her visits, by recognizing their hometown as a place that regularly hosted radical speakers and entertained radical ideas. Those people might have responded in various ways to the news that “Emma Goldman is here, again”—they might have been indifferent, incensed, curious, titillated, horrified—but nonetheless, I imagine that over time the perceivable contours of their lifeworld shifted slightly and the possibilities of more vigorous public spaces enjoyed a modest growth. Goldman’s first foray into the cross-country lecture tour was organized by her mentor Johann Most, who spotted her talent although he could not, in the end, abide the competition. Despite her stumbling first experiences speaking in upstate New York, she recalled the joy of finding her voice: “I could sway people with words! Strange and magic words that welled up from within me, from some unfamiliar depth. I wept with the joy of knowing.”133 Goldman had a perceptible, often lasting effect on her listeners; she helped them to believe in their own possibilities. Roger Baldwin, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, initially went to hear Goldman on a bet, but credited her with launching his political activism.134 Painter Robert Henri read her book Anarchism and Other Essays, attended her lecture, then offered his services to the movement, leading to his collaboration with George Bellows and other artists at the Ferrer Center. Henri remarked, “I had never heard so good a lecture.”135 Writer Margaret Anderson, co-editor of The Little Review, quipped with her usual tone of loving distance, “I heard Emma Goldman lecture and had just enough time to turn anarchist before the presses closed.”136 “She possessed you when she spoke,” Sarah Taback recalled to Paul Avrich.137 Many thousands of people attended her lectures, which generally were free or asked a small admission fee. Copies of Mother Earth and other pamphlets were sold for ten cents or given away. About 5000 people were present at her famous “take bread” speech that earned her first prison term in 1893.138 She spoke in whatever venue the local anarchists could arrange: in winter of 1907, for example, she spoke in the Paine Memorial Hall in Boston, at the Oddfellows Hall in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in a private hall located above a dental parlor in Patterson, New Jersey.139 Goldman’s listeners reported that, no matter how many of them shared her voice, everyone felt that she was speaking directly to them. Michael Warner playfully notes, “Public discourse craves attention like a child. Texts clamor at us. Images solicit our gaze. Look here! Listen! Hey! . . . The direction of our glance can constitute our social world.”140 Goldman’s lectures were carefully calibrated to cultivate the gaze of a variety of potential attendees. She prepared her talks carefully, with plentiful written notes. She is reputed to have taken a swig of whiskey before mounting

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the platform to speak. While we have only scant film footage of Goldman speaking (see chapter 4), we have several accounts of her lectures that, taken together, offer an evocative picture of her work in relation to her topical publics, the people who saw her in person and who so often reported that she changed their lives. Goldman never lost her touch: Irving Sterling heard Goldman speak during her 1934 tour of the United States and recalled, “She was still a great speaker, with a clear, ringing voice and an excellent command of English and knew how to handle a crowd.” Maurice Hollod concurred: “the fire was still there.” San Francisco educator Audrey Goodfriend met Goldman in 1939 in Canada: “She impressed me as an old woman, but when she started to speak the years dropped off. She was one of the liveliest people I ever met.”141 Here is Falk’s description of Goldman at work on the speaker’s platform: 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 audience 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. Energetic 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 lecturers, 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.142

Ben Reitman’s report, “Three Years: Report of the Manager,” from his days organizing Goldman’s tours, adds some details to the picture. He described a typical day on the road: Goldman rose early, was interviewed by reporters, met with comrades, wrote letters and articles. Reitman provided an eclectic list of places Goldman spoke—theaters, lodge halls (Eagles, Owls, Odd Fellows, Masons, but not Knights of Columbus), armories, churches, court houses, “barns, vacant lots, back rooms of saloons, and houses of the comrades.” He countered the criticism that Goldman was “getting away from the working element” by pointing out how hard it was to rent labor

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halls: “The good socialists are like the Catholics; they only go to their own church.” Reitman was a master at publicity: he estimated that in three years he distributed half a million cards, enlivened with anarchist quotations, announcing Goldman’s talks. They often charged admission, but I.W.W. members, soldiers, and those unemployed got in free. While in some venues the authorities stopped her from speaking, in others they attended her lectures: “I have seen as many as twenty-five senators and members of the legislature at one of E.G.’s lectures,” Reitman reported. “We get very few colored people, but quite a number of Japanese and Chinese at our meetings” and “a large number of women.” They distributed between 50 and 500 books and pamphlets. For example, they distributed thousands of free speech pamphlets, telling of “successful free speech fights in Chicago, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Cheyenne, Columbus, New Haven, and many other towns” so that the word would spread of their victories.143 A third brief account comes from Richard Drinnon’s biography Rebel in Paradise, based on his personal communication with scholars at Oxford who heard Goldman speak to the college’s American club after her exile from the United States: As the Rhodes scholar who introduced her recalls, “She talked for two hours, without notes, in copious detail, with magnificent management of her theme—and brought the house down with a Jeffersonian ending on freedom of the mind. She was weeping as a hundred American boys crowded around to meet her—another hundred of English boys just didn’t count with her.”144

A fourth account comes from an article in the August, 1908 issue of Mother Earth called “Proper Methods of Propaganda” by William C. Owen, who also contributed to the single-tax journal Everyman.145 According to Owen’s first-person account, Goldman gives “palpable facts” about the monstrous power and resources of elites compared to the ordinary working person; “a powerful impression is made; the audience goes away restless with discontent, and privilege scents danger.” Goldman does not draw “fancy pictures” of the future but stresses that the system has “already broken down hopelessly, since there are vast masses whom it cannot provide with the barest of life’s necessaries. Hearing this, people ponder. They go away worked; harassed by an essentially revolutionary idea.” They think it’s not just a problem for the vague future, but now. They are brought face to face with claims for individual freedom that are not “a pleasant theory to be argued in dressing gown and slippers” but “an essential principle of revolt.” The listener asks, “Why am I being sacrificed?” Goldman “treats the church as an enemy here and now, because it preaches submission where men should be ashamed to submit.” And she points out that those who brutalize others also attend church. Owen calls Goldman’s “at once the scientific and the dramatic methods.” She takes

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a general idea and fits it to the here and now, making a practical point, “being herself a member of an essentially practical race.”146 One final account of Goldman’s lectures comes from a report available to us courtesy of the meticulous records of the Immigration and Naturalization agents assigned to undercover surveillance. About 200 people came to hear her speak on “Trade Unionism” in Lowell in 1907, according to Agent Louis J. Domas, “and as all of them understood English, there was a great deal of enthusiasm displayed by the audience, which was evidenced by the frequent applause.”147 In Paterson, home to a lively anarchist community, Agent F. W. Maasch found “about five hundred men, women and children in the hall.” Finding ethnicity and nationality to be useful categories, he reported that “Hebrews [were] predominating. A number of Italians were also present.”148 Goldman spoke for about an hour and a half, followed by animated discussions as people gathered in groups to talk about her remarks. In addition to railing against the rich and powerful, Goldman informed her audience about radical politics in Europe and Russia as well as offering critical analyses of specific labor actions and urging her audience to apply the principles of anarchism in their own lives through direct action. Multiply these sorts of encounters to the hundreds—including topics ranging from birth control, homosexuality, and “free love,” through union organizing and the eight-hour day to militarism, political prisoners, contemporary drama, and freedom of speech—and expand the locale to include cities and towns across the United States, Europe, Great Britain, and Canada—and you will have some idea of the dense fabric of public speech that Goldman wove. Anarchism in general, and Goldman in particular, was able to create and address these topical publics so effectively because she embodied a particular “culture of conviction,” in Panagia’s words, that carried a regime of perception governing what can count as sense-making expressions.149 I speculate that, to approach Goldman’s sensorium, we might imagine a temporality that I’m going to call crowd time. Crowd time, I suggest, would be noisy, confrontational, exuberant, and uneven. It would be compressed in some expanses, elongated in others, as it stretched and flowed around constitutive events: the vagaries of the audience, the disposition of hecklers, the positioning of FBI stenographers, the larger context of political struggle, the arrival of the police. The air would be charged, stuffy, dense with perspiration and expectations. At outdoor lectures and demonstrations, given the styles of her day, she would have looked out over a sea of hats. Political theorist Lars Tonder suggests that a Goldman lecture might have been like a really good concert, where the band stops playing but the music continues.150 Perhaps the sensory intensity would escape organization by discrete organs: one might be able to feel the sounds on one’s skin, hear the smells with one’s eyes. One’s nervous system could have been agitated by the barrage of words, the call to feel, the postures of

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urgency. During the animated question and answer sessions, perhaps one would not be quite sure who was speaking and who was listening, as Goldman’s words moved her audience, became their words as well. The intensity and magnetism of her words, her voice, her gestures, beckoned her listeners to become people to whom anarchism could speak, people who could be summoned toward its possibilities.

TEXTUAL COUNTERPUBLICS Michael Warner reminds us that publics are multiple, “potentially infinite in number,” and composed of multiple, interactive layers.151 No single text can create a public. Nor can a single voice, a single genre, even a single medium. All are insufficient to create the kind of reflexivity that we call a public, since a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. Not texts themselves create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time.152

From the thorough records kept by the government during the Red Scare, we have an account of the “concatenation of texts through time” that created anarchist counterpublics. In 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, making his case to the Senate for even more stringent anti-radical laws, helpfully cataloged the available radical publications into 222 foreign-language publications, 105 English-language publications, plus 144 texts published in foreign countries and distributed in the United States and “hundreds of books, pamphlets, and other publications which also receive wide circulation.”153 Texts were circulated in a plethora of books, newsletters, pamphlets, magazines, speeches, letters, handbills, and journals in Russian, German, Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, nearly every other European and many Asian languages, and (eventually) English. Warner also calls our attention to “a temporality of circulation”: “a regular flow of discourse” that organizes time, as time organizes it. We can think of this as the textual version of anarchist time, a kind of “crowd time” that is virtual rather than face-to-face. “Public discourse is contemporary, and it is oriented to the future; the contemporaneity and the futurity in question are those of its own circulation.”154 Usually, in studying anarchist publications, the controversial content of the material stands out; but Warner calls our attention to the temporal regularity and common calendar of publications—not so much what was said, but the pace and timing with which discourse was put into circulation. Contrary to the stereotype of anarchists as hopelessly disorganized, they cultivated a remarkable proclivity toward regular, clearly dated publications. The punctual production of anarchist

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interventions into current affairs had its own rhythm and pace. In the case of Mother Earth, Goldman’s annual lecture tours across the country were part of the regularity of the cycle of monthly publication. Goldman reported back from the field, informing readers about anarchist activities in other regions. Her animated field reports served as radical travelogues for readers less able to visit other regions, building geographic familiarity that helped people imagine themselves as part of a larger anarchist landscape.155 Mother Earth, according to Falk’s assessment, linked anarchism’s underground movement to public organizing. The editors set circulation at 3000, and they could have sold more but could not afford bigger runs. However, well-handled copies passed from reader to reader, producing considerably higher circulation. Falk describes the journal: “At sixty pages and produced in a small five-by-eight format, the publication fit in a worker’s pocket. Well printed on relatively high-quality paper, Mother Earth was a visual representation of an intrepid, literate, and enterprising association of anarchists.”156 Mother Earth was modeled on Augustin Hamon’s L’Humanite Nouvelle, and distributed material otherwise available only in Europe, including works by Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Darwin, and Nietzsche, plus French anarchist Jean Grave, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, and many others. Mother Earth raised money for strikes, legal fees, prison breaks, and arms purchases for Russia, connecting all kinds of readers to the militant face of anarchism. The journal regularly marked the anarchist counterpublic by producing it in discourse. No wonder, from this point of view, Goldman and her comrades struggled so hard to maintain the journal despite scarce resources and government harassment: it was not simply that anarchism happened elsewhere and Mother Earth reported it, but that the acts of writing, soliciting, editing, producing, and circulating Mother Earth were a happening of anarchism. The reliable punctuality of circulation was crucial to the shared sense of participating in discussion “unfolding in a sphere of activity.” The temporality of a textual public is “not timeless” and “not without issue”: Warner points out that “the more punctual and abbreviated the circulation, and the more discourse indexes the punctuality of its own circulation, the closer a public stands to politics.”157 In this light, it is understandable that the writers, editors, and producers of struggling, under-resourced anarchist publications would nonetheless insist on frequent and regular appearance. The circulation itself is an active part of the process, as anthropologists Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma insist; it is not the “inert opposite” of the writing.158 Of the sixty anarchist and other progressive publications documented by the editors of the Emma Goldman Papers and by historian Paul Avrich, twenty-eight were weeklies, nineteen were monthlies, six were semi-monthly, three were dailies, two were biweekly, and only two were variable. The frequency and regularity are not simply traits of instrumental

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delivery vehicles for a politics that happens elsewhere—they are the politics, part of the ongoing production of public temporality. As rhetorician Dilip Gaonkar and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli explain, the “flows and forms are integrally related” so that the form of circulation both conveys and conducts social life.159 Printers The flow and the form of anarchist textual counterpublics came together in the person and the machine of the anarchist printer. Along with garment work, printing was one of the most common trades of anarchists. When government repression tightened, anarchist journals often had trouble finding a printer willing to take the risk, so having printers in the movement was as important as including beer hall owners in terms of facilitating the circulation of anarchist ideas.160 As artisans proud of their craft, printers often provided leadership within anarchist circles. The printers’ skilled laboring bodies and the presses’ irreplaceable mechanical functions held pride of place in anarchist communities, following a tradition of radical printers that included Josiah Warren, resident of Robert Owen’s New Harmony community in Indiana in the 1820s, who taught typesetting to his son.161 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the founding anarchist figures, was a printer. Joseph Ishill, widely known as “the anarchist printer,” ran the Berkeley Heights press for more than forty years, producing approximately 250 books and pamphlets “whose publication through the usual commercial channels was unfeasible.”162 Ishill was a crucial link in the political economy of circulation, selecting texts by major thinkers, including Kropotkin, Benjamin Tucker, Havelock Ellis, Elie and Élisée Reclus; lovingly printing them with the greatest artistry; and adorning them with woodcuts and engravings by well-known artists. Ishill also printed the striking Modern School Magazine and lent his talents to teach printing at the Modern School at Stelton. Joseph Labadie, founder of the Labadie Collection of radical literature at the University of Michigan, was a well-known anarchist printer, as was his son Laurance who inherited his father’s small hand press and his passion for anarchism.163 Joe Labadie was one of the “tramp printers,” the men and women who traveled the country, combining the lifestyle of a hobo with the craft of printing and the politics of union organizing. Carlotta Anderson’s story of Labadie’s life, All-American Anarchist, cites an 1889 issue of the Typographical Journal: “there are more typological unions who owe their inception to the proselyting [sic] efforts of the tramp, than to . . . all other causes combined.”164 Berkman worked as a printer for a time, but refused to purchase others’ labor for wages and soon closed down his shop, saying it was as liberating as leaving prison.165 Of the eight defendants in the Haymarket trial,

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Albert Parsons and Adolf Fischer were printers, while Michael Schwab was a bookbinder.166 Abe Isaak, Jr., learned the printing trade by assisting his family in publishing The Firebrand and Free Society. Ahrne Thorne, editor of the Yiddish anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime for much of its eighty-seven years of publication, worked earlier as a printer. Dutch anarchist Tom Meelis was a printer, as were Italian anarchists Giovanni Eramo (printer of Cronaqca Sovversiva), Aldino Felicani (printer of La Notizia and Controcorrente), and Engene Travaglio (printer of Free Society, Lao Protesta, Umana, The Petrel, Why?).167 Hippolyte Havel printed the anarchist journal Revolt in the basement of the Ferrer Center. Bill Shatoff, who helped organize the Union of Russian Workers (the Slavic counterpart of the I.W.W.) printed 100,000 copies of Margaret Sanger’s early and quite illegal pamphlet on Family Limitation.168 He later translated it into Yiddish, printed more copies, and sent them to Russia.169 Harry Kelly, one of anarchism’s key organizers, was a printer, producing The Rebel; Marc Epstein of Mohegan Colony printed Mother Earth for a time as well as Vanguard and the much-praised programs for the Free Theater performances at the Ferrer Center.170 Benjamin Tucker had a printing press in New York and George Schumm was his translator as well as printer.171 Rudolf Rocker was a bookbinder.172 His son Fermin Rocker was a lithographer.173 Goldman’s friend Mark Mratchny “established a clandestine press in Siberia and joined Makhno’s guerrilla army” in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution.174 Alexandre Atabekian, who became friends with Kropotkin, Élisee Reclus, and Jean Grave while studying in Geneva, was a printer.175 When Kropotkin died, Goldman recounts in her autobiography that anarchist comrades “broke the seal the Cheka had placed on the printing establishment of our old comrade Atabekian, and our friends worked like beavers to prepare the Bulletin in time for [Kropotkin’s] funeral.”176 Ramón Romero Rosa, Cuban anti-colonial labor activist who co-founded the weekly Ensayo Obrero (“Workers Trial”), was a printer.177 Pedro Esteve, a leader among the Spanish anarchists in the United States, was a printer in Tampa and set type for La Questione Sociale in Paterson.178 Wilhelm Könnecke was a German anarchist printer who became a colporteur (salesman) first for Freiheit, then Der Anarchist.179 While in exile in Odessa, Russia, Goldman and Berkman encountered a man named Ordovsky, an American comrade and “first class printer.”180 Anarchists Lucy and Bob Robbins had an “auto-house,” an early recreational vehicle containing a mobile print shop.181 While most of the radical printers were men, Goldman’s friend Margaret Anderson learned “the masculine art of typesetting” in her youth and there were women among the tramp printers as well.182 Emma Langdon, a printer in Colorado, printed her paper alone after her male coworkers were jailed for criticizing the mining companies.183

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Still more printers were mentioned by the nearly 200 elderly anarchists who spoke with Paul Avrich for the unique collection of Anarchist Voices. Sigor Bogin had been a printer in Russia, before coming to the United States. A Jewish printer in Toronto, identified only as Mr. Simkin, published a pamphlet on Sacco and Vanzetti by Arturo Bortolotti, the last political prisoner whom Goldman would save from deportation. Robert Bek-Fran printed Why? and Resistance; Holley Cantine, Jr., set type for Retort, and Fred Woodworth set type for The Match. Veteran anarchist Sam Dolgoff remembered Donald Crocker as “a notorious drunkard but a first-rate printer.” Louis Slater, Richard Ellington, and Paul Scott were all printers. The Italian anarchist arrested for questioning in the 1919 bomb conspiracy, who fell to his death under mysterious circumstances after a Department of Justice interrogation, was a printer named Andrea Salsedo; his comrade Roberto Elia was also a printer, also arrested, later deported. Charles Govan was a printer at Home Colony, as was Jay Fox. Becoming something of a parody of themselves, some anarchists in the contentious Sunrise Colony, led by Aaron Rockoff and his friends, printed their own internal opposition paper Sonrayz Shtime to express their criticism of leader Joseph Cohen.184 The role of the printer was respected, even revered, within anarchist publics. Regardless of their professed atheism, anarchists were people of the book. Berkman wrote a tribute to Ishill that many shared: “Believe me, I admire your devotion to this good cause, and your wonderful energy and perseverance in compiling, setting, publishing and binding such wonderful products of your art, and all in your few hours after a day’s hard toil to earn a living. It is a most exceptional and admirable work.”185 The printers’ labors sometimes resembled a guerrilla war on hegemony; outnumbered and on the run, they fired back their volleys of words and tried to evade capture in order to carry on again tomorrow. Recalling her days printing Frayhayt illegally and distributing it clandestinely, Sonya Deanin remembered, “It was holy work, you know, to distribute our literature, to spread the word.”186 Others used similar spiritual language to speak of the struggle to produce the printed word: Bronka Greenberg, one of four young people who ran an underground press in Warsaw in the 1930s, remembered, “The press was our most treasured possession. It must be kept safe at all costs.” Working in isolation and secrecy, they printed a few hundred copies, distributed them surreptitiously, then returned to their disguised print shop to do it again. “It was sacred work.”187 The print shop must have provided a point of entry into the anarchist sensorium. Derrida stresses the centrality of the printer to the archive: “It begins with the printer.”188 Veteran journalist Cindy Carson recalls, “The whole room smelled of ink,” a “bitter, oily smell.” The printing process was noisy, punctuated by “a lot of banging.” Setting the type, rolling the ink,

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pressing down the paper, blotting it with powder—this quintessentially working class job was much respected. Printers were literate, working with their minds as well as their bodies. As Carson remembers, “The printers were the elite.”189 The printers’ labor was recognized as an important part of circulating the word, not just a passive vehicle for conveying ideas written down elsewhere by others. I speculate that the physical labor of printers’ bodies, their knowledge of techniques and their intimacy with machines, carried a status that affected the way of being of anarchists. I imagine that the pungent smells, dramatic sounds, and oily feeling on skin and hair—the printer’s bodily hexis—were vehicles for constructing a sensorium linking blue collar labor to anarchist social imaginaries. Printers and non-printers alike would have experienced a sensory link between the harsh smells, loud noises, and technically savvy bodies of the print shop and the circulation of anarchist ideas to the world. Printers were emblematic of displaced skilled workers during the age of mechanization; their instruments of resistance were, in Foucault’s words, “forged in the struggles that took place around the workings of power.”190 Anarchists honored their printers, I speculate, for their integration of independent craft labor with revolutionary intellect. Printers carried a kind of historical knowledge that could express itself materially and be handed down across generations. The teenage sisters Olivia and Helen Rossetti edited and printed The Torch in London.191 Modern Schools taught printing, passing the crucial skills of circulation to subsequent generations. The Modern Schools at the Ferrer Center, Stelton, and Mohegan boasted print shops, and aging anarchists who had been pupils at these schools fondly remembered printing their own children’s periodicals. Along with the famous Joseph Ishill, Paul Scott taught printing at Stelton. Emma Gilbert, namesake of Goldman, learned how to illuminate letters and set type from Ishill, whom she remembered as an “artistic genius.” Abe Bluestein remembered producing Voice of the Children at Stelton: “I worked the presses, and loved every minute of it, under Paul Scott’s gentle guidance.” Madga Schoenwetter, also a student at Stelton, declared in 1973, “I can still remember how to set up type.” Beatrice Markowitz went to Modern Schools at both Stelton and Sunrise Colonies, and also retained the skills of printing decades later. Rina Garst, born at Stelton Colony in 1931, remembered loving the print shop. Macie and Kenneth Pope, children at Home Colony in Washington, set type for the paper The New Era on a small hand press. Ray Shedlovsky, a pupil of Ishill’s at Stelton, expressed a sentiment common to many of the Modern Schools’ former students: “We printed our own magazine. We did everything ourselves—we were gardeners, we were typesetters, we were cooks. We did everything with our own two hands. I remember how I enjoyed setting type.”192 Printing was

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a site for combining intellectual and manual labor, head and hands, an approach central to anarchist education. The next generation of anarchist printers was cultivated at the Modern Schools. Translators and Book Sellers Anarchist cultures of circulation were further enhanced by vigorous grassroots commitments to translation. New York anarchists set up a Bureau of Translation in the 1890s, and pamphlets translated into English “rolled off the press by the thousands.”193 Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna employed a staff of translators, preparing textbooks for their Sunday and evening lectures for adults.194 Before he was killed by soldiers in 1919, German anarchist Gustav Landauer translated Kropotkin, Proudhon, and Whitman. Berkman was a translator, earning his living in exile partially through such labors as translating Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed into Russian for the Moscow Art Theater.195 Goldman’s friend Tom Bell was a professional translator, as was Ida Pilat Isca, resident of Mohegan Colony and translator of Rudolf Rocker’s widely praised Nationalism and Culture into Italian.196 Her husband Valerio Isca arranged for and financed, out of his machinist’s salary, the translation of Rocker’s book and sent copies to anarchist groups in Italy.197 An Italian steelworker in Gary, Indiana, named Olivieri, part of a militant group of labor organizers and draft resistors, “put up a thousand dollars to translate Kropotkin’s Ethics into Italian.”198 Ida Isca also translated Rocker’s poem to his beloved wife Milly at her death, and Joseph Ishill published it as a pamphlet.199 Anarchists were consistently multilingual—Goldman was fluent in Russian, German, English, and French, passable in Yiddish, and beginning to acquire Spanish—bringing to bear the “true, hard internationalism of the polyglot” on the circulation of anarchist texts.200 Multilingual anarchist communities made each other’s writings available through creative labors of circulation, which are also labors of production. There were several anarchist bookstores: Benjamin Tucker, the foremost individualist anarchist in the United States, operated his “Unique” book store on 6th Ave in New York.201 The Sunwise Turn Book Store in New York hosted a series of conferences on libertarian education, including a lecture by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.202 Max Maisel had a bookstore on the lower East Side, and Alexander Horr operated a bookstore in San Francisco. Anarchist bookseller Leon Kramer had a cottage at Mohegan Colony. Samuel T. Hammersmarck was a bookseller in Chicago. William Gallo, an Italian immigrant who lacked formal schooling, educated himself by reading extensively in anarchism and operated a small bookstore in his home to help readers secure anarchist texts in Italian.203

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Anarchist publications were treated as contraband, often confiscated by authorities. When Goldman and Berkman were arrested in 1917, police raided their offices and, as Goldman recalled in her autobiography, seized: subscription lists, cheque-books, and copies of our publications. They had also confiscated our correspondence files, manuscripts intended for publication in book form, as well as my typewritten lectures on American literature and other valuable material that we had spend years in accumulating. The treasonable matter consisted of works by Peter Kropotkin, Enrico Malatesta, Max Stirner, William Morris, Frank Harris, C.E.S. Wood, George Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Edward Carpenter, the great Russian writers, and other such dangerous explosives.204

Recalling the destruction of her library, Goldman lamented in a 1935 letter to Ann Lord that her writing was “strewn to the four corners of the earth.” Yearning for her library, she wrote: “If only I had my collection destroyed by the Federal authorities during the last raids, MSS letters, all kinds of printed material all out of print now, one of the richest collections of magazines in various languages and pictures of the greatest thinkers and leaders in the Anarchist movement. Everything was swept away, not a scrap left.”205 The state’s assault on Mother Earth’s library was much more than an infringement of civil liberties, although of course it was that also; it was a slaughter of an aspect of the network of circulation that created anarchist counterpublics. Anarchist booksellers and libraries stubbornly put back into circulation texts periodically confiscated by authorities or censored from the mail, in an ongoing struggle of words. Techniques of Reflexivity The political economy of printers, translators, and book sellers, interlaced with writers, editors, lecturers, and organizers, helped to produce the ongoing temporal rhythm of anarchist publics. Warner points out that: It’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration. A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through time, and because this can only be confirmed through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric.206

Mother Earth relied on certain practices of reflexivity to generate the needed feedback loops to keep the text moving. Short, punchy articles were accompanied by activist reports and scornful (but carefully calibrated) defiance of Comstock laws and other vehicles of censorship. Readers’ relations to other readers were coordinated through ongoing

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debates, letters and responses, appeals for funds and support, and essays referring to previous essays. A regular feature called “Comments and Observations” offered “brief, occasionally humorous news items, miniature editorials, and follow-ups relating to previous issues of the magazine—a kind of anarchist ‘Talk of the Town.’”207 Goldman’s reports from the field included accounts of regional issues, tart or passionate observations on local conditions, thanks by name to local supporters, and ridicule (also by name) of persecuting officials. Ongoing attention to subsequent journal issues was cultivated by serial publication of some of the longer works. Cover art by Robert Minor, Jules-Félix Grandjouan, Adolf Wolff, Man Ray, and Manuel Komroff cultivated readers’ attention. Issues often opened with a poem.208 The journal developed reflexivity through reviews, letters to the editor, reprintings of articles, and mutual citations. Chatty announcements and advertisements notified readers of anarchist activities and events, such as the opening of anarchist bookstores; upcoming masquerade balls, dances, and parties (usually fundraisers); lectures, mass meetings, and commemorations of landmark anarchist events such as the execution of the Haymarket martyrs; and other anarchist publications made available through the Mother Earth Publishing Association. The journal’s temporal rhythms and self-reflexive circuits were constitutive of the problematic producing anarchism’s intelligibility. Ritual Events Another temporal source of meaning for anarchist counterpublics was the ritual recognition of key historical events. Many were executions: the Paris Communards in 1871, the Haymarket martyrs in 1887, Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer in 1909, and Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Annual remembrances of these deaths sparked international protest and collective anger, producing a regular periodicity shaping the social imaginary. Similarly, the anniversaries of outrages against labor—Homestead; Ludlow; Hazelton— were occasions to organize time in ways that made “we” possible. Emma Goldman was a master at the ritual dimensions of anarchist time: she regularly identified and worked to produce the memorial services, annual dinners, commemorative marches, and other “discursive forms, practices, and artifacts” that “carry out their routine ideological labor of constituting subjects who could be summoned in the name of a public or a people.”209 Each of these events, repeated through dogged insistence and the continuous retelling of anarchist counter-histories, produced a great literature of protest, which in turn was the vehicle for reinforcing the memories, in a continuous chain of circulations. Additionally, each node in the temporal chain was a fund-raising opportunity, a chance to extract the financial support to keep the movement going. For example, it was Goldman’s idea to organize

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annual commemorations of Ferrer’s death across the United States to remind people of the outrage against a man widely seen, as Paul Avrich notes, as “a martyr of free thought, done to death by a vindictive clericalism in league with a reactionary state.”210 Anarchists were joined by liberals, socialists, and people of many progressive strains to condemn the execution of another Socrates. Jack London recalled, “It were as if New England had, in the twentieth century, resumed her ancient practice of burning witches.”211 By 1910, twenty-five cities had memorial gatherings for Ferrer; the largest, in New City, brought 5000 people to Cooper Union “to pay tribute to the Spanish martyr.” At these events, organizers raised funds to support what eventually became a network of twenty Modern School across the United States, a fitting commemoration for a teacher whose last wish, when facing the firing squad, was “Long live the Modern School.”212 Goldman, Berkman, and others created a nationwide movement, the Francisco Ferrer Association, lasting half a century. The association’s journal The Modern School was joined by a series of booklets circulating the anarchists’ views of education and carrying news about the schools, enabling their interactions and their sense of a common mission. These temporal practices cemented a cadence of ritual memory sustaining public affect. Goldman invented similar temporal practices to organize her own orientation to the world and to others. She honored her bond with Berkman by always thinking of him on the 18th of every month, the day marking his release from prison on May 18, 1906.213 Marking the anniversary by one of her affectionate nicknames for Berkman, “Tolstogub’s day,” Goldman wrote her bond and debt to Berkman into her daily life by this labor of ritual remembering. She wrote to Berkman in 1935: “You may not believe it when I tell you that I feel the approach of the date every month even in my sleep . . . yes, it is rooted in my being and will end with my last breath.”214 We could think of this as a kind of temporal sensorium, a way of marking the bodily hexis with the footprints of past struggles, building chains of associations linking their enduring personal loyalties to their collective political work. Warner notes that “when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise—over the conditions that bring them together as a public.”215 During Goldman’s lecture tours, “arrest followed arrest with numbing predictability.”216 After the Espionage Act took effect, “every major leftwing publication in the country had been barred from the mails at least once, some for weeks at a time.”217 The Post Office frequently delayed circulation or confiscated issues altogether. The police seized radical literature when they arrested radicals. The offices of Mother Earth and The Blast were raided and subscription lists confiscated. On at least one occasion, the Postmaster General ordered postal workers

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to turn over the names and addresses of Mother Earth subscribers to the Department of Justice. In 1910, Canadian officials banned the delivery of materials from Mother Earth Publishing Company because of their “treasonable nature.”218 The U.S. Post Office confiscated the June and August, 1917, issues of Mother Earth because the journal’s opposition to conscription was defined as espionage under the era’s anti-anarchist laws. When Goldman and Berkman were arrested on June 15, 1917, the day the Espionage Act passed, criminalizing opposition to the draft, The Blast ceased publication. Mother Earth, now in the hands of Stella Ballantine and Fitzie Fitzgerald, struggled on until August 1917, publishing vivid accounts of Goldman’s and Berkman’s trial; after closure, it was resurrected for six months as the smaller Mother Earth Bulletin, again confiscated by authorities (this time for publishing an account of the lynching of thirteen black soldiers at an army base in Texas), and followed yet again by a brief underground newsletter, Instead of a Magazine. In July 1918, with Goldman and Berkman in prison, federal agents raided Fitzgerald’s apartment in Greenwich Village, closed down the newsletter and the Mother Earth Book Shop, and circulated the names of 8,000 subscribers to federal intelligence agencies.219 A series of nationwide arrests followed, when some 5000 people were seized, many held incommunicado for weeks and charged with vague crimes; few were convicted, but about 800 “undesirable aliens” were eventually deported, Berkman and Goldman among them. Until the end, official persecution by the authorities immediately became grist for subsequent publications; trial transcripts and letters from prison, along with accounts of raids, arrests, and confiscations, were featured in subsequent issues, in a bizarre ballet of circulations, seizures, and counter circulations of words. Journals Lists, I have argued, convey some of the accumulated sediment of facticity, the weight of the archive. One starts by noticing a bit of a pattern, as in, “Oh, look, there’s another one”—another anarchist printer, another journal, another colony, another school. They pile up, you become curious, you keep noticing their accumulation. It is a sensory experience, the archive effect, and you need a set of events to try to reproduce it in discourse. Generalizations and summaries do not fully convey the proliferation of specifics as they heap up, presenting themselves to be collected, even hoarded. The archive effect is not just more information; it is the sensory encounter with a potentially infinite set of amassed particulars, opening another door to a largely forgotten or misplaced world. Before World War I, there were more than 300 socialist publications in the United States, some with circulations over 100,000.220 One of the most

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prominent was The Masses, of which Stansell says, “Its implicit reader was an Emma Goldman listener, mentally poised in some small place for flight to some place bigger.”221 The anarchists routinely derided their larger and more prominent neighbor—Hippolyte Havel famously mocked them for voting on the virtues of a poem—but both the socialists and the anarchists benefited from the support for radical journalism that Stansell characterizes as “the appeal of human interest blended with plebian revolt.”222 Paul Avrich estimates that between 1870 and 1980, immigrants issued “some four hundred periodicals in more than a dozen languages,” “produced by ordinary workers in their spare time.”223 These journals met eager publics. Sam Dreen sold Fraye Arbeter Shtime on the streets of London’s East End: “At that time it was read. There were lots of readers.”224 A tangible idea of the density of textual productions and circulations in overlapping anarchist spaces can be gleaned from considering the following partial listing of anarchist and related journals in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many from immigrant communities.225 This list does not include journals that were not explicitly political, such as Poet Lore and Current Literature (a monthly co-edited by Edward J. Wheeler and Goldman’s colleague Leonard Abbott), even though Goldman read them regularly to learn about European drama and literature. The list does, however, include a few socialist journals that were open to anarchism or supportive of Goldman in various battles, such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses. Listed alphabetically by the town or city in which the journal usually appeared, then by the date when the journal was first launched, this list suggests the breadth of the network of anarchist textual publics. (For fuller details and sources, see this book’s website.) 1. Barre, Vermont • Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) (1903–1919)—Italian weekly, Luigi Galleani, ed. • Il Contro-pelo (Against the Grain) (1911–1912)—Italian anarchist paper. 2. Bow, Washington: • Freeland (1904, 1909)—Alexander Horr, ed. • Woman’s Journal (1870–1917)—weekly, Henry and Alice Stone Blackwell, eds. • Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order (1881–1908)—Benjamin Tucker, ed. • The Rebel (1895–1896)—monthly, Charles Mowbray, et al., eds. 3. Chicago: • Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago Labor News) (1876–1919)—German, mostly daily, August Spies and Michael Schwab, eds. • Der Vorbote (Harbinger) (1874–1924)—German weekly, Paul Grottkau, ed.

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• Die Fackel (The Torch) (1877–1919)—German weekly, Gustav Lyser, ed. • Budoucnost (Future ) (1883–1886)—Czech weekly, Josef Pecka, ed. • The Alarm (1884–1889)—weekly, later bi-weekly, Albert Parsons, et al., eds. • Lampcka (The Lantern) (1885–1886)—Czech weekly. • Der Anarchist (1886)—German monthly, George Engel and Adolf Fischer, eds. • Gazeta Rototnicza (Workers’ Gazette) (1894)—Polish, twice a week, Jozef Rybakowski, ed. • Die Strumglocke (The Alarm Bell) (1896)—German weekly, Max Baginski, ed. • The Public (1898–1919)—weekly, Louis Post, ed. • Anarchistas (1899)—Lithuanian monthly. • Kurejas (the Creator) (1900–1901)—Lithuanian weekly. • International Socialist Review (1900–1918)—monthly, Algie Simons and Charles Kerr, eds. • La Protesta Umana (Human Protest) (1900–1905)—Italian, Giuseppe Ciancabilla and Eugene Travaglio, eds. • The Liberator (1905–1906)—weekly, Lucy Parsons, ed. • The Syndicalist (1913)—semi-monthly. Successor to The Agitator. • The Little Review (1914–1929)—monthly, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, eds. • Golos Truzhenika (Voice of Workers) (1918–1927)—I.W.W., Yakov Sanzhur, Gregory Maximoff, et al., eds. Detroit: • Der Herold (The Herald)—German, Central Labor Union publication. • Der Arme Teufel (The Poor Devil) (1884–1900)—German weekly, Robert Reitzel, ed. Hayward, California: • Land and Liberty: An Anti-Slavery Journal (1914–1915)—monthly, William C. Owen, ed. Home, Washington (Home Colony, an anarchist community): • The New Era (1897)—Oliver A. Verity, ed. • Discontent (1898–1902)—weekly, James F. Morton, Jr., publisher. • The Demonstrator (1903–1908)—semi-monthly continuation of Discontent. • The Agitator (1910–1912)—semi-monthly, Jay Fox, ed. Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas: • Appeal to Reason (1895–1922)—socialist weekly, Julius Augustus Wayland, ed. • Toiler (1913–1915)—syndicalist monthly, Max Dezettel, et al., eds. Los Angeles: • Regeneración (1900–1918)—Spanish, Ricardo Flores Magón, ed.

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• Los Angeles Socialist (1901–1904)—weekly, John Murray, Jr. et al., eds. • Common Sense (1904–1909)—continuation of Los Angeles Socialist. • Everyman (1906–1909; 1913–1919)—monthly single-tax paper, James H. Griffes, ed. Minneapolis: • Instead of a Magazine (1915–1916); bi-monthly, Herman Kuehn, ed. New Castle, Pennsylvania: • Solidarity (1909–1913) later Cleveland, Ohio (1913–1917) and Chicago (1917)—weekly I.W.W. publication, C. H. McCarty and B. H. Williams, eds. New Kensington, Pennsylvania: • La Plebe (The Proleterian) (1906–1909)—Carlo Tresca, ed. New York: • New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People’s Newspaper) (1878– 1932)—German daily. • Freiheit (Freedom)(1879–1910)—German weekly, Johann Most, ed. • Die Brandfackel (The Torch of Fire) (1883–1885)—German monthly, Claus Timmermann, ed. • Internationale Bibliothek (International Library) (1887–1891)—variable, John Müller (pseudonym of Johann Most), publisher. • Varhayt (The Truth) (1889)—Yiddish, published by Pioneers of Liberty Group. • Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) (1890–1977)—Yiddish weekly, Saul Yanovsky et al., eds. • El Despertar (The Awakening) (1891–1902)—Spanish, Pedro Esteve, ed. • Solidarity (1892–1898)—mostly bi-weekly, Saverio Merlino and John H. Edelmann, eds. • Di Fraye Gezelshaft (The Free Society) (1895–1900; 1910–1911)— Yiddish, Saul Yanovsky et al., eds. • Vorwärts/The Forward (1897—1983, daily; 1983—present, weekly)— Yiddish, Abraham Cahan, ed. • Sturmvogel (Storm Bird), (1897–1899)—German weekly, Claus Timmerman, ed. • Il Proletario (The Proletarian) (1905–1942)—Italian, Arturo Giovannitti et al., eds. • Mother Earth (1906–1917)—monthly, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, et al., eds. • The Wide Way (1907–1908)—monthly, John R. Coryell, ed. • Monthly Newsletter (1910–1911)—Ferrer Association, Harry Kelly and Stewart Kerr, eds. • Cultura obrera (Worker’s culture) (1911–1927)—Spanish weekly, Pedro Esteve, ed.

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• The Masses (1911–1917)—monthly, Max Eastman et al., eds; became The Liberator in 1918. • Golos Truda (Voice of Labor) (1911–1917)—Russian, Federation of Unions of Russian Workers, August Rode-Chervinsky, Maksim Raevsky et al., eds. • The Modern School (1912–1922)—monthly or quarterly, Carl Zigrosser et al., eds. • Di Shtime fun di rusishe gefangene (The Voice of the Russian Captive) (1912–1916)—Russian, the Anarchist Red Cross. • Zherminal (1913–1916)—the Germinal Group, Zalman Deanin, ed. • The Social War (1913)—weekly, Robert Warwick and Charles Plunkett, eds. • New Review (1913–1916)—mostly monthly, W.E.B. Du Bois et al., eds. • Di Frayhayt (Freedom) (1913–1914)—Yiddish, Federated Anarchist Groups, L. Barone, ed. • Golos Ssyl’nykh i Zakliuchennykh Russkikh Anarkhistov (Voice of Russian Anarchists in Exile or Prison) (1913–1914)—Russian, the Anarchist Red Cross. • The Woman Rebel (1914)—socialist/anarchist monthly, Margaret Sanger, ed. • Bruno’s Weekly (1915–1916) (other similarly named versions)— weekly, Guido Bruno, ed. • Revolt (1916)—weekly, Hippolyte Havel and Jack Isaacson, eds. • Il Martello (The Hammer) (1916–1946)—Italian, Carlos Tresca, ed. • Rabochaia Mysl’ (Workers Thought) (1916–1917)—Russian, Adolf Schnabel, ed. • Pravda (Truth) (1917)—Russian, Mikhail Raiva, ed. • De Shturm (The Storm) (1917–1918)—Jacob Abrams et al., eds. • Frayhayt (1918)—Yiddish monthly, Jacob Abrams, Mollie Steimer, et al., eds. • Instead of a Magazine (1918)—Stella Ballantine, ed. • Kolokol (Bell) (1918)—Russian Anarchists in America, Adolf Schnabel, ed. • Nabat (Alarm Bell) (1918)—Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, Adolf Schnabel, ed. • Rabochii i Krest’ianin (Worker and Peasant) (1918–1919)—Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, Alexander Brailovsky et al., eds. • Freedom (1919)—Harry Kelly et al., eds; later published in Stelton, New Jersey. • Khleb i Volia (Bread and Freedom) (1919)—Union of Russian Workers, L. Lipotkin, ed.

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13. Paris, Illinois: • The Truth Seeker (1873–present)—the oldest freethinker publication in the world. 14. Paterson, New Jersey: • La Questione Sociale (1895–1908)—Italian bi-weekly, Luigi Galleani et al., eds. • L’Era nova (The New Era) (1908–1917)—Italian weekly, Camillo Rosazza, et al., eds. 15. Philadelphia: • Broyt un frayhayt (Bread and Freedom) (1906)—Yiddish weekly, Joseph J. Cohen, ed. • La Comune (The Commune) (1910–1915)—Italian, Erasmo Abate et al., eds. 16. Portland, Oregon: • The Firebrand (1895–1897)—weekly, Abe Isaak, et al., eds. 17. San Francisco: • Free Society (1897–1901)—weekly, Abe Isaak, ed.; succeeded The Firebrand. • The Petrel (1904)—Samuel Mintz and Eugene Travaglio, eds. • Cogito, Ergo Sum (1908)—Italian anarchist paper. • Nihil (Nothing) (1908–1909)—Italian, Adolfo Antonelli, ed. • Freedom (1910–1911)—monthly, Eric B. Morton, ed. • Revolt (1911–1912)—weekly Left-socialist, Cloudesley Johns et al., eds. • The Blast (1916–1917)—mostly weekly, Alexander Berkman, et al., eds. 18. St. Louis: • Der Anarchist (1889–1895)—German weekly or biweekly, Claus Timmermann, ed. 19. Spokane, Washington: • Industrial Worker (1909–1913)—weekly; Seattle, 1916–1931; Everett, 1919; Walker C. Smith, J. A. MacDonald et al., eds. 20. Tacoma, Washington: • Why? (1913–1914 )—semi-monthly, Eugene Travaglio et al., eds. 21. Valley Falls, Kansas: • Lucifer, the Lightbearer (1883–1910)—mostly weekly, Moses Harman, Lillian Harman, and Edwin C. Walker, eds. 22. Wellesley, Massachusetts: • Free Comrade (1910–1912)—monthly, Leonard D. Abbott and J. William Lloyd, eds. 23. Western Penitentiary, Allegheny City, Pennsylvania: • Prison Blossoms (Zuchthausblüthen) (1892–1904)—Berkman and other prisoners, eds.

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The international anarchist movement had its own expansive media: the London journal Freedom was associated with Peter Kropotkin, as had been The Anarchist earlier. Others in London included Die Autonomie, The Commonweal, The Torch, and Liberty. European anarchist publications included L’Humanité nouvelle (Paris and Brussels; this journal was the model for Mother Earth); Le Libertaire (The Libertarian) (Paris); Le Père Peinard (Cool Daddy) (Paris); Le Révolté (The Rebel) (Geneva and Paris); La Révolte (Rebellion) (Paris); La Sociale (Paris); Les Temps Nouveaux (New Times) (Paris).226 Khleb I Volia (Bread and Liberty) was a Russian-language publication out of Geneva and London, one that helped Goldman stay connected to “the growing Russian anarchist movement.”227 Well-known anarchist Félix Fénéon edited La Revue Blanche, “France’s leading intellectual fortnightly,” which carried a series of reports by an anarchist characterized by Benedict Anderson as “the remarkable Cuban Creole Fernando Tarrida del Mármol.”228 Tarrida had accompanied Malatesta through Spain, was imprisoned in the infamous Montjuich fortress after the Corpus Christi bombing, and later released with the help of a sympathetic warden who recognized his former teacher. Tarrida’s reports in La Revue Blanche linked the tortures at Montjuich to the independence struggles in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, broadening the global reach of French-speaking anarchist counterpublics.229 The dense and no doubt partial detail in the above account is necessary in order to provide a compelling picture of the relation between anarchist counterpublics and the vital, overlapping, contestatory life spaces of participants and fellow travelers. To return to Warner’s formulation: “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”230 Certainly these eclectic groupings of immigrants, feminists, laborers, intellectuals, free spirits, visionaries, fanatics, and malcontents did not think of themselves as the same “kind of person,” but they had access to social worlds that supported radical media, legitimated a normative horizon combining anger at injustice with hope for the future, and articulated a lifeworld that made anarchism thinkable. Anarchist counterpublics are rhyzomatic spaces, possessing not sovereign power to act but the dispersed power linking multiple spaces, persons, and events in capillaries of resistance. Warner remarks: Publicness is just this space of coming together that discloses itself in interaction. The world of strangers that public discourse makes must be made of further circulation and recharacterization over time; it cannot simply be aggregated from units that I can expect to be similar to mine. I risk its fate.231

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To address a public is to be motivated by the relationships such address enables, to participate in the constitution of a formative social imaginary, the worldmaking expressivity of calling worlds into being through imaginative speech. It requires the production of what Rancière calls “dissensus”—“not the confrontation between interests or opinions [but] the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself.”232 The utter tenacity and indefatigability of Goldman’s and Berkman’s struggles can be understood as an unflagging commitment to anarchist worldmaking. They wrote and spoke themselves into collective life, and when they could not imagine addressing a public capable of comprehending them, they despaired. Berkman committed suicide in 1936 when the toll of imprisonment and exile, compounded by illness and the withering of anarchist counterpublics, produced what Warner aptly characterizes as “political depressiveness, a blockage in activity and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation, frustration, anomie, forgetfulness.”233 Goldman believed that, had Berkman comprehended the robust anarchist possibilities of the Spanish revolution, “he would have made an effort to continue living . . . the chance to serve our Spanish comrades in their gallant fight would have strengthened his hold on life.”234 While Goldman also suffered in exile, her prodigious letter writing maintained her contact with comrades and sustained her participation in making anarchist worlds. Goldman’s and Berkman’s ability to configure political space, to create a second world within the first, was both sustained and compromised by their subaltern position. Their position was compromised because anarchists served as the constitutive Other of proper social order; they marked the needed outside whose exclusion allowed other elements to be properly included. Yet their position was sustained because it was exactly that fracture between legitimate space and the space of the Other which anarchists utilized to articulate their critique and to draw suffering, indignant, or visionary individuals into their circulations of words. They consistently, tirelessly, made the unseen visible, turned noise into speech, and “lodged one world in another.”235 Anarchist public-making was dangerous business, and Goldman and Berkman did indeed risk its fate.

NOTES 1. Hannah Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), 419. 2. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3. 3. Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 4. Ibid., 3.

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5. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill (Continuum Publishing, 2006), 13. 6. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 11. 7. Ibid., 1, 4, 4. 8. Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 106. 9. Ibid. 10. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72, 78, 86–87. 11. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 155. 12. Panagia, Political Life of Sensation, 9. Syntonizations means things tuned to the same frequency. Hapticities are things that can be grasped. 13. Bourdieu, Outline, 79. 14. Ibid., 81. 15. Kohn, Radical Space, 7. 16. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 8. 17. In this chapter I am focusing primarily on Goldman and Berkman’s work in the United States. After their imprisonment in 1917 and subsequent expulsion in 1919, they continued their political work in Russia, England, Canada, and Europe until Berkman’s death in 1936 and Goldman’s in 1940. Subsequent chapters explore these latter circumstances, particularly in relation to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. 18. It was common in both radical and conventional circles to refer to those born in the United States as “native,” indicating both the speakers’ distance from indigenous people and the salience of the immigrant/non-immigrant axis of distinction. I return to the implications of this language for thinking about indigenous people in chapter five. 19. Warner, Publics, 56–57. 20. Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries,” 16. 21. Warner, Publics, 73. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. Taylor, “Social Imaginaries,” 113. 24. Peter Glassgold, “Introduction” to Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, by Glassgold (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), xxvi. 25. Ben Reitman, Mother Earth III, no. 4 (June, 1908): 190. 26. For Alexander Berkman’s remarkable account of his prison writing and organizing, see Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, introduction by John William Ward (New York: New York Review of Books, 1970) (first published by Mother Earth Publishing Company, 1912). 27. Warner, Publics, 66, 67, 69. 28. Taylor, “Social Imaginaries,” 113. 29. Warner, Publics, 90. 30. Ibid., 73. 31. Gussie Denenberg, an anarchist involved with the Ferrer Center, recalled these nicknames and many other rich details about the movement. Paul Avrich,

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Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 212, 232. 32. Glassgold, “Introduction,” xx. 33. Goldman, cited in “Foreword,” by Leon Litwak in Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran, eds., Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol. I, Made for America, 1890–1901 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xvii. 34. Goldman, “Minorities versus Majorities,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969) (first published in 1911), 75, 77. 35. Ibid., 78. 36. Candace Falk, “Forging Her Place: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 2. 37. Warner, Publics, 73. 38. Theorizing counterpublics through anarchism puts pressure on Warner’s account in other ways. Political strategy sessions, communications among leaders, and other exchanges concerning planning and executing actions were, by definition, secret, both from the enemy and from the rank-and-file. These mobile, hidden, and dangerous sites were a kind of counterpublic, yet they were not public in the same sense as audiences at lectures, readers of journals, or the hypothetical universality “the People.” In chapter 1 I discussed recent historiography from the Emma Goldman Papers Project emphasizing Goldman’s involvements in anarchism’s militant underground, where violence was regularly on the table as a possible political tactic. A fuller application of anarchism’s organizing histories to Warner’s analysis of publics would require greater attention to this “secret counterpublic.” My thanks to Chris Robinson for his insights into this missing register in my discussion. 39. “Nellie Bly Again,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, 155. 40. “What Is There in Anarchy for Woman?” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, 289. 41. “Nellie Bly Again,” 155 fn 2. 42. Goldman to Stella Cominsky, August 30, 1919, in Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 8. 43. James G. Huneker, Visionaries (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1916), 227. My thanks to Barry Pateman for pointing me to this novel and sharing his knowledge of the likely relation between Goldman’s apartment and the fictional setting. 44. Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) (first published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 517. 45. Haywood, in Goldman, Living My Life, 490. 46. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 69, 71. 47. Christine Stansell, American Moderns (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 258–260. 48. See Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 323. 49. Falk speculates that between 1902 and 1904, Goldman gave birth to a child that she gave up for adoption (“Raising Her Voices: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 31). While not confirmed, this possibility

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clears up two aspects of Goldman’s recorded life that are otherwise puzzling. First, a pregnancy would make sense of changes in her body; photos in the early 1900s show a shapely woman with a small waist, while a few years later, photos show she has gained weight and, as they say, lost her figure. While this change is no doubt partly due to aging, the biological consequences of childbirth could help explain the transition. More significantly, the possibility of an unacknowledged child helps explain otherwise disturbing aspects of some of Goldman’s relationships. Her initial compassion for her beloved sister Helena, upon the death of Helena’s son David in World War I, soon changed to uncharacteristic cruelty. In a March 30, 1919 letter to Stella Ballantine, Goldman writes, “motherhood made Helena narrow,” and “my heart gose [sic] out to Helena but there are greater tragedies than even Davids [sic] death” (in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 11). When Goldman received word that her friend and lover Leon Malmed lost his daughter Freida in a motorcycle accident (Van Valkenburgh to Goldman, September 16, 1917, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, reel 10), Goldman writes to Malmed, expressing her sympathy but urging him to “brace up and find consolation in the larger issues of our Ideal which is now also bleeding and crushed by the powers that be” (September 18, 1917, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, reel 10). She is similarly dismissive of Margaret Sanger’s grief over the death of her daughter, and of Kate O’Hare’s sadness over leaving her four children behind during her prison term (Goldman to Stella Ballantine, July 25–27, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, reel 11). In a March 11, 1923 letter from Goldman to Ellen Kennan, Goldman criticizes radical women for getting too wrapped up in their children (in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, reel 13). An earlier letter to Kennan on May 25, 1919, reporting Helena’s continued life-shattering grief, asked rhetorically, “The earth has been covered with so many dead [sic] how can one be so circumscribed that he would see only his own?” (in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, reel 11). This callousness toward otherwise cherished friends and family over the loss of their children, in light of Goldman’s usual bigheartedness, makes more sense if she was projecting her own struggle onto them, awkwardly fighting her own demon. 50. Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880– 1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), ix, xix, 5, 7–8. 51. Ibid., 17. 52. Ibid., 41. 53. I am grateful to Barry Pateman for making this point clear during many discussions of violence against labor in the United States. 54. Spies and informants were a constant danger. Spies befriended the anarchists, moved in, took lovers, and exploited family connections to gain access. One spy, a fellow named Spivak, neglected to affix proper postage to one of the police reports he mailed from the Ferrer Center, which was efficiently returned by the post office and opened by Leonard Abbot. Among other activities in the movement, undercover agent David Sullivan spent thirty days in jail for his role in the Tarrytown protests before he was eventually discovered (Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 231–32). Another fellow named Potocki spied on the anarchists at

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the Ferrer Center, at the school in Stelton, and in Philadelphia; he lived with stalwart anarchist Minna Lowensohn, a friend of Goldman’s (Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 213). Fittingly, Potocki’s actitivies came to light when his wife found out about his affair with Lowensohn and exposed him (Avrich, Modern School, 232). Often it was the police agents who espoused the most irresponsible violence: a detective named Amedeo Polignani entrapped two young men in a dynamite conspiracy for which they served many years in prison (Avrich, Modern School, 231–32). Perhaps the most traumatic of the spy episodes was the treachery of Donald Vose, the teenage son of Goldman’s friend Gertie Vose from Home Colony. Vose betrayed anarchists David Caplan and Matthew Schmidt who were wanted for the 1910 Los Angeles Times Building bombing. Goldman had taken Vose into the Mother Earth family, and was outraged not least by the role she unwittingly played in the treachery by befriending him. (See Goldman, “Donald Vose: The Accursed,” Mother Earth X, no. 11 (January 1916) in Glassgold, Anarchy! 347–351). Some years later, Goldman hired Margaret M. Scully as a secretary; known as Agent 22 by the Lusk Committee of New York, Scully was fired by Goldman for incompetence before Scully’s role as a police spy became known (Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 324). While Goldman seems to have been spared knowing, it appears that her beloved nephew Saxe Commins acted as a spy (Barry Pateman, personal communication, March 20, 2010). In light of these frequent and devastating betrayals, anarchists’ fears of infiltrators takes on a different hue, looking less like paranoia and more like a realistic assessment of the situation. In 1911 the socialist journal Justice published accusations that Goldman was a spy for the Russian police. Taken as an isolated incident, this would appear to be merely an absurd indicator of bizarre internecine battles and unfounded paranoia. Yet, while the accusation against Goldman was certainly untrue, savvy anarchists and socialists had good reason to be on the lookout for spies and provocateurs in their movements. The cultivation of friendship followed by betrayal was devastating to the anarchists, whose movement rested on the development of that particular kind of political friendship called comradeship. “What scoundrels they were,” Moritz Jagendorf recalled, “talking with us, laughing with us, sharing our ideas, our hopes, our excitement—or at least pretending to!” (Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 221). 55. Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60. 56. Ronald Sanders, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (New York: Harper and Row, 1917), 75. 57. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 14, 177–182, 169–171, 28. 58. James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998), 3–4. 59. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 147. 60. Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in Amerca and Europe (Chicago: F.J. Schulte and Company, 1889), 660. 61. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 33, 48, 21. 62. Ibid., 37. Goldman scorned Yiddish as jargon, but there was considerable demand for Yiddish lectures.

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63. Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1945), 1–2. 64. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 171. 65. Ibid.,172–76. 66. Ibid., 163. 67. Ibid., 37. 68. Alexander Trachtenberg, ed., The American Labor Yearbook 1917–1918 (New York: The Rand School of Social Science, 1918), 56. 69. Ibid., 56. 70. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 161. 71. Ibid., 154. 72. Ibid., 168. 73. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 70. 74. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 114. 75. Michael Shapiro, ”Radicalizing Democratic Theory: Social Space in Connolly, Deleuze, and Rancière,” in Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, eds. David Campbell and Morton Schoolman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 209, 216. 76. Robert Park, “The City,” 126, quoted in Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 7. 77. This felicitous phrase comes from Geographies of Resistance, eds. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London; Routledge, 1997). 78. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 34, 46, 42. 79. “Criminal Anarchy Law,” Mother Earth II, no. 9 (November 1907): 385. Small wonder it was often difficult for Goldman to rent a hall. 80. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 36, 34, 36. 81. Ibid., 70, 186. Forty-eighters were veterans of the European revolutions of 1848. 82. Goldman, Living My Life, 320. 83. Huneker, in Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 44. 84. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 70. A 1902 religious publication by Hugh Vaughan Crozier, Goyens reports, saw the link between alcohol and revolution. It was entitled “The Saloon and Anarchy, the Two Worst Things in the World, versus the United States of America” (Goyens, 39). 85. Ibid., 8. 86. Goldman, Living My Life, 145; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 44–45. 87. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 44. 88. Ibid., frontis material. 89. John Gilmer Speed, “Anarchists in New York,” Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, XXXVI, no.1861 (August 20, 1892): 798–799. 90. See Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). 91. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 8. 92. Franklin Rosemont, ed., The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago’s Wildest and Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot (Chicago: Charles

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H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2004), 122. For absorbing details on radical culture in Chicago, see Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 93. Stansell, American Moderns, 84. Stansell sometimes gets Goldman wrong because she folds anarchism too readily into modernism, just another source for the quirky people and ideas that came together in the Bohemian crowd. She calls Goldman “more a prima donna than an organizer” (121); while I have no objection to calling attention to Goldman’s frequent self-absorption, I view Goldman as a relentless organizer of anarchist time and space. In Stansell’s hands, anarchists become another of the urban types, their politics put aside in favor of their colorful contributions to the Lower West Side. In chapter 4 I argue that, while Goldman was associated with modernism, her political and aesthetic ideas are best understood in the context of earlier romanticism and realism. 94. See Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 133–152, for a discussion of Goldman’s talks on “The Intermediate Sex.” 95. “Directory of Organizations,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 572. 96. Goldman, “To Solidarity,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 329. 97. Stansell, American Moderns, 104, 106. 98. Barry Pateman, personal conversation, September 28, 2010. 99. Stansell, American Moderns, 109, 100, 103. 100. Mabel Dodge, in Avrich, Modern School, 140. 101. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 29. 102. Letter from Berkman to Goldman, March 12, 1905, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol II, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 153. 103. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 79. 104. Glassgold, “Introduction,” xxii. 105. “The Aurora Turnverein,” Der Westen: Frauen-Zeitung, November 15 and 22, 1896, in German Workers in Chicago, eds. Keil and Jentz, 160–169. 106. Stansell, American Moderns, 96. For more extensive consideration of the Ferrer Center’s role in the art world, see chapter 4. 107. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 200. 108. Avrich, Modern School, 42–52, 24, 31, 272. 109. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 220, 205, 225–27. Maurice Holland recalled that “limousines pulled up with women in fur coats and lorgnettes” to hear Sadakichi Hartmann read from his symbolist drama Christ at the Ferrer Center in 1915. During intermission the playwright got rather drunk, leading to a heightened level of obscenity in the second act, when “the rich ladies all got up and walked out” (Avrich, Modern School, 137). 110. Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006), 135. 111. Avrich, Modern School, 91. 112. Suissa, Anarchism and Education, 86. Suissa looks carefully at similarities and differences among radical schools, including Waldorf schools and Summerhill.

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113. Avrich, Modern School, 233. 114. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 193–194. 115. Ibid., 196, 254; Modern School, 50–51. 116. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 234. 117. Avrich, Modern School, 158. 118. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 238, 230, 241, 242. 119. Ibid., 478 fn 22, 506 fn 342, 508 fn 363, 224, 259, 289. 120. Stansell, American Moderns, 96. See also Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 204. Anarchist colonies, independent, self-organized, often colorful communities, also flourished during Goldman’s lifetime. While she periodically visited them, to my knowledge she did not live in any of them, and I have relegated them to a footnote, but they deserve a book of their own. Anarchist colonies included: Aurora Colony in California, started by Goldman’s friends from Chicago, the Isaaks family; Home Colony in Washington, where Gertie Vose lived; Mohegan Colony, a center for health and food “faddists”; April Farm, founded by Charles Garland in Quakertown, Pennsylvania; a summer camp at Maplewood New Jersey, run by French anarchist Jacques Dubois; Bayard Lane Colony in Suffern, New York, in 1936 and Stillwater in Ossining, New York, in 1939 (Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 25, 38, 75, 234, 251, 477 fn 11). There was Stony Ford School, where “the men at the school wore knickers, which at that time was considered radical, and the women wore dresses only down to their knees and had their hair short,” and Sunrise Colony, which sent truckloads of farm produce to Flint, Michigan, and fed thousands of strikers during the great General Motors strike of 1937. There were several single-tax colonies: Belle Terre and Mount Airy Colony, in Croton, New York; Free Acres Colony in New Jersey; Arden Colony in Delaware; Alliance Colony in New Jersey; and Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama (Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 236, 298, 61, 493 fn 170, 149, 492, 503 fn 294). There was a radical artists’ colony in New Jersey called Ridgefield Colony (Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 509 fn 377), “a hotbed of anarchism” of the Dadaesque variety (Stansell, American Moderns, 165). There was an anarchist colony on an island in Puget Sound called Equality Colony, which Goldman’s friend Alexander Horr joined in 1904 (Charles Pierce Le Warne, Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885–1915 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 104–105). Evidently some back-tonature soul there lived in a stump (Stansell, American Moderns, 277). Sometimes they caricatured themselves: aging anarchists interviewed by Avrich recalled that practical questions could become hyper-political, with one colony, struggling with the ideological implications of plumbing, split between “sewerists” and “septic tankists” (Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 297). 121. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2. 122. Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg,” 421; letter from Goldman to Ellen Kennan, October 3, 1917, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk, with Zboray, et al., reel 10. 123. I have standardized Goldman’s spelling and punctuation in this letter for ease of reading. Goldman omitted the commas in the list, and wrote “gose” and “campaigne.” My guess is that Goldman was dyslexic. While her editors have

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cleaned up her prose in publication, they all refer to her poor spelling (Drinnon and Drinnon, “Introduction,” xviii; David Porter, “Introduction,” in Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press 1983), xii). Her troubles with written English were far greater than would be expected solely as a result of being a non-native speaker. She confused short vowels with one another, mixed t and th, interchanged ea and ee, confused different rcontrolled syllables (er, ar, ir, ur, or), confused homonyms, and butchered idioms. She transposed p and b (crumps/crumbs); c and k (falken/falcon); she confused similar sounding prefixes (counter/contra) and suffixes (cal/cle). She made typical errors in adding suffixes, such as failing to drop the silent e (bakeing) or change the y to i (lonlyness). Her friends complained of “the ordeal of trying to decipher my letters” which did not disappear even in typing; “They had even suggested I should be psychoanalyzed for the peculiar complex that made me strike the wrong keys” (Living My Life, 688). Goldman evidently just made a joke out of it, and went on. About her own spelling she said, “I suppose there is no help for me on this or the other world.” (Drinnon and Drinnon, “Introduction,” xviii.) Dyslexics often have gifts that are the flip side of their disabilities, and I wonder if Goldman’s unique skills in spoken expression are the obverse of her difficulties with the written language. It is not uncommon for dyslexics to be drawn to politics, acting, or some other arena requiring persuasive speech. For more information see Kathy E. Ferguson, A Resource Guide on Dyslexia for People in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: HIDA, 2008). 124. Goldman had less formal education than Berkman, but was also a voracious reader. Like Berkman, she educated herself in prison. In contrast to Berkman’s much greater isolation, Goldman’s friends could send her books. During her first prison sentence, Justus Schwab sent Voltaire’s Candide, plus works by Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill. Through the prison library she secured books by George Eliot and George Sand. She read the Bible and enjoyed conversations about religion with the chaplain at Blackwell’s Island, recognizing in his commitment a similar calling to her own. In her last and longest incarceration, she read plays, magazines (particularly enjoying The Nation), and numerous contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction. 125. Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 125 (italics in original). 126. Ibid., 124–125. 127. William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 31. 128. Ibid., 32. 129. Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography of Margaret Anderson (New York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1939), 72. 130. Goldman, Mother Earth VI, no. 5 (July 1911): 156. 131. Ben L. Reitman, “The Respectable Mob,” Mother Earth VII, no. 4 (June 1912) in Glassgold, Anarchy! 269–274. 132. From Goldman to Henry Weinberger, May 25, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 133. Goldman, Living My Life, 51.

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134. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 62. 135. Robert Henri, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 157. 136. Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 54. 137. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 430. 138. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 27. 139. “Chronology,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol II, 485–487. 140. Warner, Publics, 89. 141. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 78, 459, 208, 460. 142. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 68. 143. Ben Reitman, “Three Years: Report of the Manager,” Mother Earth VI, no. 3 (May 1911): 85, 87–88. 144. Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise, 255. 145. “Directory of Individuals,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 548–549. 146. William C. Owen, “Proper Methods of Propaganda,” Mother Earth III, no. 6 (August 1908): 250–252. 147. Louis Domas, Agent Report to George Billings, Boston, MA, Immigration and Naturalization Service, December 12, 1907, 6, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 56. 148. F. W. Maasch, Agent Report to Robert Watchorn, NY, Immigration and Naturalization Service, December 24, 1907, 1 in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 56. 149. Panagia, Political Life of Sensation, 119, 122. 150. Lars Tonder, personal communication, May 17, 2009. 151. Warner, Publics, 9. 152. Ibid., 90. 153. Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, Letter from the Attorney General, November 17, 1919, 66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Doc No. 153 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919): 11, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 64. 154. Warner, Publics, 94. 155. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 48. 156. Ibid., 42. 157. Warner, Publics, 96–97. 158. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 192. 159. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 387. 160. For example, the difficulties Freiheit had in London finding a printer in the repressive environment probably contributed to Johann Most’s decision to move the journal to New York (Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 85). 161. Avrich, Modern School, 56. 162. Avrich, Modern School, 257, 259. Ishill became the printer in residence for the University of Florida in 1964. 163. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 15.

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164. Carlotta R. Anderson, All American Anarchist: Joseph Labadie and the Labor Movement (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 38. For a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the tramp printers, accompanied by arresting drawings, see Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1878), 52–67. 165. Berkman, “To My Friends,” in Glassgold, “Introduction,” xxii. 166. Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 86–87. 167. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 28 (Isaak), 80 (Thorne), 82 (Meelis), 113 (Eramo), 118, 140 (Felicani), 160–162 (Travaglio). 168. Avrich, Modern School, 130, 177 fn 72. 169. Stansell, American Moderns, 241. 170. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 445; Modern School, 152. 171. Avrich, Modern School, 287; Anarchist Voices, 11, 37. 172. Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 40. 173. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 37. 174. Ibid., 381. 175. Goldman, Living My Life, 751. 176. Ibid., 867. 177. Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 316. 178. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 398. 179. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 185–186. 180. Goldman, Living My Life, 838. 181. Ibid., 648. 182. Stansell, American Moderns, 246. 183. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1955), 152–153. 184. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 256 (Bogin), 185 (Simkin), 488 fn 104 (Bek-Fran), 469 (Cantine), 474 (Woodworth), 420 (Crocker), 443 (Slater), 473 (Ellington), 243 (Scott), 498 fn 238 (Salsedo and Elia), 291 (Govan), 293 (Fox), 303 (Rockoff). 185. Berkman, quoted in Avrich, Modern School, 247. 186. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 336. 187. Ibid., 465. 188. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 18. 189. Personal communication with journalist Cindy Carson, whose newspaper work and knowledge of the history of print journalism informs my understanding, January 20, 2010. 190. Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 135. 191. Goldman, Living My Life, 165. 192. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 227 (Gilbert), 437 (Bluestein), 230 (Schoenwetter), 309 (Markowitz), 252 (Garst), 291 (Pope), 234 (Shedlovsky). 193. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 215. 194. Avrich, Modern School, 21.

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195. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 491 fn 134. 196. Ibid., 30, 150. 197. Ibid., 150. 198. Ibid., 142. 199. Ibid., 150. 200. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso Books, 2005), 5. 201. Avrich, Modern School, 152, 287. 202. Ibid., 287. 203. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 483 fn 72 (Maisel), 482 fn 65 (Horr), 8, 37 (Kramer), 515 fn 461 (Hammersmarck), 154 (Gallo). 204. Goldman, Living My Life, 612. 205. Goldman to Ann Lord, August 14, 1935 in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk, with Zboray, et al., reel 35. 206. Warner, Publics, 97. 207. Glassgold, “Introduction,” xvii. 208. Harry Kelly remarked in his unpublished autobiography that Mother Earth was initially intended to fully blend literary with political writing, but that the pressure of events and the need to respond somewhat overwhelmed the literary side. (Barry Pateman, personal communication, September 28, 2010.) 209. Gaonkar and Povinelli, “Technologies,” 389. Radical architect Percival Goodman points out that memorializing past events with words rather than physical constructions is central to Jewish traditions. See “The Architect from New York,” in Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein, eds., Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 322. 210. Avrich, Modern School, 30. 211. London, quoted in Avrich, Modern School, 37. 212. Avrich, Modern School, 47. Most of the twenty-two Modern Schools in the United States were Sunday Schools, while five (Ferrer, Stelton, Mohegan, Los Angeles, and Portland) were day schools. Stelton closed in 1953, after forty-two years; Lakewood operated until 1958; the Waldorf School in Berkeley lasted into the 1960s. Some Sunday Schools were conducted in the languages of immigrants— German, Yiddish, Czech, Italian, and Spanish. There was a Spanish Modern School in Gary, Indiana, where geography, natural history, and astronomy were taught and adult classes were offered. The Modern School movement had a global reach: schools were established in Brazil, Argentina, Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, Japan, and all over Europe. The anarchist revolutionary Nestor Makhno was reportedly planning a Modern School in the Ukraine before the Bolsheviks defeated him in the post-revolutionary struggle for power in Russia (Avrich, Modern School, 49–51, 67–68, 31). 213. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, January 14, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 214. Goldman to Berkman, February 17–18, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 34. 215. Warner, Publics, 12.

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216. Glassgold, “Introduction,” xxiii. 217. Stansell, American Moderns, 316. 218. Glassgold, “Introduction,” xxix. 219. Ibid., xxxv—xxxvi. 220. Stansell, American Moderns, 152. 221. Ibid., 166. 222. Ibid., 173, 187. 223. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 319. 224. Ibid., 322. 225. For fuller description and citations, see this book’s website. This listing is taken primarily from “The Directory of Periodicals” in volumes I (563–569) and II (549–554) of Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, and from the draft version of the “Directory of Periodicals” for volume III, forthcoming. My deepest thanks to Barry Pateman and Candace Falk for sharing this forthcoming work with me. I have supplemented these lists with periodicals documented by Paul Avrich in Anarchist Voices, “List of Periodicals” (529–534); Elliott Shore, Ken Fones-Wolf and James P. Danky, eds., The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of Left Political Culture, 1850–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Ernesto A. Longa, Anarchist Periodicals in English Published in the United States, 1833–1955: An Annotated Guide (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2010). I have condensed the detail contained in these thorough scholarly volumes, indicating only the best known of the editors and sites of most extensive publication. I have included only those that were being published between 1885 and 1920, Goldman’s years in the United States. There were many anarchist and other progressive periodicals that have escaped my efforts at documentation. In Avrich’s interviews with aging anarchists, numerous other journals are mentioned, yet I have not included those because full documentation of date and place of publication is lacking. Recognizing the inevitable incompleteness of this list, my goal is to illustrate, through a critical mass of concrete examples, the dense network of anarchist and anarchist-friendly textual spaces in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accordingly, I have grouped the journals according to the cities they appeared in first and/or longest, and within each city I have listed the journals chronologically according to their initial date of publication. 226. “Directory of Periodicals,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 563–569. 227. “Directory of Periodicals,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol II, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 551. 228. Anderson, Three Flags, 169. 229. Ibid., 171. 230. Warner, Publics, 10. 231. Ibid., 122. 232. Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politices,” Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001), par 24. 233. Warner, Publics, 70. 234. Goldman’s 1937 “Preface” to Berkman, What Is Anarchism? (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003) (first published by Vanguard Press and the Jewish Anarchist Federation, 1929), xi. 235. Rancière, “Ten Theses,” par 24.

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3 The Anarchist Apprentice

“Only time Standing well off Shall measure your circumstance and height.” —Lola Ridge to Emma Goldman

Goldman learned her political theories as an apprentice within the anarchist movement. Becoming an anarchist was a process of learning-inaction. Her initial inclination, stimulated by her early curiosity about Russian revolutionaries and her fascination with the events of Haymarket, led her into the movement, where her intellectual development flourished for over fifty years. Rather than first learning about politics, then becoming radicalized, as was the case for many with more formal education and accompanying privileges of class and gender, Goldman sought out the anarchist movement to acquire the political education for which she longed. Goldman often spoke about her understanding of anarchism in sublime terms: it was her “beautiful ideal.”1 Yet at the same time, she saw anarchism as a process, not a finality—“finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.”2 The tension between anarchism as a cherished universal value compared to anarchism as an always unfinished journey frequently appears in her writing. The tension manifests itself in both what she says about anarchism and in how she says it. While she often spoke of becoming an anarchist in terms of a religious conversion, Goldman’s apprenticeship in anarchism was also an open-ended development with multiple sources of stimulation and challenge. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, analyzing Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, tells us that apprenticeship is a process of learning how 129

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to interpret and interact with signs. The beginner enters a world in which many kinds of signs are emitted and put into circulation; she has to learn them by directly engaging them, deciphering them while participating in them. The feedback from these engagements and interpretations becomes more reconnaissance requiring deciphering, provoking rethinking and the possibilities of new thought. Deleuze famously characterizes the apprentice as an “Egyptologist of something”: Learning is essentially concerned with signs. Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge. To learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted. There is no apprentice who is not “the Egyptologist” of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs. Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or hieroglyphs. Proust’s work is based not on the exposition of memory, but on the apprenticeship to signs.3

Deleuze invites us to think about how people come to have a place in a political community by learning to read its signs. To take up this invitation, we need to enter “the worlds in which the hero participates.”4 Deleuze’s examples, above, do not fully do justice to his argument because they are too limited: a physician needs to be sensitive to more than disease, but also to health, to the interaction of disease and health, to the life world of the persons whose illness and wellness are of concern to her. Similarly, a carpenter might read not only the signs in wood, but in trees, forests, and tools. The signs of anarchism, then, can include a range of encounters requiring interpretation, including those which mark the injustices anarchists critique, and also those indicating possibilities of freedom and beauty toward which anarchists struggle. Signs are more than words. Like the physician and the carpenter, the anarchist encounters bodies, objects, and events that political theorist Jane Bennett characterizes as “creative materiality with incipient tendencies and propensities.”5 Like the world of health and illness, or the world of wood and tools, the anarchist lifeworld invites the apprentice into a fluid landscape for receiving and making meaning, where some signs are obvious while others are opaque, some assault the learner while others evade or confound. That the apprentice is also called a hero in Deleuze’s account dovetails nicely with Goldman’s self-understanding, while also suggesting Deleuze’s sympathy with the apprentice’s challenging journey through signs. Taking apprenticeship as a model of coming-to-politics suggests a Goldman-centric, rather than a theory-centric, approach. A theory-centric approach would start with the varieties of anarchist theory, establish their

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beginnings, trace their histories, and then show how they converged in her thinking. Instead, I want to start with her situation, chart her relationships with various people and places in which her apprenticeship was most profoundly shaped, and work “backwards” to the theoretical influences each encounter facilitated. Rather than trace an anarchist lineage that comes down to Goldman, I want to put her in the center of the story and draw together the elements most salient to her emergence as an anarchist. As we saw in the introduction, Goldman’s thinking has often been characterized as synthesis. While I contest the judgment that synthesis is the opposite of originality, I agree that she integrated several strands of thinking to produce her version of anarchism. Historian Irving Howe’s characterization of the subsequent generation of Jewish intellectuals can also be applied to Goldman: she had a “mania for range,” a voracious appetite to learn.6 Later chapters look at her inclusion of the American romantic writers as well as her development of a particularly anarchist feminism, both of which expanded anarchism beyond its usual borders. In this chapter, taking Deleuze’s apprentice as a model, I want to see how she read the signs of anarchism and put them to work.

RUSSIA TO HAYMARKET The beginnings of Goldman’s apprenticeship, as she recalled it in her autobiography, took place in Russia prior to her emigration in 1885. In her politically conservative, economically insecure family, she experienced some modest forbidden exposure to radical politics as a child: through her older sister, she met radical students who lent her forbidden books on nihilism, philosophy, and politics. She read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Ivan Goncharov’s Obriv (The Precipice) and other books provoking political questions. The Nihilists executed for assassinating the Czar provoked her admiration for their protest and self-sacrifice, and she took them to be her “heroes and martyrs,” her “guiding stars.” Their willingness to use terror to strike back at oppressors was a compelling form of witnessing for “the suffering of the people,” showing that the authorities are not safe from the revenge of the oppressed.7 When she was fifteen years old, she was taken with the character of Vera Pavlovna in Nikolai Chernyshevky’s What Is To Be Done? Often suppressed in Russia, this novel inspired a generation of radical intelligentsia. Goldman imagined herself to be Vera, the free intellectual young heroine; Fedya (Berkman’s cousin and Goldman’s friend and lover, Modest Stein) to be Vera’s brother; and Berkman as Rakhmetov, the pure revolutionary who gave up everything to serve his ideal.8 Berkman evidently shared the fantasy since he used the name Rakhmetov when he launched his unsuccessful attentat.9

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Vera’s cooperative dress shop was Goldman’s model for her own brief cooperative enterprise later in the United States. Goldman’s first major biographer, Richard Drinnon, emphasizes Goldman’s early exposure to Russian radicalism as contributing, “in embryo, her later anarchism.”10 The novel also inspired Goldman, as Martha Solomon notes, to “early consciousness of women as equal partners with men in the struggle for social change.”11 Goldman’s formal education was minimal: after three and a half years of realschule, a German secondary school in Königsberg, she was barred at age fourteen from advancing to the gymnasium by a religion teacher who would not give her a certificate of good character. A sympathetic German teacher introduced her to popular German novels by E. Marlitt, Berthold Auerbach, and Frederic Spielhagen and launched her lifelong fascination with drama by taking her to the opera.12 Goldman managed six more months of formal study in St. Petersburg, until she was forced to go to work in textile factories to help support her family. Goldman’s self-narrative focuses on her early rebelliousness as the seed of her later anarchism to establish the historical trajectory of her radicalism coming into its own. Yet we could reverse that gaze, and focus instead on the larger, persistent context of what Deleuze calls worldly signs—the formal, empty reigning signs, the established and therefore largely invisible account of how things work. Worldly signs mark the parameters of the status quo, the reigning ideologies, social imaginaries, and embodied investments of her society. These probably included her mother’s loyalty to the “good, gracious Tsar,” her father’s violent authority in the family, routine brutality toward peasants, her attenuated opportunities in school, the long hours of domestic and factory labor, and the constant risk entailed in being Jews.13 Goldman as apprentice had to “pass through” these signs, to encounter their “ritual perfection” in order to learn how they work: “the apprentice’s task is to understand why someone is ‘received’ in a certain world, why someone ceases to be so, what signs do the worlds obey, which signs are legislators, and which high priests.” Worldly signs, Deleuze insists, replace thought and action with readily available formulas for thinking: “one does not think and one does not act, but one makes signs.” In Goldman’s early world, docility and respect for authority were “legislators” and “high priests” in her family and schools. The signs that Goldman was expected to make and accept as a young working class Jewish girl were increasingly unpalatable to her. Defying her father, she immigrated to the United States with her beloved sister Helena in 1885, settling initially in Rochester, New York and soon resuming factory work, this time under the even more hateful regime of Fordist discipline. Loneliness, an early failed marriage, and the dismal cultural horizon in upstate New York grated on her; in Deleuze’s words, the “vacuity” of the “frozen” worldly signs dominating her immigrant community “betrayed

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something precarious,” the promise of the new world that, like her marriage, proved immensely disappointing.14 Into this grim landscape fell the bomb of Haymarket. On May 4, 1886, a mass meeting was called on Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest the earlier killing and injuring of striking workers at the McCormick Harvester Company who were struggling for the eight-hour work day. At the otherwise peaceful protest, the police marched in to close the meeting: a bomb exploded, the police opened fire, and numerous people were killed and injured, including both civilians and police officers.15 Like many other young people, Goldman was radicalized by the arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of four young anarchists (a fifth committed suicide prior to the execution to rob the state of its prey), and imprisonment of three others, who were clearly on trial for their ideas. Goldman did not exaggerate when she condemned their trial as “the worst frame-up in the history of the United States”: the jury was stacked against the activists, witnesses were bullied or bribed, the judge unremittingly hostile, and the general public inflamed.16 Owners saw the trial as an opportunity to derail and discredit working class struggles for the eight-hour day, which played a significant role in Goldman’s subsequent development as a thinker. Haymarket initiated her lifelong commitment to anarchism and nurtured her fledgling romance with martyrdom. She told the story of Haymarket at the beginning of her autobiography, where she recalled telling Joanna Greie, the socialist speaker whose talk she attended in Rochester, “I do feel the case with every fibre.”17 Unimpressed with the more sedate gatherings of socialists, Goldman discovered Johann Most’s incendiary anarchist paper Die Freiheit: It seemed lava shooting forth flames of ridicule, scorn, and defiance; it breathed deep hatred of the powers that were preparing the crime in Chicago. I began to read Die Freiheit regularly. I sent for the literature advertised in the paper and I devoured every line on anarchism I could get, every word about the men, their lives, their work. I read about their heroic stand while on trial and their marvelous defense. I saw a new world opening before me.18

Haymarket, in Deleuze’s formulation, can be seen as a potent “sensuous sign” in Goldman’s world, a sign that gives “a strange joy at the same time that it transmits a kind of imperative.”19 Haymarket, historian Paul Avrich remarks, “became the focus for all the raging passions of the day, including radicalism, mass immigration, and labor activism.”20 While the subsequent devastating persecution of radicals had a chilling effect on the older generation of anarchists, it galvanized many younger ones.21 For Goldman, as for Alexander Berkman, John Turner, Voltairine De Cleyre, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, and George Pettibone of the Western Miner’s Federation,

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Haymarket marked their “spiritual birth.”22 The speeches of the executed men were translated into many languages and achieved global circulation: labor halls throughout Europe displayed their pictures and words, while memorials and publications also took place throughout Latin America and Asia. Drawings of the men on the scaffold, dressed eerily by the state in flowing robes, circulated widely. An international defense movement mobilized, with spokespersons including labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, intellectuals including William Dean Howells and George Bernard Shaw, distinguished representatives of the legal profession, and thousands of workers around the world who attended rallies, signed petitions, and contributed funds from their sparse resources for the defense of the Haymarket men.23 Goldman was completely absorbed in the Haymarket events. “Our Chicago martyrs have been my greatest inspiration, their courage my guiding star.” She was drawn to their spirit: meeting Michael Schwab, who endured six years in Joliet Penitentiary before his pardon by Illinois Governor Altgeld, she described him as “staunch and proud spirit the cruel powers had failed to break.” Albert Parsons, she noted, shared her conviction that anarchism is not “a mere theory of the future” but “a living force in his everyday existence, in his home life and relations with his fellows.” In her youth, Louis Lingg, “the sublime hero among the eight,” was her favorite: she recalled “His unbending spirit, his utter contempt for his accusers and judges, his will-power, which made him rob his enemies of their prey and die by his own hand—everything about that boy of twenty-two leant romance and beauty to his personality. He became the beacon of our lives.”24 She borrowed images from the Haymarket speeches, especially that of August Spies, who pictured revolution as inevitable, like a waterfall or a hurricane, and characterized the anarchist defendants as “the birds of the coming storm.”25 The events of Haymarket revealed for Goldman the merciless violence standing just behind the law. At the end of her life, she recalled Haymarket as the event that “tore away shams and made reality stand out vividly and clearly.”26 The qualities of “Haymarket” came to exceed the historical events of that name, and to float over other events as an always-already available signifier of heroic defiance. We can think of this as the Haymarket effect, the capacity of this event to stand for more, to migrate to other events and objects. “Thus experienced,” Deleuze tells us, “the quality no longer appears as a property of the object that now possesses it, but as the sign of an altogether different object that we must try to decipher, at the cost of an effort that always risks failure. It is as if the quality enveloped, imprisoned the soul of an object other than the one it now designates.”27 Every anniversary of the police riot on May 4 and the executions on November 11, 1887, was marked with ritualized remembering.28 Haymarket was the

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touchstone: the anti-anarchist police actions and legal persecution after the assassination of McKinley in 1901 were understood as “a repetition of 1887,” and subsequent expressions of radicalism were resurrections of “the spirit of the Chicago martyrs.”29 Goldman and Berkman stressed the importance of their anti-draft trial in 1917 by comparing it to Haymarket: “It would be the first time since 1887 that anarchism had raised its voice in an American court. Nothing else was worth considering in comparison with such an achievement.”30 The violence of Haymarket extended not only to those executed and imprisoned, but to Goldman and others incited further into the world of anarchist signs. Tom Goyens concludes, “the verdict stunned reformers and radicals alike.”31 In Deleuze’s formulation, We search for truth only when we are determined to do so in terms of a concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence that impels us to such a search. . . . There is always the violence of a sign that forces us into the search, that robs us of peace. The truth is not to be found by affinity, nor by good will, but is betrayed by involuntary signs.32

Haymarket was that violence, that concrete situation demanding a search, provoking her revolt against authorities whose own ruthless excess betrayed their vulnerability. Goldman recalled the aftermath of the executions as a wrenching moment of loss and rebirth: I was entirely absorbed in what I felt as my own loss. Then I heard the coarse laugh of a woman. In a shrill voice she sneered: “What’s all this lament about? The men were murderers. It is well they were hanged.” With one leap I was at the woman’s throat. Then I felt myself torn back. Someone said: “the child has gone crazy.” I wrenched myself free, grabbed a pitcher of water from a table, and threw it with all my force into the woman’s face. “Out, out,” I cried, “or I will kill you!”33

The speaker fled, and Goldman collapsed, weeping. She was put to bed, and she recalls falling into a deep sleep: The next morning I woke as from a long illness, but free from the numbness and the depression of those harrowing weeks of waiting, ending with the final shock. I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic deaths.34

In Goldman’s conversion narrative, Haymarket provoked a wild, involuntary encounter that spurred her into action. She secretly took a course in dressmaking in order to acquire a more versatile trade, left her husband,

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scandalized her family and community, and made her way to New York City. “The new was calling.” 35 Haymarket operated as a floating signifier, always available and always temporal, not fixed in time. The time of Haymarket—like crowd time, journal time, the various times of struggle—is not fixed and static, but plural and mobile; times mingle and interact with each other in multiple combinations. Deleuze suggests that the truth of the interpretation of sensual signs such as Haymarket would always be in process: “To seek the truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate. But this ‘explication’ is identified with the development of the sign in itself. This is why the Search is always temporal, and the truth always a truth of time. The final systematization reminds us that Time itself (le Temps) is plural.”36 The Haymarket effect floats over and lights on the trials of Mooney and Billings (anarchists falsely accused of planting a bomb during the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco, July 22, 1916), Francisco Ferrer (a Spanish educator executed in 1909), Sacco and Vanzetti (anarchists executed in 1927 amid worldwide protests). It floats backwards in chronological time to link with the iconic images of resistance from the Paris Commune. Years later, the Haymarket story was even made into a sympathetic children’s book.37 “This judicial crime,” Goldman recalled in her 1934 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “left an indelible mark on my mind and heart and sent me forth to acquaint myself with the ideal for which these men had died so heroically. I dedicated myself to their cause.”38 Goyens succinctly concludes, “Haymarket was a watershed.”39 Haymarket was a marker for the authorities, too; Goldman recalled a police officer bellowing at her, “If you don’t confess, you’ll go the way of those bastard Haymarket anarchists.”40 The American poet Carl Sandburg was eight years old, growing up in Galena, Illinois, when the Haymarket events took place, and he remembered being surrounded by talk of the trial. Stark black-and-white drawings of the accused circulated with sensational accounts of their alleged words and actions, provoking fearful condemnation of anarchists while assuring viewers that the grounds for such condemnation had been there all along: “they looked exactly what we expected,” Sandburg recalled, “hard, mean, slimy faces. We saw pictures of the twelve men on the jury and they looked like what we expected, nice, honest, decent faces.” On the one hand, the meaning was new: “We learned the word for the men on trial, anarchists, and they hated the rich and called the police ‘bloodhounds.’” On the other hand, young Sandburg realized, the meaning was already available for everyone to see: “[the accused] were not regular people and they didn’t belong to the human race, for they seemed more like slimy animals who prowl, sneak, and kill in the dark.” On the day of the anarchists’ execution, Sandburg heard one man greet another with a satisfied cry; “Well, they hanged ’em!” Unsettled, the boy knew the man was happy; “he sang it out with a glad howl.” The boy further perceived

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that “everybody” felt that way, that the proper feeling was already present in the material: “I didn’t meet or hear of anyone in our town who didn’t so believe.”41 The events of Haymarket, young Carl Sandburg realized, were readily folded into the prevailing social imaginary in the United States. Outside of the radical press, newspapers exulted in the triumph of law over anarchy. Readers did not need to think or to act, as Deleuze explains; they only needed to make signs. In a characteristically dramatic gesture, Teddy Roosevelt and his cowboys in the Badlands of South Dakota “burned the dead men in effigy.”42 A satisfied account written in 1890 rejoiced that the majesty of the law had triumphed, proving that “order is heaven’s first law.”43 The violence of the executions and the violence of those who greeted the anarchists’ deaths with a “glad howl” were equally a part of the sensuous sign of Haymarket. The violence twisted, intruded, provoked: as Deleuze explains, “Truth is never the product of a prior disposition but the result of a violence in thought.”44 Goldman’s own account, however, folds her memories of Haymarket into just the sort of story that Deleuze contests: she features the importance of her prior disposition in leading to her radicalization. Goldman highlights those elements of her life, and inevitably sidelines others, to allow for a smooth trajectory toward radicalism. The implication is that we should look for the seed of her subsequent politics in her early predisposition, our thoughts running something like this: Goldman was this kind of person; therefore she thought certain ways and did certain things. This familiar narrative device tends to smooth out the political horizon, reducing it to a site of reception for a telos launched elsewhere. In this sense, Goldman’s autobiography is a pious narrative in the same manner that political theorist Michael Shapiro finds in Ben Franklin’s self-telling: the story portrays the gradual unfolding of a rebellion whose seeds were already planted. Piety in this context means a narrative practice in which a hidden truth unfolds and a person fulfills her destiny rather than creates herself and is created by the semiotic and material practices within which she resides. A pious auto/ biography tells a story in which the subject becomes the hero she was all along, and her earlier life becomes a site for finding implicit signs of her coming greatness.45 In contrast, Deleuze insists on starting with particular situations, turbulent episodes that provoke wrenching thought and shape the apprentice as a thinking person. “Truth depends on an encounter with something that forces us to think and to seek the truth,” Deleuze maintains. “We must first experience the violent effect of a sign,” Deleuze continues, “and the mind must be ‘forced’ to seek the sign’s meaning. . . . Pain forces the intelligence to seek, just as certain unaccustomed pleasures set memory in motion.”46 By using Deleuze to conceptualize Goldman’s apprenticeship to anarchism, we can see a turbulent and contingent process rather than the unfolding of a prior truth.

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While many radicals had died on behalf of their cause, few became touchstones of resistance as did the Haymarket men. Even those who rejoiced, as did writer George McLean, that “America has set the foot of the Goddess of Liberty upon the neck of anarchy and crushed the serpent brood,” often remarked on the dignity and self-possession of the condemned men.47 Kropotkin speculated that it was the well-known ethical integrity of the activists that enshrined them in radical history: “The workmen knew that our brethren were thoroughly honest. . . . They sought no power over others, no place in the ranks of the ruling classes.”48 Kropotkin’s explanation certainly rang true with Goldman, who made it her mission to prove Spies correct in his last words: ‘There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are strangling today.”49

ALEXANDER BERKMAN Deleuze suggests the sociality of the apprentice’s journey: “We never learn by doing like someone but by doing with someone.”50 Applying Deleuze’s insights to action research, John Drummond and Markus Themessl-Huber suggest that the apprentice’s participation in projects “is not ‘do as I say’ but rather ‘do with me.’”51 Of all the comrades peopling Goldman’s apprenticeship in anarchism, Alexander Berkman was the most significant; their political thinking as well as their living were fully intertwined from the day that Goldman met Berkman, August 15, 1889, at Sach’s Café on Suffolk Street, “the headquarters of the East Side radicals.”52 Like Goldman, Berkman was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, although with more formal education and a somewhat more affluent family background. Coming to the United States in 1888, he became involved in the Jewish anarchist group Pioneers of Liberty, worked with Johann Most on his paper Freiheit, then, with Goldman, moved away from Most’s circle and aligned more with the communist-anarchism of Joseph Peukert and his newspaper Die Autonomie. During his incarceration for his failed attentat, Berkman edited a secret prison journal and subsequently narrated his experience in the remarkable book Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which was widely acclaimed, Goldman triumphantly recorded it as “a work of art and a deeply moving human document.”53 After his release from prison, he helped Goldman edit Mother Earth; he and his comrade and lover M. Eleanor Fitzgerald (“Fitzie”) edited the militant labor journal Blast, and he organized among workers and the unemployed. Imprisoned and then deported with Goldman to Russia for organizing against conscription prior to World War I, Berkman eventually settled (more or less, given his vulnerable legal status as a stateless person) in the south of France, where he wrote his last book, What is Anarchism? First published in 1929,

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Goldman felt this book to be “the plainest and simplest modern exposé of our ideas.”54 Written relatively late in their lives, What Is Anarchism? is, I believe, a good indicator of their mature positions on anarchism and revolution. In a sense their long collaboration in anarchism is expressed in this compact little book. Berkman’s book was intended as a revolutionary primer for the working class, as well as a “new orientation of revolutionary tactics called forth by the experience of the Russian Revolution.”55 “The old style, the old generalizations, etc., will not do,” Berkman wrote to Goldman in 1927. “We must show clearly what we want and how we are going to reach it.”56 A romantic belief in the magic power of revolution had utterly failed in the nascent U.S.S.R., because the needed “economic and social preparation,” the “will to constructive work,” was missing in Russia—although it blossomed in Spain after Berkman’s death.57 Beginning with Proudhon’s maxim that “property is theft,” Berkman gently, conversationally, walks his reader through the basics of revolutionary anarchism. He starts with the presumption that everyone wants pretty much the same things out of life: “health, liberty, and well-being.” Because we live in a system of private ownership and profit-making, those who create wealth through their labor are being robbed by those who do not. Law and government protect the interests of the owning class, while employing some members of the working class to control the rest. Schools, media, and churches perpetuate the idea that this grave injustice is natural, inevitable, and right. Capitalism produces wars of conquest and profit; it produces crimes of desperation and greed. There is a general tendency toward justice in people, since “by nature and habit we are social beings.”58 It is precisely this spirit of justice and rebellion that capitalism and the state try to kill. These conditions can be changed, however, if working people withhold their obedience from the government and their labor from employers. Working people cannot change the state by utilizing the methods of the state, because “the means you use to attain your object soon themselves become your object.” To develop a society without inequality, people must begin to live as equals. To foster freedom, people must care for their own freedom as well as the freedom of others. Our capacity to be creative will lead us toward the work we can best do, and our desire to be useful to our fellows will motivate our contributions. To struggle against power, people must govern themselves; “It is power which corrupts. The consciousness that you possess power is itself the worst poison that corrodes the finest metal of man.” A social revolution will be necessary, but rebellion against the ruling class and the state is only the first step; the people must be prepared, both ideologically and materially, to step forward in the moments of upheaval and to reconstruct their own production, “to take over things for the general benefit . . . to reorganize conditions for the public welfare.”59

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Berkman is at his most eloquent when he tells his reader how to prepare: If your object is to secure liberty, you must learn to do without authority and compulsion. If you intend to live in peace and harmony with your fellow men, you and they should cultivate brotherhood and respect for each other. If you want to work together with them for your mutual benefit, you must practice cooperation. The social revolution means much more than the reorganization of conditions only: it means the establishment of new human values and social relationships, a changed attitude of man to man, as of one free and independent to his equal; it means a different spirit in individual and collective life, and that spirit cannot be born overnight. It is a spirit to be cultivated, to be nurtured and reared, as the most delicate flower is, for indeed it is the flower of a new and beautiful existence.60

Workplaces can become sites where workers learn how to organize their labor, to integrate mental and manual work, and to manage themselves. Production and trade can be organized on the basis of ability and need. Decision-making can be decentralized as much as possible, and localities can strive for self-sufficiency. People are not “naturally good,” as anarchism’s opponents often caricature anarchists’ views, but they have the capacity for great idealism, and it is the job of anarchists to “exemplify and cultivate this spirit and instill it in others.”61 For Goldman and Berkman, the way you live your life is a political act, both creating an example of liberated space within the larger oppressive society and building a bridge to a future transformation. Berkman’s final statement of their anarchism rests on their shared experience and the dialogue they cultivated for half a century. They were apprentices together, Egyptologists of anarchism. While Deleuze’s understanding of apprenticeship is useful in understanding Goldman’s education into anarchism, his analysis of friendship in Proust and Signs is less helpful because he undervalues the political energy in the particular kind of bond that anarchists found with their comrades. Here Deleuze underestimates friendship, seeing it as “minds of goodwill” who basically agree and do not push each other: friendship is “ignorant of the dark regions in which are elaborated the effective forces that act on thought, the determinations that force us to think; a friend is not enough for us to approach the truth. . . . [T]he truth is not revealed, it is betrayed; it is not communicated, it is interpreted; it is not willed, it is involuntary.”62 Goldman and Berkman trusted each other, fought with each other, provoked and reassured one another for decades of common apprenticeship to each other and to anarchism. Their comradeship was not, as Deleuze would have it, ignorant of the dark regions. Both certainly had their dark regions: their own deep depressions, their periodic battles over political tactics, their frequent dislike for one another’s lovers, their despair over revolutions betrayed, their inability to quit the struggle.

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What Deleuze calls goodwill toward one another, combined with their shared political missions, produced their lifelong apprenticeships in radical politics. Perhaps comradeship provides a bridge between apprenticeship and friendship: it participates in the determinations that force us to think while maintaining its grounding in love. Deleuze rightly insists on the turbulence entailed when we approach the truth—it is not a smooth process of revealing something already there, but an active intervention that selects and assembles signs, that is vulnerable, contingent, and could have been otherwise. Signs thrust themselves upon us, and we come to some sort of terms with them, terms that may painfully require reassembling as they force us to think. Goldman and Berkman did much of their thinking together. While they were lovers only briefly, they became a literary couple, their comradeship part of the apparatus of their thinking. Like Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, like John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, they collaborated on writing and revising books, editing journals, thinking out personal and political dilemmas in endless conversation and correspondence. As with her other books, she credited Berkman for his help with her autobiography: “For eighteen months Sasha worked side by side with me as in our old days. Critical, of course, but always in the finest and broadest spirit.” They were proud of each other: her accounts of Berkman in Living My Life glow with pride. When they disagreed, it was a crisis: Sasha’s criticism of Leon Czolgosz’s attentat on McKinley, contrary to Goldman’s public defense of Czolgosz’s motivations, caused her to despair. Berkman’s continued support for the Russian Revolution, after Goldman had turned that corner, was painful: “He was not yet ready to see with his inner vision the things already obvious to his outer eye.” Their disagreement “overwhelmed me like a mighty wave, leaving me bruised and battered.” Similarly, Berkman opposed her decision to publish her criticism of the Bolsheviks in the capitalist press: “Days and weeks went into the conflict, the hardest life had allotted me.”63 Berkman’s final decision to commit suicide, rather than to struggle with a life of illness and political limitations, filled Goldman with despair. Both anarchists were gifted leaders and organizers. They crafted the sort of leadership that anthropologist Karen Brodkin Sacks characterizes as center people: those who stand in the middle of a social space and bring its elements together, helping others focus and move forward.64 Marshaling the energies of a group, they brought out its possibilities. Both Goldman and Berkman took on roles of leadership and advocacy in prison. Berkman won over his wardens in the U.S. Marshal’s office where he was held pending possible extradition and execution in California. They asked to read his memoirs and were impressed by his bravery in facing likely execution. Goldman tirelessly organized protests against the extradition, and “literally

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saved Berkman’s life” during that struggle.65 Thousands attended a rally opposing his extradition, and Goldman orchestrated support from writers, unions, socialist papers, and progressives of all stripes. At that event Goldman was prohibited from speaking, so she appeared on stage with a gag in her mouth. She brought down the house.66 During the last desperate hours before their deportation in 1919, Berkman organized the deportees, who appointed him their representative, negotiating small concessions from the authorities to allow them to contact their families and friends, to acquire some resources for their journey into exile. He organized the sharing of their meager supplies; set up a mail service with Goldman via a willing sailor; put two of his men, who were cooks, in charge of the bakery; negotiated improvements in the men’s abominable conditions, as well as helping the three women deportees, who ate separately, to smuggle some of their more plentiful food to the men. He even won over the soldiers: one day some soldiers, selected by the rest as delegates, came to him with an “an offer to supply the deportees with guns and ammunition, to arrest all those in charge, turn the command of the Buford over to Sasha, and sail with all aboard to Soviet Russia.” When the Buford left England it was accompanied by an Allied destroyer because the authorities feared a mutiny: they were aware of the potentially explosive consequences of having “two hundred and forty-nine radicals on hand who believed in strikes and direct action.”67 When they went into exile, they could have married U.S. citizens and stayed in the country, but Berkman would not consider that avenue. He urged Goldman to stay to continue her political work, but their comradeship was so much a part of their thinking/acting, neither of them could really imagine severing it. “‘It’s no use, old scout,’ I said; ‘you can’t get rid of me so easily. I have made my decision, and I am going with you.’ He gripped hard my hand, but he said not a word.” Unlike her teacher/ student relation with Most, with Berkman she was an equal; they disagreed, but she never felt the same need to distance herself from him intellectually; in fact, quite the opposite, his imprisonment for their attempted attentat bound her to him forever. She struggled with his rigid ideas of revolutionary consistency, yet he did not try to control her, and her loyalty to him was “all.”68 Writing to her friends Max and Gertrude Zahler in May 1935, she reflects on her friendship with Berkman: “Yes, our friendship is the most glowing achievement of all our struggle.”69 Just before his 65th birthday, she wrote to him on November 19, 1935: “As a greeting . . . it is fitting that I should tell you the secret of my life. It is that the one treasure I have re[s]cued from my long and bitter struggle is my friendship for you.”70 Berkman considered this “the most beautiful letter, perhaps that I ever had from you.”71

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JOHANN MOST While Berkman was her unfailing comrade and equal, Most was her mentor, her tutor into anarchism. Lovers for a brief time, Most was important to Goldman for his personal presence, his inflammatory style of oratory, and not least for his library, which he generously made available to her. Twenty-year-old Goldman went with Berkman to hear Most speak on her first day in New York City, August 15, 1889: the speech was a “scorching denunciation of American conditions,” a “passionate tirade against those responsible for the Haymarket tragedy.” “He stirred me to my depths,” Goldman recalled. “He opened up a new world to me, introduced me to music, books, the theatre. But his own rich personality meant far more to me—the alternating heights and depths of his spirit, his hatred of the capitalist system, his vision of a new society of beauty and joy for all. Most became my idol. I worshipped him.”72 A former member of the Austrian Parliament and activist in the Socialist Party, Most was imprisoned, then exiled, and made his way to London and then to New York. He edited, wrote, and lectured in anarchist circuits, published journals and pamphlets in both the United States and Europe, and was frequently imprisoned for his inflammatory rhetoric.73 Most wrote Revolutionary War Science in 1885 “as a working manual for the attentater.”74 While Most is largely remembered for his early promotion of revolutionary violence, his actual legacy to international anarchism is more nuanced than his reputation credits. Along with the Haymarket men August Spies and Albert Parsons, Most was instrumental in organizing the 1883 Pittsburgh Congress, “a milestone in the history of revolutionary anarchism in the United States.”75 Anarchists from twenty-six cities were represented.76 Affiliating with the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) the Pittsburgh Congress set up a federated apparatus for encouraging anarchists to organize in their towns and neighborhoods. This loose, decentralized network among groups allowed for the organization of lecture tours, distribution of literature, and support of anarchist activities. The Pittsburgh Manifesto proclaimed “the core tenets of American revolutionary anarchism.” Primarily reflecting Bakunin’s influence on Most, the core tenets were: 1. First—Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action. 2. Second—Establishment of a free society based upon cooperative organization of production. 3. Third—Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.

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4. Fourth—Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes. 5. Fifth—Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race. 6. Sixth—Regulation of all public affairs by free contract between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.77 The scope of this terse proclamation is extensive: two of the six core tenets call for equality between women and men, while others endorse a cooperative economy based on direct exchange of goods and services and a political network of autonomous localities. It is unclear what the reference to racial equality meant for the participants, who were mostly European immigrants; it might have signified the inclusion of Jews, or it might have simply been repeating the language of the Declaration of Independence, which served as the legitimating ground for the document. While Goyens notes that there were relatively few women active in the circle around Freiheit (Goldman being an exception), and the anarchist men of Most’s era were unlikely to find ideas about equality relevant to their homes, there were nonetheless two strong claims for gender equality in this influential document. While the older generation of German anarchists held that “gender equality was an issue for a future date,” younger anarchists—often Russian, Jewish, and working class—could build anarchism’s vision of free individuals in a free society toward feminist ends.78 The Pittsburgh Congress, which took place before Goldman arrived in the United States, is credited by historian Tom Goyens with facilitating “an upsurge in group activity and propaganda through periodicals, leaflets, and speaking tours.”79 The movement for the eight-hour day regained strength after the Haymarket setback, especially among the anarchists in Chicago and the Midwest. The “Chicago idea” anticipated anarchosyndicalism by calling for radical trade unionism in which unions were “the center of revolutionary struggle as well as the nucleus of the future society.” Anarchists from New York and other eastern cities were more skeptical of unions, with Most continuing to call for complete revolution and opposing the movement for the eight-hour day as “mere reform.”80 Elements of both positions were incorporated by the Pittsburgh Congress. By the spring of 1885, there were eighty affiliated anarchist groups with an estimated membership of 3000 and another 4000 sympathizers, up from only thirty such groups two years earlier.81 Largely self-educated, Most shared his extensive radical library with Goldman. She recalled, “Most had revolutionary history at his fingertips.” From him she learned about Marx, Engels, Bakunin, the First International, and the fate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany; revolutionary poets and writers, including Ferdinand Freiligrath, Georg Herwegh,

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Fredrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Ferdinand La Salle, and of course other anarchists. Soon after they met, Most recognized Goldman’s potential talent as a lecturer and launched her speaking career. “He impressed upon me the need for humor,” she recalled. He told her, “be bold, be arrogant, I am sure you will be brave.” She loved him, expressing “infinite tenderness for the great man-child at my side.” Yet she had doubts. During her first speaking tour, Goldman entertained her audience with a sarcastic denunciation of the struggle for the eight-hour day, “scoffing at the stupidity of the workers who fought for such trifles.”82 At the end of her speech in Cleveland, an older working man in the audience made a plea for the immediate significance of “minor” reforms in the concrete lives of the workers, especially those workers too old to hope to see more revolutionary change during their lifetimes. In her autobiography she recalls, The man’s earnestness, his clear analysis of the principle involved in the eighthour struggle, brought home to me the falsity of Most’s position. I realized I was committing a crime against myself and the workers by serving as a parrot repeating Most’s views. I understood why I had failed to reach my audience. I had taken refuge in cheap jokes and bitter thrusts against the toilers to cover up my own inner lack of conviction.83

With this painful encounter, the terms of Goldman’s apprenticeship shifted. She realized that, in Deleuze’s terms, she had descended into the space of anarchist worldly signs, routinized signs that take the place of thinking. Seeing that she had followed Most’s lead blindly, she both moved away from his position on the issue and faced “the need of independent thinking.” The elderly worker, striking with his “white hair and lean, haggard face,” was another bruising sensuous sign.84 She was forced by their encounter to recognize her subservience to her teacher, reflect on her own lack of enthusiasm for Most’s rigid formulations, and accept the humiliation of feeling like a fool. Most was ruthless toward his opponents, including (especially) other anarchists who might compete with him and his journal Freiheit for influence in anarchist communities.85 Most tended to attract the fiery revolutionary Bakunist anarchists, who often called themselves collectivists, while his rival Joseph Peukert, who separated in 1885 to launch Die Autonomie, was more influenced by Kropotkin’s communist anarchism. Peukert also encouraged the practice of organizing through small groups of trusted individuals, an approach to anarchist organizing that Goldman followed throughout her life.86 Goldman and Berkman moved away from Most’s positions and took sides with his opponents in internecine struggles among immigrant German radicals. Most had begun to express reservations about the attentat as a tool that could work in the United States; when he repudiated Berkman’s attempt on Frick, Goldman held that it caused a split in

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the anarchist movement into “two inimical camps.”87 Ironically, Most’s reservations regarding Berkman’s attentat against Frick raised the same sorts of objections to the strategy—that it was useless to target individuals when the system was the problem, and in any case political assassination would not be well received in the United States—that Berkman later raised toward Czolgosz’s assassination of McKinley.88 Nonetheless, Goldman was enraged that Most would turn his scorn on Sasha, then suffering in prison for his attempt on Frick’s life. Goldman recounts in her autobiography that she stormed a stage where Most spoke and lashed the startled speaker with a toy whip she carried under her cloak. Not surprisingly, he never forgave her. By his death, she had mellowed: “My own long struggle to find my bearings, the disillusionments and disappointments I had experienced, had made me less dogmatic in my demands on people than I had been.”89 Most had not: they shared a lecture platform at the death of Louise Michel in 1905, but, according to Goldman’s account, he would not greet her. He died shortly after, and she spoke at the memorial meeting of his “genius and spirit,” appreciating the man that Richard Drinnon aptly characterizes as “refus[ing] to be bowed.”90

ED BRADY Ed Brady was an urbane immigrant from Austria, where he was active for many years in the anarchist movement; he was devoted to Goldman but, like Most, also controlling. Brady was a respected anarchist and an educated man, having completed the gymnasium before spending a decade in prison for publishing illegal anarchist literature. Like many radicals, he read widely in prison, ranging beyond the texts of radical politics. He introduced Goldman to classic English and French literature: Shakespeare, Johann Goethe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, and Molière. They read Candide together in French, and Goldman found Brady to be a “born teacher.” Awed, she looked up to him, “the most scholarly person I had ever met.” However, their personal relationship foundered on Brady’s desire for traditional family life and his contempt for Goldman’s independent intellectual interests. Unlike Berkman, whose fights with Goldman were always on level ground, both Most and Brady wanted to be in charge of her education, her thinking. When Ed “credited” her with thinking like a man, she retorted “that the reasoning faculties of most men had not impressed me to the point of wishing to join them, and that I preferred to do my own thinking as a woman.”91 While their personal relation ended unhappily, Brady’s intellectual generosity opened many opportunities for a young factory worker to expand her lifeworld.

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Both Most and Brady were pivotal people in Goldman’s apprenticeship in anarchism. Both older men loved and mentored the young woman, still in her twenties. Both, in the end, “loved only the woman in [her],” Goldman’s way of saying that they wanted her to take up a traditional sexual and domestic role as wife and mother.92 Both tried to control her intellectual and political development. Both eventually forced the issue to the point that she broke with them in a final, devastating wrenching of herself. We might, with Deleuze, think of these elements of Goldman’s apprenticeship in terms of the signs of love: “The beloved appears as a sign, a ‘soul’; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted.” The signs of love, for Deleuze, are intimately tied to jealousy, because we want the beloved to address all her gestures to us, but “because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred.”93 Both Most and Brady followed this possessive path in their struggle with what Deleuze called love’s deceptive signs, as did Goldman later in her excruciating relationship with her manager Ben Reitman. Her popular essay on jealousy, in fact, was written largely in response to her turmoil over what Deleuze called love’s truth, and her effort to advance a less possessive, more joyous understanding of love. These painful episodes are perhaps one version of the sort of pain that Deleuze sees as driving the apprentice’s journey, the kind of crisis out of which growth can arise.

PRISON Like most other anarchists we have met, Goldman did a great deal of her reading in prison. In fact, she commented that in prison she accumulated “quite a little library of good books.”94 During her first term for allegedly inciting workers to “take bread” from owners, many of her friends sent her books. John Swinton and Justus Schwab sent her Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Stuart Mill, and other English and American authors. She read the life of Albert Brisbane, and learned about Charles Fourier and other socialists. The prison library at Blackwell’s Island offered George Sand and George Eliot, as well as a Bible that she read after ascertaining that the prison priest would not press it upon her.95 Goldman recalled the education of her first term: [I]t was the prison that had proved the best school. A more painful but a more vital, school. Here I had been brought close to the depths and complexities of the human soul; here I had found ugliness and beauty, meanness

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and generosity. Here, too, I had learned to see life through my own eyes and not through those of Sasha, Most, or Ed. It had helped me to discover strength in my own being, the strength to stand alone, the strength to live my life and fight for my ideals, against the whole world if need be. The State of New York could have rendered me no greater service than by sending me to Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary!96

In 1919, Margaret Anderson sent Goldman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, and she read it in the Tombs after her anti-draft arrest. “I was fascinated by his power and originality,” she recalled, although generally she did not embrace Joyce.97 She loved Jack Reed’s book Ten Days that Shook the World, even though it did not sufficiently acknowledge the role of the Russian anarchists.98 She read Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother and found him to be the closest “to the Russian soil” of all the Russian writers.99 While in Jefferson City, she devoured books and novels about the war, and particularly loved the writings of Randolph Bourne.100 Her friends sent her Edward Carpenter, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Spanish novelist Vincinte Blasco Ibañez, French novelist Henri Barbusse, and Hungarian novelist Andreas Latzko.101 She found George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara meaningful in regard to understanding the armistice,102 and praised Ellen N. La Motte’s account of battlefield nursing, Backwash of the War.103 She kept up with her periodicals in prison: she requested French journals Les Hommes du Jour and Journal de Peuple;104 she read Pearsons, The Nation, and the New Republic.105 She read David Graham Phillips, Susan Lenox (Her Rise and Fall) and concluded, “it is by far the greatest American work I have read.”106 While Goldman often scorned her correspondents for suggesting that prison was a good place to get some reading done, in fact a substantial portion of her education took place within prison walls.

ANARCHIST CLASSICS While anarchism has earlier roots, it is generally a product of the nineteenth century and is typically divided among communist (Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin), mutualist (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) and individualist (Max Stirner) strands. Gustav Landauer and Friedrich Nietzsche are more difficult to categorize, yet their influence on Goldman was notable. In addition to producing Goldman’s journal, the Mother Earth Publishing Company published the writings of the classic anarchist thinkers as well as many other progressive writers. With Voltairine de Cleyre, Max Baginski, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, and others of her generation, she mixed themes from all three traditions, plus ideas from other philosophical and artistic sources, to create “anarchism without adjectives.”107 On both the

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conceptual and the organizational levels, Goldman insisted on pulling together the strengths of each tradition and discarding those elements that failed to contribute. Many of Goldman’s commentators have debated which strand is dominant in her thinking, and have stressed the incompatibilities among the threads, but Goldman’s goal was a weaving together of their strengths.108 Candace Falk characterizes Goldman’s thinking as “an intriguing and powerful cultural hybrid,” and many of the central elements of that hybridity are woven from these classic anarchist texts.109 We have seen that, in scholarship on Goldman, “hybrid” is often connected to “synthesis,” which quickly deteriorates to “not much of a theorist.” Instead of reentering that debate at this point, let’s instead take hybridity seriously as a creative intellectual project, and ask what this mix allows us to accomplish. The intellectual debts that went into her composition of individual, mutualist, and communist anarchism can best be seen by looking briefly at each of the classic anarchist thinkers she regularly utilized to make her arguments. What were these threads and how did she connect them? Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon Peter Kropotkin was both a personal acquaintance of Goldman’s and the “grand old man” of communist anarchism. Goldman recognized Kropotkin as anarchism’s “clearest thinker and theoretician.”110 Like him, Goldman makes vigorous use of organic metaphors, conceptualizing society as a living organism and human relations as largely reflective of the principles of Mutual Aid, the title of his most famous book. She supported Berkman’s reliance on Kropotkin in his final book to establish that “we all have an instinctive sympathy with our fellow man for by nature and habit we are social beings,” and to sketch their shared vision of independent, selfgoverning communities.111 While the usual image of Kropotkin is the gentle philosopher, he was also active in militant anarchist organizations. Kropotkin participated in an international anarchist conference in London in 1881, along with Errico Malatesta, Johann Neve, Emile Gautier, and Louise Michel.112 He was an early supporter of the anarchist attentat, and never espoused complete non-violence because he was convinced the wealthy and powerful would not give up without a fight. He published an anarchist journal Le Rèvoltè, launched in 1879, and he helped found the London journal Freedom.113 He made two successful tours of the United States in 1897 and 1901, the latter organized in part by Goldman, where he spoke to enormous crowds and made a major contribution to the circulation of anarchist ideas. Kropotkin was knowledgeable of American literature and science. Like many anarchists, he praised Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, the Declaration of Independence, and the principles of federalism.114

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Kropotkin was born in Moscow in 1842. Trained as a geographer, he was a distinguished scientist who brought his knowledge of anthropology, zoology, and history to bear on creating both a scientific and an ethical framework for anarchism. Profoundly influenced by Darwin, he insisted that survival and growth are best served when individuals within a species cooperate to repel a common enemy or survive a dangerous situation. Mutual Aid has become an anarchist classic. Taking evidence from a variety of animal and human communities, he argued that a tendency toward sociability—“the need of the animal of associating with its like”—was as fundamental as competition among our species. Not love per se, but “social feelings” facilitate cooperation among people and animals and allow a “collective sense of justice growing to become a habit.” Intelligence itself, he argues, is “an eminently social faculty.”115 Kropotkin’s systematic investigation of animal and human relationships in Mutual Aid was his attempt both to build on Darwin, who had noted that sociality was essential for species’ survival, and to rescue Darwin from the Social Darwinists who misread him in order to justify inequality and war. An equally important book, The Conquest of Bread, and its sequel Fields, Factories and Workshops, sketched his vision of an anarchist community. His vision is the heart of Goldman’s and Berkman’s as well: since the riches that human beings have created are a collective achievement, it is impossible to accurately measure the work of each individual in wages or the value of each product: “all belongs to all.”116 Technology per se was not the source of human suffering, but rather the strict division of labor, the separation of mental from manual and urban from rural labor, and of course the profit system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Kropotkin put great emphasis on education as the process of integrating labor and learning—head and heart—in what he called an “integral education.”117 Like Berkman and Goldman, Kropotkin turned more strongly to syndicalism toward the end of his life, because it offered a way to incorporate the daily lives of people into the revolution: as Goldman said in her autobiography, “without the people, without the direct participation of the toilers in the reconstruction of the country, nothing creative and essential could be accomplished.” Anarcho-syndicalism offered “what Russia lacked most: the channel through which the industrial and economic upbuilding of the country could flow”; cooperatives could “save future revolutions the fatal blunders and fearful suffering Russia was passing through.” Like Goldman in her reconsideration of the attentat, Kropotkin emphasized that the means by which a revolution is made must be consistent with the goal it seeks. She shared his despair at the end of his life, when the anarchists in Russia were “between two fires”—they could not work with the Bolsheviks, nor with the enemies of the revolution, so they could only try to “find some work of direct benefit to the masses.”118

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Goldman and Kropotkin had significant differences. Along with Rudolf Rocker, Errico Malatesta, and Gustav Laudauer, she was appalled at Kropotkin’s support for the Entente in World War I, which Kropotkin embraced out of fear that German militarism would destroy the revolutionary achievements in France.119 Goldman famously argued with Kropotkin over the importance of sex to human liberation, finally persuading him, with her characteristic humor and his warm benevolence, that sexuality would always be important to young people.120 Despite these differences, she incorporated much of his anarchism: speaking at the occasion of his seventieth birthday, she said he was “the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy, and progressive thought. Anarchism to him was not an ideal for the select few. It was a constructive social theory, destined to usher in a new world for all of mankind.”121 If Kropotkin was the beautiful soul of nineteenth-century anarchism, Bakunin was, in Kropotkin’s words, its “moral personality.”122 Kropotkin and Bakunin shared a great deal. Both were born into the Russian aristocracy, both abandoned their class privileges to become revolutionaries with global influence, both “made dramatic escapes from tsarist confinement that gave their names the aura of legend.”123 Both worked for a social revolution of workers, peasants, and intellectuals; both were adamant that the dictatorship of the proletariat would put an end to the nascent revolution it claimed to protect; both envisioned a decentralized society of creative individuals in self-governing communities. Goldman and Berkman did not meet Bakunin, who died in 1876, but they became acquainted with his ideas through anarchist publications in the United States by the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker in his journal Liberty, Albert Parson’s journal Alarm, and especially Most’s journal Freiheit. The Union of Russian Workers and the Anarchist Red Cross, with whom Goldman and Berkman worked, spread Bakunin’s ideas in their journals Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor) and Khleb i Volia (Bread and Freedom).124 Goldman became friends with Belgian intellectual and revolutionary Victor Dave in Paris; Dave had worked with Bakunin in the First International and was a friend and mentor to Most.125 Bakunin’s influence on Goldman and Berkman is especially evident in their early years, when they dedicated themselves to revolution and formed a secret society. No doubt Bakunin’s demands for immediate revolution and complete rejection of compromise appealed to their romantic yearnings for noble struggle on behalf of the oppressed. With Modest Stein, Claus Timmerman and perhaps others, they pledged their lives to “The People” and planned their attentat against Henry Clay Frick.126 Bakunin’s hopes for revolution rested on rebellion of the disinherited—the lumpenproletariat, the dispossessed peasantry, and radical intellectuals. Goldman’s and especially

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Berkman’s work with the unemployed, and their stress on including prison labor within the labor movement, may reflect their absorption of Bakunin’s broad definition of the agents of revolution. The anarchist programs that Bakunin wrote for various organizations and alliances included specific commitments to equality for women and equal education for girls and boys, principles repeated in the Pittsburgh Manifesto authored by Johann Most.127 Bakunin’s insistence that equality does not mean “leveling down” but rather respecting diversity as the “treasure house of mankind,” is further developed in Goldman’s feminism.128 Goldman and Berkman’s break with Most and move toward Peukert’s group was also, implicitly, to some extent a shift away from Bakunin and toward Kropotkin. A huge factor in the struggle between followers of Kropotkin and those of Bakunin concerned their plan for the distribution of goods and services in a proper anarchist society. Kropotkin and his followers were fully anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, envisioning a completely free and equal society in which each individual contributed according to her abilities and received according to her needs. Bakunin and his followers, including Johann Most, feared that “unproductive parasites” would mooch off of the working people, and advocated that goods be distributed according to the labor that each person contributed.129 This entirely hypothetical argument about the details of the future seems ludicrous, especially given anarchists’ general disinclination to specify the exact arrangements of potential anarchist societies. Since anarchists routinely decline to give the often-requested blueprint for the future, why argue so ferociously over a relatively small difference in an agenda otherwise largely shared? One reason may be the sheer cantankerousness of the individuals involved: Most in particular was determined to pursue “unity” in the anarchist movement by eliminating contending ideas and journals. This tactic seldom works in any organization and is guaranteed to fail with anarchists; Most only succeeded in bringing out the disunity and fragmentation against which he railed. Another reason for this vicious dispute, as it took shape in the United States, may have been the muted ethnic or national identities submerged behind the quarrel: Most was perhaps the most well known of the German speaking writers and editors, while Kropotkin was Russian and many who joined his factions were Russian Jews. Bakunin expressed dislike of both Jews and Germans,130 and Goldman suspected anti-semitism in Most’s rage against Berkman as “that arrogant Russian Jew.”131 Whatever the reasons behind the vicious factionalism, both Kropotkin and Bakunin continued to be important influences on Goldman and Berkman. Goldman cited Bakunin in her influential essay “Anarchism, What it Really Stands For,” in rejecting any hope of reform through the state.132 All four anarchists moved toward syndicalism, seeing radical trade unionism as the specific organizational setting within which resistance could proceed

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and revolutionary practices could be nurtured.133 They all relied on organic metaphors of growth and change to conceptualize the relation of individuals to society: in Bakunin’s words, “Society is the root, the tree of freedom, and liberty is its fruit.”134 They all rejected the idea of a vanguard party to lead revolutions, insisting, with Bakunin, that revolutions are “brought on by the natural force of circumstances” which no party, “not even the most powerful of associations,” can command.135 While Kropotkin’s and Bakunin’s ideas are central to Goldman’s thinking, Proudhon is more peripheral. Goldman recognized Proudhon, who was likely the first to use the term anarchism, as the greatest French anarchist.136 Of course she did not know him, since he died in 1865. Proudhon is generally known as a mutualist anarchist for his vision of cooperative groups of small-scale artisans combining market mechanisms with collective social arrangements. Proudhon’s ideas came to the United States prior to the Civil War through the work of European exiles and American followers of Fourier, including reformer Albert Brisbane, New York Tribune reporter Charles Dana, and anarchist editor Benjamin Tucker, who translated much of Proudhon’s work into English. The reformer William B. Greene of Massachusetts studied Proudhon’s ideas, and later worked with individualist anarchists with whom Goldman was familiar, including Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews and others in the New England Labor Reform League.137 Goldman approvingly (if slightly inaccurately) invoked Proudhon’s famous slogan “Property is robbery” and recognized his contributions to workers’ self-management.138 She overlooked his notorious sexism, scorned his faith in gradual reform, and evinced little enthusiasm for his efforts to create a People’s Bank. “Property is theft,” however, was an excellent slogan and she made full use of it. I disagree with Solomon’s claim that “Proudhon provided the theoretical bases for [Goldman’s] views.”139 Instead, I suggest that Proudhon was a relatively minor thread woven into the mix, while Kropotkin was the more essential element. Landauer, Stirner, Nietzsche These three writers, while different in many ways, were connected in Goldman’s intellectual world by their shared attention to the idea of spirit. Richard Drinnon noted, but did not explore, her “attempted spiritualization of politics.”140 According to Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, second edition, the word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning “breath, courage, vigor, the soul, life.” While Goldman dispensed with the deity who is said to bestow it, she continually invoked the “animating vapor infused by the breath,” the “life principle” as both the grounds and the vehicle of her politics. I imagine her spiritualization of politics included

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valorization, on the individual level, of a spirited disposition, an enthusiastic, vigorous temperament, and on the collective level of an animating principle or inspiration. She often used the language of “internal vs. external” to contrast individual psychology to social structure. “The new social order,” she declared, rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life—individual as well as the collective; the internal as well as the external phases.141

As both animating disposition and universal principle, an anarchist revolution would be one of the spirit. Radical thinkers, as political theorist Jane Bennett has explained, challenge the established ideals of their societies—their worldly signs, in Deleuze’s terms—“by way of contrast with other, younger, and more amorphous constellations.” Counter-ideals are best expressed not as blueprints but as imagined political spaces capable of hosting radically different ways of life. The pervasive hostility of the hegemonic social order to Goldman’s imaginings necessitated a vigorous idealization on her part. “It is through idealization,” Bennett continues, “that a kind of life is given to proto-selves and embryonic aspirations that can’t catch their breath in the current ethical and political atmosphere.”142 Spirit, in my reading, is Landauer’s and Goldman’s way of reaching toward this idealization, toward something universal, a common human capacity to struggle and to create. Perhaps we can think of this invocation in terms of Deleuze’s fourth kind of sign, the sign of art, the world-making capability that multiplies possible worlds.143 “The Ideal,” Goldman held, “is the spark that fires the imagination and hearts of men. Some idea is needed to rouse man out of the inertia and humdrum of his existence and turn the abject slave into an heroic figure.”144 Yet idealization is tricky business: spirit is also, in Stirner’s and Nietzsche’s hands, an ideal that readily transmutes into its own dogmatic orthodoxy. Separating the ennobling ideal from the fixed idea, and keeping them separate when they bleed together, is a crucial political and intellectual struggle. The least known and recognized of the classic anarchist writers, Landauer is cited less frequently than the others in Goldman’s work. However, I can hear his cadence and his urgencies in her prose, and I suspect that she found both an echo and an inspiration in his writings, which were contemporary with hers. She referred to him in her autobiography as a “brilliant German anarchist,” “one of the intellectual spirits of the ‘Jungen,’” the young radicals who seceded from the German Social Democratic party in the 1890s and moved toward anarchism.145 Landauer introduced some of Goldman’s and Berkman’s writings to German-speaking readers.146 Landauer’s compatriot

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Rudolf Rocker, also a well-known German anarchist and friend to Goldman, called Landauer “a spiritual giant.”147 Born in 1870 to an affluent German Jewish family, Gustav Landauer was a philosopher, novelist, translator, journalist, and activist. Expelled from the International Socialist Conference in London in 1896 for his turn toward anarchism, he served several terms in prison for distributing anarchist works, insulting the police, and other political offenses. In prison he wrote a novel, edited a book by linguistic philosopher Fritz Mauthner, and translated the sermons of German medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. A close friend of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Landauer translated works by Proudhon, Kropotkin, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman into German.148 Laudauer’s development into anarchism shared many elements with Goldman: both participated in theater groups promoting working class cultural development; both edited independent journals (his was the weekly Der Sozialist); both were influenced by Nietzsche and Ibsen as well as Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Proudhon; both were fascinated with Walt Whitman. In contrast, and very much unlike Goldman, Landauer was persuaded to take a position as Minister of Culture and Education in the post-revolutionary Bavarian government in November of 1918. While he sometimes mocked the Social Democrats, suggesting they assembled revolutionaries with Germanic precision, “to be sure to have the right number of them in case of a revolution,” he nonetheless embraced the opportunity to participate in creating the new society.149 He was arrested on May Day of 1919 and brutally murdered by soldiers the following day. Russell Berman and Tim Luke’s description of Landauer’s ideas as a “fusion of vitalistic Nietzschean individualism with socialistic communism” could well serve as a characterization of Goldman as well. Landauer and Goldman converged in their shared emphasis on spirit. Not bound to either the traditional religious image of a divine agency above human being, or to Hegel’s idea of a transcendental spirit manifesting itself in history, Landauer’s spirit, in Luke and Berman’s interpretation, is closer to “folk consciousness,” “an inner individual awareness of social ties that demand cooperative activity.” Mental awareness and bodily activities are not separate elements but rather conjoint dimensions of spirit’s vital forces. When people lose or fail to develop this “organic social reciprocity,” when meaningful relationships are replaced by states, laws, and prisons, people experience “social death.”150 Spirit resides in our common languages, our psychic make-up, our interactions with our environments, and especially in our art, music, and poetry. Berman and Luke conclude, “for Landauer socialism [anarchism] is the communal regeneration of the individual’s inner essence through creative activity, familial love, and social labor.”151 In Skepsis und Mystik, Landauer asserts that people must actively work to create their individual spirits as

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part of the shared collective ideal: “we have been satisfied until now to transform the universe into the human spirit, or better, into human intellect; let us now transform ourselves into universal spirit.”152 Spirit provides needed inspiration, and it can endure as energy—“it is spirit that must lead to revolution, spirit that performs miracles”—but it does not by itself create new social forms.153 “The spirit,” Laundauer insists, “will not establish things and institutions in a final form, but will declare itself as permanently at work in them.”154 Laudauer looked to revolutionaries to tap and enable our spirit, to realize its possibilities, while aware that revolutionaries themselves can become its enemies: The incredible miracle is brought into the realm of possibility. The reality which is otherwise hidden in our souls, in the structures and rhythms of art, in the faith-structures of religion, in dream and love, in dancing limbs and gleaming glances, now presses for fulfillment. However, the tremendous danger remains that the old humdrum way and empty imitation will take hold of the revolutionaries and make them shallow, uncultured radicals, with the ringing rhetoric and violent gestures, who neither know, nor want to know, that the transformation of society can come only in love, work, and silence.155

As with Goldman and Berkman (as well as Luxemburg), a failed revolution was a bigger danger than no revolution at all. Accordingly, revolutionaries need to work toward new values: New forms of work must be developed, freed from a tribute payable to capital, ceaselessly creating new values and new realities, harvesting and transforming the produce of nature for human needs. The age of the productivity of labor is beginning; otherwise we have reached the end of the line.156

Just as Goldman invoked Nietzsche’s idea of “the untimely” to claim for anarchism the “uncompromising and daring spirits [who] never ‘arrive,’”157 Landauer also lauds the untimely, “[b]ecause socialism must commence and because the realization of spirit and virtue is never mass-like and normal but rather results only from the self-sacrifice of the few and the new venture of pioneers.”158 “The state,” Landauer famously remarked, “is a social relationship: a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.”159 The capacity for these creative interventions emerges from the energy it takes to pursue them. Spirit contains the ideal, which we tap in order to create a new reality; we don’t just transfer our ideal, piece by piece, to our lives but we call on the ideal to realize a new material way. Interventions in the world to create something new, Deleuze suggests, have the capacity to invite “an absolute, radical beginning.”160 Goldman noted in her autobiography that “in 1900 Landauer had drifted from the Kropotkin communist-anarchist attitude to the individualism of

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Proudhon, which change also involved a new conception of tactics. Instead of direct revolutionary mass action he favoured passive resistance, advocating cultural and co-operative efforts as the only constructive means of fundamental social change.”161 While her comment sounds a bit dismissive (passive resistance is seldom a good thing for Goldman), in fact their positions were not so different: both called on Proudhon and Kropotkin to support the creation of radical communities developing their anarchist spirit through collective life and work, while at the same time educating people for the next revolutionary opportunity. Landauer was notably unlike Goldman, however, in his sexual conservatism. He seems worried about unrestrained sexuality: “Already, the voices of degenerate, unrestrained and uprooted females and their male consorts are proclaiming promiscuity and seeking to replace the family with the pleasure of variety, free, unrestrained, union, fatherhood with state motherhood insurance.” He fears “freedom without spirit, sensual freedom, freedom to irresponsible pleasure,” while for Goldman, sensual freedom is very much part of the embodied spirit she celebrated and is precisely one of anarchism’s neglected goals.162 As she did with Proudhon, Goldman simply overlooked this odd sexist turn in Laudauer’s thinking in order to make use of his other ideas. On January 3, 1919, Landauer wrote of his hopes for the Bavarian revolution in the foreword to For Socialism: “Chaos is here. New activities and turmoil are on the horizon. Minds are awakening, souls rising to responsibility, hands taking action. May the revolution bring rebirth.” His plaintive call was so like hers: “I want people to hear me, stand by me, walk with me, people who, like me, can no longer bear it.” Both anarchists emphasized the importance of play and of living the sort of life one wants the revolution to make possible: “Our spirit must ignite, illuminate, entice and attract. Talk alone never does this; even the mightiest, angriest or gentlest talk does not. Only example can do it.” Spirit could be an individual spark that is also a shared energy, a way of bridging talk and action, mind and body, reason and affect. With Nietzsche, Landauer seeks that which makes it possible to create: “Doesn’t to live mean: to become new?”163 Landauer and Goldman locate Deleuze’s signs of art in the capacity to multiply the worlds we can imagine and invent.164 Anarchist signs of art could emerge when radicals offer “the best thing their mind and spirit can imagine” to create something new by the act of reaching for it.165 Laudauer ends For Socialism with a sparkling Nietzschean salutation: Greetings, you restless wanderers, hobos and vagabonds, who can bear no economy and no place in this our time. Greetings, you artists, whose creativity transcends the time. Greetings, you warriors of old, who did not want life to shrivel up in the stove-pipe! What there is in the world today of war, sabrerattling and wildness is almost entirely only the grotesque mask of desolution

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and greed: stature, fidelity and knightliness have become preciously scanty. Greetings, you stammerers, you silent ones, who have an intimation deep in your hearts, where no word rolls out; unknown greatness, unspoken struggles, deep suffering of soul, wild joys and sorrows will from now on be mankind’s lot, both for individuals and peoples.166

In some ways Goldman’s debt to Landauer is the opposite of that which connects her to another classic anarchist thinker, Max Stirner, suggesting a vital tension that can be thought of in Deleuzean terms as the tension between sensuous signs and worldly signs. Stirner was one of the Young Hegelians, a circle of radical thinkers in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Born in 1806, Stirner died in 1856, and was relatively unknown during his lifetime; he came to the attention of English readers through the prodigious efforts of American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who translated The Ego and Its Own in 1907.167 Goldman was delighted with Stirner’s denunciation of “fixed ideas” and his insistence on the individual as a creative process, not a stable essence. Stirner’s self is always becoming, “he exists only in not remaining what he is,” and creates itself through projecting itself toward an open future. Stirner’s egoist resists possession by any unquestioned idea that cages the self within a permanent standpoint. Stirner urges each individual to “realize yourself.” Stirner’s ownness is not possessive individualism; he has contempt for the shopkeeper’s calculations as well as any commodity relations or wage labor. Rather, he calls people to exuberance, “to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment.”168 Like Nietzsche, Stirner’s playfulness is a call to cut away the drab, self-confining cleric morality and to engage in creative, imaginative explorations of life. The great barrier to joy, he thought, was possession by a fixed idea: Man, your head is haunted; you have bats in your belfry! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!169

While Landauer is a mystic, Stirner is unendingly suspicious of any idea that might become a “spook”: “Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”170 Yet the two anarchists are talking about different aspects of sacredness, and both discussions have value for Goldman. Landauer invites us to embrace an ennobling sacred: “Spirit is the grasping of the whole in a living universal. Spirit is the unity of separate things, concepts and men. In times of transition, spirit is ardent enthusiasm, courage in the struggle. Spirit is constructive activity.”171 Stirner, in contrast, is warning against reification, against the dominance of lifeless generalities such as “Man” or “God” over living persons: “He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest.

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Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.” He warns that such spooks, once established, tend to grow: “around the altar rise the arches of a church, and its walls keep moving farther and farther out. What they enclose is sacred. You can no longer get to it, no longer touch it.” Stirner’s advice is to waste no time, to hasten and seize the sacred: “if you devour the sacred, you have made it your own. Digest the sacramental wafer, and you are rid of it.”172 Characteristically, Goldman recruited the elements of Stirner that nourished her apprenticeship in anarchism, and simply ignored the rest. She shared Stirner’s horror at reification because it makes people more vulnerable to the claims of authority, and found his critique of fixed ideas useful in demystifying what Deleuze calls worldly signs, the naturalized ways of seeing that maintain the status quo by making power invisible. She insists, “with Stirner, that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take.”173 Goldman’s reflections on individuality suggest Stirner’s focus on the flow of identities and evasion of stable definitions that can easily become immobile: Individuality may be described as the consciousness of the individual as to what he is and how he lives. It is inherent in every human being and is a thing of growth. . . . The very essence of individuality is expression; the sense of dignity and independence is the soil wherein it thrives. . . . [T]he living man cannot be defined; he is the fountain-head of all life and all values. 174

Yet Goldman finishes this sentence with a turn toward Kropotkin or Landauer via the organic image of wholeness: “he is not part of this or of that; he is a whole, an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole.”175 Stirner seldom spoke the language of wholeness because organic metaphors of balance and growth readily reintroduce a placid sense of completion against which Stirner’s jagged prose works. When Goldman develops her critique of abstractions such as the state, the nation, capital, or God, she often calls on Stirner’s assault on fixed ideas. When she reaches toward the universal desire for freedom and community at the heart of her beautiful ideal, she turns more to Landauer and Kropotkin: “Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle,” she concluded, “is eternal. It must and will go on.”176 Her universal is a core possibility, something everyone could do, might do, ought to do—a common fulfillment of a possibility latent in us all. Yet of course there is no way to erect a firm barrier between sensuous signs and worldly signs, or to guarantee that the startling impetus received from sensuous signs will issue in a fresh, creative intervention in the world promised by artistic signs. Goldman, with Landauer, treasures the sensuous signs of revolutionary spirituality. “The sensuous sign,” Deleuze insists, “does us violence: it mobilizes the memory, it sets the soul in motion; but

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the soul in its turn excites thought, transmits to it the constraint of the sensibility, forces it to conceive essence as the only thing that must be conceived.”177 Sensuous signs make possible the creativity enacted in artistic signs. Worldly signs drag sensuous signs back into the world of fixed ideas, where one does not think or act, but merely makes signs. Yet it is difficult to sustain the mobility and the energy marked by sensuous signs; once put into circulation, they tend to settle, to become familiar. They become a new version of worldly signs. Additionally, worldly signs have their uses: they orient people within political space by offering recognizable landmarks and signposts. It is difficult to imagine how one would even recognize sensuous signs absent some more unremarkable continuity of worldly signs. Goldman and other anarchists implicitly address this tension by insisting on everyone thinking for themselves, and coming to cherish their own as well as others’ capacities for creativity, not simply consuming the ideas of others. Worthwhile though this injunction may be, one does not escape readily from the circle of signs. Another philosopher to whom Goldman turned for resources to address this dilemma of the circle of signs was German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Goldman seldom wrote sustained analyses of other thinkers. Instead, she drew their ideas together to make sense of some event, institution, or problem, making use of the thinkers whose tools were serviceable for that task. Nietzsche was one partial exception to this generalization: perhaps because he was (and still is) not usually thought of as an anarchist, Goldman had to reach farther to get hold of his ideas and work harder to bring them into anarchist discussions. Devoting one of her lectures to Nietzsche in 1912–1913, she called Nietzsche “the intellectual storm center of Europe.”178 As with Stirner, she saw his “extreme individualism” as an important but not sufficient element of anarchism. Nietzsche’s call for a transvaluation of values worked perfectly for Goldman, who insisted that our problem is not that we do not live up to our values, but that we need to rework what we think is valuable. She looked to Stirner and Nietzsche for antidotes to “the pernicious slave morality” within “the sick-room atmosphere of the Christian faith.”179 Goldman read Nietzsche as “the great poet-philosopher,” an aristocrat of the spirit. She recalled discussing Nietzsche with friends one evening at Justus Schwab’s café, when the writer James Huneker expressed surprise that Goldman was “interested in anything outside of propaganda.” “That is because you don’t know anything about anarchism,” she replied, “else you would understand that it embraces every phase of life and effort and that it undermines the old, outlived values.” Huneker pointed out the anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary aspects of Nietzsche’s ideas, but Goldman held “that Nietzsche was not a social theorist but a poet, a rebel and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of

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the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.”180 Goldman loved Nietzsche’s “revolutionary spirit.” Goldman encountered Nietzsche, as well as Henrik Ibsen, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, and others “who were hurling their anathemas against old values” when, under the name of Mrs. E. G. Brady, she was studying midwifery and medicine at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna in 1895. As was often the case, her home became a center for intellectual and political activity, in this case a meeting place for Russian students in Vienna. It was a fertile time for the development of her thinking: she heard Freud lecture, attended performances of Richard Wagner’s music, and saw Eleanora Duse play the role of Madega in Hermann Sudermann’s play Heimat, which Goldman compared favorably to a memorable performance by Sarah Bernhardt in Fedora that she saw years earlier in New Haven. In addition to her diplomas in midwifery and nursing, she acquired her “beloved books” on the “new art” which she was determined to share with her lover Ed Brady. In the short run, Goldman’s affinity for Nietzsche led to her break-up with Brady, who held in contempt the “new spirit” which so excited Goldman in Vienna. “Nietzsche is a fool,” Goldman remembers Brady pronouncing, a “pseudo-modern” who will be “forgotten in less than a decade.”181 Brady’s scorn for Goldman’s intellectual interests, and his willingness to ridicule her “silly books” rather than take up the intellectual challenge of discussing them, wounded Goldman badly. Yet Brady no doubt had company among his generation of anarchists, who may have detected only the anti-democratic, anti-socialist aspects of Nietzsche, or perhaps feared the undisciplined effects of Nietzschean passions on revolutionary zeal. In the long run, though, Goldman, Landauer, and her generation of anarchists fruitfully opened anarchism to Nietzsche’s influence. Goldman’s Nietzsche bears little resemblance to the Nietzsche inherited by many later readers: hers was not the antifoundationalist thinker whose counter histories paved the way for Foucault’s genealogies; nor was he the grim nihilist blamed for enabling Nazism with his desperate embrace of the overman. Goldman instead glimpsed a different Nietzsche, a joyous Nietzsche. It was “the magic of his language, the beauty of his vision” that enchanted her, his lyrical ability to encourage noble sentiments over base.182 His call for a master morality, she argued, had “nothing to do with the vulgarity of station, caste, or wealth. Rather did it mean the masterful in human possibilities, the masterful in man that would help him to overcome old traditions and worn-out values, so that he may learn to become the creator of new and beautiful things.”183 Goldman’s critiques of established institutions were usually accompanied by an invocation of a revolutionary sensibility. She embraced Nietzsche both for “the fire of his soul, the rhythm of his song” but also

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for his skepticism about judgment and his plea to let difference be.184 Goldman argued: Beyond good and evil means beyond prosecution, beyond judging, beyond killing, etc. Beyond Good and Evil opens before our eyes a vista the background of which is individual assertion combined with the understanding of all others who are unlike ourselves, who are different. By that I do not mean the clumsy attempt of democracy to regulate the complexities of human character by means of external equality. The vision of “beyond good and evil” points to the right to oneself, to one’s personality. Such possibilities do not exclude pain over the chaos of life, but they do exclude the puritanic righteousness that sits in judgment on all others except oneself.185

Here Goldman invokes Stirner’s notion of ownness, “the right to oneself, to one’s personality” in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of judgment and ressentiment. In her essay on crime, she similarly tracked the desire to punish to a violated sense of possession and a self-righteous dichotomy between innocence and guilt. In defiance of the demonization of “criminal types” common in her day, she declared, “we all have the rudiments of crime in us, more or less, according to our mental, physical, and social environment.”186 Goldman’s advocacy of atheism reflects Nietzschean values: it is based on her reading of atheism as open-ended, fluid, respectful of life, in contrast to a “static and fixed” theism. She advocated a kind of vitalism, a joyous energy, “the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.”187 Her scathing critique of oppressive institutions is accompanied by her concern with facilitating the conditions for a vital inner life, for “generous feeling,” for the circumstances that make us “big and fine.”188 Her affirmations of anarchism are tied to this open-endedness, to her resistance to being “bound by fixities.”189

A LIFETIME APPRENTICESHIP What can we conclude about Goldman’s political thinking by this journey through her apprenticeship? First, we can see a recurrent tension at the level of metaphor between tropes that affirm the turbulence of sensuous signs, and the creative promise of artistic signs, versus those that enable a more settled space of worldly signs. Second, we see a more complex idea of human nature than anarchists are often credited with holding. While other critics have been troubled by what they see as an unaddressed conflict between individualism and community in Goldman, I suggest that Goldman’s work is more troubled by an untended tension between Nietzsche’s and Stirner’s open-ended images versus the more prevalent organic metaphors she adopts from Kropotkin and others. These are not just different ways to say the same thing: rhetorical practices do not

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simply deliver a message crafted elsewhere, they are themselves part of the message. Michael Shapiro explains that attention to metaphor is not simply concern with communication; it “liberates reflection on how reality is constituted.”190 The how of writing helps create the what, helps name that which can count as real. Nietzsche’s influence suggests an unending mobility to ideas and identities, while organic imagery tends to reassure Goldman and her readers that her political agenda is consistent with, and affirmed by, an alleged constant underlying nature. Goldman writes: Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeks and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.191

The organic metaphors erase tension: they hide the act of embracing certain political values at the expense of others by folding affirmations into an untroubled telos of health: There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one, the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs with are distributing the element to keep the life essence—that is, the individual—pure and strong.192

Oppressive institutions are characterized as parasites, plagues, and “deathly germs.”193 In her address to the jury that convicted her of conspiracy to interfere with conscription, leading to her imprisonment in 1917 and deportation to Russia two years later, Goldman characterized herself as a physician diagnosing illness in a patient—society—in order to effect a cure—anarchism.194 The rhetorical counterpart of Goldman’s reassuring organic imagery is her threatening mechanical images, notably of the clock: Real wealth consists of things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in . . . if we are to continue in machine subservience, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King . . . centralization is not only the death knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clocklike mechanical atmosphere.195

Mechanical images typically represent danger: “[The state’s] highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork.”196 Reflecting not only the anti-machine rhetoric popular in her time, but also her own personal experiences of Fordism, Goldman deployed mechanical images to denote

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space that is artificial, controlling, and bad, while organic images mark the space of the natural, free, and good. Of course, it is not only Goldman who pursues these tropes: organic images of wholeness vs. threatening images of machines are found readily among many thinkers and can be used to different ends.197 Goldman was not a primitivist; she did not oppose using modern technology. She envisioned anarchist society, not as less technological than hers, but as technological differently. Berkman explains in What Is Anarchism? that the problem is not technology, but the capitalist and state organization of technology to exploit and control people. Both anarchists want production to be simpler organizationally, as the mechanisms for making profit are reduced, and they want mental and manual labor to be integrated. Both want power to be decentralized and hierarchy to be minimized. But neither of these necessitates an anti-technological bent—sophisticated technologies can be managed in teams by workers who do all aspects of the task, from planning to execution. My charge is different than that lodged by Solomon, who sees Goldman as torn between the mandates of individualist anarchism (complete individual freedom) and of communist anarchism (the harmonious, self-governing community). Solomon refers to Goldman’s synthesis of Proudhon, Bakunin, Stirner, and Nietzsche as “compelling her into confusing inconsistencies.”198 But Goldman addresses this challenge rather well. She contests the premise that the two must be seen as irrevocably hostile values or practices. The individual and the collective, she argued, did not need to contradict one another; the structural and the psychological aspects of politics could be pulled together; the macro level of analysis could be integrated with the micro level. At the anarchist congress in Amsterdam in 1907, Goldman and her friend Max Baginski, an accomplished editor and writer whose politics had taken shape in the “Jungen” movement bridging socialism and anarchism in Germany,199 argued against the old divisions: We held that anarchism does not involve a choice between Kropotkin and Ibsen; it embraces both. While Kropotkin had thoroughly analyzed the social conditions that lead to revolution, Ibsen had portrayed the psychologic[al] struggle that culminates in the revolution of the human soul, the revolt of individuality. Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychologic[al] motives and needs upon existing institutions.200

Anarchism without adjectives, they argued, also integrated the practices of anarchist organization with the struggle for personal freedom: There is a mistaken notion in some quarters, we argued, that organization does not foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay

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of individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid the development and growth of personality. Just as the animal cells, by mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in the formation of the complete organism, so does the individuality, by co-operative effort with other individualities, attain its highest form of development. An organization, in the true sense, cannot result from the combination of mere nonentities. It must be composed of self-conscious, intelligent individualities. Indeed, the total of the possibilities and activities of an organization is represented in the expression of individual energies. Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism, which will make an end to the struggle for the means of existence—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man and ever widens the social abyss. In short, anarchism strives toward a social organization which will establish well-being for all.201

Goldman’s and Baginski’s speech at the 1907 Amsterdam Congress offers a thoughtful way to rethink relations between freedom and equality, between autonomy and justice. Anarchists are often accused of naïve faith in a benign human nature, even though most anarchists, including Goldman, have a more complex, anti-essentialist view than that. Goldman generally rejects the idea of a fixed, pre-social essence of human nature; instead she looks at human situations, people-in-context.202 Like Nietzsche, she sometimes uses the language of instinct, but she generally means inchoate human energies rather than specific behaviors toward others. She recognized an instinctive urge toward motherhood in women, a powerful predisposition that could nonetheless be resisted. She sees two potentials within human beings, one moving toward justice and solidarity, the other toward selfishness and fear; hence the importance of education to develop and inspire our cooperative side. Aware that claims about human nature were often used to dismiss anarchism, Goldman ridicules those who claim to know what cannot be known: Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every good, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature. Yet, how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? 203

Given this undecidability, the decision to work toward the most liberatory possibilities is a political act. Writing from exile, reflecting back on past struggles, she offers this nuanced view: I found that there is no straight and clearly marked line between good and evil. Both are interwoven and overlap each other. Surely neither good or evil can

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be chosen by one’s mere “free will.” I have found that good and evil are terms for human actions conditioned by various forces outside of man. Their meaning and content are subject to modifications and development in accordance with the changes constantly going on in the social and ethical values at various periods of human life.204

Here we have not a morally dualistic universe but a complex weave of inclinations and situations. My quarrel is not with this vision of the human condition, but with Goldman’s frequent recourse to metaphors of nature and growth to resolve the tensions that such a view would otherwise suggest. Organic metaphors have the unintended result of simplifying her argument. The language of wholeness and completion tends to fill in rhetorical spaces with reassuring assumptions. Organic tropes are sufficiently docile that they may come to operate as worldly signs, reassuring signs that take the place of thinking: “one does not think and one does not act, but one makes signs.”205 I am suggesting that when Goldman dwells in the stable and predictable discursive world of organic metaphors, she also moves toward anarchism’s own worldly signs, a fixed place of repetition without difference. But when she resists this too-easy rhetorical confinement, she is more prepared for the turbulent world of sensuous signs, signs that provoke rather than reassure. Deleuze insists that Thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence to it. More important than thought is “what leads to thought”; more important than the philosopher is the poet. . . . But the poet learns that what is essential is outside of thought, in what forces us to think. The leitmotif of Time regained is the word force: impressions that force us to look, encounters that force us to interpret, expressions that force us to think.206

When Goldman leans more toward Nietzsche, she finds resources to maintain her apprenticeship to anarchism’s sensuous signs, and to fulfill the creative promise of artistic signs. Yet, I also recognize the utility of organic metaphors for Goldman’s work: they provided a kind of safety net for her political activism, allowing her to embrace Nietzsche’s and Stirner’s poetic extravagance while still continuing to move toward her beautiful ideal. Organic tropes stand in tension with more disruptive ones, yet they facilitated her perseverance in a lifetime of struggle. Perhaps it is her very ability to inhabit both kinds of discursive energies, and to negotiate their incompatibilities, that her apprenticeship in anarchism enabled. Apprenticeships, after all, are not only for the young. In some ways, anarchism requires a lifetime apprenticeship, laboring to make and sustain new worlds while maintaining the refusal of closure that allows thinking to happen.

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NOTES 1. Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) (originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 56. 2. Goldman, “What I Believe,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, third edition., ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 49. 3. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 4 (italics in original). 4. Deleuze, Proust, 5. I am taking certain liberties with Deleuze here, perhaps blurring the (already indistinct) relation between Deleuze’s own position and that which he attributes to Proust. Through Proust, Plato haunts this text, while Deleuze’s presence summons Henri Bergson’s pluralistic process philosophy into tension with Plato’s unifying metaphysics. My riff on Deleuze takes up his fertile suggestions about linguistic, affective, and embodied negotiations with signs, while sidestepping those directions of argument that serve my purposes less well. Perhaps I am borrowing from Goldman’s toolbox, making raids on thinkers for what they can offer, then gathering it all (hopefully into honey) back in the hive. My thanks to Jane Bennett, Jason Adams, and Bill Connolly for helping me think through Deleuze’s challenging prose. 5. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 56. 6. Irving Howe, “Range of the New York Intellectuals,” in Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 284. 7. Goldman, Living My Life, 28. Her interest endured: over thirty years later, Goldman gave talks on “Women Martyrs in Russia.” See Goldman’s letter to Rebecca Shelley, December 4, 1917, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1990), reel 10, asking Shelley to announce a forthcoming lecture. 8. See Candace Falk, “Forging Her Place: An Introduction” In Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol 1, Made for America, 1890–1901, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 13–14. 9. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 34. 10. Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 10. 11. Martha Solomon, Emma Goldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 3. 12. Goldman, Living My Life, 116; Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise, 6. 13. Goldman, Living My Life, 27. 14. Deleuze, Proust, 5, 6, 18. 15. The bomber was never identified, but several anarchists later implied that they knew his identity, and that he was an anarchist, not a Pinkerton, as others had claimed. Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 444–445, speculates that it was New York shoemaker and militant George Schwab.

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16. Goldman, Living My Life, 8. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Ibid., 9–10. 19. Deleuze, Proust, 110. 20. Avrich, Haymarket, xii. 21. For an account of Haymarket’s effect on the older generation of anarchists, see Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 148. 22. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 149; Goldman, Living My Life, 346, 430, 489, 461; Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American SocialRevolutionary and Labor Movements (New York: Russell and Russell, 1936), 534. James Hallbeck, who played a significant role in Goldman’s 1917 trial, was radicalized by Haymarket (Living My Life, 608). James Colton, the Welsh coal miner who married Goldman so she could get a British passport, was, too (Living My Life, 974). 23. Avrich, Haymarket, 433–436; James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 276–277; Philip S. Foner, ed., The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 9–10. 24. Goldman, Living My Life, 461, 221, 223, 42. 25. August Spies, quoted in Avrich, Haymarket, 434. I’m grateful to Barry Pateman for pointing out the significance of Spies’s speech for Goldman’s thinking. (Interviews with Barry Pateman, July 22, 2002; February 23, 2004.) 26. Goldman, “Was My Life Worth Living?” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 433. 27. Deleuze, Proust, 11 (italics in original). 28. Goldman, Living My Life, 110, 202, 249. 29. Ibid., 300, 178. 30. Ibid., 615. This claim was not actually accurate. Among other cases involving anarchists, British anarchist John Turner, appealing his deportation order, took his case to the Supreme Court in 1904; Goldman was well aware of Turner’s case because she helped bring it to trial as a test of the 1903 anti-anarchist law. See Sidney Fine, “Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley,” The American Historical Review LX, no. 4 (July 1955): 777–799. 31. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 6. 32. Deleuze, Proust, 15. 33. Goldman, Living My Life, 10. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 25. 36. Deleuze, Proust, 17. 37. Irving Werstein, Strangled Voices: The Story of the Haymarket Affair (New York: Macmillan Co., 1970). 38. Goldman, “Was My Life Worth Living?” 434. 39. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 6. 40. Goldman, Living My Life, 300. 41. Carl Sandburg, Always the Young Strangers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1952), 132–133. 42. Avrich, Haymarket, 401.

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43. George N. McLean, The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1972, frontis material. Originally published in 1890. 44. Deleuze, Proust, 16. 45. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 51, 58, 82. 46. Deleuze, Proust, 16, 23. 47. McLean, Rise and Fall, 238. 48. Kropotkin, Freedom (December 1888), quoted in Avrich, Haymarket, 436 (italics in original). 49. August Spies, quoted in Avrich, Haymarket, 434. 50. Deleuze, Proust, 22 (italics in original). 51. John Drummond and Markus Themessl-Huber, “The Cyclical Process of Action Research: The Contribution of Gilles Deleuze,” Action Research 5, no. 4 (December 2007): 441; Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 23. 52. Goldman, Living My Life, 5. 53. Ibid., 506. Of the two, Berkman was in some ways the better writer—more gentle, less bombastic—although Goldman was the better speaker. There is not room here to consider Prison Memoirs; for a brief discussion, see my essay “Anarchist Counterpublics,” New Political Science 32, no. 2 (2010): 193–214. 54. Goldman to Albert de Jong, June 7, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers Project: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 34. What Is Anarchism? has a confusing publication history; it was also published as Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism and other titles. 55. Goldman, “Preface” to What Is Anarchism? 1937 edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), x. 56. Berkman to Goldman, February 24, 1927, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 17. 57. Goldman, “Preface,” What is Anarchism? x. 58. Berkman, Anarchism? 2, 42. 59. Ibid., 92, 95 (italics in original), 184. 60. Ibid., 185. 61. Ibid., 222. 62. Deleuze, Proust, 95. Perhaps a better model is Deleuze’s collaboration with Felix Guattari, where they worked together through a friendship that was “intermezzo (working with or between each other).” Charles J. Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), 239. 63. Goldman, Living My Life, vii, 323–324, 780, 781, 937. 64. Karen Brodkin Sacks, “Gender and Grassroots Leadership,” in Women and the Politics of Empowerment, eds. Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), 79–80. 65. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 12. 66. Goldman, Living My Life, 634–635. 67. Ibid., 722, 723.

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68. Ibid., 714, 293, 109. Some commentators have stressed the periodic problems in their relationship. Drinnon finds that Goldman exploited Berkman in their writings on Russia by making use of Berkman’s diary before he himself had a chance to publish it (Rebel in Paradise, 244–245). Wexler says that Goldman was ungenerous to Berkman in her autobiography, indirectly attacking him with barbed remarks (Exile, 151). For a summary of these issues, see Bernice Carroll, “Emma Goldman and the Theory of Revolution,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kenninger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 142–145. Drinnon and Wexler raise relevant points—it is no secret that Goldman was difficult to live with and could be colossally self-absorbed. Yet most of the two anarchists’ biographers agree that Goldman and Berkman usually took pleasure in each other’s successes, looked to each other for help, found stimulation in their conversations, and cherished their friendship. Wexler concludes that they “wove an indestructible fabric of friendship” (Exile, 183). 69. Goldman to Max and Gertrude Zahler, May 11, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 34. 70. Goldman to Berkman, November 9, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 35. 71. Berkman to Goldman, November 24, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 35. 72. Goldman, Living My Life, 6, 40. 73. Morris Hillquit, radical lawyer and Socialist Party nominee for the New York City mayoral race, defended Most, and recalled in his autobiography that Most’s case resulted in New York State’s 1902 criminal anarchy law, making it a felony “to advocate the forcible overthrow of government or the assassination of the executive official of the government or to justify the assassination of such an official in this or any other country” (Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1934), 128–129). The new crime was punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment. 74. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 15. 75. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 105. 76. Avrich, Haymarket, 73. 77. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 106–107. 78. Ibid., 66. 79. Ibid.,108. 80. Avrich, Haymarket, 72–73. 81. Goyens, Beer, 108. 82. Goldman, Living My Life, 66, 48–49, 51–52. 83. Ibid., 52–53. 84. Ibid. 85. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 117. 86. My thanks to Barry Pateman for pointing out this link between Goldman and Peukert (personal communication, October 3, 2010). 87. Goldman, Living My Life, 106; see also Wexler, Exile, 150. 88. For a translation of part of Most’s article criticizing Berkman’s attentat while recognizing his courage, see Goldman, “To Der Anarchist,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 119–120, fn 1.

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89. Goldman, Living My Life, 379. 90. Ibid., 381; Drinnon, Rebel, 35. 91. Goldman, Living My Life, 118, 115, 340. It might well be that Ed Brady would have a different story to tell about his relationship with Goldman. 92. Ibid., 151. 93. Deleuze, Proust, 7, 8 (italics in original). 94. Goldman, writing from Jefferson City Prison to Louis Kramer in Caldwell, New Jersey, Prison, August 12, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 95. Goldman, Living My Life, 145–146. 96. Ibid., 148. 97. Ibid., 612. 98. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, April 13, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 99. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, September 22, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 100. While she had never met Bourne, she expressed her sadness at his death. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, January 7, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 101. Goldman, Living My Life, 684. Vincinte Blasco Ibañez, best-selling Spanish novelist (1867–1928), authored Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Henri Barbussse was a French writer who served in World War I and wrote novels decrying militarism. Andreas Latzko also served in World War I and wrote the highly praised antiwar novel Men in War (1918), which Goldman called “truly great.”(Goldman to Ellen Kennan, July 28, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11). 102. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, November 24, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 103. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 1, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 104. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 26, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 105 Goldman to Stella Ballantine, May 11, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 106. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, June 30, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 107. Benedict Anderson credits Terrida de Mármol with coining the term “anarquismo sin adjetivos” at a public lecture in November, 1889 (Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso Books, 2005), 171–172). 108. See Jason Wehling, “Anarchy in Interpretation: The Life of Emma Goldman” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Weiss and Kensinger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 30–32. 109. Candace Falk, “Raising her Voices: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 60.

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110. Goldman, Living My Life, 168. 111. Berkman, What is Anarchism? 42. 112. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 77. 113. Avrich, Portraits, 68; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 126. 114. Avrich, Portraits, 79–80. 115. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizon Books, 1955), 54, 58, 58. Originally published in 1902. 116. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (Middlesex, England: Echo Library, 2009), 20. Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906. 117. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), 158. Originally published by Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1912. 118. Goldman, Living My Life, 864, 864, 771. 119. Avrich, Portraits, 69; Goldman, Living My Life, 564–565. 120. Goldman, Living My Life, 253. Kropotkin at the time was 57, Goldman, 30. 121. Ibid., 509. 122. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston, 1899), 288. 123. Avrich, Portraits, 53. 124. Ibid., 27–30. 125. Goyens, Beer, 92; Goldman, Living My Life, 266. 126. Falk gives a more complete account of the attempted attentat than does Goldman in her autobiography; see “Raising Her Voices,” 8–9. 127. Bakunin, “Four Anarchist Programs,” in Arthur Lehnin, ed., Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 166–77. 128. Bakunin, “Principles and Organization of the International Brotherhood,” in Arthur Lehnin, ed., Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 76. 129. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 127. 130. Avrich, Portraits, 14. 131. Goldman, Living My Life, 73. 132. Goldman, “Anarchism,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969 [1910]), 57. 133. Avrich, Portraits, 15. 134. Bakunin, “Individuals are Strictly Determined,” in The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, ed. G. P. Maximov (New York: The Free Press, 1953), 165. 135. Bakunin, “What the Workers Lack,” in The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, ed. G. P. Maximov, 323. 136. Goldman, Living My Life, 265. 137. Avrich, Portraits, 137–140. 138. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 53; “Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 93. 139. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 39. 140. Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise, 314. While the concept of spirit provoked her attention, she had absolutely no interest in the popular spiritualist movement of her time. In Living My Life she comments, “I was no doubt too much of the earth to follow their shadows in the clouds” (145). See also Lynne M. Adrian, “Emma Goldman and the Spirit of Artful Living,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Weiss and Kensinger, 219.

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141. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 50. 142. Jane Bennett, “Kafka, Genealogy, and the Spiritualization of Politics,” Journal of Politics 56, no. 3 (1994): 666. 143. Deleuze, Proust, 42. 144. Goldman, “The Individual, Society, and the State,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 122. 145. Goldman, Living My Life, 681. 146. Gabriel Kuhn with Siegbert Wolf, “Introduction,” in Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader by Gustav Landauer, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 45. 147. Avrich, Portraits, 248. 148. Russell Berman and Tim Luke, “Introduction” to For Socialism by Gustav Landauer, trans. David J. Parent (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978), 4. See also Martin Buber, Paths to Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 46–57, and Avrich, Portraits, 248. 149. Landauer, For Socialism, trans. David J. Parent (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978), 82. 150. Berman and Luke, “Introduction,” 3, 8, 8. 151. Ibid., 9. Landauer sometimes called himself a socialist or anarchist-socialist; see Avrich, Portraits, 249. 152. Landauer, quoted in Berman and Luke, “Introduction,” 9. 153. Landauer, For Socialism, 20. 154. Ibid., 130. 155. Ibid., 21–22. 156. Ibid., 22. 157. Goldman, “Intellectual Proletarians,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 223. 158. Landauer, For Socialism, 25. 159. Landauer, “Weak Statesmen, Weaker People!” in Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader by Gustav Landauer, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 214. 160. Deleuze, Proust, 44. 161. Goldman, Living My Life, 681. 162. Landauer, For Socialism, 116. 163. Ibid., 26, 44 (italics in original), 141, 51. 164. Deleuze, Proust, 42–43. 165. Landauer, For Socialism, 30. 166. Ibid., 142–143. 167. John Carroll, “Introduction,” in Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 27. Originally published in 1845. 168. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 55, 118 (italics in original). Goldman called herself an egoist in an interview with Nelly Bly, and Berkman called himself an egoist when arrested for his attentat. Barry Pateman suggests that they did so partly to avoid implicating other anarchists in their attempt on Frick, but also because of Stirner’s influence on them. (Barry Pateman, interview, July 22, 2002.) 169. Ibid., 58–59. 170. Ibid., 142, 72 (italics in original).

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171. Landauer, For Socialism, 45. 172. Stirner, Ego, 83, 89–90 (italics in original). 173. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 65. 174. Goldman, “The Individual, Society, and the State,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 111. 175. Ibid., 111–112. 176. Ibid., 123. 177. Deleuze, Proust, 101. 178. For a list of Goldman’s talks on Nietzsche, see Leigh Starcross, “‘Nietzsche Was An Anarchist’: Reconstructing Emma Goldman’s Nietzsche Lectures,” in I am Not Man, I am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition, eds. John Moore with Spencer Sunshine (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 37–38. 179. Goldman, “The Failure of Christianity,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 238, 232. 180. Goldman, Living My Life, 193–194. 181. Ibid., 172–173, 194. 182. Ibid., 172. 183. Goldman, “The Failure of Christianity,” 233. 184. Goldman, Living My Life, 172. 185. Goldman, “Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 215. 186. Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 342. 187. Goldman, “The Philosophy of Atheism,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 245, 248. 188. Goldman, “Jealousy,” 216. 189. Goldman, “The Philosophy of Atheism,” 245. 190. Shapiro, Politics of Representation, 8. 191. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 50. 192. Ibid., 52. 193. Goldman, “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 349. 194. Goldman, “Address to the Jury,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 363–364. 195. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 55. 196. Ibid., 57. 197. Adrian notes that Goldman’s reliance on organic metaphors could reflect the impact of the Transcendentalist writers as well as anarchists. See Adrian, “Emma Goldman and the Spirit of Artful Living,” 220. 198. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 38. 199. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 206. 200. Goldman, Living My Life, 402. 201. Ibid., 402–403. 202. For a useful discussion, see Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York, Routledge, 2006), 39, 28. 203. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 61–62.

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204. Goldman, “America by Comparison,” in Americans Abroad: An Anthology, ed. Peter Neagoe (The Hague: Servire Press, 1932), 176, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 52. For a thoughtful analysis of the various contexts within which Goldman addresses individuality, see Janet Day, “The ‘Individual’ in Goldman’s Anarchist Theory,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Weiss and Kensinger, 133–34. Day points out that Goldman fails to attend to the possibility that a community without organizational hierarchy might nonetheless still host various coercive practices undermining members’ freedom. 205. Deleuze, Proust, 6. 206. Ibid., 95 (italics in original).

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4 Gender and Genre

“All that can be done is to plant the seeds of thought.” —Emma Goldman

Goldman’s sex life has commanded a great deal of attention, both during her lifetime and since. Goldman certainly invited this attention by her scandalous public advocacy of free love and her ruthless critique of marriage. By free love she meant joyous, freely given mutual passion, a “spiritual awakening” without regard for the hypocritical expectations of bourgeois respectability or the legal and religious confinements of marriage:1 Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church–begotten weed, marriage?2

Like capitalism, “that other paternal arrangement,” Goldman argued, marriage is a form of robbery: it promises to protect women and children while actually rendering them dependent and vulnerable, resentful and servile.3 For love to flourish freely, society must change: Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.4 177

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Goldman’s accounts of her own sexual relationships were considered daring, even scandalous, in her day. Her autobiography recounts her rape as a teenager in St. Petersburg, her early failed marriage (her husband was impotent), her romantic ménage-a-trois with Berkman and his cousin Fedya (Modest Stein) during her first months in the anarchist movement, her stormy intimacies with Johann Most, Ed Brady, Ben Reitman, Hippolyte Havel, Leon Malmed, Frank Heiner, and many others. Goldman consistently presented herself as a daring sexual rebel. In particular, her explicit love letters to Reitman, kept secret until after her death, were, as described by historian Christine Stansell, simultaneously pornographic and confessional, mixing explicitly naughty talk with the awesome beauties of the sexual sublime.5 Following Goldman’s own lead, several feminist commentaries on her work have focused critical attention on the relation between her erotic life and her politics. Recognizing that for Goldman, as Candace Falk observes, “love and politics were completely intertwined,” these accounts probe the relation of eros to politics at multiple levels of personal and collective struggle.6 On one level, these feminist commentators feature Goldman as caught between her anarchist feminist demands for freedom in personal relations and her longing for a stable and fulfilling relationship with a man. On another level, they articulate politically compelling connections between Goldman’s devotion to her lovers and to her political ideals, showing how the personal both engages and complicates the political. This chapter explores both of these levels of analysis in Goldman’s writing, connecting Goldman’s self-interrogations to the literary practices within which her thinking was embedded, in order to nudge feminist thinking about Goldman away from a concern with consistency between ideology and behavior and toward heightened appreciation of her radical vision of political change. Within the significant literature on Goldman that has emerged since the publication of Richard Drinnon’s biography Rebel in Paradise in 1961, feminist analyses by Alice Wexler, Candace Falk, and Lori Marso stand out for their sustained focus on the imbrication of Goldman’s personal and political lives.7 Wexler’s biography finds a contradictory erotic dependency on male lovers: “She who had always disclaimed possessiveness in love now wanted her lover entirely at her command.”8 Falk similarly finds in Goldman’s letters “a tortured effort to reconcile her bitter disappointment and anger [at her lover] with her ideology.”9 Falk argues that Goldman’s “contradictory longing for the security of ‘husband, children, and a home,’ while rejecting the forms in which such stability was commonly manifested, kept her from being able to work honestly on a popular revision of her lecture on ‘Marriage and Love.’”10 Erotic dependence on men contravenes Goldman’s publicly proclaimed independence; jealousy reintroduces bourgeois

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property relations into ostensibly revolutionary eros. While Wexler suggests that Goldman should have revised her public remarks in light of her personal failings, Falk recognizes that Goldman’s reticence to qualify her personal and sexual radicalism reflected a strategic choice: Her ideas about free love were so far ahead of her time, and so threatening, that any hint of her own personal failure to live out her vision of an open relationship, or of the fears and regrets she harbored about her own infertility, would have discredited her as well as her ideas. This incongruity was the burden she felt that she had to bear in order to lead people to ultimate freedom.11

Beyond questions of strategy, both writers see a “pattern of denial” in which Goldman “could not acknowledge how deeply conflicted she felt about many of her most adamant public stands, especially on marriage, marital stability, and love.”12 While neither Falk nor Wexler dismiss Goldman on these grounds, their persistent focus on inconsistencies between what she practiced and what she preached implicitly suggests that we should expect consistency and be chagrined by its absence. Marso’s analysis initially eschews surprise or disappointment that Goldman did not live up to her beliefs, looking instead at her life and work “as an example of how even the most radical and forward thinking women can get trapped by the contemporary patriarchal norms under which they live, often even unconsciously internalizing these norms.”13 Marso takes Goldman’s story as a case study of “the constraints that patriarchy imposes on the lives of even the freest-thinking women.”14 Wexler too concludes in her Epilogue that the gap between “the reality of Emma Goldman’s private life” and “her legend” is instructive because it “deepens our understanding of the psychological tensions and conflicts facing women at a moment of rapid historical change.”15 While these conclusions are more forgiving toward Goldman’s contradictions, they are of “the devil made her do it” variety, still finding Goldman disappointing in her inability to fully live her commitments, but locating the source of the let-down in Goldman’s response to limiting external conditions rather than in intimate personal failings. My point is not to discount these readings, but to recognize their contributions while enlarging their range. My reservations here have less to do with these particular texts, whose further contributions I will discuss below, than with the psychological inclinations in Goldman scholarship to which these texts may inadvertently contribute. Wexler and Falk were writing biographies, so of course a focus on Goldman’s life story is needed, but subsequent discussions of Goldman, as Weiss and Kensinger note, have often stayed within a “largely biographical” frame, often looking to Goldman as a feminist role model, thus implicitly generating expectations and

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fueling subsequent disappointments when she fails to deliver.16 Following Nietzsche, I want to ask why we are asking these questions: why are so many readers of Goldman predictably drawn to largely psychological interpretations? What other resources are there in Goldman and her interlocutors to nourish more fully political interpretations? A contrapuntal reading of Goldman, one that interrogates her ideas in relation to implicit practices of rhetoric and media rather than the more psychological inquiries framed by many previous critics, can produce needed intellectual and political friction to highlight other possible interpretations. I am not trying to reverse the reservations expressed by others, but to evade them in order to locate Goldman’s intertwining of the personal and the political within a different discursive context.

READING GOLDMAN AGAINST GOLDMAN The most straightforward reason that Goldman’s feminist critics pursue their line of inquiry may simply be that Goldman herself did so. Goldman often invited precisely the kinds of criticism leveled by Wexler, Falk, and Marso through her insistence on utter, unwavering consistency between her anarchist beliefs and her ways of life. The mandate to “live the revolution” typically involves anarchists in endless scrutiny of themselves and others for signs of deviation from the revolutionary ideal. Nothing enraged Goldman so much as the accusation of inconsistency, or worse, hypocrisy: tart claims that “I have never said . . .” or “I have always argued . . .” pepper her responses to any such criticism. While failure to live a life consistent with her “beautiful ideal” was the worst sin, success in doing so, no matter what the price, was a singular source of satisfaction.17 In accordance with the anarchist mandate to live as a model of the revolutionary future in the present, Wexler notes, Goldman “offered herself as a model of strength and certainty,” thus setting herself up to be closely scrutinized for lapses.18 In particular, Goldman berated herself for advocating free, unpossessive love and sexual independence while living as a “slave to sexual passion.”19 Comparing her ten-year relationship with the colorful and unreliable Ben Reitman to Mary Wollstonecraft’s unhappy affair with American diplomat Gilbert Imlay, she lamented, “EG, the Wollstonecraft of the 20th century, even like her great sister, is weak and dependent, clinging to the man no matter how worthless and faithless he is. What an irony of fate.”20 In this light, Goldman’s biographers are simply agreeing with her own severe selfassessment, echoing the disappointment that Goldman already had voiced. Goldman also explored the question that Marso and Wexler pose, analyzing the weight of patriarchal expectations in the lives of the modern women for whom she was often taken as a leader. In a poignant letter to Berkman

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in September of 1925, she named a painful slippage in the lives of her generation of women between old securities and new freedoms: The tragedy of all of us modern women . . . is a fact that we are removed only by a very short period from our traditions, the traditions of being loved, cared for, protected, secured, and above all, the time when women could look forward to an old age of children, a home and someone to brighten their lives. Being away from all that by a mere fraction of time, most modern women, especially when they see age growing upon them, and if they have given out of themselves so abundantly, begin to feel the utter emptiness of their existence, the lack of the man, whom they love and who loves them, the comradeship and companionship that grows out of such a relation, the home, a child. And above all the economic security either through the man or their own definite independent efforts. Nearly every modern woman I have known and have read about . . . have felt and feel that their lives are empty and that they have nothing to look forward to . . . The modern woman cannot be the wife and mother in the old sense, and the new medium has not yet been devised, I mean the way of being wife, mother, friend and yet retain one’s complete freedom. Will it ever?21

The shorthand term “modern woman” flagged a complex site of rapid economic, political, and social change in women’s lives, and Goldman was attentive to the contradictory pull such changes produced. With her later feminist interlocutors, Goldman pushed herself to rise above patriarchal limitations and was chagrined at her failures. Like them, she scrutinized her relations with men and often found them wanting. Yet Goldman’s own insistence on taking anarchist political theory as the template against which to evaluate her intimate life does not thereby require us to do so as well. Goldman does not control the way we read Goldman; her life and texts are loose in the world and can be recruited in a variety of ways. So why has Goldman’s insistence on interrogating her life in terms of consistency with her ideal encouraged many of her feminist readers to follow suit? The answer may be that Goldman’s own frame of self-understanding is amplified not simply by what she said, but by the unspoken assumptions governing how she said it. Not just constraints of gender but questions of genre work to reproduce the mandate for judgment that many of Goldman’s readers share with their subject. Here we have to move into a terrain that Goldman seldom entered: she resisted moves toward “how” questions. She saw little reason to examine ideas about how to change the world in terms of how those ideas grasp the world, which is exactly the move I’m suggesting we need to make to explore the hold that Goldman’s own selfunderstanding exercises on her critics. Goldman was inattentive to representation and the practices of mediation, but we need not be so; we can examine not just gender expectations and the complex workings of eros, but genre expectations and the equally complex workings of media and

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discourse. Doing so may open up a different angle on erotic politics, allowing us to return to the terrain explored by prior feminist critics from an angle that minimizes their concern with Goldman’s interpersonal failings in order to amplify their insights into the place of love in radical politics. I approach the gender/genre intersection at two levels: first, by contrasting the medium of film, which Goldman completely rejected, with that of theater, which she enthusiastically endorsed; and second, by contrasting the rhetorical practices of modernism, the aesthetic/political form most associated with her political agenda, with those of romanticism and realism, the sources of the discursive repertoire upon which she implicitly drew. Goldman’s cultivation of theater and resistance to film suggest an implicit commitment to some chronological practices and accompanying disavowal of others. Similarly, the norms of interpretation enacted in romanticism and realism, compared to those of modernism, authorized some questions and evaded others. Investigating Goldman’s habits of genre can open up a field of questioning in which consistency between her ideological commitments and her love life takes a backseat to inquiry into how she made meaning in politics and in love.

MEDIA-TIONS: FILM AND THEATER Goldman saw no political potential whatsoever in the new genre of film. The cinema was ephemeral: even the best films, she announced to Berkman in a 1931 letter, “have never left the slightest impression beyond the moment in which they were reeled off.”22 She objected to cinema’s speed. Complaining about the schedule of her 1934 reunion tour through the United States, she wrote Berkman that the tour was “like a moving picture, everything rushed before my eyes with the same rapidity. AND, I got as much out of it all as I usually get from the cinema. Namely nothing.”23 Toward the end of her life, she speaks approvingly of a few films: in correspondence with Berkman, she praised the film versions of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Charles Morgan’s The Fountain, describing the latter as “the most perfect artistic picture I have seen.”24 On the whole, however, these are rare gestures of approval for a medium she generally disdained. She consented to a filmed interview during her U.S. return tour and reportedly took the opportunity to attack movies as “the opium of the masses.”25 Admittedly, films of her time typically portrayed anarchists as “wild-eyed, homicidal” hotheads, inexplicably inclined to “random acts of terror.”26 D. W. Griffith’s 1909 film, The Voice of the Violin, for example, presented political radicalism as a kind of criminal contagion.27 At the same time, she had some limited experience with anarchist films, having arranged screenings in London of Louis Frank’s The Will of a People, a re-edited version of

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the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) film Fury over Spain (1937).28 She also provided the English-language voice-over in the U.S. release of Homage to Durruti.29 She might have concluded that cinema, like theater, was neither inherently progressive nor conservative but had the potential, in the right hands, to politicize a large audience. The long and honorable traditions of theater were central to her locus of enunciation as a Jew, a radical, and a European.30 Film, in contrast, was a new technology that had no viable tradition; it was “up for grabs.” Why didn’t she grab it? There is no evidence that she ever reconsidered her casual dismissal of the medium. Theater, in contrast, was her medium of choice for reaching mass audiences. She advocated theater as both a mirror of society and a force for transformation. Theater offered a place where people could experience in a visceral way the dramas of social unrest and the need for social change. Goldman wrote two books and gave hundreds of lectures on drama, summarizing the plots, character developments, and political lessons in dozens of plays by both luminaries and lesser-known writers.31 Goldman lectured on theater in coal mines and union halls as well as lecture halls across the United States, Canada, and England, introducing the European theater of revolt to middle class and working class audiences. Critic Bernard Smith found Goldman’s work with drama “very useful in spreading an appreciation of the stage as a social influence and in arousing writers to a realization of their power to move men in the direction of free thought and rational behavior.”32 Literary historian and critic Van Wyck Brooks concurred, observing, “no one did more to spread the new ideas of literary Europe that influence so many young people in the West.”33 Rebecca West credited Goldman with popularizing George Bernard Shaw in the United States.34 In 1905 and 1906 Goldman managed the Russian-speaking Pavel Orleneff troupe in their successful American tour, and a decade later was connected to the influential Provincetown Players. Orlenov was an early advocate of the free theater movement, or theater for the people, and his troupe’s successes stimulated her interest in the political power of drama, which was also an important element of Jewish immigrant life.35 Like Nobel Prize–winning writer Romain Rolland, whose work The People’s Theatre she later enjoyed in prison, Goldman aspired to free theater from the control of a narrow literary elite and bring it to the masses.36 Goldman influenced Henry Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and many other playwrights and worked with a theatrical group called the Progressive Stage Society; literary scholar Harry G. Carlson credits her with helping to “spearhead the experimental little theatre movement.”37 She supported the formation of community theaters across the United States, hoping to develop local talent and to transform participants from passive consumers to active producers of culture.38 Continuing her theater activities in exile, she lectured under the auspices of the British Drama League, presenting American plays to English audiences

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and developing lectures on Yiddish playwrights, including Sholem Ash, Peretz Hirshbein, and Jacob Gordin, for the Bristol Jewish Literary Society.39 Not all theater, however, won her praise. She did not consider the medium inherently progressive, but capable of productive political work in the right hands. In a 1914 letter to her manager and lover Ben Reitman, Goldman complained that her research for The Social Significance of Modern Drama turned up numerous European plays she found “absolutely rotten, cheap; bourgeois family business.”40 While in exile in the newly created Soviet Union in the early 1920s, she dismissed the Russian avant garde, disliked the Futurists and Constructivists, and preferred the traditional Moscow Art Theatre. She longed for “new Ibsens, Tolstoys or Tchekovs to thunder their protest against the new evils.”41 The theater she considered worthy carried a radical political message. Why such an enthusiastic investment in political theater, alongside a rather thoughtless dismissal of cinema? Like Wexler, I find Goldman’s rejection of the medium “curious.”42 I speculate that cinema did not recommend itself to Goldman because the tropes and temporalities within which she operated recoiled from the new apparatus while finding a congenial home in the old. In his study of anarchist film, Richard Porton concludes that “her contempt for cinema reflects her distinctive oscillation between a Nietzschean, quasi-elitist individualism and a more traditionally anarchist advocacy of radical democracy.”43 Yet he offers no evidence for this interpretation, and I think he misreads her disgust. Her rejection of film was not a reflection of tensions between the individual and the collective, which in any case she did not find particularly problematic, but rather reflects her suspicion of the role of machines and speed in political communication. Goldman lived during the time that historian Friedrich Kittler analyzes as “the founding age” of new media.44 “Changing media ecology” saw the erosion of “print’s former monopoly” in favor of communication with light and sound waves, “visual and acoustic effects of the real.”45 Importantly, Goldman did not reject all new technologies: she made no critical mention, to my knowledge, of the automobile or gramophone; she criticized the railroads, not because of any inherent traits of trains but because of the crushing of farmers’ resistance by powerful railroad companies; she criticized airplanes not for their inherent relation to motion but because she predicted that governments would use them to drop bombs on people from the air.46 She enthusiastically embraced the typewriter, the new miniprinting press that German philosopher Martin Heidegger apprehended as “an ‘intermediate’ thing between a tool and a machine.”47 Perhaps the typewriter seemed less foreign, its speed and noise less ominous, because of her prior intimacy with the sewing machine. Or perhaps the respect that anarchists in general gave to printers rubbed off on the typewriter. In any case, she seemed to share Nietzsche’s conviction that “Our writing tools

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are also working on our thoughts” and to think that film worked on our thoughts and on our affects in undesirable ways.48 The “commerce between bodies and media technologies” that delighted her in plays filled her with impatience in movies.49 Time, Kittler explains, is central to media: “Time determines the limit of all art, which first has to arrest the daily data flow in order to turn it into images or signs.”50 The “daily data flow” seems more preserved in theater, where the markers of time’s arrest—changes of act and scene, the entry and exit of characters—are more tangible and move at an ordinary pace. While even theater must pass through “the bottleneck of the signifier,” Goldman could imagine theater as an unmediated relation between the audience and the play while cinema’s technical mediations were no doubt unavoidable.51 The motion of bodies on the stage, Michael Shapiro explains, is in real time, chronological time, embodied time, so that “the image of time is indirect, presented as a consequence of motion.”52 The temporality of theater’s sensorium, in other words, mirrors that of ordinary life, rendering it familiar and thus unremarkable. Movies, in contrast, employ different times. Theatrical time resembles Deleuze’s notion of the “organic regime” of narration, in which “the real that is assumed is recognizable by its continuity.” Organic narration may contain dreams or flashbacks, but these interruptions are anchored in “linkages of actuals.” In contrast, filmic practices utilize “crystalline regimes” producing nonchronological time in which the virtual “detaches itself from its actualizations, [and] starts to be valid for itself.”53 The assemblage of camera shots lends itself to time tricks. Shapiro explains, “Instead of composing movement images to treat the tensions explicitly acknowledged by the actors, the camera creates time images that respond to the critical thinking of the orchestrated cinematic apparatus rather than the modes of consciousness of the film’s characters.” The filmic sensorium can speed forward, reverse directions, repeat scenes, elongate or compress events, and in other ways juxtapose or interrupt relations between time and space. An organic narrative takes place in representational space, in which “the present emerges from the past for everyone in the same way.” Crystalline narrative employs “cinematically thought space,” its temporalities “connect the brain to the world differently.”54 Goldman did not welcome this new connection of brain to world because, I speculate, she feared that its nonlinear time undermined its potential didactic function. While Goldman excelled at crowd time (the pacing and delivery of speech in a lecture hall or on the street), journal time (the circulation and reflexivity of written texts) and ritual time (the marking, pacing, and repetition of key events), she did not understand cinematic time. In Steven Fischler’s and Joel Sucher’s documentary Anarchism in America, there is a brief film clip of an interview with Goldman when she returned to the United States for a ninety-day lecture tour in 1934. She sat

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waiting for the interview to begin, looking very dignified, gazing at the camera, her hands folded in her lap, her expression serious. She spoke in stentorian tones, declaring herself delighted to be back in the United States, where she had chosen many years before to devote herself to the cause of anarchism. She stared fixedly at the camera the entire time, her face frozen into a single, unmoving visage. Three men began to pepper her with questions, which she answered with a series of staccato one-liners. “What do you think of Italy?” one asked. She shot back, “Beautiful country minus Mussolini.” She never looked at her questioners, made no attempt to engage them (nor they, her). It is a startling gaffe for one so skilled at interlocution. I can only make sense of it by imagining that she did not understand the camera’s gaze.55 She treated the moving picture camera as though it were a still photo camera, failing to grasp the critical difference that motion introduced. Similarly, she underestimated the unconventional political energies that could be triggered by crystalline narratives. Understanding that media act on us, she refused the invitation to act or be acted on by film. Yet of course plays are as mediated as film in another sense: they are written by someone, directed by someone, acted by someone, on stages designed by someone, in theaters erected by someone, for audiences consisting of some people and not others. Writers and directors for the stage, no less than for the cinema, must create a pace and temporality for their stories, construct transitions, create settings, establish continuities and interruptions. There are no “natural points of division” separating one event from another in either medium; the organization of acts, scenes, stage directions, lighting, etc. impose order on the stage in the same way that camera shots, angles, cuts, speed ups, slow downs, etc., do for film.56 All media “place demands on the duration of representations,” Shapiro explains, in order to process a sequence of frames or motions into an organized, continuous flow.57 The levels of interpretation inevitably pursued by playwrights, directors, actors, set designers, and audiences are no less constitutive of drama than their filmic equivalents are of cinema. So why did the stage seem more real? Wexler points out the likely generational and class elements in Goldman’s inclinations on visual media. She and most of the rest of the Mother Earth family were working class immigrants, unevenly educated, with backgrounds in radical journalism and long-time political activism, “without the sophistication, education, exuberance, or ease of their more affluent counterparts at The Masses” or The Little Review.58 Wexler’s observations help us understand why Goldman came to her aesthetic orientation, but shed little light on how her genres worked, on the political dynamics of her strategies for making and interpreting texts. Jean-Paul Sartre’s comparison of theater and film is helpful in sorting out Goldman’s implicit textual practices. Like her, Sartre praised political theater that shared “the imperatives of commitment” with an audience.59

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“Speech in the theater should express a vow or a commitment or a refusal or a moral judgment or a defense of one’s rights or a challenge to the rights of others, ” Sartre argued. This “magic, primitive and sacred role” brings the audience into the commitment process, includes them in the situation, and appeals to them to throw their lot with those struggling for freedom. Sartre praised “a theater of situations”: “The most moving thing the theater can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life. The situation is an appeal: it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it’s up to us to choose.” Sartre continued, “It is through particular situations that each age grasps the human situation and the enigmas human freedom must confront.”60 The dramas Goldman presented to her audiences often dwell within the situations of workers, peasants, and prostitutes: she took these particular and unprivileged life contexts as the way into the shared human situation. Sartre suggests at least four critical differences between film and theater. First, theater is three dimensional, with the actors present in the flesh; yet the setting is artificial—the audience does not see a tree or a mountain on the stage, but a flimsy silhouette—and depends on the characters’ gestures to bring it to life. Film is two dimensional, with no living material bodies in the room to differentiate actors from setting; yet film could portray actual nature, that is, be shot outdoors, while theater must convey the larger environment with props and sets. Second, film audiences see through the eye of the camera, “an impersonal witness which has come between the spectator and the object seen.” The camera directs the gaze and the camera can “look” from anywhere. In theater, “I see with my own eyes and am always at the same level and in the same place.” The audience’s gaze originates from a single stable place, but can be directed anywhere. Third, film is “ready-canned,” it can be shot over and over until it meets the director’s expectations, while theater is a “jam session,” its productions different each time, “an event at once ordinary and unique.” “Intentions don’t count in the theater. What counts is what comes out.”61 Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for Goldman, the play inhabits roughly the same time frame as the audience. The action on the stage has the same relation to space and motion as do the ordinary lives of spectators. The time needed for stage hands to shift scenes is organic, not crystalline; it is comparable to that needed for audience members to go to the bathroom during intermission. Like Sartre after World War II, Goldman before World War I appeared out of date to her avant-garde contemporaries. The plays Goldman and Sartre praised (and in Sartre’s case, wrote) were about meaning, not method. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka’s commentary on Sartre could serve for Goldman as well; they note that “the themes of his plays seemed to belong to an era that had ended; the anguished or playful metaphysical

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questionings of the avant-garde seemed to have put the imperatives of commitment wholly out of date.”62 Goldman fought to keep anarchism’s imperatives of commitment at the forefront of audience’s perceptions, and she found organic time more conducive than crystalline time for that pedagogy, just as she found the face-to-face relations of the theater more stimulating than relations mediated by cameras. In a January 13, 1935 letter to her friend Mildred Mesirow, she remarked: “I hold that radio and the cinema have dulled human sensibilities . . . at least one has the choice to go or not to go to a cinema, but one is victimized by the radio.”63 I suspect that the dulling of human sensibilities was, in Goldman’s eyes, a consequence of the intervention of the camera or the recording device, with their greater liberties in regulating the temporal flow of data between the audience and the performer. Continuing my speculations, I suggest that Goldman’s preference for theater over film both reflected and helped produce her discursive placement within the literary and philosophical frames of realism and romanticism. She sought theatrical performances that could change the very structure of affect, resituating the audience in relation to the struggles they witnessed, and she felt that cinema’s crystalline narratives disrupted the needed transference. To venture an analogy: for Goldman, the stage was to the film as realism/romanticism was to modernism. The former were reliable vehicles for revolutionary education, while the latter were superficial indulgences.

REALISM, ROMANTICISM, AND MODERNISM Alice Wexler notes, in comparing Goldman’s journal Mother Earth to other radical publications of the time like The Masses as well as to avant garde cultural magazines like Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, that Goldman displayed “relatively conservative aesthetic taste” and was indifferent “to experiments in form and style.”64 Anderson agreed: “about this matter of form,” she said, “She [Goldman] believes that it is of second importance; I think it is first.”65 In her Preface to the 1987 edition of The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, Erika Munk notes that Goldman’s “taste was surprisingly more conformist than her ideology.”66 Martha Solomon concurs, finding that Goldman sought “radical ideology in conservative literary form.”67 Goldman insisted, these critics each note, that the content of plays must challenge the status quo, but she was inattentive to the form. What conventions did this inattention reinforce? What do “conservative” and “conformist” mean in the context of Goldman’s time? To answer these questions, we need to ground Goldman’s writing in the shifting literary, artistic, and political context within which she wrote. Goldman’s celebration of freedom in the arts, politics, work, education,

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and sexual life were very much a part of the pre-World War I modernist rebellion of Bohemians, radicals, and artists. Anarchists and modernists were certainly linked in the eyes of the establishment; the editors at the New York Times, for example, found the modernists, like anarchists, to be “extreme and savage,” insane and diseased.68 Goldman drew the Greenwich Village crowd to her speeches and movements, and they shared many of her ideas. Through the Ferrer Center she and other anarchists helped to cultivate the intellectual, artistic, and institutional conditions for the emergence of modern art in the United States, sustaining the lively historical link between art and anarchism that stretches back to Proudhon’s friendship with French painter Gustave Courbet.69 Art historian Alan Antliff argues, “anarchism was the formative force lending coherence and direction to modernism in the United States between 1908 and 1920.”70 Margaret Anderson remarked, “I have never known a people more rabid about art than the anarchists. Anything and everything is art for them—that is, anything containing an element of revolt.”71 Goldman frequently sketched for her audiences a vision of “a self whose creative powers were unleashed by revolutionary ferment,” cultivating a robust affinity between anarchist and artistic rebellions.72 Goldman’s unflagging support for alternative artistic institutions, as well as for access to the arts for the masses, helped to contest control of the high arts by the East coast establishment of her day.73 Painter Robert Henri, for example, met Goldman in 1911, and began, at her suggestion, to teach at the Ferrer Center. He was joined by a stellar cast of who’s who in New York’s radical artistic and literary circles in the early twentieth century: artists George Bellows, Bayard Boyesen, John Weichsel, Man Ray, Manuel Komroff, William Tish, Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan, Benjamin De Casseres, Robert Minor, Max Weber, Ben Benn, and Abraham Walkowitz; cartoonist Robert Minor; sculptor Adolf Wolff; writers André Tridon, Hippolyte Havel, Hutchins Hapgood, Carl Zigrosser, William Thurston Brown, and Leonard Abbott.74 John Weichsel taught at the Ferrer Center and started the People’s Art Guild, which sponsored more than fifty exhibitions in poor neighborhoods between 1915 and 1918 to build unity between artists and workers. The blockbuster Armory Show of 1913 featured 1300 works of art, and attracted 70,000 visitors to exhibits mixing realism and modernism, European and American art, much of it linked to the artists at the Ferrer Center.75 Goldman saw radical artists as members of the “intellectual proletarians,” the “real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature” who are “untimely” in relation to prevailing values and thus offer the possibility of “real unity” with revolutionary workers.76 She lambasted those leftists who only recognize political thinking in their “time-worn vocabulary,” equating them with conservatives who only recognized radicalism when accompanied by “the Red Flag”: “Both are equally blind to the fact that any mode of creative effort which portrays life boldly, earnestly and unafraid, may

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become more dangerous to the present fabric of society than the loudest harangue of the soap-box speaker.”77 The Ferrer Center and the People’s Art Guild exemplified the cross-class alliances Goldman sought between intellectuals and workers. Goldman often referred to herself as a modern woman and her journal Mother Earth featured a column called “The Avant Garde.” In a letter to her friend Ellen Kennan in Denver, Goldman described the audience for her drama lectures in San Francisco in 1913 as “sincerely desirous to learn modern ideas.”78 Yet, despite these gestures toward being modern, Goldman’s intellectual home was never in the cultural avant garde and modernism was not a primary source of her energies. Wexler points out that she shared her loyalties to nineteenth-century aesthetics with others in her generation of radicals: Like most political radicals of her generation, Emma had never been a partisan of modernism. The conventional form of her autobiography reflected her relatively conservative aesthetic tastes and desire to appeal to a popular audience. For all her modern views of love, she nonetheless shared certain ideas more characteristic of the nineteenth-century free lovers than of twentieth-century Freudians. She justified erotic passion by reference to its spiritual and ethical possibilities, its ennobling powers, its capacity to inspire “high thoughts and fine deeds.”79

If we define modernism, with Sylvia Yount, as “more of a cultural attitude than a coherent movement—an effort to turn away from the past and look to the future, to disparage the old and celebrate the new,” then Goldman was quite modern in her political vision but not in her aesthetic practices.80 While she often made alliances with modernists, her head and her heart were grounded in romantic realism. Heeding literary scholar David Duff’s warning against seeking “aesthetic laws” that “control literary and artistic kinds,” we can think of genre, with Peter Seitel, as “an interpretive tool, that is, a set of concepts and methods that provides insight into the kinds of meaning articulated by a work and that accounts for the aesthetic experience it produces.”81 As aesthetic forms producing “chunks of communication that do work,” modernism, romanticism, and realism create “frames of expectation” that configure “time, space, causality, and motivation” to depict events and tell recognizable stories.82 While relations among aesthetic modes are overlapping and fluid, attention to the distinct “narrative methodology” that each facilitates can unpack the representational worlds they make possible.83 Margaret Anderson, for example, was an ally, but the two radical women worked within very different “compositional logics.”84 Anderson founded and edited The Little Review in Chicago in 1914, with Jane Heap as co-editor and Ezra Pound as foreign editor. Bernard Smith, the 1930s literary critic

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who expressed admiration for Goldman’s determined contributions to dramatic criticism, reserved his greatest admiration for Anderson’s journal. “It was the maddest, bravest, and most stimulating experimental magazine America has ever had.”85 The Little Review ran James Joyce’s Ulysses and brought Dadaism to U.S. audiences. It was burned four times by the U.S. Post Office and prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. “They were willing to try anything,” Smith observed.86 The Little Review’s unrestrained artistic rebellion made common cause with Goldman’s equally unrestrained political rebellion, yet neither Anderson nor Goldman confused alliance and admiration with identity. Goldman’s favorite writers were recruited from the ranks of nineteenthcentury realism and included Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Turgenev, Walt Whitman, Henrik Ibsen, and Gerard Hauptmann. She liked Jack London, Frank Norris (author of The Bomb, an anarchist-friendly account of the Haymarket riots), and Upton Sinclair, praising “the burning sparks of the growing social unrest and the deep felt indignation against the things that make the horrors portrayed by these authors possible . . . the growing kinship and sympathy between the author and his material.”87 She loved Oscar Wilde for his wit and his verve as well as his vision of an artistic future in The Soul of Man Under Socialism. She admired Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and James Huneker’s Visionaries.88 She appreciated muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips and dramatist Eugene Walters, both of whom wrote sympathetically about prostitution. In letters to friends and family, often from prison, she expressed her dislike for D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Ernest Hemingway.89 She turned away from the experimental writers whose work often appeared in The Little Review, such as Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, and Ezra Pound. Goldman delighted in Ibsen, “the hater of all social shams.” In his Nora she found a woman who could not stomach the humiliation and degradation when she came to realize “that for eight years she had lived with a stranger and borne him children.” In Mrs. Alving, in Ghosts, she found a “free mother,” one who “had broken her chains, and set her spirit free” to find that “love in freedom is the only condition of a beautiful life.”90 She was not alone: a number of activist women in England and Europe, including Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl) and feminist Olive Schreiner, translated, publicized, and even produced Ibsen’s plays. Actress Elizabeth Robins and her colleague Marion Lea pawned their jewelry to raise funds to purchase and produce Hedda Gabler. Literary historian Katherine Kelly explains that activist women in London also “shaped the reception of his plays, filling up the theatres at afternoon matinees designed precisely for unescorted female audiences eager to witness performances in the company of other women.” These women intervened in “The Ibsen Campaign,”

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an intense public debate over the morality of his plays, “claiming Ibsen’s dramas as a cultural tool for shaping the new woman and the new family who would break with older forms of domesticity.”91 Similar disputes surrounded Ibsen’s introduction to the United States: initially the plays were widely branded as incomprehensible and obscene by most commentators, with only a few feminist critics praising Ibsen’s “clarion call to women to throw off the yoke of the past, to arise.”92 Popular stage actress Minnie Madern Fiske, whom Goldman met some years later while Goldman was managing the Orleneff company, starred in A Doll’s House, and some prominent American women participated in readings, while others declined to abandon their “obligations to decency.”93 After the turn of the century, Ibsen’s plays received somewhat warmer reception; literary historian Orm Øverland notes that Ibsen’s social criticism paved the way for later work by Eugene O’Neill, another favorite of Goldman.94 Both playwrights, in Goldman’s view, had the capacity to draw audiences into worlds in which rebellions were possible. Goldman’s literary preferences are not simply idiosyncratic questions of taste. Rather, they are clues to the grammatical and rhetorical practices, the aesthetic frame, which constituted the discursive reservoir from which Goldman drew. A modernist aesthetic posed the same dangers to her anarchist vision, she imagined, as later postmodern practices are often accused of posing to modernist hermeneutics. For example, in her commentary on Edmond Rostand’s allegory Chantecler, Goldman sees in the figure of the blackbird, the modernist who has become blasé, mentally and spiritually empty. He is a cynic and scoffer; without principle or sincerity himself, he sees only small and petty intentions in everybody else. . . . [he is] the embodiment of a shallow, superficial modernity, a modernity barren of all poetic vision, which aims only at material success and tinseled display, without regard for worth, harmony or peace.95

Similarly, she commiserated with her nephew Saxe Commins over his work editing Gertrude Stein’s writing: My education is certainly sadly neglected for I have never been able to make hard or tail out of Gertrude and I am sure most people who rave about her haven’t the remotest idea. But she is in style now like Communism . . . I cannot bear this aesthetic trend or the people who strut about in their literary importance. Far from being innovators they are decadent to me.96

Modernism here is dangerous to anarchism because it undermines the commitments and the largeness of spirit needed to sustain radical politics. Smith’s judicious evaluation of Goldman’s contribution to drama criticism notes that she “was dealing only superficially with esthetic ques-

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tions.”97 I agree with Smith that Goldman’s primary interest was in the plays’ immediate contributions to a message of sexual freedom and social justice; yet I suggest that there are aesthetic practices at work in Goldman’s apprehensions of literary works that can aid us in a fuller encounter with her political thinking. Goldman’s lectures and books on drama invariably involve a brief introduction to the playwright and his/her time, a plot summary resting on extensive quotations from the play, and a commentary drawing out the “moral lesson” or “revolutionary message.”98 Sometimes the playwrights themselves, including Henrik Ibsen, Frank Wedekind, John Galsworthy, and George Bernard Shaw, viewed their art as “portraying life or as stirring revolutionary sentiments,” giving Goldman material to support her own readings of these dramas.99 Other times she read the plays apart from reported or imagined intentions of the authors. Either way, Goldman honed in on what Margaret Anderson called “the big thing.”100 Goldman looked for plots depicting social injustice, characters cultivating (or serving as object lessons by failing to cultivate) individual liberation, and dramatic tone encouraging rebellion. Aspects of the plays that did not serve these ends were generally left unattended. As Wexler notes, “where there was ambiguity or ambivalence, she tended to impose a simple moral conclusion.”101 Anderson, who often commented on Goldman’s largerthan-life qualities, observed trenchantly that her friend tended “to push an attitude into the place of an argument.”102 Critics often found her handling of literary productions wanting, yet commended her for her courage, energy, and sincerity. She often concluded her presentation by asserting that the radical message of the play was obvious: in Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening, for example, she claimed, “It is hardly necessary to point out the revolutionary significance of this extraordinary play. It speaks powerfully for itself.” Similarly, she asked, rhetorically, about Galsworthy’s The Pigeon, “Is it necessary to dwell on the revolutionary significance of this cruel reality?” Introducing Ibsen’s plays, she expressed her frustration with interpreters who “go about seeking mysteries and hunting symbols, and completely losing sight of the meaning that is as clear as daylight.”103 To Goldman, the revolutionary message of the plays went without saying. But what prior assumptions about value and meaning must be in place, such that the appropriate interpretation of the play is obvious? Goldman drew her resistance to modernism’s experimentalism from the aesthetic resources of romanticism and realism. These appeared conventional and conservative, perhaps old-fashioned, to the avant garde crowd of her day as well as perhaps to contemporary readers. Anderson’s co-editor and lover Jane Heap drew an affectionate yet barbed sketch of one of Goldman’s lectures: Heap shows Anderson sitting slouched in her chair, head in hands, while Goldman pounded the lectern; the caption read, “Suffering for Humanity at Emma Goldman’s Lectures.”104 Feminist Sara Bard Field,

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whose life was profoundly influenced by Goldman’s critique of marriage, said Goldman’s lectures on drama reminded her of Sunday school classes: “I think Ibsen would groan in spirit and Hauptmann hold up his hands in horror.”105 For these young Bohemians, anarchism’s radicalism required modernism’s experimental energies rather than the earnest and predictable aesthetic of romanticism and realism. Yet of course romanticism and realism mark not a static status quo but rather a dynamic reservoir of cultural practices. They had come from somewhere, in response to something; they had interrupted some prior set of conventions. In his 1939 study of American literary thought, Bernard Smith observes that “Romanticism is, in essence—revolt—in American letters as in English, French, and German—revolt against the traditions and circumstances which bind, limit, or repress the individual. It is an assertion of the right to dream, the right to conceive ideals and satisfactions beyond those afforded by the immediate environment.”106 Subsequent scholars have described romanticism as “engaged in a defensive reaction against the unfinished work of the American revolution.”107 According to Smith, romanticism rebelled against the prior preoccupation in American letters with bourgeois morality—“industriousness, sobriety, chastity, monogamy, conjugal fidelity, and abstention from gambling.” Earlier criticism, of the kind that Goldman called puritan, gave substance to H. L. Mencken’s quip that Puritanism consists of the suspicion that someone, somewhere is having a good time: it “condemned improvidence and professed to scorn all those forms of play—physical, mental, or emotional—which are indulged in solely for the pleasure inherent in their pursuit.”108 The principles of moral utility and gentility were the unspoken, habitualized values governing the reigning aesthetic, which historian T. J. Jackson Lears aptly characterizes as “evasive banality.”109 In the well-ordered genteel world of the ruling class and its admirers, the things that went without saying were the things that upheld class and male privilege while disguising the political and economic labor that produced those privileges. Romanticism gave subversive names to some of the things that went without saying among the genteel moralists. It offered a joyous celebration of life and eros, an impudence toward authority, and a spiritual validation of the common person that, in Goldman’s hands, enlivened the sometimes dour anarchist critique of capitalism, religion, and the state. Goldman loved Walt Whitman for his spirited assault on both gentility and moral utility. He was “unamerican,” she said, when he “arraign[ed] the Puritanic interference which has paralyzed life” and when he resisted “the deadening tendency of commercialism.”110 Whitman viewed the immense and growing accumulation of capital and the authority of capitalists as “antidemocratic disease and monstrosity.”111 The romantics, Alan Trachtenberg explains, took seriously “the republican rhetoric valuing labor, indepen-

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dence, and free institutions, [and] they tended to view wage labor as another form of slavery, of life-long dependency, and the monied classes as usurpers.”112 Critic Bernard Smith explains Whitman’s appeal to Goldman’s integration of romanticism and realism: “Giving voice to all the spiritual aspirations of romanticism while insisting that concrete facts, the immediate present, the common people, and the teachings of science are alone worthy of attention by American artists, he marked the transition from ‘the purest romance’ to realism.” Characterizing Whitman as “Emerson without doubts,” Smith sketches Whitman’s appeal: plain speaking about sex, attention to things exactly as they are, and “passionate love for the masses,” not as an abstract collectivity but as “living sweating beings.”113 Other anarchists shared Goldman’s enthusiasm for Old Walt. Leonard Abbott also recognized him as an inspired rebel against social conventions. Landauer translated Whitman into German. The editors of the anarchist journal Firebrand were arrested in 1897 on orders of Anthony Comstock, and Firebrand withheld from the mail, because of the publication of Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for Me.” The editors were convicted: seventy-fouryear-old Abner J. Pope served four months in prison, while Abe Isaak and Henry Addis were released on appeal.114 Both Whitman and Goldman praised “the beauty and wholesomeness of sex . . . freed from the rags and tatters of hypocrisy.”115 In Whitman’s romanticism Goldman found support for her early impulse, which went contrary to the sterner inclinations of many of her male comrades, that beauty and joy were as important as freedom and justice to anarchism. Whitman’s sensuality and wildness of spirit imbued his idea of democracy with anarchist energies. Like romanticism, realism also invoked the worthiness of ordinary people and their struggles. Realism’s commitment to verisimilitude and social criticism is often read as an attack on romanticism’s celebration of beauty, nature, and the individual’s ability to triumph over adversity. Yet, “while realism’s favorite whipping boy is the romance,” the two aesthetic forms share a great deal.116 Romanticism and realism were both taken by elites as scandalous threats to social stability, giving aid and comfort to revolutionary workers, intrusive journalists, disreputable bohemians, and other boisterous radicals. Smith argues that while “realism is an esthetic movement in its own right,” it developed out of romanticism, sharing a focus on “suffering and struggling human beings” rather than “symbols, manners, or mythology.”117 Alan Trachtenberg suggests that realism is “a tendency among some painters and writers to depict contemporary life without moral condescension.”118 Realism’s concern with what Smith calls “materialistic truth,” accurate re-creation of observable human experiences, could address “thought and emotion as well as action and perception.” “Realists want to know the world as it really is, to create a world of fiction congruent with ‘real life.’” Since earlier aesthetic boundaries had largely

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mandated a studied blindness toward the oppressed and impoverished, the “serious treatment of every reality” brought previously “low” subjects into realms formerly reserved for the “high.”119 In a 1912 Denver Post article, Goldman sketched the pedagogical demands of realism: The Spirit of Unrest which is undermining the citadel of learning is equally strong in literary, dramatic and artistic endeavor. We no longer want a novel to represent the heroine in a fluffy gown, and the hero on his knees before his beloved; nor do we care for the drama as a mere idle amusement. We look to both as the mirror of the struggle for greater human expansion. In other words, literature and the drama today are the most fiery exponents of the accumulated forces in men and women trying to find themselves and their true contact with their fellow beings.120

Realism made room for working-class and immigrant characters alongside of those respectable and successful men and women whom historian Alan Trachtenberg, reflecting on the literary interventions of William Dean Howells, editor of Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, called “grammatical characters.”121 Many of the plays Goldman praised featured decidedly ungrammatical characters, a fitting appellation in light of the Times condemnation of the artists at the Armory Exhibit as “cousins to the anarchists in politics, the poets who defy syntax and decency, and all would-be destroyers.”122 Goldman’s beloved plays included Leonid Andreyev’s allegory of poverty and suffering in King Hunger, John Galsworthy’s portrait of class struggle in Strife, and Gerhart Hauptmann’s story of workers’ oppression and resistance in The Weavers, the play that Johann Most’s experimental theater and other anarchist stage groups had performed. In her unpublished manuscript on Russian drama, Goldman praised Alexander Griboyedov’s play Intelligence Comes to Grief, as a “great classic” because of “its dramatic power and its forceful indictment of the aristocracy from which he sprang.” Censored in Russia during his lifetime, Griboyedov’s play targeted the vacuous, idle rich, “whose senseless and wasteful lives were made possible by the toil and suffering of their serfs,” and the cringing servility of the attending class. The political veracity of this play, in Goldman’s view, was inseparable from its artistic merit.123 Goldman advocated a realism engaging literature with struggles for social justice, a scandalous turn, in the eyes of the art establishment, toward the abject. Ungrammatical characters, the Times anxiously reminded readers, interrupted the reigning syntax and decency of the theater, including bodies and voices who disrupted the prevailing theatrical sensorium. Goldman caricatured the indignation of middle class theater-goers at being exposed to “the age-long misery of labor” in dramatic form: When “The Weavers” first saw the light, pandemonium broke out in the “land of thinkers and poets.” “What!” cried Philistia, “workingmen, dirty, emaciated

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and starved, to be placed on the stage! Poverty, in all its ugliness, to be presented as an after-dinner amusement? That is too much!”124

“The land of thinkers and poets” is no doubt the land of academics and critics, where the ungrammatical assent of the oppressed onto the stage was greeted with dismay. Realism subverted the literary grammar of the ladies and gentlemen whose tastes and interests defined the hegemonic contours of proper arts and letters. Goldman worked in the intersection of romanticism and realism, recruiting anarchism’s political energies to sustain her assumption that the stories were waiting to be found in the material, “all a matter of proper seeing.”125 In her tribute to Eugene Walter’s play The Easiest Way, for example, Goldman praises the play’s vivid portrait of “every-day people living every-day lives” as well as its implicit protest against the destruction “of integrity, of truth, and justice” which “put the universal stamp on the play” and provided “the strongest indictment against society.”126 Romantic realism rests not on description alone, but on a true-to-life picturing that, as Alan Trachtenberg explains, “will seem credible because life itself contains that picture, that form, that symmetry of plot.”127 Goldman’s preferred theater presented figures she took to be real people in real situations in order to elicit for the audience the meaning that, for her, already resided in the story. Interrogating these claims to reality, an interrogation that could have been facilitated by the more obviously mediated genre of film as well as the more self-reflective and experimental practices of modernism, was a project she steadfastly refused. She selected plays in which she could find an anarchist pedagogy and in the process assumed that the pedagogy was already in the story. On one level, her approach enlivens the linkages of theater and politics by insisting, in much the same manner that Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks find in Frederic Jameson, that “we should view the work [of art] as performative in the sense that it intervenes in a concrete social situation or problem and attempts to arrive at some sort of response or solution.”128 Yet on another level, Goldman domesticates and confines the range of political meanings that plays might offer by rejecting their indeterminacy: departing from Jameson, Goldman’s readings do not take the plays to be “full of surprises.”129 Rather, their performativity is rendered transparent by her insistence that they have only one route toward intervention in social situations. The plays lose their dynamism and their interventions become predictable. Goldman’s own approach to stories, I speculate, may encourage subsequent feminist critics to follow her lead, taking her life as pedagogy and interrogating it for its success in delivering a revolutionary message. Goldman’s romantic realism inhabits both her message and her medium, shaping subsequent critics’ encounters around the demanding contours of

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revolutionary verisimilitude. If the story is understood as already in the material, then it is difficult to get the discursive purchase necessary to tell a different story. Realism clutches at Goldman’s readers in the same way it held onto her, through its claim to be “a corrective to faulty vision, a way of disclosing what is really there.”130 Like Goldman’s readings of plays, feminist critics’ readings of Goldman risk becoming predictable and blocking other potential interventions. Biographer Richard Drinnon rather harshly dismisses her method of reading plays as “homily-hunting,” but he is not wrong to note that her approach suppresses tensions and closes off other possible interpretations.131 Drinnon concludes that, essentially, the problem was one of education and class: Obviously it was one thing for Emma to outline the plot of a play to a group of miners so they could understand it; it was quite another for her to analyze critically the structure of a play and tie it to the history of the drama in a way that would impress the sophisticated members of her audience.132

Drinnon may be right. No doubt better-educated audiences had more extensive backgrounds in and expectations for the practices of theatrical criticism. Yet, Anderson offers a somewhat different analysis of the shortcomings of Goldman’s work on drama. In her report on Goldman’s drama lectures in the Chicago Fine Arts Building in 1914, Anderson writes: she understands what the authors were trying to do and she doesn’t distort and misinterpret in an effort to say something clever on her own account. . . . But that is not enough from Emma Goldman. Unless she can link up a drama talk with her special function—with her own reactions—the essence of her personality is lacking and the thing misses fire.133

Drinnon interprets the misfires as insufficiently academic or informed, while Anderson, herself a highly sophisticated reader of modern culture, suggests instead that the missing ingredient was political. Anderson was not calling for greater analytic insight or more extensive explanation of the works in their literary context; she was asking for precisely what Goldman excelled at, the animation of words with her passion that the topic really mattered—if everyone would just get it, the world could change. Goldman understood that this was her gift—that she could “sway people with words.”134 She was fond of saying, “if you do not feel a thing, you will never guess its meaning.”135 Anderson appears to be saying that, when the drama talks stumbled, the failure was due to a lack of Goldman’s usual political investment, rather than an insufficiently learned approach. Goldman’s work on drama accomplished a great deal: she gave her audiences a way to look at plays, a handle on a world of drama that was unfamiliar, often inaccessible, to them before. She brought literature and drama

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to many people who would otherwise have had little opportunity to encounter it. She contributed the resources for what Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” a process of placing oneself in an identifiable world and naming elements of that world in order to develop the capacity to struggle.136 The unfamiliar must become “figureable,” Jameson insists, “representable in tangible form.”137 Goldman’s speeches and writings on theater offered untutored audiences a way into this visceral media; she contributed to the figurability of oppressive structures and to the accessibility of radical visions. Solomon points out that “she made drama real for her audience” and gave her listeners a frame, a vocabulary, and a set of questions with which to approach the previously inaccessible world of drama.138 To accomplish these anarchist cultural interventions, Goldman participated in what Kittler calls “old-fashioned viewing,” a form of gaze that corresponds roughly to what Jameson characterized as the “world of worn things” in the culture of realism.139 In theater, Kittler continues, “eyes did not mix up statues or paintings, or the bodies of actors for that matter—those basic stage props of the established arts—with their own retinal processes.”140 Film can confuse sensory inputs that theater generally leaves alone. From a modernist perspective, such confusion can be productive; it contributes to the modernist call to “make it new” by calling attention to the inevitably selective and active dimensions of all perception. From the perspective of romantic realism, however, such confusion is an interruption of the very plot and narrative needed for didactic expression.

LOVE AND REVOLUTION The feminist critics with whom I began this chapter, whose interrogations of Goldman, I have argued, are unintentionally captured by the same romantic realism that Goldman inhabited, have featured the contradictions they see between Goldman’s public analysis of love and marriage and her personal erotic experiences. Yet these critics also push us to see the workings of eros and politics, as Marso insists, in “the importance of the transformation needed in intimate relations for the revolutionary movement.”141 By following the latter direction of inquiry, I re-read their analyses with an eye toward allowing disjunctions rather than insisting on consistency. Goldman was acutely aware of her own periodic neediness and insatiable desire for the love of a man. She sometimes thought, “This craving for companionship or love or understanding is a weakness, like drink, morphine, gambling, or any other dope.”142 She wanted a world without jealousy, insecurity, or possessiveness, and she fought those feelings in herself, with limited success. Their hold on her does not make such feelings either desirable or inevitable; why should she revise her published accounts to lower

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her sights instead of using her words to urge herself and others toward a transcendence of limitations? She wanted her lovers to choose her over others, not because they were bound by law or tradition but because they cherished her more. Why should feminists find this disappointing? Certainly Falk, Wexler, and Marso have no intention of reducing Goldman’s political thinking to a checklist against which to judge her desires or evaluate her behavior, or dodging the implications of her relentless critique of the status quo. My argument is not about the intent of the authors, but about the unintended consequences of genre practices. If I am right in suggesting that some of Goldman’s feminist critics have been constrained by the same romantic realism that shaped Goldman’s thinking, that they are in this sense too much like Goldman in their reading of her, then what sort of questions might facilitate a different feminist encounter? I suggest that, with Falk, Wexler, and Marso, we continue to take her analyses of sexuality and love seriously, but instead of comparing the positions she advocated with the behavior she achieved, we instead compare her loves. Goldman’s elevated expectations for the transformative power of love is a mirror image of her intense desire for revolution as a transvaluation of values. Her passion for her individual lovers intertwined with her passion for radical political change. The parallel between love and revolution in both her ideas and her actions, rather than the inconsistencies between what she practiced and what she preached, holds a stronger promise for radical feminist interventions. Solomon succinctly summarizes Goldman’s ideal of emancipated sexual relations: “Her goal is a free, open relationship between liberated men and women without taint of unnatural dependency, a relationship sustained only by the bond of love.” For Goldman, Solomon continues, love between two people should create an intensified microcosm of the more general relation between individuals and the community in a liberated society: “This free and equal relationship between individuals, furthering the potentials of both without hindering the development of either, would offer them the deepest fulfillment in life. For its creation and fruition, the independence and strength of both parties are essential.”143 She envisioned anarchist love as creating bonds between free individuals that would enhance rather than confine each person. Similarly, she envisioned an anarchist society as a voluntary community of free, self-directing individuals, so that individual growth and empowerment are nurtured through collective life. Falk succinctly explains Goldman’s intertwining of eros and revolution: She tried to reach people who were yearning for love and commitment in their lives, and to expand their vision of the individual’s need for love into that of a social need. By making people aware of the conventions that limited their expectations, she was able to connect their inner need for a sense of belonging with their feelings of deprivation at the absence of a larger community.

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In order to live fully, each person would have to confront societal norms, the hypocrisy and injustices that inhibit freedom. Similarly, by showing the barrenness of the socially approved forms of love, she hoped to inspire people to change the conditions that blocked them from living out their vision of love.144

By insisting on the interconnections between freedom and community at the collective level with parallel practices of autonomy and relationality within our intimate lives, Goldman politicized personal life while infusing political struggle with desire. Both love and revolution have the potential to draw upon erotic energies to give rise to a free individual in a transformative community. Goldman’s letters about the Spanish revolution were loaded with erotic metaphors: Spain was a woman and Goldman embraced “her strength, her gentleness as well as her rugged harshness.” In a powerful letter to Rudolf and Milly Rocker, Goldman sketched Spain as her irresistible lover: “Spain is too fascinating even if terrible in some respects. One cannot escape its sway. Like a grand passion it holds me tightly clasped in her arms.” Readily mixing genders, the Spanish revolution she loved was a woman who could nonetheless be “emasculated” as the Russian Revolution had been by the Bolsheviks.145 Instead of seeing Goldman as a slave to passion, we could say that she never gave up on either love or politics, that the mandate to persevere was not easily derailed by disappointment, and that her commitments were always nourished by her ideal of what was possible. When Goldman and Berkman went to the Soviet Union in 1919, they were eager to participate in the revolution. Goldman held onto her commitments through numerous initial disappointments with the growing class inequalities in the nascent post revolutionary society, the massive waste and inefficiency, the disempowerment of workers’ councils, and the institutionalization of terror by the Bolsheviks against fellow revolutionaries. Not until the massacre of anarchists at Kronstadt in 1921, however, did she fully face her growing suspicions that the new ruling class had killed the revolution. It nearly broke her heart. Angelica Balabanova recalled Goldman weeping with disappointment at the failure of the Russian Revolution.146 Rada Bercovici, daughter of anarchist parents from the Ferrer Center Modern School, whom Goldman and Berkman visited in Paris in the 1920s, has a similar memory: “She was broken-hearted about Russia. She wept, and Sasha went over and patted her shoulder.”147 Solomon finds the same fault in Goldman’s loyalty to the Russian Revolution that some feminist critics find in her dependency on her lovers: she was hoist on her own petard, caught up in the very thing she opposed. “Goldman, who had always railed against those whose thinking was controlled by myth or superstition, admits her vulnerability to these same forces.”148 Don Herzog’s assessment of Goldman, while recognizing the utility of Goldman’s early critique of the Bolsheviks, finds childish

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infatuation rather than mature political engagement in what he calls her “breathless, starry-eyed, oh so intense” romance with anarchism.149 But it was neither superstition nor infatuation that sustained her resolve: it was love. She refused to give up easily on disappointing lovers or failing revolutions; when she eventually did, in both cases, admit the bitter defeat of her cherished dreams, she gathered up her considerable resolve and tried again. Her sorrow over the Russian revolution was a manifestation of the same voluminous desire, deep disappointment, and stubborn determination to persist until every last shred of hope for a better outcome had been exhausted. After her disillusionment in Russia, she and Berkman subsequently rethought the whole process of revolution, shifting more toward syndicalism and toward the economic and political practices that can prepare people to take advantage of the uncertain, cataclysmic opportunities revolutions present. Their sustained reevaluation of revolution suggests, not Herzog’s image of an unreflective “besotted stance,” but a passionate intellectual and political struggle to come to terms with disappointment while continuing the fight.150 The very traits that drove Goldman to hold onto deeply problematic personal relationships also compelled her revolutionary resolve: she loved her revolutions in the same extraordinary way she loved her partners, they disappointed her in the same devastating way, and in that same stubborn way she reconsidered her experience while refusing to surrender her ideal of what could be. This is not to say that Goldman’s intertwining of eros and revolution is unproblematic. Falk gives us insight into the displacement that such intertwining can produce: if anarchism mediates everything, then patterns of dependency and withdrawal such as those plaguing her relations with Ben Reitman and other lovers could be formulated “only as a political conflict over their visions of the meaning of free love.”151 Falk attributes Goldman’s slowness to come to terms with her own motivations and needs to her corresponding quickness to interpret them in exclusively ideological terms, as “disappointment in the failure of her grand vision” rather than as pain and anger over problems to which she herself contributed. “Accordingly,” Falk continues, “in describing the break-up of her marriage, instead of reexperiencing her sadness, anger, and loneliness, she immediately shifted to a discussion of free love and the young revolutionaries of Russia, and wrote about her ‘disappointment’ in the failure of this ideal.”152 While substituting the paler satisfactions of work or politics for lost intimacies, or for the hard work of processing failed relationships, is an understandable retreat from pain, Falk is correct to point out that both political analysis and personal self-understanding are hindered by folding the latter entirely into the former. Still, while Falk gives us reasons to beware of a complete collapse of our love for other individuals into our love for political change, neither does she suggest that we ought to completely disengage them.

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A parallel sort of limitation in Goldman’s practice of intertwining the personal and the political appears when we think about the possible function of Goldman’s frequently overheated prose. Don Herzog mocks Goldman for “sighing and swooning over [her] political one and only,” seeing her as a “lovesick radical” falling into a “delirious stance” over her romance with anarchism.153 While Lori Marso is right to insist that Herzog’s exclusive focus on Goldman’s affect marginalizes the actual content of her political arguments, Herzog is nonetheless onto something in calling our attention to the frequent sentimentality in Goldman’s language.154 Goldman overworks the common nineteenth-century speech gesture that Friedrich Kittler calls “the primordial sigh,” the “oh!” expressing the soul’s lament. Kittler suggests that “‘oh’-saying” was a sign that could reach directly into the soul.155 Other extravagant gestures, including exclamation marks, excessive adjectives, rhetorical questions, and dramatic pauses, could also work as grammars with which she sets before her reader an intention to connect. Quoting Theodore Hippel, Kittler proposes, “In ‘oh,’ the Spirit releases the muted body and rushes forward to speak for it, but the Spirit alone speaks.”156 To get at the possible significance of Goldman’s often extravagant prose, we could consider insights into the language practices of Goldman’s distant partner in revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. In Jonathan Rabb’s novel Rosa, his main character, a detective trying to solve the mystery of Luxemburg’s death, muses on the rhetorical excesses he finds in her writing: Pain was never simply pain—it was acute or frantic or unbearable—beauty never less than triumphant. There was a morality to socialism that seeped into everything. It was as if she had been unable to separate herself from the woman who shouted down to the crowds, even when writing for herself. A few lines would hint at more, but then, just as quickly, the exclamation points would return—the heightened sense of purpose—and the other Rosa would slip quietly away.157

Perhaps there is something in the subject position of nineteenth-century women revolutionaries, the expectations of the crowd, the need to produce oneself as a person who can repeatedly address that crowd, which can help us understand the intemperate surplus sometimes marking Goldman’s writing. The heightened sense of purpose had to be produced, over and over, perhaps leaving little room for a quieter, more tentative language. There would likely be consequences at the level of the sensorium as well as the social imaginary. There might be neurological consequences, changes in the way the brain processes the world, as memory after memory of crowd time is logged in her social imaginary, subtly shifting her expectations about how the world works. Repeatedly being looked at would create a certain way of being in her body; so would gathering that much language and passion, then projecting it across crowds of many thousands of people,

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without a microphone, over and over, year after year. It makes sense, then, that some of Goldman’s best writing is found in her letters to Berkman, especially those later in their lives, when there is little need to perform herself as a revolutionary. Those letters often display a vulnerability, a poignancy missing from other communications. It is not that she is less radical with Berkman, far from it; but she is sometimes less needful to persuade, more content simply to explore. The emotional excess that Herzog lampoons could be thought of as a useful (if aesthetically unattractive) rhetorical strategy for producing the public Emma Goldman. Goldman’s continuing contribution to feminism is better sought in the determination with which she sustained a radical vision of personal and political transformation than in her alleged failures as a role model for women. She insisted on our power to change the world. Goldman had a perceptible, often lasting effect on her listeners; she helped them to believe in their own possibilities. With the romantics, she advocated the transformative power of art and love. With the realists, she strove to be faithful to the experiences of the oppressed. She told people what they didn’t want to hear—Solomon aptly dubs her “the traveling conscience of a nation that often did not appreciate her efforts”—and what they desperately longed to hear.158 Her vigorous love for a better future energized her political struggles; as she remarked to her niece, in a letter from Russia, “never in my life did I [so much] long to help, to be of service, to give out of my overflowing heart to the people of Russia.”159 Goldman was an unflagging advocate for possibilities of freedom, creativity, and joy that lie underarticulated within prevailing understandings of both individual and collective life.

NOTES 1. Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 238. 2. Ibid., 236. 3. Ibid., 235. 4. Ibid., 239. 5. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 294–295. 6. Candace Falk, “Let Icons Be Bygones! Emma Goldman: The Grand Expositor,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 49. 7. For a more complete assessment of secondary literature on Goldman prior to the mid-1990s, see Oz Frankel, “Whatever Happened to Red Emma? Emma Goldman, from Alien Rebel to American Icon,” Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (December 1996): 903–942. For a condensed analysis of the subsequent and extensive rethinking of Goldman in the work of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, see Candace Falk, “Let Icons Be Bygones!” 41–70.

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8. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 150. 9. Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 83. 10. Ibid., 135–136. 11. Ibid., 155. 12. Ibid., 402. 13. Lori Marso, “A Feminist Search for Love: Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality and the Feminine,” Feminist Theory 4, no. 3 (2003): 306. 14. Ibid., 316–317. 15. Wexler, Intimate Life, 278. 16. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (with Berenice A. Carroll), “Digging for Gold(man): What We Found,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Weiss and Kensinger, 3. For an overview of biographies on Goldman, see Jason Wehling, “Anarchy in Interpretation: The Life of Emma Goldman,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Weiss and Kensinger, 19–37. 17. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) (first published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 56. 18. Wexler, Intimate Life, 198. 19. Ibid., 160. 20. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, July 26, 1911, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 5. 21. Goldman to Berkman, September 4, 1935, in Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 131, 133. 22. Goldman to Berkman, August 22, 1931, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 24. 23. Goldman to Berkman, March 14, 1934, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 30 (capitalization in original). 24. Goldman to Berkman, February 5, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 33. 25. Goldman, quoted in Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (New York: Verso, 1999), 248. 26. Porton, Film, 13. 27. Ibid., 18. 28. Goldman to Ethel Mannin, December 10, 1938, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 44. 29. Porton, Film, 81–82. 30. I am indebted to Michael Shapiro for the phrase “locus of enunciation.” 31. The Social Significance of Modern Drama summarized her lectures on Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Hermann Sudermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, Maurice Maeterlinck, Edmond Rostand, Brieux, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Stanley Houghton, Githa Sowerby, William Butler Yeats, Lenox Robinson, T. G. Murray, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Leonid Andreyev. Foremost Russian Dramatists, Their Life and Work was never published, but was the basis for her 1925 lecture series in England. Again including Gorky, Chekhov, Andreyev, and

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Tolstoy, this manuscript also treated Alexander Griboyedov, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Ostrovsky, Alexey Pisemsky, and Ivan Turgenev. 32. Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism: A Study in the History of American Literary Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1939), 291. 33. Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years: 1885–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1955), 368. 34. Critic Harry Carlson complained that West may have been “too generous in crediting her with making Shaw’s ideas popular on this side of the Atlantic,” but he agrees that “her impact was considerable.” “Introduction” to The Social Significance of Modern Drama by Goldman (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987), vi. 35. Falk, “Raising her Voices: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 34. See also Wexler, Intimate Life, 121. See Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 460–496, for a discussion of the centrality of theatre to the immigrant communities of which Goldman was a part. 36. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, March 6, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers Project: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 37. Carlson, “Introduction,” in The Social Significance of Modern Drama by Emma Goldman (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987), v. 38. One example of a successful anarchist theater was the Little Theater in Chicago, attached to the Radical Bookshop, the Hobo College, and the notorious Dil Pickle Club. The Little Theater performed Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and local plays. See Frank O. Beck, Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman and Other Agitators and Outsiders in 1920s-30s Chicago (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2000), 7–8. 39. Falk, “Emma Goldman: Passion, Politics, and the Theatrics of Free Expression,” Women’s History Review 11, no. 1 (2002): 21. 40. Goldman to Ben Reitman, October 1, 1914, 7, in The Emma Goldman Papers Project: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 8. 41. Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Apollo Editions, 1970), 227. Originally published by Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1922. 42. Wexler, Intimate Life, 125. 43. Porton, Film, 248. 44. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis,” in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich A. Kittler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxvii. 45. Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction,” xxvii, xxviii (italics in original). 46. Goldman, “What I Believe,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, third edition, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (New York: Humanity Books, 1996), 54. 47. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Shuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 86. 48. Nietzsche, quoted in Kittler, Gramophone, 200. 49. Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxix. 50. Kittler, Gramophone, 3. 51. Ibid., 4. Early films were shot at eighteen images per second, rather than today’s more generous twenty-four, accounting for the jerkiness of movement. My thanks to Konrad Ng and Thad Oliver for pointing out this difference.

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52. Michael Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation, and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 23. 53. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (London: Continuum, 2005), 123. 54. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought, 25, 69, 30, 69. 55. It is possible that she was hampered by official restrictions—one of the conditions of her return was that she would lecture only on allegedly nonpolitical topics such as theater—but Goldman was accustomed to far more acute threats. I do not think that a pragmatic caution about her topic can account for the woodenness and immobility of her self-presentation. It makes more sense to me to speculate that she sat still on purpose, as one would if one were having one’s picture taken. Falk points out that Goldman worked both with theater and worked as theater. Her lectures established her as “a virtuoso of political theatrics” (“Emma Goldman: Passion, Politics, and the Theatrics of Free Expression,” 11). Goldman’s experience on speaking platforms probably made the theatrical stage familiar while the movie set was not. 56. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought, 21. 57. Ibid., 16. 58. Wexler, Intimate Life, 125. 59. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, “Introduction,” in Sartre on Theater by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Random House, 1976), ix. 60. Sartre, Sartre on Theater, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Random House, 1976), 17, 17, 4–5, 4–5. 61. Ibid., 9, 9, 59, 62 (italics in original). 62. Contat and Rybalka, “Introduction,” ix. 63. Goldman to Mildred Mesirow, January 13, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 33. 64. Wexler, Intimate Life, 125. 65. Margaret Anderson, “An Inspiration,” Mother Earth X, no. 1 (March 1915): 435. 66. Erika Munk, “Preface,” in The Social Significance of Modern Drama by Goldman, iv. 67. Martha Solomon, Emma Goldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 95. 68. Alan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American AvantGarde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 48. 69. Porton, Film, 246; See also Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 17–33. 70. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 1 (italics in original). 71. Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography of Margaret Anderson (New York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1939), 133. 72. Stansell, American Moderns, 151. 73. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: P. Hill and Wang, 1982), 144. 74. Avrich, The Modern School Movement (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 157, passim. Solomon and Wexler argue that radical writers were, by and large, more drawn to The Little Review or The Masses rather than Mother Earth because of Mother Earth’s “narrow” political perspective. Wexler asserts that “radical artists were drawn to socialism, not anarchism” (Wexler, Intimate Life, 124; Solomon, Emma Goldman,

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94). This may be true for many writers, but not for visual artists, as the Ferrer Center’s remarkable success indicates. Stansell, in contrast, speaking for the Bohemian authors, claims that writers “drew ethical strength more from the anarchists than from the aesthetically timid socialists” (Stansell, Moderns, 149). Stansell describes New York during the first decade of the twentieth century as a writer’s city more than an artist’s or musician’s, but in the case of the Ferrer Center, visual art was at the center of their creative endeavors. 75. For a fascinating discussion of Robert Henri, John Sloan, and the urban art scene surrounding the Ferrer Center, see Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 76. Goldman, “Intellectual Proletarians,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 224, 231. 77. Goldman, “Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist,” Mother Earth VIII, no. 6 (August 1913): 172. 78. Goldman to Ethel Kennan, July 17, 1913, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 7. 79. Wexler, Intimate Life, 147. 80. Sylvia Yount, “Reclaiming the Cradle of Liberty: Philadelphia’s Adventures in Modernism,” in To Be Modern: American Encounters with Cézanne and Company by Sylvia Yount and Elizabeth Johns (Philadelphia: Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 1996), 9. 81. David Duff, Modern Genre Theory (Essex: Pearson, 2000), 28; Peter Seitel, “Theorizing Genres: Interpreting Works,” New Literary History 34, no. 2 (2003): 275. 82. Seitel, “Theorizing Genres,” 277. 83. Richard Lehan, “The European Background,” in Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62. 84. Seitel, “Theorizing Genres,” 281. 85. Smith, American Criticism, 352. 86. Ibid., 353. 87. Goldman, “Nation Seethes in Social Unrest,” Denver Post (April 26, 1912): 1, 11. 88. Smith, American Criticism, 275. 89. Wexler, Intimate Life, 125. 90. Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” 229, 229, 238. 91. Katherine E. Kelly, “Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism,” South Central Review 25, no.1 (2008): 25, 26. 92. Annie Meyer, “Ibsen’s Attitude Toward Women,” The Critic 16 (March 22, 1890): 147, quoted in Orm Øverland, “The Reception of Ibsen in the United States: A Mirror of Cultural and Political Concerns, 1889–1910,” Studia Universitatis Babes¸Bolyai, Philologia, 3 (2006): 101. 93. Øverland, “The Reception of Ibsen,” 98; for Goldman’s comments on Fiske, see Living My Life, 373. 94. Øverland, “The Reception of Ibsen,” 103. 95. Goldman, The Social Significance of Modern Drama, 76. 96. Goldman to Saxe Commins, February 15, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 33. He wrote back, “I suf-

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fer from violent nausea when I have to work on the insane drivel of La Stein.” (Saxe Commins to Goldman, February 18, 1935, reel 34.) 97. Smith, American Criticism, 292. 98. Wexler, Intimate Life, 204. 99. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 103. 100. Margaret Anderson, “Emma Goldman in Chicago,” Mother Earth IX, no. 10 (December 1914): 324. 101. Wexler, Intimate Life, 204. 102. Anderson, “Emma Goldman in Chicago,” 324. See Solomon for detailed analyses of Goldman’s method and the reception of her writing during her lifetime. 103. Goldman, The Social Significance of Modern Drama, 68, 124, 5. 104. Jane Heap, “Light Occupations of the Editor, While There Is Nothing to Edit,” The Little Review 3, no. 6 (September, 1916): 14. The remainder of the issue consists of blank pages, offered as a Want Ad to solicit material worth printing. 105. Sara Bard Field to C. E. W. Wood, July 24, 1914, Field/Wood collection, quoted in Stansell, American Moderns, 134. 106. Smith, American Criticism, 131 (italics in original). 107. Donald Pease, “Romanticism in America: The Emersonian Tradition,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2004), 485. 108. Smith, American Criticism, 34. 109. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 7. 110. Goldman, “Walt Whitman,” 1, in The Emma Goldman Papers Project: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 54. 111. Whitman, quoted in Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 73. 112. Ibid., 73. 113. Smith, American Criticism, 143, 144, 147, 147. 114. Goldman, “The Propaganda and the Congress,” Free Society, April 8, 1900, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 392–393 fn 2. 115. Goldman, “Walt Whitman,” 2. 116. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 16. 117. Smith, American Criticism, 133 118. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 182. 119. Smith, American Criticism, 135, 184, 188. 120. Goldman, “Nation Seethes in Social Unrest,” 1. 121. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 191. 122. “Cubists of All Sorts,” New York Times, March 16, 1913, 6. 123. Goldman, “Foremost Russian Dramatists, Their Life and Work” (1926), 9, 14, 15, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 50. 124. Goldman, Social Significance of Modern Drama, 52. 125. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 192. 126. Goldman, “‘The Easiest Way’: An Appreciation,” Mother Earth IV, no. 3 (May 1909): 87–88. 127. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 192.

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128. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, “Introduction,” in The Jameson Reader, eds. Hardt and Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 9. 129. Ibid. 130. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 185 (italics in original). 131. Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 159. 132. Ibid., 156. 133. Anderson, “Emma Goldman in Chicago,” 323. 134. Goldman, Living My Life, 51. 135. Goldman to Emmy Eckstein, June 10, 1931, in Nowhere at Home: Letters in Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 164. 136. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 232. 137. Fredric Jameson, “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture,” in The Jameson Reader, eds. Hardt and Weeks, 290 (italics in original). 138. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 110. 139. Kittler, Gramophone, 121; Jameson, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism,” in The Jameson Reader, eds. Hardt and Weeks, 183 (italics in original). 140. Kittler, Gramophone, 121. 141. Marso, “A Feminist Search for Love,” 151. 142. Goldman to Ben Reitman, January 2, 1911, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 4. 143. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 66–67. 144. Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, 114. 145. Goldman, in Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter (New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983), 38, 14 fn 44, 143, 90. 146. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 118–119. 147. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 198. 148. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 113. 149. Don Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism and Pedestrian Liberalism,” Political Theory 35, no. 3 (2007): 315. 150. Ibid., 329. 151. Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, 98. 152. Ibid., 382. 153. Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism,” 323–324. 154. Lori Marso, “The Perversions of Bored Liberals: Response to Herzog,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (February 2008): 123–128. 155. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, foreword by David Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 6, 41. 156. Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel, quoted in Kittler, Discourse Networks, 41. 157. Jonathan Rabb, Rosa (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 134–135. 158. Solomon, Emma Goldman, 153. 159. Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, 311.

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5 How Could She Miss Race?

“The whole world is a madhouse.” —Goldman to her friend Mark Mratchny about rising anti-Semitism in Europe, June 2, 1935

Emma Goldman has been heavily recruited since the 1960s to serve as an icon of feminist struggle. A popular button has a picture of Goldman with the inscription “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” Evidently the famous button was not the first: in a March 2, 1919, letter from prison to Stella Ballantine in New York, Goldman lamented, “I see that I shall now be on every one’s coat and waist immortalized in a button. Our dear friends mean well, I know, but some things are so [distasteful].”1 Despite Candace Falk’s warning about the pitfalls of taking Goldman as a feminist icon, it is difficult to discontinue such practices.2 Reading Goldman through the lens of second- and third-wave feminism produces certain expectations. Some aspects of Goldman’s politics, such as her vigorous advocacy for women’s personal and sexual independence, openness to homosexuality, relentless critique of capitalism, insistence on creative revolutionary action, and consistent opposition to war, continue to serve feminism well. But from the perspective of feminist theory in the twenty-first century, Goldman was conspicuously and alarmingly silent on race. Race/ethnicity, sex/gender, and class are the “big three” of contemporary feminist analysis, and it is disturbing for one of our major forerunners to be so bold and radical on sex and class while so inattentive to race. Numerous commentators have called Goldman to task for overlooking or neglecting race. Richard Drinnon attributes her “blindspot when it came to the importance of race” to “a pervasive economism traceable to Marxism, 211

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with all that doctrine’s unfortunate inattention to racism and nationalism.” While I concur that Goldman collapses race into class, Drinnon takes his insight in a problematic direction. “You will look in vain,” he warns in his introduction to the 1969 reproduction of Anarchism and Other Essays, “for an illustration of Emma’s magnificent outrage directed against the lynchings and oppression of Blacks.” Not because she was personally a racist, he argues, but because “even for someone as alert as Emma, the Blacks and their plight were essentially invisible.”3 Historian Christine Stansell similarly asserts that “she never spoke a word about lynching.”4 Yet, Drinnon and Stansell are not correct on this matter. Goldman addressed lynching several times, both in her own voice and through essays she published in her journal. In a letter from prison to Stella Ballantine in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on August 2, 1919, Goldman commented bitterly on the race riots in Washington, D.C., and Chicago: “. . . how Europe must laugh at our wonderful democracy. . . . The farce of it, the utter impuden[c]e with hundreds of people slaughtered under the very nose of the White House and in the streets of Chicago, not in time of war, not by German Barbarian[s] but by our arogant [sic] whites.”5 The August, 1917 issue of Mother Earth carried a chilling account of the East St. Louis race riots, in which a disputed number of blacks—between a few dozen to a few hundred—were murdered by rampaging white crowds urged on by union leaders and armed soldiers.6 The December 1917 issue of the journal was confiscated by the postal authorities for printing an account of the lynching of thirteen black soldiers at a Texas army base.7 More examples are discussed below. Goldman’s problem, I suggest, is not a lack of empathy or an absence of magnificent outrage. If, contrary to Drinnon and Stansell, Goldman did not overlook lynching or racism, then what is it that is unsatisfying in her account? Other commentators have also called attention to Goldman’s inadequate understanding of racism. Falk points out that Goldman refused to base her political analysis on any set of racial categories. While she often expressed affection for her Jewish cultural heritage, she urged her contemporaries to eschew a “shtetl mentality” and instead identify with the universal promise of a liberated humanity.8 Falk suggests that, while anarchists called for racial equality, “Goldman herself was guilty of adopting a political style that mirrored the custom of separate racial spheres of her time.”9 Historian Leon Litwack, in his Foreword to the published volumes of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, concludes that Goldman “avoided the South and mostly ignored the struggle for black rights and racial equality.”10 Since Goldman traveled to places where there was a sufficient local anarchist population to organize and sustain her lectures, it is not quite accurate to say that she avoided the South. She no doubt would have lectured there, as she did a few times in Texas, had there been a local radical community to sponsor her. There is certainly no evidence that she avoided controversial engage-

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ments; on the contrary, she tended to charge into such situations, as she did in the San Diego free speech fights. However, Litwack, Stansell, Falk, and Drinnon are nonetheless correct in pointing out her silence on the struggle for black rights. How could she both notice and condemn the power of whites over blacks in the United States without taking the next logical step, which would have been to attend to the political activism generated out of that space of oppression? Her silence suggests a weakness in Goldman’s kind of political thinking, which I have called located theory to stress its spatial and temporal grounding. Goldman did not travel to the locations of black political activism. Those streets were not her streets, those struggles not the tinder that ignited her political thinking. Race is not absent from Goldman’s political thinking; it is present, yet in a way that obscures rather than clarifies racial power. I take seriously Matthew Frye Jacobson’s advice to “listen more carefully to the historical sources than to the conventions of our own era.”11 Goldman did indeed express, in Drinnon’s apt phrase, some of her magnificent outrage at the oppression of blacks; their suffering was not invisible to her, but it was figured within an implicitly Jewish, explicitly class/state analysis in which “race” meant something other than it can mean for contemporary thinkers. My goal in this chapter is to figure out what race meant to Goldman, how racial difference figured into her understanding of power. I hope to avoid the temptation to be either apologetic or defensive, and instead to cultivate a stance of curiosity: how did racial difference operate in Goldman’s world, what sense did she make of it, how did it fit into her political analysis, and what can we learn from it today? I am not asking, “what did she think of different races?” so much as I am asking “how did she think race?” The first question is, perhaps, a necessary step on the way to the second, but it is less interesting and less useful. It is less interesting because it does not take us very far into Goldman’s thinking—she was consistently, matter-of-factly egalitarian toward every human grouping, except the rich and powerful or those who sided with them. For instance, Goldman’s re-write of the Declaration of Independence in July, 1909, declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life.”12 Yet her inclusion of race in the litany of injustices sheds little light on how race did its work in Goldman’s thinking. This question is more useful to us today, when invidious statements about racial groups are less common than unspoken prior constructions of racial difference that maintain subtle ontologies of racialized order. It is neither her sympathy nor her style that is in question. Goldman repeatedly stood up for blacks: an obituary for Eugene Debs in the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier praised Goldman, along with Debs and a few others, as “the most outspoken advocates for justice and a square deal

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for Negroes in this country.”13 Yet, while Goldman often witnessed and decried racial injustice, race as a dynamic vector of power did little work in her thinking. It is this silence that I want to understand and contest.

GOLDMAN’S AMERICA Emma Goldman lived in the United States during a time, as political scientist Noel Kent explains, of intense nativism, scapegoating, and “an epidemic of racial violence.”14 In 1790, America’s first naturalization law allowed “free white persons” to become naturalized citizens. This permit opened the east coast immigration doors to a massive inflow of alarming persons from Europe with contestable racial identities who were nonetheless white by the standards of the law. From about 1840 until the passage of restrictive immigration legislation in the 1920s, a barrage of scientific, legal, and cultural efforts were launched to fracture and order the European masses into “a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races” as well as to hold the racial/national line against blacks and Asians.15 The language of race was everywhere: “Old stock” Americans invented themselves as Anglo-Saxons, confident that they possessed “a special genius for self-governance, state building, technology, and military conquest that marked them from other ‘races.’”16 “Race sciences” helped to make whiteness the measure of Americanness; “race destiny” legitimized both internal and external colonialism. For the nine million blacks living in the American South in 1900, Reconstruction gains had been rolled back, lynching was a perpetual danger, and grinding poverty continued to be the common currency. For those Native Americans remaining after the onslaught, the Dawes Act of 1887 took back half of the land the federal government had awarded them. Hysteria about those “perpetual foreigners,” the Chinese, prompted the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and Asians became the “yellow peril.”17 For anyone attuned to inequality and oppression, “race” was everywhere. One would think that it would have been hard to miss the legacy of slavery in America during Goldman’s life. While Goldman seldom visited the South, where nine out of ten blacks lived in 1900, northward black immigration had begun; about 60,000 blacks lived in New York and an equal number in Philadelphia during Goldman’s residency on the east coast. In New York, Southern blacks clustered on the west side of Manhattan, where they were targets of white hostility and police abuse. Within progressive political circles, there were detectable African American voices contesting racism: W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells wrote and spoke; the National Afro-American Council, the National Association of Colored Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the Niagara Movement were all organized in the early 1900s. There was a vigorous black press, including The Chicago

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Defender, edited by Robert Abbott, the Boston Guardian, edited by William Monroe Trotter, the NAACP’s periodical The Crisis, edited by Du Bois, the Black Dispatch, edited by Roscoe Dunjee in Oklahoma City, and the Free Speech and Headlight, edited by Ida B. Wells in Memphis.18 So, with all this racism around, and all these voices raised against it— where was Goldman?

CONSTRUCTING RACE/CLASS RELATIONS Occasionally Goldman addressed racism directly. The strongest example that I have found is contained in her report to the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907. Most of the report detailed “the great conflicts of capital and labor” in the United States. She castigated the bourgeois unions like the American Federation of Labor, which were “law-abiding and orderly bodies” because they were “still living in the blind belief of their alleged political liberty”: Taking for granted the identity of interests of employer and employee, our trade organizations fail to see the real source of wage slavery in the system of capitalism. They limit their activity to attempts to improve economic conditions within the present regime; they are seeking palliatives for evils conditioned in the very system of industrialism, never questioning the social right of existence of labor exploiters.19

Like the Social Democratic Party, the establishment unions, in her view, swam in the “swamp of opportunism.” She criticized isolated strikes as ineffective and praised “direct action and the General Strike” as expressing “the natural spirit of revolt” of the strikers at Homestead in 1892 and the Pullman strike of 1894. She argued in some detail in favor of the militancy of the Western Federation of Miners and the progressive organization of the Industrial Workers of the World, and she discussed the contributions of several radical publications in English, Yiddish, German, and Italian, including the Alarm, Freiheit, Solidarity, The Anarchist, Brandfackel, Strumvogel, Zukunft, La Questione Sociale, The Firebrand, Free Society, Rebel, Discontent, Demonstrator, and Emancipator.20 Goldman’s extensive assessment of anarchist activism in the United States was accompanied by two brief special reports: one paragraph noted the demise of the independent farmer at the hands of the large-scale property holders and the railroads; a second paragraph addressed “the position of the American negro,” which she called “sad and deplorable in the extreme.” Goldman wrote: Rivers of blood have been shed to free the black man from slavery; yet, after almost half a century of so-called freedom, the negro question is more

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acute than ever. The persecution, suffering and injustice to which this muchhated race is being constantly subjected can be compared only to the brutal treatment of the Jews in Russia. Hardly a day passes without a negro being lynched in some part of the country. It is no uncommon occurrence for a whole town to turn out to witness the no less brutalizing than brutal spectacle of so-called “mob justice”: the hanging or burning of a colored man. Nor are these terrible atrocities perpetuated in the South only. Through in a lesser degree, the North is guilty as well. Nowhere in the country does the negro enjoy equal opportunity with the white man—socially, politically or economically—notwithstanding his alleged constitutional rights. Legally and theoretically, black slavery has been abolished; in reality, however, the negro is as much a slave now as in the ante-bellum days, and even more ostracized socially and exploited economically.

She then broadened her net beyond black-white relations: Race hatred and persecution are not limited to the negro. In a lesser degree, other races and nationalities also suffer from the same narrow-minded spirit. Only recently Japanese residents were made the victims of this curse of our Christian civilization.21

Several ideas stand out in these plain-talking paragraphs: 1. The abolition of the institution of slavery did not end the enslavement of blacks. 2. Constitutional rights and legal arrangements do little or nothing to protect blacks. 3. Racism against blacks is nearly as intense and violent in the North as in the South. 4. The brutality of white persecution of blacks is comparable only to the treatment of the Jews in Russia. 5. Other non-white groups are targets of race hatred, to a lesser degree. 6. Christian civilization produces racism. 7. The situation is “sad and deplorable,” adjectives suggesting sympathy more than struggle. 8. The problem is defined as the negro question, rather than, say, the white question or the slavery question. 9. No struggle against racism is recognized; no black writers or activists are named as political actors contesting race relations. These passages give some clues as to how race worked in her thinking. First, as Drinnon, Pateman, and others have pointed out, race was incorporated into a class and state analysis. Goldman’s most basic intellectual energies, as I argued in chapter three, came from Bakunin, Stirner, Kropotkin, Landauer, and Nietzsche—a tradition steeped in European

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class analysis, state theory, and anti-bourgeois cultural critique. Later infusions of American individualist thinking—through Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau—enhanced but did not fundamentally alter the European anarchist-communist frame of her ideas. The first three points in my restatement of Goldman’s argument reflect the European class/state lens through which Goldman viewed the situation of all working people. African Americans’ enslavement was folded into the larger process of wage slavery; violence against blacks was part and parcel of the violence of capitalism against workers. Just as capitalism can be counted on to steal the labor of workers, the state can be counted on to use the pretense of legal reform to obfuscate and disavow the institutionalization of inequality. Regional claims to be “less prejudiced” are actually self-satisfied efforts to cover up the relentless exploitation of ordinary people by those in power. Goldman elaborated on this argument in the September, 1908, issue of Mother Earth: “Negro lynching by white barbarians,” she argued, is an expression of “race hatred” that cannot be stopped by law: When the white worker learns to see in the black man his fellow-slave in the economic market; when the negro learns to fight for his rights; when both make common cause against a mutual exploiter, then only will the first step have been taken toward solving the Negro question.22

This passage clearly suggests that, while white workers need to change their attitudes toward blacks, black workers need to learn to fight in the first place. Goldman often praised John Brown for his militant struggle against slavery—his was the sort of politics she recognized as radical—but she gave no credence to struggles for legal reform, no matter what their context. Second, the paradigmatic example of racial oppression was the Jews. Points 4–6 in my gloss suggest that “race” was not anchored in blackwhite relations but in Jew-Gentile relations. The pogroms against Jews in Goldman’s former home were the gold standard by which racial violence was assessed: lynchings and their surrounding violence was comparable to the pogroms, two extreme examples of racism’s violence and economic exploitation. Christian civilization generates racial prejudice. It is likely that she was implicitly referring to the role of Christianity, particularly Catholic clerics, in supporting harsh authoritarian regimes in Spain, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, and other colonized places. Probably she also was referring to the legitimating role of Christianity in dispossessing indigenous people: in the October, 1911 issue of Mother Earth, Goldman reports the execution in Mexico of “Juan Guerrero, noted Cucapas Indian war chief,” who was seeking the return of land to his tribe, the Yaquis. “Verily,” Goldman remarks sarcastically, “Christian civilization is of the same brutal nature everywhere.”23 Churches were tools of colonial

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regimes. Each reference circles back around to the collaboration of religion and the state with the ruling class, indicating the hopelessness of looking to the state for meaningful reform as well as the bankrupt ethical currency of cultures calling themselves Christian. Finally, the last three points in my reordering of Goldman’s words suggest a lurking absence: the relentless militancy of her opposition to capital, patriarchy, and the state is missing here. Injustice is not usually unfortunate, in Goldman’s eyes; it is intolerable, and one should locate and support those fighting to right the wrongs. She would never have defined economic inequality as a labor problem, but rather as a capitalist problem; nor would she bemoan the oppression of the masses without both insisting that it could be changed and pointing to those thinkers and activists working to bring about such changes. Goldman’s encounters with African American resistance were limited. We know that she heard Du Bois speak and was impressed with his analysis.24 We know that her colleagues Anna Strunsky Walling and William English Walling worked with Du Bois and other black reformers editing the Crisis for the NAACP.25 We know that, later in her life, Goldman became friends with Paul and Estelle Robeson and her understanding of the circumstances of African Americans became somewhat enlarged.26 But these were the exceptions: as both Goldman and Reitman observed, Goldman’s lectures frequently attracted Asian and Mexican listeners but seldom included blacks. Goldman’s brief comments suggest a puzzling limit on her imagination of political struggles in this oppressed community. Aside from the report to the Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, Goldman usually mentioned race only in passing, to illustrate yet another example of the exploitation of the masses, not as a unique vector of power with its own logic and history. For example, in an 1898 speech reported in the San Francisco Call, Goldman lampooned arguments that government is necessary because ordinary people would degenerate into violence if they were not controlled by their leaders. She used a powerful racial image to make this point: “Who does the lynching in the South—the white or the black?”27 She did not linger on this point, but used it to illustrate how the powerful, not the powerless, are the ones who are out of control. Similarly, in her 1908 essay “What I Believe” for the New York World, Goldman remarked that “the history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, a black man’s right to his body, or a woman’s right to her soul.”28 The consequences of legal servitude are folded into the large category of “unpopular causes,” rather than examined for their specific political dynamics. There are occasional forays into black history in Mother Earth; for instance, Voltairine de Cleyre reviewed James F. Morton’s The Curse of Race Prejudice and marshaled historical evidence

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on the progress of Negroes toward literacy and participation in the professions.29 But by and large, racial difference is an opportunity for Goldman to explore capitalist exploitation and Christian hypocrisy, not an identifiable site of struggle requiring its own historical analysis. Goldman’s main face-to-face knowledge of African Americans came, not surprisingly, from her experiences in prison. Goldman was a beloved mother figure to many of the other prisoners, most of them poor and uneducated. In a letter from Jefferson City Prison on March 30, 1919, to her niece Stella Ballantine in New York, Goldman writes: the colored prisoners . . . are so much more interesting than the whites. What you say about the Colored People is only too true. But the fa[ult] of knowing so little about them lies with us, not with them. I find them easy of approach, so simple and childlike and trusting. I like them immensely. We have one or two rotters, especially one, who is the stool pigon [sic] in the place and is hated by everyone, colored and White. But then, Color has nothing to do with a rotten character. Favoritism is to blame. On the whole though the Coroled [sic] have much stronger sense of solidarity that [sic] the white women. They have much more spirit. Nor are they quite so submissive and cringing and cowardly than [sic] the whites.30

The racial connotations of “simple and childlike and trusting” are troubling. Goldman used identical language to talk about any people, including Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, and the Russian and Irish peasantry, who she felt were good of heart but lacked an adequate political analysis.31 Yet to apply this condescending characterization to a racial category suggests she viewed “colored people” as an undifferentiated unity. She recognized that the lack of knowledge across racial lines is the responsibility of the more powerful group, yet there is no evidence that she pursued that recognition outside prison walls. Goldman’s observations indicate that she judged “colored people,” like everybody else, on their spirit and their integrity. She valued a sense of solidarity and willingness to stand up to authority, and she had no patience with submission. Her words convey her respect for her fellow prisoners, but leave us even less clear as to why she failed to pursue alliances with those communities whose spirit and solidarity she had admired during her incarceration. Goldman mentions one promising African American political speaker in the January, 1914, issue of Mother Earth. She recounts this event: At a negro meeting in Washington, D.C., Rev. I.N. Ross called upon his hearers to fight for their political, social, and industrial rights. “To prepare for war in times of peace is the policy of this nation,” he argued. “It should be your policy, if you wish to free yourself from the oppression and break the fetters of this era of new slavery.”

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Goldman comments: It is not often that an Anarchist can agree with a Christian gentleman, but I heartily concur in this case, except that I feel that it is not only the Negro who must learn to fight against the oppression, the fetters of the era of the new slavery, but also the white man, the workers at large. They owe it to themselves, to the cause of labor, and above all to their own self-respect and dignity that they should no longer submit meekly to the indignity, injustice, and crimes heaped upon them.32

Reverend Ross, in Goldman’s eyes, is speaking as a Christian gentleman, not a potential ally in organizing working people. Reverend Ross encouraged blacks to withhold their votes from the Democratic Party “as long as the jim-crow car, disfranchisement, lynching, and segregation remain as [its] ruling principles.”33 Goldman did not overlook these evils, but she scorned Ross’s hope that mere electoral politics offered a chance for positive change. Goldman was ready to welcome blacks into the ranks of those who struggle against injustice, but only if they folded their cause into the cause of radical labor. Racial differences to Goldman were facts, not histories. She was confident that class would always trump race in the production of social inequality, and that the reforms promised by the state were always dead ends which only siphoned off energy from more productive struggles. It seems likely that, in her view, efforts by African Americans to amend the Constitution, change the laws, and obtain access to the ballot were simply palliatives; certainly she viewed the struggle for women’s suffrage in that disdainful light. Billy Sunday, rather than, say, Sojourner Truth, served as her model for African American Christianity, which always worked hand-in-hand with capital to “return enormous profits from the subdued, tame, and dull masses.”34 Her implicit presumption appears to be that racial differences are static indicators rather than dynamic histories requiring analysis. This lack of curiosity about the workings of race in society is most visible in relation to slavery. Without attending to the history by which some people, but not others, were made into property, she failed to ask questions about the specific political location of African Americans. Observing the racial politics in prison on Blackwell’s Island, Goldman commented: “I myself never had any prejudice against coloured people; in fact, I felt deeply for them because they were being treated like slaves in America.”35 Missing here is the recognition that only thirty-five years before, they actually had been slaves. “Slavery” was not a simile in this context. Given Goldman’s usual insistence on grounding her political thinking in concrete struggles, her failure of imagination stands out even more. Her silence on African American political struggles indicates, I suggest, a predictable weakness in the practices of located theory. Outside of prison

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walls, Goldman shared little of African Americans’ locations. Their struggles took place in the kinds of political spaces that Goldman found hopelessly inadequate: churches, fraternal orders, women’s clubs, political parties, and elections. African American churches, while often conservative during Goldman’s era, sometimes nourished seeds of political protest.36 Similarly, African American fraternal orders and clubs were homes for mutual aid organizations based not on charity but on fraternity: “mutual obligation to support brothers and sisters in need.”37 Goldman, I have argued, did her thinking “in the streets,” but she did not seek out, nor did she respect, the political spaces within which much African American politics took place. She never appears to have asked herself why there were so few black anarchists. It would have taken a serious wrenching of her analytic categories to make room for the likely answers: that African American churches were one of the very few relatively safe havens for organizing these vulnerable communities; that black women and men needed the trappings of bourgeois, Christian respectability to protect themselves from the sexually predatory legacies of slavery; that African American workers often faced more bigotry from white unions than from white owners; that black activists hoped for a strong state to make and enforce laws against segregation and lynching.38 Goldman’s approach may, ironically, remind us of Southern apologists for slavery who tried to finesse the particular dynamics of black servitude by noting that the life conditions of working class immigrants in the North were often as bad as those of blacks. Of course, Goldman was not defending slavery, she was attacking capitalism and Christianity; but without a historical analysis of slavery to distinguish it from wage slavery, the distinction could be lost. Without assessing the political implications of claims to rights by those who were not accepted as rights-bearing persons in the first place, she overlooked the radical potential of “mere reforms.” In contrast, Goldman’s relation to Mexican and Mexican American communities was far more vigorous than her connections with African Americans. She found fellow revolutionaries there, rather than those who appeared to be only reformers. When a struggle could be understand as part of the international class war, such as the confrontations in Mexico “where the Yaqui Indians and the peons are engaged in a wonderful, heroic fight for land and liberty,” Goldman was in the trenches with them.39 Similarly, her interactions with revolutionaries from Japan and China indicate meaningful alliances, alliances that never materialized in relation to African Americans. Her analysis of the Chinese revolution, written after World War I, highlighted labor and student unrest in the fight against foreign domination and called for anarchist support for Chinese anti-imperialism.40 She forged relationships with any individuals who were rebelling in the ways she thought were necessary, and disdained those who, for whatever reason, chose what appeared to be less confrontational or militant approaches.

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Jews were generally considered a race in Goldman’s time.41 While the explicit context for her thinking on race was her analysis of global capitalism, the implicit background was the contrast between Jew and gentile. “Race” generally meant Jewish or not Jewish, while “color” often referred to the popular nineteenth-century distinctions among “red, yellow, black and white” as different members of the “family of man.”42 In Goldman’s view, I hypothesize, Asian, African, and Latin revolutionaries were simply different colors of rebels, rather than racially constituted anti-imperialists. The political imaginary that animated Goldman’s thinking was located in the intersection of European radicalism and Jewish immigrant life, a space that highlighted certain political struggles while leaving others unexplored.

ON BEING JEWISH Between 1881 and 1914, nearly two million Jews came to America from Russia and eastern Europe. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the regime’s abbreviated tolerance toward Jews came to an end and a new wave of pogroms swept Russia. Approximately one-third of eastern European Jews left their homelands in the thirty-three years between the Tsar’s assassination and the start of World War I, “a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition.”43 Many Jews came to the United States straight from the shtetl (poor Jewish towns saturated with Hebrew religion and Yiddish culture) while others, like Goldman, spent some time in the urban areas, becoming familiar with both urban proletarian conditions and revolutionary agitation. Dreams of better conditions in the United States combined with despair over mounting poverty and violence in the home country, creating what Irving Howe in his classic study World of Our Fathers calls “the explosive mixture of mounting wretchedness and increasing hope, physical suffering and spiritual exaltation.”44 While about 120,000 Jews settled in London, most continued to New York and other large urban areas on the east coast of the United States.45 The arrival of those widely referred to as “human garbage” generated fear and hatred among non-immigrant Americans in which unease about racial others was wound around class antagonisms and labor unrest.46 Howe writes: Nativism as a movement taking the “immigrant hordes” as a target for attack began to make itself felt during the eighties; in its rudimentary forms it emerged as a xenophobia bristling with contempt for unfamiliar speech, dress, food, and values. Much of the hostility toward immigrants was stoked by the fear of radicalism which swept the country during the late eighties, partly as a result of the Haymarket Affair of 1886, in which six immigrants were sentenced to death after a bomb explosion at an anarchist rally in Chicago, and partly as a result of fierce labor struggles across the country, which could be attributed conveniently to foreign agitators.47

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Wealthy gentiles, Protestant clergymen, and Republican party leaders were eventually joined by unions, women’s suffrage organizations, temperance groups, and clean government advocates in pressing for and eventually achieving anti-immigration legislation, including the anti-anarchist legislation of 1903. Like most other arrivals, Goldman ended up on the Lower East Side of New York City. Jewish immigration, in contrast to other European groups, was very much a family affair: about 43% of the immigrants were female and another quarter were children. Goldman, again typical, was preceded by her older sister, accompanied by another sister, and later followed by her parents and other siblings. Compared to other immigrant groups, a relatively high number were skilled laborers and persons with some education; despite her father’s opposition, Goldman had eked out an uneven education in Russian schools and on the streets. Unlike many other immigrant groups, most Jews remained permanently; in 1908 only 2% of Jewish immigrants returned to the old country.48 Goldman was more than typical here; America became her home, and her subsequent exile was an enduring loss. Goldman’s generation of immigrants were both assisted and rejected by the earlier Jewish immigrants from Germany, now prosperous and as uneasy as the nativists about the “human garbage” whom they nonetheless recognized as kin. While the two groups were connected by philanthropy and religion, they were often class enemies; in 1885 the large majority of garment factories in New York City were owned by German Jews and worked by east European Jews. As one early union leader observed, “The early class struggles in the modern clothing industry in New York were Jewish class struggles; both masters and men were of the Hebrew race.”49 In his classic book The Spirit of the Ghetto, Goldman’s friend Hutchins Hapgood notes that the “uptown rabbis,” largely wealthy and German, and the “downtown rabbis,” generally Russian and poor, “hate one another like poison.”50 For Goldman, the exploitation of workers by owners within the same race was further evidence that race was in the end secondary to class. While the traditions and rituals of Judaism continued to be a central axis of community life for the new immigrants, they underwent tremendous erosion and transformation. Goldman and other anarchists who professed atheism within the immigrant community both shocked the believers and mirrored them: with their Yom Kippur balls and picnics, they highlighted their attachment to what they denied. In 1890 the announcement in the New York Sun read: Grand Yom Kippur Ball. With theatre. Arranged with the consent of all new rabbis of Liberty. Koll Nydre Night and Day.

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Chapter 5 In the year 5651, after the invention of the Jewish idols, and 1890, after the birth of the false Messiah . . . . The Koll Nydre will be offered by John Most. Music, dancing, buffet, “Marseillaise,” and other hymns against Satan.51

Howe rightly remarked, “the parodies of the traditional prayers they printed in their papers were often clever, but also revealed how well they remembered the prayers.”52 Writer Marcus Ravage similarly recalled ostentatiously smoking big cigars and carrying hefty bags of food on his way to the atheist picnic on the Day of Atonement, while observant Jews fasted, repented, and prayed. The Passover ball was another site for the public consumption of forbidden food and drink, religious strictures ironically being observed in the breach.53 While Goldman moved out of immigrant circles to become a household word across the country, she could always retreat to the East Side and renew her ties there. She was “an astonishing sort of ‘Jewish daughter’” but she was still theirs.54 Of course the Russian Jews brought with them a deep history of antiSemitism, collective memories that Jacobson characterizes as “the particular history of special sorrows in the ghettos of Eastern Europe.”55 Steeped in the inheritance of a persecuted people, Goldman never seemed to have seriously questioned anti-Semitism as the paradigm of all racisms. In the United States she inhabited space relentlessly divided between Jews and non-Jews. In most major cities she gave two sets of talks, the “Jewish” and the “English,” organized in two different sets of neighborhoods, in halls owned by different sets of people and organizations, in two (or more) different languages, for two segregated audiences. This segregation extended to Canada as well, and into the 1930s; her last lectures in Toronto and Calgary were still characterized by the enduring spatial separation of Jews from gentiles. The Jews were segregated economically as well. The largest group of them—about half the Jews employed in industry in 1890—worked in the garment industries. These industries were, in Howe’s words, An ideal setting for superexploitation: seasonal in setting; capricious in product; requiring labor both disciplined and, for the most part, semiskilled; encouraging the sudden rise of new manufacturers and contractors with only a petty capital investment; and peculiarly open to such social evils as homework, child labor, the contract system, and various refinements of cutthroat competition.56

At the same time, the workplace was also a site for reading and debating among the largely self-educated workers. In his memoir of his immigrant youth, Marcus Ravage recalled, “The sweatshop . . . was my first university.”

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He was swept into the world of books and lectures by his fellow garment workers, who always brought books with them to read during the midday break: “During the lunch hour, if the disputatious mood was not on them, the entire lot of them had their heads buried in their volumes or their papers, so that the littered, unswept loft had the air of having been miraculously turned into a library.”57 When Goldman arrived in New York, armed with the address of a distant relative, a burning desire to meet some anarchists, and her sewing machine, she moved into the ranks of the New York garment workers. Because she owned her own sewing machine, she was a step ahead of the girls and women who had to pay the sweatshop owner for the use of his machines; she also had the option of sewing piece work at home, a grueling job that at least allowed her a bit of control over the pace and setting of labor. (Ironically, in prison thirty years later, she returned to her first trade, struggling to meet the quota of fifty-four jackets per day—often with assistance of loyal fellow prisoners—at Jefferson City Penitentiary.) Wages were low, especially during periodic depressions; in 1885 the average semi-skilled worker’s wage fell to $7/week; the most skilled workers were taking home $10/week, while women made $3–$6/week.58 They endured long, punishing hours; horrible working conditions; debilitating illnesses (tuberculosis was called the tailor’s disease); and crowded, dirty living conditions. Anarchists used the language of wage slavery to describe these conditions and to spur workers to outrage; in the process, the distinction between metaphorical and literal slavery, between having little property and being property, was implicitly lost. As Jews were already used to being a despised minority group within a hostile culture, Howe comments, “the strategies of the pariah” were already available to them. These strategies of survival on the bare margins were a source of great frustration to labor organizers, who often accused the Jewish immigrants of too readily cooperating in their own exploitation. When pushed to the brink of despair, they often countered with heroic strikes, but in the early years they had no tradition of working class organizing and created few enduring unions. The United Hebrew Trades organized in 1888, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) organized in 1900; by the second decade of the twentieth century, the Jewish labor movement flourished; yet the “strategies of the pariah” were always in tension with the demands of labor militancy.59 “We were a frightened people,” recalled activist Louis Panken. Yiddish poet Abraham Liessen, writing about the striking cloakmakers of 1910, proclaimed “the 70,000 zeros became 70,000 workers.”60 This line was widely quoted around the East Side precisely because it spoke to the pride of those who had become fighters in the face of the enduring pariah tradition.

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Many aspects of the cultural practices of the Russian Jewish immigrants contributed to the production of anarchist counterpublics. Importantly, they had a vigorous press. “Everyone read a Yiddish paper,” Howe recalled: There were seldom many books in the average immigrant’s home, but the Yiddish paper came in every day. After dinner our family would leaf through it page by page, and sometimes my father would read some interesting items aloud. Not to take a paper was to confess you were a barbarian. For ordinary Jews who worked in the shops or ran little stores, the Yiddish paper was their main tie, perhaps their only tie, with the outside world.61

There were hundreds of Yiddish publications of a variety of political persuasions, as well as German, Russian, and later English papers reaching Jewish audiences in America.62 The Jewish Daily Forward and the Day were longlasting fixtures of immigrant life. The socialist Arbeiter Tseitung and the anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtime both began publication in 1890, and the latter was to become the longest-lasting Yiddish paper in the United States. Recalling his childhood selling newspapers on the Lower East Side, Harry Roskolenko reminisced, “The Yiddish press was the immigrant’s moral arbiter. It was public as well as private with its news and tales. It was each reader’s own paper, addressed to him alone.”63 Goldman, Berkman, and other Jewish radicals could count on a substantial readership for their publications not only because anarchists read widely, but because Jews in general did so. While historian Selma Berrol argues that the level of education of the first- and second-generation east European immigrants has been exaggerated, it is clear that the Jewish press both constituted and served its readers.64 In addition to publications, the Jews enjoyed a rich network of theatres, libraries, cafés, and community lectures. A variety of clubs and leagues sponsored dramas in lofts, cellars, and halls across the lower East Side, rehearsing religion, politics, class conflict and upward mobility, the old country and the new. Roskolenko remembers, “The ghetto was transforming itself into a theatrical Holy Land.”65 Children and adults alike flooded reading rooms, literary societies, night schools, public libraries, various clubs and classes, and any other settings offering intellectual development. Samuel Tenenbaum recalled the centrality of the community library to his childhood: The library was something more than a place where one went for books. Here one met and made friends, those from high school, but even more important, those men and women who had little formal schooling, who worked in factories and were socialists, anarchists, Zionists, Macfaddenites, chiropractors, atheists, food faddists, sun worshipers, Buddhists; men and women who wanted so much from life: to be great writers, to be great humanitarian leaders, to be innovators of world-shaking importance.66

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An article in The New York Tribune condescendingly praised the “intellectual aristocracy of the East Side” who met in “the happy hunting grounds of radical thinkers,” the East Side café.67 Historian Moses Rischin estimates that there were between 250 and 300 coffee houses on the lower East Side by 1905, “each with its Tendenz and special clientele.”68 Roskolenko remembers the “mishmash scene” in the cafés: anarchists, socialists, Bundists, Zionists, Labor Zionists and others had their own cafés, as well as “cafés in common for talking over their insurmountable divisions.”69 The immigrant Jewish community generated a remarkable coterie of scholar-intellectuals, some formally trained and others, like Goldman, more self-educated; some reaching deeply into scholarly sources and others, in Howe’s succinct words, were alarmingly prepared “to speak at great length out of small knowledge.”70 Goldman seems to have begun her successful lecturing career as one of the latter, but with determination educated herself into the ranks of the former. For long periods of time Goldman lectured weekly on the lower East Side, joining an astounding and eclectic network of lecturers on radical political and cultural ideas. While she expanded her audience across the United States, “she remained a shining star in Yiddish radical circles.”71 The authorities in the United States and Canada were guided, evidently, by their need to always notice Jews. Relentless government surveillance of Goldman and Berkman frequently noted that the two anarchists were Jews. Given that the same agents and agencies tracked these activists over long periods of time, one would think that their Jewishness would cease to be news. Agent Jos. F. McDevitt’s report of January 30, 1920, to his superiors at the Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. Department of Justice recounted information on Goldman, Berkman, and Mina Lowensohn under the heading “Alleged Jewish Bolsheviki Activities, Philadelphia.”72 J. Edgar Hoover instructed Agent McDevitt to investigate Jewish control of the Bolshevik movement; the agent evidently interviewed a Dr. Goricar who assured him Jews were behind the Union of Russian Workers. In his December 6, 1939 report to his superiors in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Agent 304 remarked that about 600 people “of Jewish nationality” attended Goldman’s speech at the Starland Theater in Winnipeg three days earlier.73 Agent 302 similarly reported, in a document marked “secret,” that several “well-to-do Jews” from Workman’s Circle financed Goldman’s visit to Winnipeg.74 Agent 304 further noted, in his report on Goldman’s speech for the I.W.W. on December 6, 1939, that Jews “are still working on an International Revolution.”75 The repetition of these observations suggests an ongoing anxiety about Goldman’s Jewishness and a corresponding need to control it. Anarchists were implicitly racialized in hegemonic discourse by the use of metaphors of disease and dirt. Anticipating Hitler’s vilification of Jews

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in Mein Kampf, Congressman William Vaile reported in the Congressional Record that anarchists were an illness to be excised from the body politic. Congressman Vaile’s eyewitness account of Buford’s departure, read into the Congressional Record on January 5, 1920, poetically reported that the tugboat taking them to Ellis Island was emblematic of the cold, sharp cleanliness of the undertaking on which we were engaged and suggested the spotless apron of the surgeon. . . . Just as the boat had suggested the surgeon’s apron, so Ellis Island, white in the moonlight with her light covering of fresh snow, suggested the operating table. A little later we inspected the cancerous growth about to be cut out of the American body politic.76

Congressman Vaile concluded that, in the dawn light, the Statue of Liberty was “bathed from her feet to the tip of her torch in the new light of a cleaner and better day, her calm and noble face looking upon us in the confidence that the Republic shall be kept clean and in its cleanliness shall endure.”77 The Washington Post agreed. On January 27, 1920, the Post’s article, “For the National Defense” painted radical politics as a viral invasion of the body politic: From every point of the compass come warnings against the danger of radicalism. Every day some new nest of treason is unearthed and some revolutionary plot laid bare to the world. Germs of anarchy are breeding and multiplying in the body politic and the virus of bolshevism is manifested in eruptions which as yet are but superficial, but which, unless subjected to treatment, threaten serious results.78

Thus the Post welcomed the deportation of Berkman and Goldman, “those twin anarchists who for more than a quarter of a century have labored to poison the minds and hearts of American citizens, incite to murder and foment unrest.”79 Jews, blacks, Indians, Asians, and immigrants in general were named and organized in the nativist social imaginary around pervasive images of dirt. Anthropologist Mary Douglas explains that dirt, in this context, is “matter out of place.”80 Aware of the racism behind these fears, Goldman took it to be a sort of undifferentiated prejudice rather than a floating signifier marking a variety of Others. Differences in how they were dirt, and how they might be cleansed or restored, went unattended in Goldman’s thinking. By the mid 1920s, according to Jacobson, after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act and other immigration restrictions, Jews, along with Irish, Poles, Greeks, Celts, and Slavs, were on the road to assimilation, moving unevenly toward more secure status as both fully Caucasian and properly American. Goldman was sent into exile in 1919 and had little op-

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portunity to observe these subtle shifts, as well as the pervasive and often violent backlash. During her time in the United States, to use Jacobson’s felicitous phrase, Jews were still “on probation” as white. Since 1790 they had been white in the sense that they could enter the country and become naturalized citizens; yet at the same time they never lost their Otherness. In Jacobson’s words, “the question is not are they white, nor even how white are they, but how have they been both white and Other? What have been the historical terms of their probationary whiteness?”81 Goldman’s life was woven into, at the same time that it moved outside of, the immigrant Jewish communities of her time. She often expressed pride in her Jewish heritage, to which she attributed her own tenacity in the face of oppression, and she had utter scorn for the “alrightniks” who abandoned Jewish ethical traditions to assimilate into bourgeois circles. At the same time, while being a Jew was very visible in America, it was not particularly dangerous; but being an anarchist certainly was—after all, she was deported for her political views, not her “race.” She saw how readily the state could change its laws to target radicals. The 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, which prohibited non-citizen anarchists from entering the United States, was the law of the land until November 1990. States, including New York, enacted their own criminal anarchy laws; New York police used this law to arrest Goldman and other anarchists in 1906–1907. That law did not give government the authority to deport citizens; however, a 1906 denaturalization law allowed the state to cancel citizenship “fraudulently obtained.”82 Armed with this vague mandate, in 1909 federal authorities cancelled the citizenship of Jacob Kershner, her former (and deceased) husband, and deported her in 1919. These legal maneuvers only reinforced Goldman’s conviction that legal protections were ephemeral and that organizations working primarily for legal reform were fundamentally wrongheaded.

GLOBAL ANARCHISM The larger context for encountering racial difference within anarchism was the fertile, uneven space of anti-colonial struggles. Jessica Moran of the Emma Goldman Papers Project observed that anarchism was a thoroughly global movement.83 Historian Tom Goyens concurs, noting that “revolutions and upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic between 1775 and 1914 reveal a surprising degree of cross-fertilization” among anarchists. Immigration and exile enhanced the spread of anarchism, as did opportunities for young men to study abroad along with an “increasingly transnational radical press.”84 Goyens notes that, for example, contributors and correspondents to Freiheit “stretched as far as Switzerland, Belgium, France,

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England, Hungary, Italy, Canada, Norway, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and even one person in Africa.”85 The 1907 conference in Amsterdam, at which Goldman gave her report, drew about a thousand people, among them eighty delegates from Europe, Latin America, Japan and the United States.86 For the most part, anarchists held onto their internationalism even during times of war; Kropotkin was one of the few well-known anarchists to support the allies during World War I, and his position was heavily criticized by Goldman, Berkman, Malatesta, and others. Most anarchists agreed with their French comrade Victor Drury, who proclaimed, contra nationalism, “I am a patriot of the universe.”87 Not only was anarchism a global movement; but globalization also enabled the spread of anarchism. The invention of the telegraph, the transoceanic submarine cables, and the Universal Postal Union pushed communication into global high gear; Benedict Anderson observed that “the ‘wire’ was soon taken for granted by city people all over the planet.” The steamship—“safe, speedy, and cheap”—enabled the growth of transatlantic migration and shipping, while a “thickening lattice of railways” drew immigrant workers, many of them radicals, to industries booming due to increased global trade.88 The porosity of borders was enhanced by global flows of workers, soldiers, and capital, and these flows in turn increased the malleability of the borders. For example, the border between the United States and Mexico was a globalizing site: not only did workers cross, but corporations controlled assets on both sides of the border and alliances between state law enforcement and private vigilantes also crossed national borders. MacLachlan explains, “By 1910, American interests controlled three-quarters of Mexico’s productive mines and many of the railway lines in northern Mexico.”89 During a strike in Cananea in June 1906, miners protesting layoffs as well as lower wages for Mexican workers were put down by Mexican troops supported by armed volunteers from Bisbee, Arizona.90 Activists also circulated freely among the United States, Canada, and Mexico, creating “a loose network of anarchists from all over the world” supporting anarchist organizing within the Mexican Revolution.91 Anderson frames his remarkable study of anarchism and anti-colonialism in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century as “political astronomy” because he “attempts to map the gravitational force of anarchism” at a global level. His sketch of that world is worth quoting at length: Following the collapse of the First International, and Marx’s death in 1883, anarchism, in the characteristically variegated forms, was the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical left. It was not merely that in Kropotkin (born twenty-two years after Marx) and Malatesta (born thirty-three years after Engels) anarchism produced a persuasive philosopher and a colorful, charismatic activist-leader from a younger generation, not matched by mainstream Marxism. Notwithstanding the towering edifice of

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Marx’s thought, from which anarchism often borrowed, the movement did not disdain peasants and agricultural laborers in an age when serious industrial proletariats were mainly confined to Northern Europe. It was open to “bourgeois” writers and artists—in the name of individual freedom—in a way that, in those days, institutional Marxism was not. Just as hostile to imperialism, it had no theoretical prejudices against “small” and “ahistorical” nationalisms, including those in the colonial world. Anarchists were also quicker to capitalize on the vast transoceanic migrations of the era. Malatesta spent four years in Buenos Aires—something inconceivable for Marx or Engels, who never left Western Europe. Mayday celebrates the memory of immigrant anarchists—not Marxists—executed in the United States in 1887.92

The expansion of global communications and transportation allowed, for example, revolutionaries in Cuba and the Philippines to correspond and meet each other, often with the help of comrades in Paris, Hong Kong, London, and New York. Networks of local-born activists, immigrant or exiled radicals, and foreign supporters blossomed. “Newspaper-reading Chinese nationalists eagerly followed events in Cuba and the Philippines—as well as the Boer nationalist struggle against Ukanian imperialism, which Filipinos also studied—to learn how to ‘do’ revolution, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism.”93 While many earlier histories of anarchism have concentrated on western Europe and the United States, recent work by political theorist Jason Adams and South African researchers Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt supports Anderson’s contention by marshaling an extensive overview of global anarchism during the classical period of the mid-1890s to the mid1920s. Anarchism’s global reach was not confined to skilled artisans, although de-skilling of labor was one of the sources of support for anarchism and syndicalism. The urban working class and farm workers also flocked to anarchism: “the syndicalist unions were primarily made up of groups of people like casual and seasonal labourers, dockworkers, farmworkers, factory workers, miners, and railway employees, and to a lesser extent white-collar workers and professionals, notably teachers.”94 There were large anarchist peasant movements around the world, rising in opposition to landlords, governments, wars, and increasing commercialization of rural areas; peasant armies were crucial to anarchist uprisings in the Ukraine, the Kirin Revolution in Manchuria, and the better-known peasant rebellions in Spain.95 In South America, anarchism was strongest in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, where it was “the largest revolutionary movement in the first quarter of the 20th Century.”96 Anarchist influence in labor was also significant in Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru.97 When Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta lived in Argentina, he helped organized the country’s first Baker’s Union in 1887 and supported the creation of anarchist publications.98 Augusto

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Sandino’s nationalist movement in Nicaragua was influenced by anarchist ideas, and the substantial anti-war movements in Brazil and Argentina were based in anarchist and syndicalist organizations.99 Mexico’s anarchist movement began in 1863 with the work of a philosophy professor in Mexico City, and was joined by students, other professors, urban workers, peasants being squeezed by the rise of export-oriented commercial agriculture, Indians in the south of the country fighting to hold onto land, and even some survivors of the Paris Commune in exile.100 Mexican and Cuban anarchists worked together, and the Cubans found support with the anarchist geographer Élisee Reclus in Paris.101 Among both urban laborers and rural peasants, anarchism was strong.102 A quick global accounting of anarchists and their allies extends to the Middle East, parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. Armenian anarchists, organizing against both the Ottoman Empire and intervention by European states, published several journals in their home country and in exile in the United States. The most internationally recognized of the Armenians was Alexandre Atabekian, who became friends with Kropotkin, Élisee Reclus, and French anarchist Jean Grave while studying in Geneva.103 Goldman and Berkman knew Atabekian in Moscow, where he had his own print shop.104 Atabekian translated several anarchist works into Armenian and published an anarchist journal called Commonwealth (Hamaink) that was also translated into Persian.105 The globe-trotting Malatesta showed up in Armenia, as well as Lebanon and Turkey.106 German Jewish anarchists Gustav Landauer and Rudolf Rocker, as well as Kropotkin, inspired the early kibbutz movement in Palestine/Israel; Mutual Aid was “one of the first books ever to be translated into Hebrew and distributed throughout Palestine.”107 Malatesta and militant Italian anarchist Luigi Galeani found their way to Egypt, where anarchism was largely an immigrant activity, as it was in Tunisia and Algeria; in other parts of Africa, anarchism was incorporated with local land practices and anti-colonial activities.108 In South Africa, anarchism began with the work of an immigrant from London in the 1880s; by the 1910s, a substantial number of syndicalist unions, including workers of color and involving both native and immigrant leadership, were established.109 The usual cycle of union organizing, translating, publishing, state repression, imprisonment, immigration, and exile spread anarchist ideas. As with Latin America, “anarchism was the primary radical left movement in the first quarter of the 20th century.”110 Chinese anarchists were active both in China and in immigrant communities in Paris, Tokyo, and other metropolitan areas.111 Shifu from China founded the Society of Anarchist-Communist Comrades and began syndicalist organizing in China, leading to the founding of “at least forty unions in the Canton area by 1921.”112 Anarchist labor organizing was also significant in Changsha and Shanghai, and among

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Chinese diaspora communities in Tokyo and Paris.113 Chinese anarchist Ba Jin (a pseudonym made from the Chinese characters for Bakunin and Kropotkin) was a highly regarded novelist as well as friend of Goldman’s, whom he regarded as his “spiritual mother.”114 Historian Arif Dirlik notes that, in China, nationalism and anarchism emerged together; Chinese nationalism was “a rather radical idea at its origins,” creating “active political subjects” who developed both “a nationalist consciousness and a new kind of supra-national utopianism.”115 Japanese anarchists Hatta Shuzo and the more syndicalist-oriented Kotoku Shusui and Osugi Sakae were among the best-known anarchist leaders from Japan. Kotoku Shusui, after getting out of prison, worked with I.W.W. organizers in San Francisco in 1906 before returning to Japan. The Eastern Anarchist Federation included members from China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Japan. Anarchism was particularly significant among Koreans, who formed the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation in 1924 and fought for regional autonomy in the Shinmin province. Both Gandhi’s anti-imperial pacifism and Bhagat Singh’s armed struggle were connected with anarchist ideas and practices in India.116 Third world revolutionaries, Anderson concludes, found their most reliable allies in the west among the anarchists, who saw anti-imperial militancy as a key ingredient in global struggle. Anderson’s riveting tale of anarchism in the Philippines centers on folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, well-known novelist José Rizal, Cuban anarchist Tarrida del Mármol, and other anti-colonial activists whose relations with anarchists in Europe and the United States were pivotal in fueling their struggles. These global networks fostered much more than casual friendships: they were the basis for international comradeship, that intense shared commitment to liberation, the cross-fertilization of ideas, and the mutual building of unions, publications, and other organizing. Again the 1907 Amsterdam Congress played a notable role. At that congress the anarchists formed an International Bureau, headed, appropriately, by Malatesta, German anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker, and labor activist Alexander Schapiro.117 This bureau, headquartered in London, was to be a site for what I have called ectopic theory: its purpose was “to bring into closer contact the anarchist groups and organizations of the various countries, to make a thorough and painstaking study of the labour struggle in every land, and to supply data and material concerning it to the anarchist press.”118 The conference established a weekly multilingual journal, Bulletin International du Movement Syndicaliste (“Bulletin of the International Syndicalist Movement”), published regularly until mid-1914.119 Goldman’s journal Mother Earth regularly published updates from radical struggles around the world, contributing to the creation of a global anarchist imaginary for readers. A section of the journal called International Notes in October, 1906, for example, carried announcements about free

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schools in Paris; a new anarchist monthly, En Marcha, in Uruguay; and a change of name of the Belgium anarchist paper The Insurgent to The Emancipator.120 In other issues, the International Notes included updates on anarchist translations and publications in China; the appearance of an anarchist journal called La Giustizia in Argentina; new journals in Brazil, Terra Livre and Novo Rumo, plus labor actions on behalf of the eight-hour day; the arrest of an anarchist speaker in Cuba; revolutionary activities in China; new anarchist publications in Japan.121 An article by Harry Kelly, “Statistics,” analyzed the decay of the British Empire and predicted that the same will happen to the United States.122 Every issue expanded readers’ knowledge of global injustice and activism: soldiers refusing to shoot peasants during a revolt in Romania; repression in British India; strikes in Persia, Peru, and Argentina; a report on massacres of Jews in Bialystock.123 The October 1907 issue expressed solidarity with “natives” who were “striving to shake off the yoke of the foreign masters” in Indian revolts against England, Malay against Holland, and Koreans against Japan.124 Other issues carried news of the “pacification” of the Philippines and Filipino resistance; Goldman characterized the American “liberation” of the Philippines and Cuba as imperial ventures “merely removing the obstacles in the way of the American capitalists who are eager to press profits from the conquered people.”125 Other issues announced an attentat in Portugal; silk weavers’ strikes in Turkey; a saltpeter strike in Chile in which 250 miners were killed; an I.W.W. announcement of T. Takahashi’s English-Japanese language magazine The Proletarian; rent strikes in Switzerland, Italy, and Argentina; land reform campaigns in Japan.126 This small sample of international anarchist news indicates the consistent monthly delivery to Goldman’s readers of accounts that enabled them to feel ongoing involvement with global struggle. One of Goldman’s most consistent areas of transnational activism linked her to anarchists in Mexico and the Mexican American communities of the southwestern United States. Goldman was close to Ricardo Flores Magón and Enrique Flores Magón, anarchist leaders of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). The Magón brothers were of Zapotec Indian background. According to Adams, they were “driven largely by a determination to ensure the autonomy of Indian peoples in whatever social arrangement would arise out of the revolution.”127 The Magón brothers were considered dangerous by the U.S. government as well as the Mexican government because they “appealed to one of the most oppressed segments of the working class, Spanish-speaking workers in labor-intensive sectors of the economy such as agriculture and mining.”128 Ricardo Flores Magón was a radical journalist who went into exile in the United States after his arrest and imprisonment by the Diaz regime. The brothers published a journal Regeneración, which also had an English language edition; anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre served

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as the Chicago correspondent and fundraiser for the journal. Ricardo Flores Magón violated U.S. criminal syndicalism laws as well as the 1903 immigration law “that banned or expelled those who advocated the overthrow of any government or did not believe in the theoretical legitimacy of the state.”129 The Magóns’ journal and associated correspondence was banned from the U.S. mail.130 Goldman and Berkman supported Magón as he tried to mobilize “the large Mexican American population of the Southwest.”131 They raised bail money for the Magón brothers and organized mass meetings to support them. Goldman may also have raised funds to arm the Magóns’ guerrilla fighters.132 The anarchists’ Magonista meetings drew large numbers of Mexican Americans with their attractive combination of anarchist labor activism and Mexican nationalism. Mother Earth was “a vital forum for the PLM,” publishing Magón’s letters and manifestos.133 Goldman supported the Mexican Revolution Conference and demonstration at Cooper Union, New York; she sent copies of Regeneración to supporters around the world; and she raised funds for the Magón brothers’ defense for their trial. The February, 1908 issue of Mother Earth carried Ricardo Flores Magón’s “Manifesto to the American People” (co-authored with Antonio I. Villarreal, Librado Rivera, and Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara) and several subsequent issues carried similar messages from the Mexican revolutionaries.134 A pamphlet mentioned in the May 1912 issue called the Mexican revolution “the greatest struggle of our day.”135 Goldman no doubt considered Ricardo Flores Magón a political prisoner, and she arranged to send him books in Leavenworth when she was in Jefferson City Penitentiary.136 Colin MacLachlan concludes that Goldman used Mother Earth, as Berkman did the Blast, to keep the Magón brothers’ imprisonment “before the radical community.”137 This association did not always work to the brothers’ advantage: during their 1918 trial in Los Angeles, their affiliations with Berkman and Goldman were used against them.138 Yet it was largely through the work of Goldman, Berkman, de Cleyre, and other anarchists that the Magón brothers became known outside of the southwest as part of American radicalism as well as Mexican. The Magón brothers’ legacy endures: in 1968, a speaker addressing a quarter-million anti-government protestors in Mexico City reminded listeners of Ricardo Flores Magón’s revolutionary heritage.139 The Magón brothers were also important to later Chicano activism in the United States; speaking about Goldman in New Mexico, three-quarters of a century later, Candace Falk was met by Chicano activists with armloads of flowers in recognition of Goldman’s support for the Magóns.140 Other American radicals and liberals also supported the Magón brothers. However, the brothers encountered a certain amount of condescension from American socialists who assumed that Mexicans were all illiterate

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peasants, while in fact the Magón brothers were educated intellectuals. MacLachlan reports, Flores Magón found support from anarchists much more acceptable. Emma Goldman shared PLM’s belief that Mexico constituted an important arena in the coming world-wide struggle; accordingly, her newspaper consistently devoted considerable space to Mexican affairs.141

Goldman also stood up for other Mexican radicals, including Carlos de Fornaro, author of Díaz, Czar of Mexico, who was tried and imprisoned in the United States on libel charges.142 Unwilling to renounce his anarchism to qualify for parole, Ricardo Magón died in Leavenworth Prison of diabetes in 1922. In his Foreword to MacLachlan’s book, John Hart notes, “The news of his death rocked Mexico.” Noting that Magón was buried with honors and a great public outpouring of respect, Hart continues, “He was special to Mexico because he held steadfast to some of the highest ideals of Mexican culture: community independence, political freedom, economic equality, workers’ control over the forces of production, national integrity, and international brotherhood.”143 Another major global involvement carried on in the pages of Mother Earth publicized Goldman’s connections to anarchists in Japan: frequent updates on Japan and reports on the Kotoku Defence committee fund were accompanied by translations of letters from Japanese anarchists.144 “Comrade Denjiro Kotoku writes us that there is a great awakening taking place among the intellectuals of Japan,” Goldman wrote in August of 1907.145 Kotuku was a journalist who, while jailed for his public opposition to Japanese imperialism, translated Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread and launched an anarchist journal Heimin Shumbum (“Common People’s Newspaper”).146 In 1911, there was a temporary respite of police interference in Goldman’s lectures: Goldman reported, “I could speak in behalf of the awakened revolutionary consciousness in Japan; in behalf of the great human indignity of Mexico.”147 In February of 1911 came reports of the execution of the Japanese anarchists, with pictures of Denjiro Kotoku and Sugano Kano, and accounts of the worldwide protests that Mother Earth helped to organize. Berkman’s final statement of their political ideas affirmed anarchist support for anti-colonial struggles: Wherever there is injustice, wherever persecution and suppression—be it the subjugation of the Philippines, the invasion of Nicaragua, the enslavement of the toilers in the Congo by Belgian exploiters, the oppression of the masses in Egypt, China, Morocco, or India—it is the business of the workers everywhere to raise their voice against all such outrages and demonstrate their solidarity in the common cause of the despoiled and disinherited throughout the world.148

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Readers of Mother Earth, the Blast, and other anarchist periodicals were kept abreast of militant efforts on the part of oppressed people around the world to confront their exploiters, while the more law-abiding efforts of the NAACP, the black press, and other reformers never appeared in those pages. Perhaps, had the locations of African American struggles gained legitimacy in anarchist eyes, the iron wall that the anarchists built between reform and revolution would have become more permeable, and race could have been more productively thought as a venue in which hierarchy is produced, justified, and maintained.

RACIAL WANDERINGS Matthew Jacobson warns against “facile comparisons of the AfricanAmerican experience with the white immigrant experience; it is not just that various white immigrant groups’ economic successes came at the expense of nonwhites, but that they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized whiteness itself in part to these nonwhite groups.”149 Goldman typically engaged in exactly these sorts of facile comparisons, not to downplay black oppression but to fold it into the universal wage slavery of the masses. Her analysis has the benefit of addressing a potentially united working class, but misses the uniquely devastating historical circumstances that accompany being property, as opposed to lacking property. She often recognized that one group of workers might benefit at the expense of others, but she calibrated these conflicts and inequalities within the working class in terms of inadequately developed radical consciousness rather than racially enabled opportunities. The tendency to psychologize Goldman, which we saw in some critics’ assessments of her views on sex and gender, reappears in other critics’ readings of Goldman on race. In both cases, her readers encounter her primarily on the level of personal thoughts and feelings rather than political ideas. Speculating on why she “mostly ignored the struggle for black rights and racial equality,” historian Leon Litwack imagines her possible motives: Perhaps she was trying to appease the racism pervading the labor and socialist movements. More likely, she was unconscious of this contradiction in her life’s commitments to “the wretched of the earth.” Whatever her personal feelings about these matters, they would occupy little space in her writings or speeches.150

However, there is no evidence that she avoided the racism of her comrades; in fact, there is evidence to the contrary. In the August, 1909 issue of Mother Earth, she reported on a court case in which a U.S. Senator was found not

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guilty of hitting a black dining car waiter because, the judge agreed, the Senator “did not strike a man, [he] slapped a nigger.” Goldman pointed out, as always, that such incidents happen in the North as well as the South, and then commented with her usual combination of sarcasm and anger that “few white people in this enlightened land have risen to the level of recognizing in the Negro a fellow-man, a social equal.” Even some radicals, she emphasized, share “this most stupid of prejudices.”151 Nor did she lack commitment: Goldman was as incensed at the mistreatment of blacks as she was at the suffering of any other group of oppressed people. Goldman’s problem, in my view, is not to be understood at the level of emotional range or personal style. The problem is in her analysis: she did not give racism a history, as she did patriarchy, Christianity, capitalism, or empire, so she did not understand it as a dynamic vector of power. Racism in her thinking is simply prejudice, while capitalism, colonialism, male dominance, and religious authority are systems of oppression. She would never refer to capitalist contempt for workers as a stupid prejudice because she knew full well what was at stake in the bourgeoisie’s assumption of superiority: they were protecting their interests, not simply making a mistake or revealing their individual narrow-mindedness. When Mother Earth announced the appearance of T. Takahashi’s English-Japanese language magazine The Proletarian, which was “devoted to the emancipation of the Japanese workers in America,” she singled out this quote from the new publication: “Salvation lies in the unity of workmen regardless of race or color.”152 Race and color matter to her because they can tap prejudices that disrupt the needed unity of those who should struggle together for a better future. When she discussed the genocide of Native Americans, it was not magnificent outrage (in Drinnon’s words) that was lacking. She condemned the settlers who forgot that they, too, were originally of foreign stock: “After all the real American was the Indian who was robbed of his land and who is being exterminated.” She mocked the first settlers for pretending that their new society was not based on the extermination of those who came before; they “erected their stronghold on the sculs [sic] of the Indians [but] now do not care to remember their origine [sic].”153 She understood colonialism, within nations as well as between them, as a massive land grab dressed up in concern for the “heathen’s” soul. What is lacking in Goldman’s thinking is the capacity to imagine indigenous people in the United States as resisting their oppression; she sees them instead as a defeated people, “dwindled to mere shadows of what they had once been,” unlike the indigenous people of Mexico who rallied around the Magón brothers to resist their exploitation with force of arms.154 Any revolution, anywhere, was worth supporting because it threatened the hegemony of global capitalism, while any reform movement, anywhere, simply cemented that hegemony even further.

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Goldman did not have contempt for racial identities; she simply did not think they were particularly important politically. Goldman frequently expressed appreciation of her own Jewish heritage. She recognized the “dread of massacres and persecutions” that have “put the stamp of sorrow on the Jews” and often appealed to Judaism’s ethical heritage for radical energies.155 She refused, as Falk has pointed out, to anchor her political views in particular racial memberships, but reached past those to an ideal of universal human liberation. Responding to Kristallnacht, she wrote on November 9, 1938: My deep sympathy with the victims of Hitler is, as you will understand, not because I myself come from the Jewish people. It is because all human sorrow and injustice fill me to overflowing and make me want to reach out to alleviate the suffering. I must confess, however, that my absorption in Spain and in the great tragedy that is being enacted there has taken hold of my imagination more so even than the suffering of the Jews. It is because the Spanish people are so heroic, so absolutely consumed by their longing for liberty that they would rather die fighting than live as slaves. Every time I go back they wind themselves round my heart more powerfully.156

Yet at the same time, she could treasure her membership in her tribe. In a playful account of her meetings in Montreal in March, 1908, she described her “Jewish meetings” as packed: But then, Jewish meetings are always packed—with men, women, infants, and baby-carriages. The herding instinct of my race has aided its survival, despite all the horrors it was made to endure. Besides, what would become of progress were it not for the Jews? . . . the bulk of our American radicals would positively die of inertia and anaemia [sic], were it not for the Jews constantly infusing new blood into their system.157

She certainly did not deny her Jewishness, although she sometimes mocked it. Peggy Guggenheim once teased her that she was “the cordon bleu of gefilte fish,” and I can imagine her enjoying that gentle joke.158 Goldman may have been moving toward a more complex assessment of race and racism in the last years of her life, as she watched the rise of fascism in Europe. She wrote to her friend Mark Mratchny of the hatefulness around her in France: It is no longer so pleasant to live in France with the anti-foreign feeling one is made to endure. It is not so bad here [at Bon Espirit, in the south], the people are simpler than in Paris. But there it is positively hateful. Not only the antiforeign but even more so the anti-semitic demonstrations in cafees [sic] and the grand boulevards. The whole world is a madhouse.159

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In a letter to her old friend and lover Leon Malmed, on April 20, 1935, she wrote, “One must face facts. No one is safe in Europe now.”160 In a letter the next day to her friend Henry Alsberg, she shared her concern that Berkman would be interned if war were to break out.161 She credited the Bolsheviks for fighting anti-semitism: “Whatever critical attitude I have to Soviet Russia I must give it credit for its determination to hold the hatred of the Jew in check,” she wrote to Charney Vladeck at the Jewish Daily Forward on February 12, 1935.162 Reflecting on her experiences in Canada, she confided to Berkman her fear that even an anarchist society would still house anti-Semitism: “I don’t see how that is going to be done away with even in a free society. . . . Anyway, for the present the situation of Jews all over the world is not enviable. I can see the anti-Jewish feeling here and the discrimination.”163 Yet, so far as I know, she never built on her glimpses of anti-Semitism’s vicious operations to analyze race without collapsing it into class. Her reflections on the aftermath of pogroms she and Berkman encountered in the Ukraine led her to “see that there is a Jewish question,” to be analyzed apart from “the whole social question.”164 Yet it is still a “Jewish question,” not a “gentile question” or some other formulation that would switch the locus of attention from the discrimination against people to the construction of power relations within which they resided. I think it unlikely she would ever have altered her opposition to Zionism, based on her disdain for a liberation struggle that would settle for “our own territory where we can surround ourselves with walls and watchtowers.”165 Since the state is never the answer, a Zionist state could not be the answer for Jews. Yet, Goldman’s musings over race and racism, prompted by rising fascism in France and lingering anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, might have led her to analyzing race apart from “the whole social question.” Rethinking Judaism might have led productively to rethinking slavery and indigeneity as well. Despite the limits of Goldman’s political thinking with regard to race, there are still useful insights here for contemporary critical thinkers. First, her radical insistence on the primacy of a class/state analysis is a useful reminder of the limits of liberalism. While race, along with sex, have become equal opportunity/affirmative action categories in U.S. law, class never will. The first two can be forgiven—they are not our fault—but the latter must remain a consequence of our abilities and our efforts in order for liberal capitalism to maintain legitimacy. Goldman was ruthless in rejecting offers of legal reform that failed to address the systemic production of inequality through capitalism and the state. While we may nonetheless welcome the reforms she scorned, it is not a bad idea to keep in mind and contest their price. Second, she approached liberation struggles globally. Current efforts to make feminism a transnational project, to think oppression and liberation at a global level, were well underway in the anarchists’ agenda. By insisting

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on the constitutive connections of geographically dispersed power and rebellion, Goldman refused the language of advanced vs. backward political movements or developed vs. undeveloped societies. By insisting that the state is a temporary historical arrangement, she called attention to transnational practices of power and resistance. Third, while Goldman approached race ahistorically, she offered a full and (to a contemporary audience) often surprising historical perspective on anti-labor violence, the blood upon which the later New Deal labor reform legislation rested. During Goldman’s lifetime, as I discussed in chapter 1, it was often open season on striking workers, with private armies available to do the killing and the public authorities either actively cooperating or looking the other way. Workers of all colors, ages, and genders were shot, clubbed, burned out, arrested, convicted, and executed. Goldman brings this neglected history into focus, forcing us to see the physical and structural violence directed against people because they were workers, and the robust resistance of which the workers were capable. While Goldman recognized that Jews, blacks, Indians, and Asians were victimized because of their race, it was their capacity to withhold their labor and their obedience that made them rebels.

NOTES 1. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, March 2, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 11. As mentioned in chapter 1, the legend on the button that inspires many second- and third-wave feminists is not an accurate quote, but the sentiment is quite close to that expressed in Living My Life. 2. See Falk, “Let Icons Be Bygones!” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 41–69. 3. Richard Drinnon, “Introduction,” in Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman (New York: Dover Publishers, 1969), xi-xii. 4. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), 131. 5. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, August 2, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 6. Martha Gruening, “Speaking of Democracy,” Mother Earth XII, no. 6 (August 1917), in Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, ed. Peter Glassgold (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 400–404. 7. Peter Glassgold, “Introduction: The Life and Death of Mother Earth,” in Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, ed. Glassgold (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), xxxiv. 8. Falk, “Raising Her Voices: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace

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Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 60 fn 94, also 64. 9. Falk, “Forging her Place: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, Made for America, 1890–1901, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 52. 10. Leon Litwack, “Foreword,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, xxii. 11. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6. 12. Goldman wrote her Declaration of Independence for a contest sponsored by the Boston Globe; even though she had been invited to compete, and even though she won the contest, the newspaper’s owner reneged before the award was given, disqualifying her “damned anarchist declaration.” (Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 64–65). 13. “Eugene V. Debs,” The Pittsburgh Courier, October 30, 1926, 16. 14. Noel J. Kent, America in 1900 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), xi. 15. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 7. 16. Kent, America, 97. See also Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1800–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 17. Kent, America, 98–101, 103, 44. 18. Kent, America, 110, 123, 127, 131. See also Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present, revised and updated edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 340–341; and Charles Simmons, The African American Press (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 17. 19. Goldman, “The Situation in America,” part 2, Mother Earth II, no. 8 (October 1907): 320–321. 20. Ibid., 326–329. 21. Ibid., 325. 22. Mother Earth III, no. 7 (September 1908): 277–278. 23. Goldman, “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth VI, no. 8 (October 1911): 229–230. 24. Personal communication with Candace Falk and Barry Pateman, Emma Goldman Papers Project. 25. Stansell, American Moderns, 67. 26. Theresa Moritz and Albert Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman (Toronto: Subway Books, 2001), 26. 27. “Emma Goldman, Anarchist,” San Francisco Call, April 27, 1898, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History, vol I, eds. Falk, Pateman, and Moran, 333. 28. Goldman, “What I Believe,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, third edition, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 49. 29. Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Curse of Race Prejudice,” Mother Earth I, no. 7 (September 1906), 34–37. 30. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, March 30, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: The Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 31. She commented that Ernest Hemingway, whom she met at a party given by Ford Maddox Ford in London, “reminded [her] of both Jack London and John

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Reed because of his simplicity and exuberance of spirit.” She praised the Russian anarchist Shakhvorostov, “his manner utterly simple,” as well as peasant revolutionaries in Russia who she found to be “simple folk.” Bertrand Russell was a “gracious and simple personality.” Her friend Mrs. Gordon in Pittsburgh was “a simple and tender-hearted woman.” And so on. “Simple” seems to mean straightforward and genuine. (Living My Life, 961, 839, 803, 795, 198.) 32. Goldman, Mother Earth VIII, no. 11 (January 1914): 330–331. 33. Robyn Muncy, “Trustbusting and White Manhood in America, 1898–1914,” American Studies 38, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 28. 34. Goldman, “The Philosophy of Atheism,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 244. Robert Minor’s famous cover art lampoons the “Billy Sunday Tango,” portraying Sunday dancing gaily with a bleeding and despairing Christ, on the cover of Mother Earth X, no. 3 (May 1915). 35. Goldman, Living My Life, 138. 36. See Andrew Billingsley, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 37. Eric Laursen, “The Legacy of the Lodges: Mutual Aid and Consumer Society,” The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books 2, no. 2 (Winter-Spring 2004): 52. 38. “Colored Labor’s Fear,” Cleveland Advocate 6, no. 22 (October 4, 1919): 8. See also Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 39. Goldman, “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth VI, no. 8 (October 1911): 230. 40. Goldman, “Chinese Revolution,” in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 55. 41. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 64 fn 94. 42. See, for example, “The Races of Men, 1877,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United States Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 20. 43. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 26. 44. Ibid., 24. 45. Selma Berrol, East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870–1920 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), xi. 46. Kent, America, 98–99. 47. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 51. 48. Ibid., 58. 49. Ibid., 82. 50. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1909), 63. Historian Jeffrey Gurock points out that the appellations “uptown” and “downtown” were more metaphoric than descriptive, since many thousands of Russian Jewish families moved uptown after 1895. Over half of the uptown Russian Jews were skilled laborers, with a remaining one-quarter working at unskilled labor

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and only one-quarter employed in white-collar jobs. Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 33, 38. 51. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 106. 52. Ibid. 53. Marcus Ravage, An American In the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), 156. 54. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 107. 55. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 172. 56. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 80. 57. Ravage, An American in the Making, 146–147. 58. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 83. 59. Ibid., 72, 108. 60. Louis Panken and Abraham Liessen, quoted in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 306. 61. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 518. 62. Ibid., 544. 63. Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side 1900–1914, An Intimate Chronicle (New York: The Dial Press, 1971), 112. 64. Beroll, East Side/East End, xii. 65. Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, 146. 66. Samuel Tenenbaum, “Brownville’s Age of Learning,” in Commentary 8 (August 1949), in How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880–1930, eds. Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo (New York: Richard Marek Publishers,1979), 202. 67. “In the East Side Cafés,” The New York Tribune, September 30, 1900, in Portal to America: The Lower East Side 1870–1925, ed. Allon Schoener (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 138–139. 68. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 142. 69. Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, 188. 70. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 103. 71. Falk, “Forging Her Place,” 46. 72. Agent Jos. F. McDevitt, “Alleged Jewish Bolsheviki Activities, Philadelphia,” January 30, 1920, The Bureau of Investigation in the United States Department of Justice, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 65. 73. Agent 304 of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 6, 1939 in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 66. 74. Agent 302 of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 6, 1939, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 66. 75. Agent 304 of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 12, 1939, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 66. 76. Congressman William Vaile, “Deportation of Anarchist Aliens: Extension of Remarks of Hon. William N. Vaile, Rep.,” The Congressional Record (January 5, 1920): II, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 65. 77. Ibid., IV.

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78. “For the National Defense,” The Washington Post, January 27, 1920, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 65. 79. Ibid. 80. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2003), 165. 81. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 8, 176. 82. Falk, “Introduction to Reel 56,” in Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources, eds. Candace Falk, Stephen Cole, and Sally Thomas (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1995), 244. 83. Personal communication with Jessica Moran, July 22, 2002. 84. Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 3. 85. Ibid., 155. 86. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van de Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 181. 87. Drury, quoted in Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 209. 88. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005), 3; see also Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 32. 89. Colin M. MacLachlan, Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States (Foreword by John Hart). (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 12. 90. MacLachlan, Mexican Revolution, 15. 91. Jason Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global Context (Johannesburg, South Africa: Zabalaza Books, 2003), 22. 92. Anderson, Three Flags, 2. 93. Ibid. 94. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 15. 95. Ibid., 284–5. 96. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 20. 97. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 155, 167, 271. 98. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 19, 20. 99. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 287–288, 216–217. 100. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 21; Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 186–187. 101. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 23. 102. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 271. 103. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 23–24. 104. Goldman, Living My Life, 751. 105. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 23. 106. Ibid., 24. 107. Herrox, Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 5. 108. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 16–17. 109. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 271, 166, 238, 252. 110. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 8. 111. See Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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112. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 126, 168. 113. Ibid., 168; Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 9–10. 114. Ba Jin, “To E.G.,” “Celebrating the Life of Ba Jin: An Obituary for Emma Goldman’s Spiritual Son,” The Emma Goldman Papers Project, accessed August 7, 2010. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Features/BaJin_letter2.html. 115. Chuck Morris, “Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism: an Interview with Arif Dirlik,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 1, no. 2 (Fall, 1997): 1, 6–8. 116. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 10–14. Adams reports that in 1926, the Japanese government rounded up over 6,000 anti-imperialist Korean immigrants who had been influenced by the spread of anarchism from Japan, and held these unfortunates responsible for Tokyo’s 1923 earthquake (12). 117. Goldman, Living My Life, 400–404. 118. Ibid., 404. Goldman had met Malatesta briefly in London in 1895, coming to know him better at the Amsterdam conference in 1907, where she and Max Baginski “fell under the spell of Malatesta.” 119. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 182. 120. “International Notes,” Mother Earth I, no. 8 (October 1906): 51–52. 121. This sample of international announcements comes from Mother Earth, I, no. 11 (January 1907); II, no. 2 (April 1907); II, no. 5 (July 1907). 122. Harry Kelly, “Statistics,” Mother Earth I, no. 3 (May 1906): 35–37. 123. Mother Earth I, no. 7 (September 1907); I, no. 5 (July 1907). 124. Mother Earth II, no. 8 (October 1907): 301–302. 125. This sample of international announcements comes from Mother Earth II, no. 9 (November 1907); VII, no. 12 (February 1912); I, no. 9 (November 1906). 126. This sample of international news comes from Mother Earth III, no. 2 (April 1908); III, no. 3 (May 1908); III, no. 10 (December 1908). 127. Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms, 21. 128. John Hart, “Foreword,” in Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States by Colin M. MacLachlan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), x. 129. Ibid. 130. MacLachlan, Mexican Revolution, 17. For a detailed account of U.S. official and private security efforts to thwart the Magonista movements, see William Dirk Raat, “The Diplomacy of Suppression: Los Revoltosos, Mexico, and the United States, 1906–1911,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 4 (1976): 529–550. 131. Hart, “Foreword,” xiii. 132. Falk, “Raising Her Voices,” 63. 133. MacLachlan, Mexican Revolution, 39. 134. Mother Earth II, no. 12 (February 1908): 536–554. 135. Mother Earth VII, no. 3 (May 1912): . 136. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, January 19, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 137. MacLachlan, Mexican Revolution, 48. 138. Ibid., 86–87. 139. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 5–6. 140. Personal communication with Candace Falk, January 15, 2010. For further discussion of Magonismo then and now, see Chuck Morse, “Magonismo: An Over-

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view,” The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books 2, no. 2 (WinterSpring 2004): 61–65. 141. MacLachan, Mexican Revolution, 31. 142. Ibid. 143. Hart, “Foreword,” xiv. 144. Mother Earth VI, no. 3 (May 1911): 93. 145. Mother Earth II, no. 6 (August 1907): 239. 146. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame, 168. 147. Mother Earth VI, no. 5 (July 1911): 157. 148. Alexander Berkman, What is Anarchism? (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 203. Originally published in 1929. 149. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (italics in original), 9. 150. Litwack, ”Foreword,” xx. 151. Mother Earth IV, no. 6 (August 1909): 167. 152. Mother Earth V, no. 5 (July 1910): 174. 153. Goldman, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” [fragment, probably 1930]: 20, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 55. 154. Goldman, Living My Life, 432. 155. Goldman, “National Atavism,” Mother Earth I, no. 1 (March 1906): 54, 55. 156. Goldman to Pauline Turkel, November 9, 1938, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 44. 157. Goldman, “National Atavism,” 36, 37. 158. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, November 24, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 159. Goldman to Mark Mratchny, June 2, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 34. 160. Goldman to Leon Malmed, April 20, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 34. 161. Goldman to Henry Alsberg, April 21, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 34. 162. Goldman to Sharney Vladek, February 12, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 33. 163. Goldman to Berkman, February 12, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 33. 164. Goldman to Stella Balantine and Fitzi Fitzgerald, November 3, 1920, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 12. 165. Goldman, “National Atavism,” 50.

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6 Emma Goldman’s Women

“Emma Goldman told me, when things are bad, scrub floors.” —Madga Schoenwetter, Anarchist Voices

Emma Goldman is frequently, and I believe rightly, credited with bringing feminism to anarchism. Janet Day observes, “Goldman brought a particular concern for women’s issues to anarchist critique that other anarchists neglected.”1 Bonnie Haaland agrees, seeing Goldman’s inclusion of gender as “a paradigm shift in anarchist theory.”2 Martha Solomon also concurs: “Her insistence on the significance of issues related to women and on the importance of sexuality in human life were hallmarks of her interpretation of anarchism.”3 Alix Kates Shulman suggests, “her major contribution to anarchist theory was to insist on gender as a primary category of oppression.”4 While I have sometimes disputed the judgments of other commentators, in this case I agree with their assessments: Goldman’s most original contribution to anarchism lies in her weaving of sex and gender into the mix, a conceptual innovation that may seem obvious now, but was largely unheard of at the time. With her comrade Voltairine de Cleyre, Goldman was an outspoken advocate for an anarchism that folded in gender as an analytic category and made the liberation of women a central aspect of the liberation of all of humanity. The first goal of this chapter is to explore Goldman’s writings on women, sexuality, and gender. Goldman addressed birth control, marriage, love, sexuality, and prostitution. These are among her strongest essays, resting on a sturdy base of empirical and historical research, explaining the relationships among ideas and events rather than simply 249

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asserting their importance. Goldman wrote during a time of enormous change in women’s lives: the birth rate was declining for women of all races, classes, and regions; between 1800 and 1940, the average number of children born to women who lived to be fifty years old declined from seven to two. Women’s participation in the paid labor force was increasing, although they were crowded into a small number of sex-segregated and race-segregated occupations. The proportion of women who stayed single rose dramatically,5 as did the numbers of women attending college and earning professional degrees.6 The plethora of liberal, radical, and unclassifiable individuals and groups who contributed to the first wave of feminism is far too huge and complex to summarize here, but we can safely say that Goldman was among the most bold and radical. Goldman’s feminism was very much focused on bodies—pregnant bodies, laboring bodies, desiring bodies, prostituted bodies. Her work as a nurse-midwife brought her into contact with the dire circumstances of poor women’s homes, and through her work in the garment trades, she knew first-hand the grim setting for working class women’s paid labor. In prison she glimpsed the patterns of domestic violence in the lives of her fellow inmates. Her integration of feminism into anarchism produced early versions of some of the central concepts of second- and third-wave feminism: opposition to dualistic thinking, rejection of hierarchy in favor of intersectionality, and an early encounter with the equality/difference debates. She discusses what Foucault and others call the productive, as opposed to merely repressive, aspects of power, the specific functions of biopower and the intimate as well as structural consequences of what later feminists call the protection racket. Alix Kates Shulman has noted the “telling affinity” of anarchism and the radical side of feminism: “Both [are] fundamentally and deeply anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian. Both operate through loose, voluntary social organization from the bottom up, relying on collective action by small groups . . . and both favor direct action to promote change.”7 Anarchist feminist Lynn Farrow has argued, “feminism practices what Anarchism preaches.”8 Peggy Kornegger contends, “feminists have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years.”9 I want to elaborate the anticipation of contemporary feminist ideas in Goldman’s anarchism to enhance our understanding of that debt and to expand the radical history to which twenty-first-century feminists can lay claim. The second goal of this chapter is to explore the gendered horizons of Goldman’s world. Emma Goldman’s admirers frequently remarked, either in praise or justification of Goldman’s views, that she was ahead of her time. William Marion Reedy, a sympathetic newspaper editor in St. Louis, imagined her to be “eight thousand years ahead of her time.”10 Goldman’s comrade Harry Kelly wrote in his unpublished memoirs, “Emma Goldman was ahead of her time, a crime that humanity cannot forgive until the of-

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fender is dead.”11 The poet Meridel Le Seuer characterized has as “a woman of the future.”12 In this snapshot of Goldman, her anarchist feminist vision of a just and beautiful society recedes into the future, with Goldman a lone harbinger of better times to come. While Goldman herself sometimes relished this view of her own singularity, the trail of her involvements in a variety of public spaces, including labor organizing, free speech activism, birth control struggles, anti-war movements, free love advocacy, and anarchist education, suggests instead that she worked within a world densely populated by radical women. Goldman’s time, like any time, was not one thing, but rather a fluid set of densely intertwined layers of connected, conflicting social imaginaries and material habitats. Each had its pace, rhythm, and duration. Sex and gender were particularly mobile semiotic and material participants in these complex networks; the organization of sex, gender, and sexuality were central to many social movements and to the emergent global capitalist empire to which these movements often responded. My argument is that Goldman was very much of her time: her time and her place were saturated with the bodies, voices, and ideas of many hundreds of radical women. In a 1901 interview in the New York Sun, Goldman noted that “many of our ablest writers are women,” and others are active dispersing anarchist literature.13 Some of these women were part of Goldman’s immediate anarchist communities: a few, notably Voltairine de Cleyre, Rose Pesotta, Marie Louise Berneri, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Lucy Parsons, are remembered today through their published writings.14 Many more, primarily orators rather than writers, including Rebecca Edelman and Mollie Steimer, are little known outside anarchist circles. Many others, including Fitzie Fitzgerald, Ethel Kennan, and Stella Ballantine, were grassroots movement activists who organized speeches, marches, lecture tours, cafés, free schools, picnics, balls, theatrical productions, and publications through which anarchists created their counterpublics. Still more moved in overlapping progressive circles, including high-profile figures such as Djuna Barnes, novelist and playwright for the Provincetown Players; settlement house worker Lillian Wald; Isadora Duncan, pioneer of modern dance; and many hundreds of lesser-known women doing their political work in a variety of radical contexts. In this chapter I return to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the habitus to speculate on the consequences of inhabiting a densely female radical habitus for Goldman’s thinking and writing. Goldman made her living primarily as a nurse and midwife, tending to bodies, particularly women’s bodies. She gave a great deal of thought to the embodied conditions under which women struggle to birth and feed children, to have fewer children, to sell their labor, to love, to survive. A teenager when she encountered the young women and men of the Russian populist movements, seventeen when she

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was politicized by the Haymarket events, twenty when she moved to New York City to join the anarchist movement, Goldman apprenticed in anarchist life worlds. Those worlds, in Bourdieu’s way of thinking, appropriated her, took her as their own on an embodied level, and in turn enabled her to appropriate the worlds, take them as hers.15 My argument is not that Goldman knew all of these women personally nor that she liked those whom she did know. Somewhat ironically for my argument, Goldman thought of herself as a “man’s woman” and was not particularly inclined to seek women’s friendship; she could also be prickly and demanding, stressing her friendships, sometimes, to the breaking point. Rather, my argument is that scores of radical women were present in the publics through which Goldman moved, shaping these publics in significant ways. The third and final goal of this chapter is to find a way to reproduce, in this text and on the book’s website, something like the effect of these women’s world-making presence, and use that discursive production to reflect on the significance of missing historical data about women in radical politics. These women’s presence enabled Goldman, as she did them; their work contributed to the dense radical habitus within which Emma Goldman was possible. They have been largely forgotten, not by innocent oversight but rather by the highly attenuated, individuated and celebrity-oriented way that memory is produced, leaving us with a stunted version of our radical history. Rather than a rich and complex history of radical thinking and acting, we inherit an emaciated account in which a few stalwart people, either lionized or demonized, fought the establishment. My goal is not to minimize Goldman, but to explore the context that made it possible for there to be an Emma Goldman, and in the exploration to claim radical movements, not just radical individuals, for contemporary feminist histories.

THEORIZING ANARCHIST FEMINISM Shulman points out that Goldman “never doubted that sexual and reproductive matters were at the very heart of women’s inferior position in society.”16 Her emphasis on the social and economic context of women’s bodies led her to link birth control, reproduction, prostitution, marriage, and love in ways that were often quite startling to contemporaries who sought a more sedate account. Goldman prided herself on her spirited confrontation with Kropotkin, in which she persuaded him to acknowledge the relevance of sexuality to anarchism.17 She was equally quick to confront the historian Max Nettlau about his blithe assumptions concerning reproduction and his corresponding dismissal of Goldman’s work for “free motherhood.”18 While Goldman urged women to change their way of thinking

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about these matters, the larger context was always the need for radical, structural change. Shulman rightly insists that Goldman was “always political, fighting to change the social structures that restricted women instead of simply changing her own life.”19 In “The Social Situation of Women,” she wrote that even in revolutionary situations such as Spain, women’s liberation is often not valued as part of the social transformation, and she urged women to ensure that they are part of the larger liberation struggle.20 She understood that patriarchy existed within anarchism as well as in the larger society and was willing to confront her comrades when needed. Goldman once pronounced Max Baginski and Rudolf Rocker to be the only two Germans she knew who were “free”—that is, applied anarchism fully to their lives, including their relations with women.21 Goldman wrote her essay “The Traffic in Women,” published in her 1910 book Anarchism and Other Essays, during a potent moment of moral panic over alleged violations of white women’s virtues through the “white slave traffic.” Penelope Saunders and Gretchen Soderland note the globalization of communications media that enabled the contagion: “Fueled by a rapidly expanding communications system, a veritable traffic in media narratives transported stories of abduction and seduction from England’s daily papers to the United States’ muckraking magazines.” These “late nineteenth century transatlantic media flows” scandalized European and American reading publics with tales of virgins sold into the depraved embrace of sexually perverse aristocrats.22 Middle class reformers began to agitate against trafficking, recruiting the cultural resources of the Second Great Awakening to bring the values of purity to bear on the regulation of sexual labor. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the National Vigilance Committee sent delegates to three international conferences on the traffic in women, contributing to the alarmed international clamor. In 1907, in response to fears that the white slave traffic had reached the United States, journalist George Kibbe Turner wrote a series of muckraking articles for McClure’s magazine called “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities.” Turner reported that “organized ‘vice trusts’ profited from kidnapping and selling native and foreign-born white women into the sexual slave trade.” With the help of city officials and business leaders, Turner told the titillating story of “a major commerce in women [that] was insidiously spreading its tentacles from the major urban centers of Chicago and New York outward to the rest of the nation.”23 Since Turner’s exposé produced McClure’s biggest-selling issue of the year, the magazine was understandably anxious for more. A follow-up article in 1909, “Daughters of the Poor,” accused Tammany Hall and a Jewish organization called the New York Independent Benevolent Association of training “cadets,” procurers who recruited the women into the prostitution

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machine that generated votes and money for corrupt city officials. Other Progressive-era media took up the story, generating a “national sexual and moral panic over the traffic in women.” Saunders and Soderlund summarize historians of the era who say the fears were far out of proportion to any actual trade in white women; following Jeffrey Weeks, they see the campaign as a displacement of other anxieties about “race, urbanization, increased European immigration, and changing gender relations.” The campaign resulted in far-reaching legislative and organizational changes, strengthening the nascent FBI and resulting in the White Slave Traffic Act, or Mann Act, which prohibited transporting unmarried women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The legal changes strengthened state borders, gave states the means to regulate women’s travel, and “criminaliz[ed] interracial couples.”24 A decade later, the Mann Act was used by the FBI to regulate the internal migration of blacks to the North as well as to regulate the movements of political radicals. By 1910, official questions had been raised about the veracity of the claims concerning the white slave traffic, and media coverage focused increasingly on eugenics-based explanations of prostitution. While lascivious stories of innocent girls forced into prostitution by racially ambiguous men still sold well in pulp novels and “white slave” films, Saunders and Soderlund conclude, “defective heredity replaced white slavery as the dominant explanation for women’s entry into prostitution.”25 In both cases, anxieties about immigration and racial otherness merged with fears about women’s sexuality to create hegemonic accounts of sexual labor that steadfastly avoided examining capitalism, patriarchy, or religion. In “The Traffic in Women,” Goldman tried to alter those accounts by showing the combined effect of patriarchy, capitalism, and religion in creating commercial sex. Four other essays on gender and sexuality set the broader context: “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” and “Marriage and Love” focus more on prevailing sexual norms, while “Woman Suffrage” and “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” castigate inadequate reforms in comparison to revolutionary possibilities for women’s liberation. A few other writings, mostly in Mother Earth and in letters to friends, further elaborated her views on women’s liberation. Each essay contributes key elements to the assemblage of ideas that we could call Goldman’s anarchist feminism. In “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” she gives vent to her rage against the reign of bourgeois respectability. Viewing life as a temporal process, she castigates Puritanism for being a particularly nasty example of Stirner’s “fixed idea”: More than art, more than estheticism, life represents beauty in a thousand variations; it is, indeed, a gigantic panorama of eternal change. Puritanism, on the other hand, rests on a fixed and immovable conception of life; it is based

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on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, imposed upon man by the wrath of God. In order to redeem himself man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty.26

Puritanism censors artistic expression, political discussion, and personal intimacy. It destroys lives: its victims include Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. The burdens of Puritanism fall hardest on women: the demand for chastity imposes dangerous sexual ignorance on girls and women and interferes with their ability to develop a healthy sex life; men’s sexual rights to their wives combined with lack of access to contraception condemns married women to “indiscriminate breeding”; and the strict conventions governing the attitudes and behavior of “good women” inevitably produce their necessary other, the “bad woman,” the prostitute.27 The greatest contribution of this essay lies in Goldman’s insistence that Puritanism produces the vices it abhors. Just as the police need crime, schools need ignorance, and the church needs sin, “decent society” needs indecency: Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism. It is its most cherished child, all hypocritical sanctimoniousness notwithstanding. . . . The prostitute is the fury of our century, sweeping across the “civilized” countries like a hurricane, and leaving a trail of disease and disaster. The only remedy Puritanism offers for this illbegotten child is greater repression and more merciless persecution.28

The prostitute is the scapegoat, the cover story for controlling women’s sexuality and shaming people with venereal disease through a “spirit of obtuse narrowmindedness” so that the disease is driven underground and used to control sexuality in general.29 “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” is not, in general, one of Goldman’s strongest essays: the writing is overwrought, never using one adjective when three would do; organic metaphors flourish; the obligatory invidious comparison with Russia is offered; startling statements of fact are made with no sources given, such as the claim that seventeen abortions are committed for every one hundred pregnancies in the United States; and in a glorious but altogether unsupported slap at the temperance movement, Goldman ends on a pro-alcohol note, insisting that stimulus is “as necessary to our life as air.”30 Yet the key contribution is her insight that systems of power produce the thing they claim to oppose. This Nietzschean insight contributes to the much stronger analysis of sexual exploitation in “The Traffic in Women.” “Marriage and Love” continues Goldman’s critique of bourgeois family practices. Both marriage and capitalism are “paternal arrangements.” Primarily a costly insurance policy for women, marriage “condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual

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as well as social.” Men are oppressed by marriage, too, but they don’t feel it as much because their “sphere is wider.” Taught to seek marriage but denied all knowledge of sexuality, the demands of “respectability” rob women of “the most natural and healthy instinct, sex.” Society’s insistence that women marry serves the interests of capital: as Goldman no doubt learned first-hand in her early experience organizing women garment workers, it is harder to organize women than men because women do not see themselves as long-term wage earners. Women have entered the paid labor force in large numbers—there were six million women wage earners in the United States at that time—yet women look at paid work as a transition to marriage, “to be thrown aside for the first bidder.” Further, married wageearning women have two jobs: oppressive labor outside the home and “the drudgery of housework” within it. The “glory of sex experience” and the “glory of motherhood” are distorted within marriage, because women and children have no power over themselves: the woman has “to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself.” Recognizing the likelihood of marital rape, she asks rhetorically why a child conceived “in hatred, in compulsion” is considered legitimate, while those conceived in “free motherhood” by “women who became mothers in freedom by the men they loved” are well-cherished but endure society’s scorn.31 Goldman reveals the dynamic that later feminists have referred to as the protection racket. Marriage is supposed to protect women and children (from other men), when it actually makes them dependent on their “protectors” against whom they have no recourse. “It is the man who creates her sphere,” which shrinks to the limits of his home, whether he is “a brute or a darling.” She becomes a “parasite.” Marriage “incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.”32 She connects “the slavish acquiescence to man’s superiority” that marriage both reflects and perpetuates to the operation of biopower at the macro level: The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine—and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman.33

The “paternal arrangement” of capitalism and marriage organizes women’s emotional and sexual lives to serve the needs of armies, corporations, and states.34

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“Woman Suffrage” and “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” focus attention on the larger context within which first-wave feminism took place. Putting her encounters with Freud to work, Goldman proclaims, “our modern fetich is universal suffrage.” People elevate it to be the entirety of political struggle. “Woe to the heretic who dare question that divinity!” Of course, she assures her readers, she is in favor of equality between men and women: “woman must have the equal right in all affairs of society.” But suffrage is not one of these rights because it gives more power to the propertied classes: “True, in the suffrage States women are guaranteed equal rights to property; but of what avail is that right to the mass of women without property, the thousands of wage workers who live from hand to mouth?” Although Goldman admires the “heroism and sturdiness of the English suffragettes,” and recognizes that some suffragists were affiliated with the Women’s Trade Union League and other working class women’s organizations, on the whole she saw suffrage as a middle class movement that was antagonistic to labor and siphoned energy away from more transformative political struggles.35 In an April 3, 1919 letter to Stella Ballantine from Jefferson City Penitentiary, she laughingly refers to her “conversion” to feminism, then continues: [D]o not think it is the vote which has charmed me, or any of the silly Feminist stuff. I flatter myself to have been more interested in the fate of woman and by far from a broader and deep[er] point of [view] than those who label themselves Feminists and have no interests whatever in the general social questions. . . . I have always been on the side of the underdog, whether that be man, woman or child, as individuals, as a sex, or a class. My quarrl [sic] with the Feminists wasn’t that they were too free, or demanded too much. It was that they were not free enough and that most of them see their slavery apart from the rest of the human family. Finally, also because the Feminists foolishly believe that having a man’s job, or professions, makes them free.36

Two contributions stand out in Goldman’s essay on suffrage: her wholehearted rejection of claims that women are morally superior to men and would purify politics; and her inquiry into the reason why many women, perhaps most women, embrace rather than question patriarchy. “The oftrepeated assertion that woman will purify politics is also but a myth.” If women speak in what later feminists called “a different voice,” it was not always one that should be promoted: “Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.”37 Mother Earth spoofed women’s moralism with articles penned by Margaret Grant (who was actually a man) under the heading “Woman’s Association for the Regulation of the Morals of Others.”38 Goldman does not conclude that women have no significant point

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of view by virtue of their gendered location; in other contexts she argues for the value of women’s gendered experiences and the perspectives those experiences might generate. In “The Social Aspects of Birth Control,” published in Mother Earth in April 1916, she anticipates Simone de Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex that women’s oppression reflects a higher social value on taking life than on giving it: For ages she has carried her burdens. Has done her duty a thousandfold more than the soldier on the battlefield. After all the soldier’s business is to take life. For that he is paid by the State, eulogized by political charlatans, and upheld by public hysteria. But woman’s function is to give life, yet neither the State nor politicians nor public opinion have ever made the slightest provision in return for the life woman has given.39

In “An Urgent Appeal to My Friends,” the lead article in the birth control issue of Mother Earth, Goldman notes, against criticism within anarchist ranks for publishing a special issue on birth control, that the issue “represents the immediate question of life and death to masses of people.”40 This was not hyperbole on her part: her birth control lectures drew huge crowds, leading her to comment in a letter to her friend Anna Strunsky Walling, “there is nothing the people need so much as the knowledge of how to prevent bringing undesirable and undesired children to the world.”41 Her goal is to “treat the Birth Control question from every angle; historic, scientific, social, economic and above all from the point of view of Woman, which of them all is the most decisive.”42 The priority of women’s perspective on birth control is obvious to her because it is part of anarchism’s basic conviction that the people who are most effected by decisions should make those decisions. It was clearly a working class issue, because, as Stansell indicates, contraception was “widely regarded as a rich woman’s secret.”43 At her trial for distributing birth control literature, Goldman located the struggle for “free motherhood” at the intersection of gender and class: The question of birth control is largely a workingman’s question, above all a working woman’s question. She it is who risks her health, her youth, her very life in giving out of herself the units of the race. She it is who ought to have the means and the knowledge to say how many children she shall give, and to what purpose she shall give them, and under what conditions she shall bring forth life.44

In a draft of a later essay on “Methods of Birth Control,” she disputes the common opinion that women seek abortions for trivial reasons: “not because they are frivolous young things, unwilling to accept the responsibilities of motherhood, but because they cannot face the added economic worries and the further drain on their health which a large family entails.”45

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Again it is the intersection of gender and class that best explains women’s perspectives on limiting reproduction. The authorities evidently agreed: they also understood contraception in a class/gender frame. The prosecutor seeking to convict Ben Reitman upon his December 12, 1916 arrest for distributing birth control literature claimed, “if you will let him break the law on birth control, our property and our wives and daughters will not be safe.”46 Access to information about birth control, the prosecutor frankly acknowledged, threatened both capitalism and patriarchy; not wives and daughters themselves, but the control over girls and women by husbands and fathers, was at stake, as was the ability of the propertied class to control the labor of others. The judge in that trial used the word “filthy” to describe Reitman’s actions, suggesting the familiar intersection of dangerous sexuality with unclean Otherness. Along with Italians and blacks, Eastern European Jews, in Goldman’s day, were viewed as “animalistic and uninhibited in their sexual excesses.”47 Information about contraception was filthy, not only because it pertained to sex, but also because Reitman was putting it in the hands of non-elite women. There, the information was ectopic, out of place. Having argued in “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” that the production of “good women” requires the parallel production of “bad women,” in “Woman Suffrage” Goldman requests a third option: “Since woman’s greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes.” Far from seeing women as morally superior to men, Goldman names three arenas in which women, even more than men, worship the fetishes that sustain the status quo: god, war, and the family. Woman, “ever on her knees . . . has been the greatest supporter of all deities.” She quotes approvingly “Nietzsche’s memorable maxim, ‘When you go to woman, take the whip along,’” because it “expressed in one sentence the attitude of woman toward her gods.” Religion makes her a slave, yet “the most ardent churchworkers, the most tireless missionaries the world over, are women, always sacrificing on the alter of the gods that have chained her spirit and enslaved her body.” War takes her sons, brothers, husbands, and lovers, “yet the greatest supporter and worshiper of war is woman. She it is who instills the love of conquest and power into her children . . . it is woman, too, who crowns the victor on his return from the battlefield.” Women devote themselves to their homes, “this modern prison with golden bars,” even though it “saps the very life energy of woman.” Goldman tries to understand women who are not anarchists, not feminists, not radical in any way, by examining their loves. She identifies elements of what we might call the patriarchal sublime—the big, vague, potent signifiers that defy our capacity to fully comprehend them, while beckoning us with their promise. These big ideas do not simply brainwash women who are

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passively receiving their message; rather, Goldman insists, they involve women in extensive activities, contributing the active ideological and material labor that sustains the edifices each fetish needs in order to thrive. Each ideological arena offers women a relationship to an authoritative figure— religious and political leaders, husbands and fathers, God—to reassure the women that these powerful men or male-dominated institutions really do know what is going on, and that woman’s proximity to them will enhance her ability to enjoy participation in the sacred space of church, state, and family. Suffrage is held out to these women as affirmation of their fetishes, thus further embedding women in their oppression: “they insist always that it is woman suffrage which will make her a better Christian and homekeeper, a staunch citizen of the State. Thus suffrage is only a means of strengthening the omnipotence of the very Gods that woman has served from time immemorial.” In embracing suffrage, women “closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.”48 “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” continues the themes of “Woman Suffrage.” In “Woman Suffrage” she emphatically rejects the idea that sexual difference implies a rank ordering: women and men are not the same, but neither is superior nor inferior to the other. Difference does not require hierarchy. In this essay she comes at the question from the equality side: equality does not mean sameness, it means equal worth, equal value in difference: Peace or harmony between the sexes and individuals does not necessarily depend on a superficial equalization of human beings; nor does it call for the elimination of individual traits and peculiarities. The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities. This seems to me to be the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman, can meet without antagonism and opposition.49

Her call for equality that embraces difference, for difference that resists hierarchy, leads her to problematize gender dualism as a whole: true emancipation “will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.” Rather, she insists, “woman’s freedom is closely allied with man’s freedom.”50 Universal human freedom beckons: Regardless of all political and economic theories, treating of the fundamental differences between various groups within the human race, regardless of class and race distinctions, regardless of all artificial boundary lines between women’s rights and man’s rights, I hold that there is a point where these differentiations may meet and grow into one perfect whole.51

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Goldman’s reservations about the consequences of women’s advancement in education and the professions reflect her disdain for the requirements of bourgeois propriety that such advances may entail. It was, she acknowledged, “fair and just” for women to have these opportunities, so long as they did not confuse their individual professional advancement with the liberation of humanity. Further, women should not be willing to give up a fulfilling personal life to secure a fulfilling professional life; if these are the terms set for her, then she must “emancipate herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.” Her economic independence should not require her to police her feelings or her sexuality to sustain the suffocating requirements of respectability. The ability to direct one’s own destiny, to develop one’s creativity to its fullest expression, requires nothing less than the reinvention of love, ending “the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate.”52 Reimagining love without subordination or commodification returns us, full circle, to the pivotal role of prostitution in maintaining the intertwined systems of patriarchy and capitalism. Goldman’s begins “The Traffic in Women” with the wholly appropriate question, why now? Why did the panic over white slavery emerge when it did? Her answer is that a moral crusade was needed to divert the public from apprehending “a great social wrong,” the economic exploitation and sexual commodification of women.53 In this essay Goldman invents an early version of the idea that later feminists call intersectionality: refusing to identify a single cause as more basic than others, she knits together the practices of capitalism, immigration, family structures, and religious authority to explain prostitution. Goldman’s anarchist feminism was ripe for intersectionality because she rejected hierarchy in thinking as well as in organizing social relationships. Anarchists are generally eager to distinguish themselves from Marxists by eschewing the substructure/superstructure distinction. The anarchist mandate “I will not rule, and also ruled I will not be!” translates into the intellectual practice of relating multiple vectors of power horizontally rather than establishing a vertical structure in which an alleged primary cause underwrites all others.54 Since there is no ultimate cause of oppression or foundation of order, there is no final struggle, either, but rather an interlinked network of struggles against “all forms of tyranny and exploitation.”55 Goldman begins her analysis by removing prostitution from a racial context (“white slavery”), and relocating it within capitalism: What is really the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution.56

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She then factors in sexuality and the lack of sex education: It would be one-sided and extremely superficial to maintain that the economic factor is the only cause of prostitution. There are others no less important and vital. . . . I refer to the sex question, the very mention of which causes most people moral spasm. It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex. Everything dealing with that subject is suppressed, and persons who attempt to bring light into this terrible darkness are persecuted and thrown into prison.57

The sexual double standard leads people to expect boys to follow “the call of the wild,” while comparable sexual experiences for women are “looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor.” So the rules creating good girls also create the needed bad girls, while not even keeping the good girls safe: “Fully fifty percent of married men are patrons of brothels,” Goldman writes. “It is through this virtuous element that the married women—nay, even the children—are infected with venereal diseases.”58 Yet social norms condemn only the women: Yet society has not a word of condemnation for the man, while no law is too monstrous to be set in motion against the helpless victim. She is not only preyed upon by those who use her, but she is also absolutely at the mercy of every policeman and miserable detective on the beat, the officials at the station house, the authorities in every prison.59

Bourgeois society, Goldman insists, is fine with the commodification of women’s sexuality, providing it is done within the institution of marriage: “marriage for monetary considerations is perfectly legitimate, sanctified by law and public opinion, while any other union is condemned and repudiated.”60 A good marriage for a middle class woman is largely an economic transaction, where she is expected to make the best deal for her sexual and reproductive services; such material calculations are well within the female path to virtue, protecting the good wife from seeing any parallels between herself and the women who sell their sexual labor outside of marriage. Goldman takes on three misrepresentations of prostitution by the white slavery reformers, who claimed that the prostitutes came from Europe, were already engaged in prostitution before they immigrated, and were predominantly Jewish. Goldman asks, with splendid sarcasm, “How would America ever retain her virtue if Europe did not help her out?” If more foreigners than native-born women appear to be engaged in prostitution in New York, she reasons, it is because the majority of that city’s population is foreign born; but in cities with smaller immigrant communities, “the number of foreign prostitutes is by far a minority.” Low wages in shops and factories,

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combined with “the thoroughly American custom for excessive display of finery and clothes, which of course necessitates money,” are more than adequate conditions to recruit working class women into prostitution; “there is no reason to believe that any set of men would go to the risk and expense of getting foreign products, when American conditions are overflooding the market with thousands of girls.” Finally, Jewish girls, she points out, nearly always immigrate in families and are extremely unlikely to be imported for prostitution in significant numbers.61 For a twenty-first-century reader, it is odd, perhaps quaint, to hear Europe represented by Americans as “the swamp whence come all the social diseases of America.”62 Yet “Europe” here is not a reference to other industrialized nations, as it would be today, but rather a code for people whose claims to be fully white are carefully scrutinized and hotly contested in the United States. Europe was a prime source of immigrants—Slavs, Celts, Italians, Jews—who were associated with poverty, disease, filth, and vice. The U.S. self-understanding still promoted itself as the New World garden, the fresh beginning, where the old European vices and confinements are swept away.63 The myth of American innocence vis-à-vis old world sin was of course a convenient disguise for home-grown oppression, while the overlay of Europeans, prostitutes, and Jews maintained the familiar weave of sexual debasement with the racialized Other. Considerable empirical research supports Goldman’s arguments. In an earlier version of the essay, entitled “The White Slave Traffic,” she ridicules George Kibbe Turner’s famous but “superficial” exposé in McClure’s magazine for pretending to “outraged morality” while avoiding any comment on the actual causes of prostitution.64 She refers to Dr. William Sanger’s book, The History of Prostitution, to show that prostitutes are generally working class girls and women, and that nearly one-quarter (490 out of the 2000 cases to which Sanger refers) were married.65 She also cites Dr. Alfred Blaschko, a German physician and author of some note who studied prostitution and venereal disease for his book Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century, as well as her standard source on sexual matters, Havelock Ellis, in his book Sex and Society. Blaschko argued that nineteenthcentury urbanization, industrialization, and economic dislocation have “given prostitution an impetus never dreamed of at any period in human history.”66 Both Blaschko and Ellis conclude that attacks on prostitution by states and moral crusaders “accomplish nothing save driving the evil into secret channels,” and in fact “the most stringent the methods of persecution the worse the condition becomes.”67 Goldman also praises the research of Reginald Wright Kaufman, author of The House of Bondage and a journalist of some renown. The New York Times covered Kaufman’s return from Europe, where he and his (unnamed) wife had researched prostitution for eight months and concluded that everywhere the cause

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is poverty. A woman would need to make $8/week to support herself in New York, Kaufman maintained, while the average wage, according to the last census, was $6/week: “My hope is better wages for women. It is all we can do; all that will help in any way.”68 Goldman cites her friend, reformer Gilbert Roe, who lost his position as assistant attorney general of Cook County, Illinois, for openly charging that New England girls were shipped to Panama to service U.S. soldiers there.69 She also cites James Bronson Reynolds, a well-known progressive era reformer and a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, who championed “sex education, sex hygiene and the passage and enforcement of national and state laws, for the better promotion and protection of public health and public morals.”70 Referring to Bronson as “a staunch American citizen and friend of the future Napoleon of America,” she cites his claim that in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yokohama, “American prostitutes have made themselves so conspicuous that in the Orient, ‘American Girl’ is synonymous with prostitute.”71 Concluding from this wealth of evidence that vice crusades only strengthen the police, expand corruption, and worsen the conditions of the women themselves, she calls for an end to legal and social persecution of prostitutes: “An educated public opinion, freed from the legal and moral hounding of the prostitute, can alone help to ameliorate present conditions.” To fully address the issue, a revolution is necessary: “as to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values—especially the moral ones—coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.”72 In these essays Goldman’s target is the wrong kind of reform as much as it is the conditions that produce the need for reform. Sanctimonious moralists such as George Kibbe Turner “discover” the “unheard-of conditions” of the white slave traffic, giving vent to self-indulgent moral outrage, while lawmakers gear up to pass new laws “to check the horror.” In the process, the underlying conditions producing prostitution are obfuscated, the public is amused for a time, and “a few more fat political jobs—parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives, and so forth” are created.73 While some kinds of reforms, such as decriminalizing or legalizing prostitution, could be at least a step in the right direction, the white slave “reforms” are explicitly counterproductive: they produce the thing they are designed to oppose. Suffrage, for Goldman, fell into this same category: under no circumstances did she see it as a valuable step in the right direction. Instead, a revolution is required: a structural reorganization of collective life, which she often referred to as “external,” and a reinvention of our subjectivity, which she called “internal”: Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex

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commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women.74

GENDERED ANARCHIST HABITUS Numerous commentators have asserted that anarchism was a maledominated movement. Stansell, for example, states that both Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg were “token women in their respective milieus.”75 In his essay on Goldman, Jason Wehling chattily comments, “There is no denying that the anarchist movement was largely made up of men—Emma along with Voltairine de Cleyre were the exceptions.”76 “Despite her status in the anarchist movement,” Marion Morton wrote in her 1992 biography, “she was subordinate to powerful male leaders.”77 Of the nine leading anarchists featured on the website of Anarchy Archives, only one—Goldman—is female. Out of fifty-one “lesser lights,” seven are women.78 Yet I believe this assessment is misleading. It is based on the historical visibility of anarchists who wrote and published lasting material, rather than on a close reading of a greater variety of textual and organizational marks within anarchist landscapes. Many, many women were active in anarchist circles in other capacities, and some of them have left traces behind. What difference does it make for our understanding of Goldman if we attend to a forgotten context of active, influential radical women? We can utilize Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus to theorize the gendered workings of Goldman’s world. Habitus, Bourdieu tell us, are “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” In the idea of habitus, Bourdieu is combining structures and processes: habitus are the material conditions of existence that are both self-generating structures and articulated processes. Habitus are life worlds that exhibit regularities but are not explicitly regulated by particular agents; they are functional, but not because of anyone’s conscious mastery of their operations; they are “collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”79 The systems of dispositions that make up habitus are layered relationships of bodies and movements. Disposition, Bourdieu writes, “expresses first the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as structure; it also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of

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the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination.”80 Bourdieu’s language for explaining habitus circles around different forms of the verb pose: transpose, disposition, predisposed. The Latin root pose means to put or place. Etymologically, it has become mixed with the Latin pausere, to halt, rest, or pause.81 The words Bourdieu employs center on the problematics of bodies moving and stopping in space. The prefix dis means away, apart, or not; trans means across or over; pre means before. Placed/paused away or apart; placed/paused over or across; placed/paused before: the systems of dispositions making up the habitus name the organized tendencies of bodies to move and place themselves and to be moved and placed. The habitus, Bourdieu explains, makes it possible for things to “go without saying”: “One of the fundamental effects of the orchestration of habitus is the production of a commonsense world endowed with the objectivity secured by consensus on the meaning (sens) of practices and the world, in other words the harmonization of agents’ experiences and the continuous reinforcement that each of them receives from the expression, individual or collective (in festivals, for example), improvised or programmed (commonplaces, sayings), of similar or identical experiences.” The habitus has its temporality: “a past which survives in the present and tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practices structured according to its principals.”82 The habitus projects an elsewhere, a “not yet,” a future moment in chains of associations. I speculate that, while Goldman was obviously affected by the hegemonic habitus of her society, she spent a great deal of her face-to-face time within an alternative habitus, an anarchist habitus, one that was saturated with the bodies of radical women who contributed to and received anarchist, feminist understandings of what Bourdieu calls “the impossible, the possible, and the probable.” There was more than one ethnoscape available to Goldman, more than one world within her world. I am particularly interested in the women’s presence in the anarchist counterpublic, not because the men were less important but because their gendered presence would have been, I imagine, less unexpected and less disruptive of prevailing sex/gender dispositions. “Systems of dispositions,” Bourdieu explains, “are active only when embodied in a competence acquired in the course of a particular history.” The systems of dispositions that inclined anarchist women to their ways of being, anchored in the embodied capabilities produced and required in a radical mileau, mediated relations among women and between women and men. “Undertakings of collective mobilization cannot succeed,” Bourdieu explains, “without a minimum of concordance between the habitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g., prophet, party leader, etc.) and the dispositions of those whose aspirations and world-view they express.”83 A critical mass of radical women in anarchist publics may have made anarchist feminist

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aspirations seem reasonable, capable of being widely embraced if only, as Goldman said, people would “wake up.”84 Metaphors of rebirth, which Goldman regularly used to talk about her political awakening in her youth, could refer to the idea of starting over in the anarchist habitus, leaving the hegemonic world behind and relocating real life within radical political spaces. Goldman’s frequent expressions of disappointment with the masses can be read as a constitutive part of her anarchist apprenticeship: she expected the People to rebel, was disappointed when they did not, yet always found the means to overcome each bitter pill and go on. The world of the anarchist movement provided the capacity to imagine and help to produce an anarchist “elsewhere” toward which it was possible to struggle. Like habitus, Bourdieu uses hexis, meaning an active condition or a stable arrangement of parts, to theorize the mutually constituting relations among bodies, spaces, and meanings. Hexis too revolves around the Latin root pose: it segues into possession, position, disposition, posture. “Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values.” Our habitus transmits: the apprentice learns “the principles of the ‘art,’ and the art of living,” some known explicitly, others unconsciously understood; “every society provides for structural exercises tending to transmit this or that form of practical mastery.” To apprentice in a social world is to come to an embodied hexis that is “achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy.”85 Goldman’s life world, I argue, staged postures, impositions, dispositions, and possessions that were implicitly embedded in a significantly female space. The hidden pedagogy could have been the didactic consequences of an unconscious recognition of the specific spatial contours created and occupied by large numbers of female bodies. Like Deleuze, Bourdieu refers to “the dialectical relationship between the body and a space” as a “structural apprenticeship which leads to the embodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world.”86 The life world of anarchists took in, made a place for, Goldman’s embodied presence which was thus enabled to take in, make a place for, that life world, and on and on and on. My argument, ironically, is opposed to Goldman’s own self-understanding as someone who often struggled alone. In her account of the dark time after the assassination of McKinley, Goldman recalled her isolation, as others in the movement joined the general condemnation of Czolgosz’s act. Similarly, writing to Theodore Schroeder, Goldman laments the hypocrisy of those who claim to stand for freedom of speech while retreating when put to the test: “[A]s I have fought my struggle pretty much alone all through these twenty-six years, I don’t propose to whine because the proclaimers

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of liberty will not stand by me. I have long ago learned to realize that only he is truly free who can stand quite alone.”87 Yet, as discussed in chapter 2, she had several comrades who similarly braved public approbrium to defend McKinley’s assassin, and she certainly had many stalwart colleagues in the free speech fights. More importantly, she always had a cohort of fellow radicals to whom she could address such laments. My point is not to underestimate the degree to which the general public demonized Goldman, but rather to recover the more intimate context of the anarchist movement within which Goldman was not alone.

A PUBLIC OF WOMEN While Goldman scorned the pious belief that women were morally superior to men and would “clean up” politics, she recognized that women, especially those who had enough freedom from daily economic hardship to cultivate some education and “the energy to dream,” could be dynamic sources of social change. Mirroring the populist women who struggled against the Tsar, Goldman argued, “in America, women and not men, will prove to be the most ardent workers for social reconstruction. Already we find in all radical movements women as the most zealous workers.”88 There is reason to guess that anarchist groups during Goldman’s time and place were roughly one-third or even one-half women. In his 1970s interviews with aging anarchists, historian Paul Avrich spoke with sixty-nine women out of a total of one hundred and eighty-two persons.89 In a photograph taken at a Ferrer Center picnic at Leonard Abbott’s cottage on July 4, 1914, the day of the Lexington Avenue explosion, about twenty-two of the fifty picnickers are women.90 A photograph of a staff meeting at Stelton around 1920 contained four women and nine men.91 In Steve Fischler’s and Joel Sucher’s 1980 documentary film Free Voice of Labor, old photos of anarchist groups contain roughly one-third women. At least a third of the subscription list for Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, helpfully retyped by the FBI, was identifiably women. (Since many subscribers used only their first initial, the number is probably higher.) I recognize that each of these sources is questionable: old photographs were often from anarchist picnics or other social events, where family members who were not active in the movement might be present to swell the numbers of female bodies. Since women live longer, on the whole, than men, interviews in the 1970s with activists from the turn of the previous century might be skewed toward surviving women. Also, there were detectable ethnic/national differences among anarchist communities, with Jewish anarchist communities far more likely to include activist women than were the Italians or the Spanish. Further, anarchists sometimes played with pseudonyms: a recurrent satiric column in Mother

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Earth was signed with a woman’s name but actually written by a man.92 Similarly, one suspects that the name Ida Rebelsky, one of the signatories on an anarchist tract for the Union of New York Cloak and Dressmakers, was an activist joke.93 Nonetheless, the combined weight of these elusive sources is suggestive. It beckons one toward speculations based on what some historians dismiss as “magpie” history, amateurish efforts to collect shiny things from here and there, with inadequate attention to structures and boundaries.94 Since, however, I have few other ways to recover the presence of rank and file anarchist women except to look for them in Goldman’s wake, so to speak, that is what I am doing. A wake, of course, is a track or turbulence left by something going forth across land or water; a wake is also a vigil for the dead, as well as an act of becoming cognizant of something that had not been known before. In all these senses, my wake for departed anarchist women is intended to track traces of radical political turbulence, recognize the contributions of the dead, and stir the still-living to a state of wakefulness about a hidden radical past. The list below offers a brief sample of the longer list, found on this book’s website, of the women who moved within Goldman’s own radical circles as well as in other communities that intersected with hers. I call them “The 800,” although this arbitrary appellation indicates only the approximate number I have identified to this point. I provide only names and brief descriptions of these women. Many of them are mentioned in Goldman’s autobiography or in the pages of her journal. I have listed them by the fullest name available; in some cases, such as when women were thanked by Goldman in Mother Earth for hosting her lectures, only their honorific and last name are given. Some of “The 800” were stalwart figures of anarchist activism, including Natasha Notkin in Philadelphia and Louise Olivereau in Seattle. Rose Yuster Abbott, Mollie Albert, Naomi Bercovici, and Margaret Pearle McLeod were active in the Ferrer Center. Many helped organize Goldman’s talks: Edith Adams in Chicago; Lizzie Holmes in Denver; Yetta Bienenfeld and Agnes Inglis in Detroit; Evangeline Bessenberg in Indianapolis; Miss and Mrs. Craig in Los Angeles; Kitty Beck in Portland; Dorothy Rogers in Toronto; Mrs. Aron and Rose Bernstein in Montreal. Some were teachers in anarchist schools; others were residents of anarchist colonies. I have not included women who were primarily known as suffragists, temperance activists, spiritualists, club women, settlement workers, antiwar activists, birth control activists, or activists in other political movements of the time, unless a specific individual (for example, suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell or settlement house leaders Lillian Wald and Lavinia Dock) also fell within Goldman’s and/or anarchism’s chain of influence. I have included only those socialists (such as Helen Keller and Jessie Ashley) and

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trade unionists (such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Mother Jones) who intersected with Goldman’s world. I have included women who edited or wrote for anarchist journals, such as Lisa Brilliant at the Road to Freedom and Sara Bard Field for The Blast, and women such as Mary Alspaugh and Estelle Baker who wrote for the anarchist-friendly International Socialist Review. I have included foreign anarchist women who came to the United States during Goldman’s time or edited journals to which she probably subscribed, including Luisa Capetillo, founder of La Mujer. I’ve included women who, while not anarchists themselves, were sufficiently open to radical ideas to host Goldman, to move in similar circles, and/or to support Goldman’s activities, including dancer and singer Josephine Baker, union organizer Annie Besant, writer Neith Boyce, dancer Isadora Duncan, and birth control activist Mary Ware Dennett. I’ve included revolutionaries from other countries whom Goldman knew, either personally or by their work: Angelica Balabanoff, Catherine Breshkovskaya, and Vera Figner in Russia; Rosa Luxemburg in Germany; Louise Michel in France; Federica Montseny and Therese Claramunt in Spain; Teresa Gonzales in Mexico; Kaneko Fumiko and Kano Sugano in Japan. I have made educated guesses about women who, while not mentioned by name in Goldman’s publications, moved in the same political circles with others who were mentioned. I have not included Goldman’s other women correspondents if I have no other information on them besides the fact of their correspondence. I have listed them in alphabetical order because the relative neutrality of the organizing principle highlights the sheer bulk of the list and invites it to grow. Were one to include all the women from all the relevant political movements in the hypothetical multi-volume list that would be thus created, my argument about women’s presence in public space would be even more fully illustrated, yet it would also be more diffused. Here, my aim is to sketch in concrete detail the radical female habitus of Goldman’s anarchism. Many irregularities and oddities people this most regular and straightforward of forms, an alphabetical numerical list. It imitates a linear apprehension of reality; it masquerades as an orderly presentation of data. The rhetorical authority of the list suggests that the material is straightforward, coherent, factual. Yet, at the same time, this blunt instrument may convey something of the sheer weight of the archive, the stubborn quantity of accumulating traces. I invite the reader to dwell for a time with The 800, to think about the possibilities for political life suggested by their presence, their voices, their words, their work. The impersonal order of these assembled names might create something like the archive effect, a recurring female bodily hexis that spreads over the surface of Goldman’s time and space. Behind the rhetorical authority of the list lies a whole landscape of possibilities. Names, for example, are complex; one cannot assume names are stable. Many names were changed at Ellis Island. Other families changed

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their names to avoid authorities: the Luchkovsky family, for example, became the Sosnovsky family to avoid the draft in Tsarist Russia.95 Women’s names are especially difficult: some women are only mentioned in the context of their husbands or children. Yet I have included them when Goldman specifically recognized their presence in her activist life, since to do otherwise would be to cooperate with women’s historical disappearance behind the names and identities of their husbands. Who is left out? There were strong women in her family. Her grandmother, to whom Goldman casually referred as a storekeeper and a smuggler, visited her in prison at Passover. She brought “a large white handkerchief containing matzoth, gefülte fish, and some Easter cake of her own baking.” The elderly lady was proud of her granddaughter for being such a good Jewish girl, “better than any rabbi’s wife because she gave everything to the poor.”96 Goldman’s mother, Mrs. Taube Goldman, became a respected leader in Rochester’s Jewish community, leading projects to build a local orphanage, to bankrupt an unethical business, and to organize numerous charities and lodges. When the chairwoman of one of the lodges tried to curtail a lengthy speech by Mrs. Goldman, the lady announced defiantly, “The whole United States Government could not stop my daughter Emma Goldman from speaking, and a fine chance you have to make her mother shut up!”97 Her gentle sister Helena, who risked their father’s wrath to love and protect Goldman in their childhood, was a socialist who subscribed to Free Society and Lucifer and collected funds for Berkman’s legal defense.98 There were many women whose trace was lighter than that left by these named participants who are to be found in the radical historical records. There were the “forty prominent San Francisco women pledging their willingness to distribute pamphlets and go to prison in solidarity with Emma and Ben” over their birth control campaign.99 There were the unnamed women who organized food and clothing for I.W.W. men during the free speech fights in San Diego.100 There were the women marching with Goldman at the Union Square demonstration on behalf of the unemployed where Goldman gave her “take bread” speech. She recalled in her autobiography: “The girls and women were in front, I at their head carrying a red banner.”101 There were the women, beyond those named here, who lived at Stelton, Mohegan, Home, and other anarchist colonies, who often did so in order for their children to attend the Modern Schools; these women were likely involved in the schools and in the creation of community emanating from the schools. There were the women of the “Yiddish intelligentsia” in Montreal who were “proud that I was one of their race.” Goldman recalled fondly, “It was worth coming back to Montreal to reach their Yiddish hearts by the grace of the goi Walt Whitman.” 102 There were many hundreds of women anarchists in the Spanish revolution who go unnamed here.103

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There were “the girl students of the University [in Winnipeg] who invited me to speak [and] were the saving grace of my ordeal,” along with the “factory girls during their lunch hour” and the members of the Council of Jewish Women.104 There were the two unnamed Russian anarchist girls, aged fifteen and seventeen, whose release Goldman and Berkman were able to effect after the girls were arrested for protesting the “unbearable conditions of the politicals” in Russian jails.105 There were the women who attended Goldman’s Butte, Montana birth control lectures and “stood up in a public assembly and frankly avowed their hatred of their position as domestic drudges and child-bearers.”106 The archive effect thins out over this uneven terrain, as the traces of radical women become unbearably light.

NOTES 1. Janet Day, “The ‘Individual’ in Goldman’s Anarchist Theory,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Penny Weiss and Loretta Kensinger (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 109–136. 2. Bonnie Haaland, Emma Goldman: Sexuality and the Impurity of the State (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994), 5. 3. Martha Solomon, Emma Goldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 77. 4. Alix Kates Shulman, “Biographical Introduction,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, third edition, ed. Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 36. 5. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, “Introduction: Power as a Theme in Women’s History,” in Women and Power in American History: A Reader (vol II from 1870), eds. Sklar and Dublin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 3–7. 6. Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” in Women and Power in American History, eds. Sklar and Dublin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 16. 7. Alix Kates Shulman, “Emma Goldman’s Feminism: A Reappraisal,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 17. 8. Lynne Farrow, “Feminism as Anarchism,” in Quiet Rumors: an AnarchaFeminist Reader ed. Dark Star Collective (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002), 15. 9. Peggy Kornegger, “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” in Quiet Rumors, ed. Dark Star Collective (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002), 26. 10. William Marion Reedy, “Daughter of the Dream,” Mother Earth III, no. 10 (December 1908): 357. 11. Harry Kelly, “Roll Back the Dead,” unpublished manuscript, quoted in “Directory of Individuals,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 530 12. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 2. 13. “Talk with Emma Goldman,” New York Sun (January 6, 1901), in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, Made for America, eds.

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Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 428. 14. See Dana Ward, Anarchy Archive: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, accessed March 10, 2008. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ Anarchist_archives/index.html for biographies and bibliographies for those he calls “bright but lesser lights.” 15. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 89. 16. Alix Kates Shulman, “Emma Goldman’s Feminism,” 8. 17. Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) (originally publised by Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 253. 18. Goldman to Max Nettlau, February 8, 1935, in Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter (New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983), 254–65. 19. Alix Kates Shulman, “Emma Goldman’s Feminism,” 9. 20. Goldman, “Die Soziale Stellung der Frau,“ Die Soziale Revolution (May 1937): 20, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990), reel 53. 21. Goldman to Berkman, February 20, 1929, in Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 145. 22. Penelope Saunders and Gretchen Soderlund, “Threat or Opportunity? Sexuality, Gender, and the Ebb and Flow of Trafficking as Discourse,” Canadian Women’s Studies 22, no 3–4 (2003): 17. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 18. 25. Ibid. 26. Goldman, “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 167. 27. Ibid., 168, 171. 28. Ibid.,173. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 172, 176. 31. Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 235, 228, 228, 231, 233, 233, 231, 235, 236, 237. 32. Ibid., 234, 235. 33. Ibid., 237. 34. Ibid., 235. 35. Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 195, 195, 197, 201, 206. 36. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, April 3, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 37. Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” 203. 38. Margaret Grant, “This Man Gorky,” Mother Earth I, no. 3 (May 1906): 8. 39. Goldman, “Social Aspects of Birth Control,” Mother Earth XI, no. 2 (April 1916) in Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, ed. Peter Glassgold (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 200), 136.

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40. Goldman, “Urgent Appeal,” Mother Earth XI, no. 2 (April, 1916): 450. 41. Goldman to Anna Strunsky Walling, July 8, 1916, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray et al., reel 10. 42. Goldman, “Urgent Appeal,” 450–451. 43. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 237. 44. Goldman, trial transcript, The Masses 8, no. 8 (June 1916): 27, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 48. 45. Goldman, “Methods of Birth Control,” 1935 [fragment], 21, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 53. 46. Ben Reitman, “Justice in Cleveland and Rochester,” Following the Monkey, 341–344, The Ben Lewis Reitman Papers, box 2, folder 23. University of Illinois at Chicago Library. 47. Stansell, American Moderns, 296. 48. Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” 198–199, 195, 196, 196, 196, 196, 197, 197. My re-statement of Goldman’s position draws from Slavoj Žižek’s analysis in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). Goldman overcame her opposition sufficiently to offer suffragists a discount at her scalp and facial massage business. See Falk, “Raising Her Voices: An Introduction,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 48. 49. Goldman, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 213–214. 50. Ibid., 224–25, 219. 51. Ibid., 213. 52. Ibid., 215, 224. 53. Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 177. 54. John Henry McKay, “Anarchy,” Mother Earth III, no. 3 (May 1908): 119. 55. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 6. 56. Goldman, “Traffic in Women,” 178. 57. Ibid.,184. 58. Ibid., 184–185, 188. 59. Ibid., 188. 60. Ibid., 185. 61. Ibid., 189, 189, 189–190, 191–192. 62. Ibid., 191. 63. See David Noble, The Eternal Adam in the New World Garden (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1971). 64. Goldman, “The White Slave Traffic,” in Mother Earth IV, no. 11 (January 1910) in Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, ed. Peter Glassgold (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001),115. 65. Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” 180. 66. Alfred Blaschko, quoted in Goldman, “Traffic in Women,” 181. 67. Goldman, “Traffic in Women,” 194.

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68. “Says Small Wages Make White Slaves,” New York Times (November 5, 1911). 69. Goldman, “Traffic in Women,” 190. Roe evidently had conducted a “mediasavvy campaign against ‘white slavery’” but nonetheless was fired for tarnishing the image of the armed forces (“Crime and Chicago’s Images,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, accessed March 3, 2008. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/352.html.) 70. James Bronson Reynolds, “The Union of the American Vigilance Association and the American Federation for Sex Hygiene,” accessed December 9, 2010. (http:// www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Vigilance/Reynolds_1913.html.) See also Reynolds, “Injustice of the Present System,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 38 (1911): 83–85. 71. Goldman, “Traffic in Women,” 190–191. 72. Ibid., 194. 73. Ibid., 177, 178. 74. Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” 211. 75. Stansell, American Moderns, 131. 76. Jason Wehling, “Anarchy in Interpretation: The Life of Emma Goldman,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, eds. Weiss and Kensinger, 33. 77. Marian J. Morton, Emma Goldman and the American Left (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 62. 78. Dana Ward, Anarchy Archives, accessed December 9, 2010. http://dwardmac .pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/. 79. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72 (italics in original). 80. The translator, Richard Nice, notes that the “semantic cluster” around disposition is “rather wider in French than in English” but “the equivalence is adequate.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 214 fn 1. 81. See Dictionary.com Unabridged, accessed March 8, 2008. http://dictionary .reference.com/search?q=pose. 82. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 80 (italics in original), 82. 83. Ibid., 78, 81 (italics in original), 81. 84. Goldman, Living My Life, 123. 85. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 8 (italics in original), 88 (italics in original), 94. 86. Ibid., 89. 87. Goldman to Theodore Schroeder, April 16, 1916, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, reel 9. 88. Goldman, “The End of the Odyssey, Mother Earth V, no. 5 (July 1910): 159–163. 89. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005). 90. Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 203. 91. Ibid., 298. 92. My thanks to Candace Falk for pointing out that columns written in Mother Earth under the name Margaret Grant are actually by a male writer. 93. A close-up of this document in Free Voice of Labor shows these identifiably female signatures on a document attributed to “The Anarchist Workers’ Group”: Minnie Edelman, Bluma Gobin, Bessie Horn, Sonia Pinski, Gussie Mogulesco, Rose Pesotta, Riva Hertzberg, and Ida Rebelsky. (Another signee was J. Davidson.)

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To contemporary ears, “Mogulesco” may sound satiric, but Zelig Mogulesco was a popular comedian in Jacob Adler’s Yiddish theatre company in New York City at the turn of the century. (See Irving Howe, World of our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 468–478, passim.) Getting even more suspicious, one might suspect that the name Pinski, for someone working in the needle trades, was a joke, but David Pinski, editor of the Yiddish labor paper Tsayt, was a well-known writer. (See Howe, 544.) 94. Historian David Henige warns that “practices such as piecing together fragmentary memories from ‘inarticulate’ informants into some kind of bricolage constitute magpie history. Treating idiosyncratic testimonies as complementary, and all as grist for the same mill, cannot rescue the past from oblivion. The hand of the historian simply rests too lightly on the tiller.”(“Review: Omphaloskepsis and the Infantilizing of History,” The Journal of African History 36 no. 2 (1995): 316.) Infantilizing history, Henige charges, strays too far from the evidence and “can degenerate into little more than indulgent and diffuse authorial musings projected onto, but hardly into, the historical record” (319). Recognizing the danger of the authorial will to power over one’s material, I insist that the risk is worth taking. 95. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 253. 96. Goldman, Living My Life, 144. 97. Ibid., 697. 98. “Directory of Individuals,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, Made for America, 1890–1901, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 535. 99. Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 246. 100. Goldman, Living My Life, 495. 101. Ibid., 122. 102. Ibid., 992. 103. For an account of anarchist women during the Spanish Revolution, see Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 104. Goldman, Living My Life, 988–89. 105. Ibid., 784–87. 106. Ibid., 539.

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7 Political Thinking in the Streets

“With Prohibition coming in and Emma Goldman going out, t’will be a dull country.” —A “big lawyer” in Washington, D.C., at Goldman’s deportation1

In this chapter I want to return to the challenge posed by Virginia Woolf at the beginning of this book: “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.” For feminists and our fellow travelers, what does Goldman offer? What sort of foremother is Goldman for us now? I have argued in chapter 1 that Goldman’s unrelenting focus on violence against workers makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of capitalism, and in chapter 6 that Goldman’s analyses of marriage and prostitution are strong contributions to our explorations of sex, gender, and class. In chapter 2, I have made a case for her substantial role in the creation of anarchist counterpublics, and in chapter 3 for her emergence as a thinker through her apprenticeship in anarchism. In chapter 4 I raised questions about her inability or unwillingness to engage the genre and media challenges posed by modernism and film, and in chapter 5 I sought to understand her lack of attention to African American political struggles of her day. In each of these encounters my goal has been to understand Goldman’s thinking within her own social and historical context, as well as to glean from her analyses resources useful for us, today. This final chapter turns again to the kind of thinking Goldman offers, not only what she had to say but the practices through which she made her thinking happen. I have suggested that Goldman’s political thinking can best be understood as event based, ectopic, and untimely. By event based, I mean that her thinking addresses and is stimulated by specific political 277

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situations—a strike, a repressive state action, a revolution. By ectopic I mean that it is out of place, located in subaltern spaces, not the expected spaces of the state or the academy. By untimely I mean that it is out of step with prevailing currents of thought; it disrupts the dominant temporal regime. “Untimely” and “ectopic” are mirrors of one another, the first temporal, the second spatial. Both connote ways of mapping events that are geared to what Rancière calls “the part that has no part.” I end this book with some further reflections on the payoff offered by Emma Goldman’s political thinking. What has she given us that we can use? What else could she have done?

ROADS NOT TAKEN Alice Wexler complains in Emma Goldman in Exile that Goldman could have made significant contributions to anarchist thinking during her time in exile had she not “dissipated her energies in thousands of letters that repeated over and over the same litanies, but did not advance the cause of anarchism.”2 I suggest that we frame her prodigious letter-writing differently: not a waste of time, but a technique for creating herself, was at stake in this extraordinary epistolary investment. I will return to this argument later, but first I want to acknowledge Wexler’s larger point: there were potential directions Goldman’s thinking could readily have taken, projects begun but not completed or imagined but not begun. She could have used the last fifteen years of her life, when she had a more or less secure home at St. Tropez as a base, and many months between her Canadian, British, and European lecture tours, to go more deeply into her ideas. Barry Pateman agrees, indicating that her time in exile was mostly spent reacting to the events in Russia, rather than pushing anarchist thinking forward.3 Goldman’s high profile as a radical outsider brought considerable pressure on her to keep explaining her anarchism, over and over, at the expense of exploring fresh material. Essays such as “What I Believe,” first published in 1908 in the New York World, and “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” the lead essay in her 1911 book Anarchism and Other Essays, pushed her writing in a declamatory direction, with the attendant rhetorical expectations. Christine Stansell notes that, on the lecture circuit, each audience constituted a new group of beginners: “Because she directed herself implicitly to the neophyte, her lectures could wear thin for those who had already arrived.”4 The respites from lecturing and from constantly explaining herself to an alarmed and disbelieving public could have been used to take on something new, to embrace a fresh challenge and further refine her thinking. Several possibilities presented themselves to Goldman in exile. She speculated in a letter on April 28, 1937, to “Auntie” (her friend Martha

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Gordon Crotch) that, if she did not get a second visa to re-enter the United States, she might go to Palestine. Had this path materialized, she might have been provoked to develop her critique of Zionism, or to see anarchism in practice in the kibbutz movement.5 She might have taken up the suggestion from Ann Lord, her publicity agent during her 1934 tour of the United States, that she and Berkman write a one- or three-act play depicting the experiences of the deportees.6 Lord was willing to pitch the project to a Broadway producer, thinking it would attract interest in dramatizing Goldman’s autobiography. Goldman’s considerable experience in reading and interpreting plays could have been put to a fresh use had she turned her hand toward writing one. The two most intriguing of these lost opportunities, in my estimation, are the books she might have written on the revolution in Spain and on women in prison. In a letter to English anarchist Herbert Read on October 7, 1939, she mentions her plan to write about Spain.7 David Porter’s excellent collection of Goldman’s letters about Spain, which I will examine more closely below, is the closest we have to such a book. Coming to terms with the successes and failures of the Spanish anarchists could have pushed her to continue rethinking revolution. Less well known was her desire to write about women in prison.8 This book could have been a fascinating document, as Goldman was uniquely positioned to analyze women’s imprisonment in relation to larger structures of power. Recalling her fellow inmates in Jefferson City Prison, Goldman writes in her autobiography: the inmates in the Missouri penitentiary, like those at Blackwell’s Island, were recruited from the lowest social strata. With the exception of my cell neighbour, who was a woman above the average, the ninety-odd prisoners were poor wretches of the world of poverty and drabness. Coloured or white, most of them had been driven to crime by conditions that had greeted them at birth. My first impression was strengthened by daily contact with the inmates during a period of twenty-one months. The contentions of criminal psychologists not withstanding, I found no criminals among them, but only unfortunates, broken, hapless, and hopeless human beings.9

Goldman was much loved by the other prisoners—she shared her copious gifts of food and personal items, smuggled forbidden communications out of prison via visiting friends, and arranged for books and magazines to be available to the women prisoners, who were initially not allowed to access the men’s library. She surreptitiously nursed ill patients during the influenza epidemic, when nearly half of the women inmates were stricken. The inmates showed their gratitude by providing personal services or helping Goldman “make the task,” that is, complete the required number of jackets per day.10 It was usually the black inmates, Goldman

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observed, who had the strength and skill to make the task, and could even earn a bit of money by helping other inmates complete their labor. On the eve of her birthday, her “coloured friends” presented her with the full complement of required jackets for the following day, allowing her a labor-free birthday. Goldman even learned some new dances in prison, shared with her by adoring fellow prisoners. Goldman’s letters and recollections from prison contain some glimpses into the direction such a book might have taken. She noted that a number of women were imprisoned for killing their husbands. She spoke of the women by name, including brief biographies that could have been expanded: Mrs. Schweiger, in ill health, unable to attain a divorce due to her devout Catholicism, and brooding over her husband’s affairs, killed him “in a fit of homicidal melancholia.”11 Aggie Meyers faced a life sentence for killing her husband; Goldman suggests that she had been framed for the murder by another man who turned state’s evidence. Incarcerated at age eighteen, Aggie was allowed a small dog, Riggles; the dog was “her only tie in life” and highlighted “the heart-hunger of the unfortunate the law’s stupidity had stamped a hardened criminal.”12 A “Chinese girl” was serving a long term for killing her physically abusive and philandering husband.13 Goldman gave the young woman a Chinese-language magazine sent by anarchist comrades in Beijing, and the two became friends. Goldman similarly befriended “the coloured orderly Addie,” who confided to Goldman that she was in prison “for killin’ my man, who played me false.”14 In a letter to Stella Ballantine, Goldman wrote about two women in prison for killing husbands, and many others for being “born poor.”15 The connections among capitalism, domestic violence, and patriarchal marriage were there to be made. Goldman also observed the prison’s role in the larger macrostructures of capitalism and the state. The state government of Missouri sold the prisoners’ labor to private firms all over the country. The convicts were required to sew the firms’ labels onto the items they made: “Even poor old Abe [Lincoln] had been turned into a sweater of convict labour: the Lincoln Jobbing House of Milwaukee had the picture of the Liberator on its label, bearing the legend: ‘True to his country, true to our trade.’” Goldman smuggled some of the fake shop labels out of the prison when her niece visited, perhaps hoping to publicize the incarcerated labor behind the seemingly innocent pride in “our trade.” The prison’s bullying shop foreman, vicious head matron, and punitive acting warden controlled the “prison regime” in the interests of the state, “slave-driving and tormenting us,” while “acting as scab on the organized workers.”16 Kinder matrons and wardens could sometimes intervene to lighten the most severe suffering, and interventions by Kate Richards O’Hare’s husband Frank brought improvements in food and living conditions, but the overall conditions of incarceration remained

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grim. As her release from prison neared, Goldman’s eagerness to return to her life was qualified by her sense of responsibility and sorrow for her fellow prisoners. In a September 23, 1919 letter to Ben Capes in Chicago, she wrote: “my heart is very heavy with the human misery I am leaving behind. Some have attached themselves so much that they have been weeping for days. ‘What will become of us, when you’re gone Miss G?’ . . . Oh the crime of it, O, the cold horror that goes on in every penal institution of this land.”17 Like Berkman in Prison Memoirs, Goldman could have further analyzed the patterns she observed, thinking through the links among women’s subordination, domestic violence, and class structure. She might have further developed her arguments in “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” where she challenged radical unions to “insist on the right of the convict to work . . . meet him as a brother, take him into his [union] organization, and with his aid turn against the system which grinds them both.”18 She might have come to a stronger understanding of the life circumstances of poor black women, or developed an analysis of wife battering independent of the Prohibition-centric writings of the temperance movement. Her two years in Jefferson City Penitentiary offered her a perfect ectopic opportunity for the kind of political thinking she did best: anchored in a space of conflict, within face-to-face relations promoting dialogue and struggle. Goldman could have made a significant early contribution to feminist understandings of women, labor, and crime.

ENGAGING THE STATE Other lost possibilities in Goldman’s political thinking revolved around her unwillingness to take apart the category of the state and look within it for relevant distinctions or useful resources. Unlike my speculations concerning potential work on women prisoners, deportation, or Palestine, Goldman leaves no clues indicating any interest in taking on these questions; indeed, her definition of anarchism prohibited such considerations. Yet her work implicitly raises these questions, calling attention to the silences that reign where responses might otherwise have grown. There are at least three forms that such an investigation of states might have taken: greater attention to the relation between reform and revolution; clarification of significant differences between states; and greater willingness to consider the circumstances under which anarchists should compromise. Rather than a blanket rejection of reform as an inadequate band-aid on gaping wounds, Goldman could have thought more fully about which kinds of reforms advance transformational change and which do not. If she had pushed herself to look at the specific relations that different subgroups of working people have to state institutions, she might have opened the

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way to theorizing the intertwining of race with class, rather than subsuming race within class. When the power of governments and owners is organized through practices of slavery and genocide, rather than immigration, unionbusting, and impoverishment, exploitation works differently. The crucial distinction in her lifetime between those who have little property and those who until recently had been themselves property would have been more visible. Similarly, the distinctions would be clearer between those who immigrated voluntarily, no matter what duress they were under, and those who were brought in chains as slaves or who were displaced from land they had lived on for many generations as the indigenous people. Goldman invested a great deal in certain reforms: for example, she worked hard to create and legitimate recognition of political prisoners in the American penal system and she recommended the decriminalization of prostitution as a needed first step toward women’s liberation.19 Why did those changes in the legal structure mark worthwhile struggles, but legal enfranchisement of blacks or women did not? The answer could be that civil rights reform could siphon energy away from revolutionary struggle; leading people to be satisfied with partial reforms, while creating legal status for political prisoners or ceasing to arrest prostitutes does not offer any comparable bribe to redirect or disperse political aspirations. But then Goldman would be in the uncomfortable position of opposing reforms that could actually help people in the here-and-now, and only endorsing those changes that do not actually improve anyone’s life. That is not a persuasive position for a political organizer to take, and in other contexts, she does not take that position. She recognizes the radical significance of the struggle for the eight-hour day precisely because she realized its potential to improve the lives of ordinary working people. Further, Goldman understood syndicalism, which she called “the revolutionary philosophy of labor” and “the economic expression of anarchism,” to call for a double approach.20 Like other trade unions, syndicalist unions “fight for immediate gains” while understanding that they cannot “expect humane conditions from inhuman economic arrangements” and consequently must also work for revolutionary change.21 Rudolf Rocker, whose explanation of syndicalism was influential for Goldman, explains the dual role of unions in anarcho-syndicalism: first, “safeguarding and raising of their standard of living”; and second, “providing a school for the intellectual training of workers, to make them acquainted with the technical management of production and economic life in general, so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic organism into their own hands and remaking it according to Socialist principles.” Rocker stresses the link between reform and revolution: improvement in workers’ everyday lives is key to enabling them to imagine and pursue revolutionary change. Opportunity for intellectual development is not compelling

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when people are “constantly threatened by direst misery.” Once a better standard of living is available, then expansion of ideas generates itself: “By the intellectual elaboration of their life experiences there are developed in individuals new needs and the urge for different fields of intellectual life.”22 Radical unions, then, are expected to pursue both immediate reforms and revolutionary transformation. Goldman is evasive about how this is to be done: she rules out signing contracts, negotiating disputes, or maintaining a union treasury adequate to sustain members through strikes, all strategies unions of any sort would find it difficult to eschew.23 Yet she is clear that radical unions have no choice but to simultaneously pursue immediate relief for suffering workers and long-term transformation of the system that produces the suffering. Some reforms have radical potential, raising expectations and opening doors for further change; some have more conservative consequences, when people settle for half a loaf and give up the larger struggle. But the distinctions need to be theorized, analyzed historically and cross-culturally, just the kind of thing anarchists, with their global reach and long historical memory, could have been in a good position to accomplish. Historians Christine Stansell and Leon Litwack argue persuasively that Goldman neglected the situation of African Americans because black politics was too reformist.24 I have argued in chapter 5 that, contrary to common accusations, Goldman vigorously condemned lynching and expressed empathy with African Americans’ suffering. However, I agree with her critics that she neglected the political struggles of African Americans; my point is not to rescue her from this charge, but to reformulate it as a problem of political thinking rather than one of inadequate personal feelings or ethical range. Not a defective personality but a flawed analysis is to blame. One way that her position could have been rethought, was in fact ripe for rethinking, was for her to ask more questions about the relationship between the reforms she disdained and the transformation she sought. If she had stepped back from the anarchist inclination to take the state and capitalism as singular monolithic power machines, and instead asked about the particular relationships that identifiable subgroups of workers sustain to different faces of the state and of capitalism, she could have arrived at a more nuanced and engaged understanding of African American politics. A related question, which would also require more subtle attention to the operations of governments, would have been to ask if, despite their serious common flaws, some forms of state are preferable to others. She often recognizes, informally, that governments protecting freedom of speech offer greater potential for radical political work. She valued the political liberties available in Germany in the 1920s, implicitly recognizing the significance of states in which “our comrades could publish their papers, issue books, and hold meetings.”25 She watched the rise of fascism with growing horror.

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“I had long ago realized that in a country deprived of press and speech, public opinion must needs [sic] be based on exaggerations and falsehoods.”26 She could still have pursued her critique of reform; I am not suggesting she should have given up anarchism’s insistence on radical change, only that she contextualize it more fully. In a 1919 letter to Roger Baldwin, she commented: “The tendency toward reform seems to be in the blood of most Americans. I think it is due to the superstition about political liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.”27 Her insights into the superstition undergirding faith in the legal system could have become more compelling, had she addressed the implicit tension between her first point, in which the value of civil liberties for radical critique is recognized, and the second, in which that same arrangement becomes part of the problem radicals must address. Clearly, it would be anathema to an anarchist to look to the state for solutions to pressing social problems. Contemporary anarchist writers Michael Schmidt and Lucien van de Walt explain this clearly: The state, whether heralded in stars and stripes or a hammer and sickle, is part of the problem. It concentrates power in the hands of the few at the apex of its hierarchy, and defends the system that benefits a ruling class of capitalists, landlords, and state managers. It cannot be used for revolution, since it only creates ruling elites—precisely the class system that anarchists want to abolish. For anarchists the new society will be classless, egalitarian, participatory, and creative, all features incompatible with a state apparatus.28

Yet this anarchist axiom, with which Goldman would have completely agreed, does not require us to eschew all questions about the kinds of power wielded in particular states. If radical trade unions can be expected, even required, to pursue both reform and revolution at the same time, then why not raise similar challenges for other types of organizations, including media, professions, universities, even political parties? We have to both live in the world at hand, and transform it into the world that could be; some reforms may be steps in the right direction, while others could be depoliticizing dead ends. Fuller attention to the relation between these two faces of political change would have been a contribution to radical politics. Questions about differences within and among states lead inexorably to questions about compromise. Goldman’s friend Roger Baldwin once commented, “The anarchists, as I knew them, were always right and always ineffective. They never resigned themselves to making compromises, which are necessary in any struggle.”29 Don Herzog makes a similar point when he castigates Goldman for being “too pure to soil her hands in the wirepulling and chicanery of everyday political action.”30 While, as Lori Marso rightly points out, Herzog’s assessment neglects the voluminous hands-on political work that Goldman produced in other contexts, he is right that Goldman largely disconnects anarchism from the requirements of working

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within the system. Usually, Goldman had utter contempt for compromise: it was not simply a strategic error, it was a moral failing. Talking about the militant British suffragists, she remarked, True, as politicians they must be opportunists, must take half-measures if they can not get all. But as intelligent and liberal women they ought to realize that if the ballot is a weapon, the disinherited need it more than the economically superior class, and that the latter already enjoy too much power by virtue of their economic superiority.31

The obvious response from the intelligent and liberal women fighting for suffrage would have been that women’s suffrage could in the long run benefit the have-nots, and that half measures are better than none. Goldman had no room in her anarchism for thinking directly about this question, yet it came up in her political life frequently. One recurrent form these questions took manifests in the difficult problem of anarchism’s relation to socialism. When is a united front with socialists worth pursuing? Most of the time, Goldman’s answer is “never.” Yet she called for anarchists and socialists to stand together against the persecution of dissenters in World War I. In a letter from Goldman in Jefferson City Prison to Stella Ballantine, Goldman praised Eugene Deb’s “wonderful stand” in his trial over his opposition to World War I: “Debs stand is the most magnificent since Albert Parsons.”32 She also praised Max Eastman in making a good stand at the end of The Masses trial.33 She repeated this praise for another ally who refused to bow to the state’s persecution of war resistors: “what a fine stand Roger Baldwin has made.”34 A letter from Goldman in prison to her friend and lawyer, Harry Weinberger, expressed solidarity with all political prisoners, regardless of ideology.35 In a subsequent letter to Weinburger, she welcomed the launch of a new anarchist paper but felt the attacks on the socialists made in its pages are “out of place now” and requests that he “tell it to Abrams for me, please.”36 Why are these moments more pregnant with the possibility of an alliance, or at least a cease-fire, with socialists, compared to other places and times? How could progressives take advantage of these moments to build a broader movement? One answer could be found in the emotional dynamics of shared struggle: when Goldman was in prison with socialist activist Kate Richards O’Hare, it was the power of their radical visions combined with their shared experience of incarceration that made them allies and friends. Goldman wrote to her friend Louis Kramer, who was also in prison, about her intimacy with O’Hare: “there is someone in this terrible place whose thoughts are akin to yours—whose heart beat[s] in union and who [,] whatever differences of opinions there may be [,] nevertheless feel[s] with you and [has] the same burning faith.”37 Goldman implicitly addresses these questions when she forges coalitions with reform-oriented liberals

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around birth control and free speech struggles, as she does with socialists around anti-war work, but we would have benefited from fuller thinking through the dynamics of these relations. Toward the end of her autobiography, remarking on the lessons she learned from life, she declared dead “the notion that one could remain on earth without making compromises.”38 Since compromise is sometimes necessary, and always dangerous, how are we to think about it? From a contemporary vantage point, when anarchist and socialist activists in the United States number more in the dozens than the thousands, it is heartbreaking to look back at the missed opportunities for a Left coalition during Goldman’s lifetime.

PROPHECY My curiosity about the relation of anarchism to states and to reforms would itself be problematic for Goldman: she would probably have seen it as a violation of anarchism to seriously engage such questions, at least, until the Spanish revolution required her to stretch her thinking. In a nonrevolutionary context, these queries smack of the dreaded “respectability” that she consciously eschewed. She commented, for example, on the dilution of the radical message in the Mooney case: “Unfortunately, all respectable issues have a tendency to get chloroformed and when they come out of the anesthesia—they are minus their most vital parts.”39 Goldman chose to stay marginal rather than risk incorporation and the attendant loss of critical edge; that very resistance to incorporation into the mainstream political understanding provides a powerful frame for her ideas. At the same time, in a revolutionary context, when anarchists are achieving some of their goals, and are hopeful about achieving more, questions about transforming vs. reforming society require attention. Other readers of Goldman have expressed their frustrations and demands more pointedly: Solomon, for example, complains about Goldman’s unwillingness to “express her ideas more clearly and to assess matters dispassionately” and her inclination to put sweeping vision ahead of “objective analysis.”40 Yet of course it was precisely Goldman’s passion and her vision that allowed her to make her mark. She became that relatively rare kind of thinker and performer that political theorist George Shulman calls a prophet.41 Prophets, Shulman tells us, are “called” to public responsibility. They are messengers: their role is not merely to correct our misunderstandings by providing better information, or to predict the future, but to provoke us to confront our “willful blindness” and look at our investments in the practices we claim to oppose. Prophets bear witness; they “testify to what they see and stand against it.” They are the “watchmen who forewarn” of dangers

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that loom but could be forestalled with enlightened intervention. They are “singers” who invest our painful past with meaning and set before us our capacity to change.42 Shulman’s discussion draws on Martin Buber, whose close friendship with German anarchist Gustav Landauer may be reflected in Buber’s perspective: to be a prophet, Buber wrote, means not to predict the future but “to set the audience, to whom the words are addressed, before the choice and decision.”43 Prophets speak for the damaged but possible universal: as Shulman explains, they “stand with people whose exclusion makes the whole partial.”44 Prophets make their audiences see and feel the costs of exclusion, as well as confront the excuses that allow people to disavow the damages they do; prophets also hold forth the possibility of doing otherwise. Like the prophets Shulman examines—James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, and Toni Morrison— Goldman creates “an extraordinarily resonant form of political speech.” Prophecy is both rhetorical and embodied, a form of symbolic action fusing speech and physicality; by its utterances, prophecy performs the speaker and the public into a new yet familiar relation. “From prophecy,” Shulman explains, “they draw modes of address and registers of voice by which they try to reconstitute an exclusionary regime and redeem the catastrophic history of a subjugated people.” Shulman outlines “three recurring registers” for the prophetic voice: an imperative tone of “firm persuasion”; recurrent tropes of solidarity creating a “we”; and history retold as a narrative of loss nonetheless offering redemption.45 Tone and cadence create a sense of urgency; potent registers of affect both open the listeners to the prophet’s message and draw them into participation with her words. “Propaganda” did not mean brainwashing people, to Goldman; it meant propagating the faith by issuing a call to which people could respond. Goldman saw herself as awakening the force within people that impels them toward inner searching. As Shulman says about Thoreau, Goldman’s goal was not so much to justify rebellion but to “cultivate a people capable of it.46 She often characterized herself as constitutionally unable to stay out of the struggle. She wrote to her niece Stella Ballantine a somewhat self-mocking but still heartfelt self-reflection about her “Slav-Jewish soul”: “What a curse it is. It embraces the woe of the whole World. Goes out in overflowing sympathy to all pain and sorrow. Exhausts itself in a vain attempt to bring solace to every tortured spirit.”47 Rather than hear these declarations as an inflated assessment of self-importance, Shulman’s analysis of prophecy encourages us to hear them more literally, as an honest effort to characterize the urgencies that compelled her. She experienced her own drivenness much as her beloved Whitman characterized prophecy, as a need “to reveal and outpour the God-like suggestions pressing for birth in the soul.”48 Her drive toward prophetic speech did not lessen with age: In

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her January 13, 1935 letter to Evelyn Scott, she continues: “My misfortune is the older I get the more violent, the more intense the need of crying out against the horrors of the world. It is a hell of a state to be in.”49 Anarchism was her vocation, and on its behalf she was required by her inner voice to bear witness, to exemplify the needed rebellion, to create and participate in the needed “we.” The prophet’s “practice of claim making” has to be aggressive and authoritative because through it, she enacts her faith, and exposes herself every time to failure and rejection. Prophets need rhetorical practices that speak to the “concrete other” while it is precisely those particular listeners who, by virtue of inattention or dismissal, can turn a prophet into just another pontificating speaker or writer with grandiose ideas. Prophets implicitly raise issues about authority because they express an animating faith and invite others to share it. If the prophet is effective, she “remake[s] the deep axioms by which people orient self-reflection and agency.” She enacts a “we” and invites the rest of us to join.50 Perhaps Goldman found her best political venue in the United States, and never ceased longing to return, because her political voice matched the prophetic language that Shulman finds “axiomatic in American life.” Prophecy, Shulman argues, is a potent “semantic field” in the United States; it is “already in our hands.” It provides a “powerful vernacular to provoke acknowledgement of domination and its disavowal, to depict accountability, to affirm democratic commitments, and to redefine collective purpose.” Goldman was able to develop a prophetic relation to a series of available vernaculars: the European revolutionary aspirations of her generation of immigrants; the romantic realism of Americans shaped by Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman; the anti-Victorianism of her Bohemian neighbors; the fierce feminism stimulated but not fully satisfied by the suffrage movement. Christine Stansell characterizes Goldman’s life-changing potency this way: Her genius lay in the polyvalence of her presentation, the availability of her ideas to many uses. . . . Goldman’s personification of the metropolitan center and its modernity, what Margaret Anderson described as “something cosmic in the air, a feeling of worlds in the making,” was so powerful that meeting her could in itself be a spur to leaving where you were and going where you longed to be. She addressed herself implicitly to all the people on the edge of leaving one thing—a marriage, a job, an identity, a town—for something else. In her own anarchist way she spoke to the virtues of social mobility; she stationed herself as the oracle pointing in the direction of untested possibilities. Emma Goldman, it was said, could change your life.51

Shulman’s characterization of the rhetorical practices prevalent in the United States meshes nicely with Stansell’s assessment of Goldman. Shulman argues that a “vernacular ‘political theology’” is already in circulation

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in the United States, and is “the ordinary language even of those who (believe they) are secular.”52 Goldman benefited from, as well as contributed to, the vague yet potent language of lament and possibility already available in American public life. Stansell explains: Tapping these sources allowed Goldman to fire the soul for a secular age. She evoked her role as evangelizer and exhorter when she argued back to comrades contemptuous of her bourgeois audiences that it was “spiritual hunger and unrest,” not just economic oppression, that drove people to rebel.53

Candace Falk reports that Goldman’s lectures on love often moved people to tears.54 Goldman’s friend and correspondent Agnes Inglis characterized Goldman’s pamphlet “What I Believe” as “this five cent booklet it was that changed my life!”55 Her friend Margaret Anderson tried to characterize the ineffable quality of her spoken presence in her 1914 review of Goldman’s Chicago lectures: The exasperating thing about Emma Goldman is that she makes herself so indispensable to her audiences that it is always tragic when she leaves; the amazing thing about her is that her inspiration seems never to falter. Life takes on an intenser quality when she is present. . . . She is always a giant—for some reason that no one has yet expressed very well. Perhaps because, like science, she denies finalities.56

Ironically, the very experience that Shulman puts at the heart of American prophecy—slavery and its legacy—is what Goldman misses; but she does not miss the opportunity to be heard through prophecy. Shulman argues that “to face race in America is to be compelled toward prophecy.”57 Shulman’s persuasive account also, I argue, applies to class, and for similar reasons. The mainstream of American liberalism is deeply invested in creating and disguising class inequalities. Americans learn to see class differences as natural or earned; class is the residue left over when people either work hard and prosper, or fail to do so and flounder, in each case getting what they deserve. Goldman does her work prophetically, not simply argumentatively, because she has to break into that cycle aptly characterized by American philosopher Josiah Royce as “viciously acquired naiveté.”58 It simultaneously generates the oppression and exclusion of Rancière’s “part that has no part” while blaming the oppressed and excluded for their situation. The registers of voice that prophets use may strike other political theorists as dogmatic and moralistic; Shulman challenges us, not to overlook or justify these disquieting political practices, but to ask what they allow the prophets to accomplish. The prophetic voice is “adversarial and aggressive” because it has a lot of work to do—not just delivering more information, or appealing for consistency between what we practice and what we preach,

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but invoking and exemplifying what Goldman, echoing Nietzsche, called “a transvaluation of values.” The irony here is that the register of speech is polemical on one level, but it can “perform truly democratizing and politicizing work” on another, reframing the problematics within which polemics can take shape.59 Recognizing that prophecy cannot be neatly divided into good/progressive vs. bad/reactionary, and that prophecy can be dangerous, Shulman encourages us to negotiate a better political relationship with prophecy’s alarming potencies. He writes: Its political value is inseparable from what we find dangerous about it: the exercise of authority in claims about willful blindness and judgment of injustice, in uncompromising and aggressive calls to conflict over fateful and costly choices, in intense avowals of solidarity, in urgent demands for accountability on behalf of reimagined community, and in poetic promises of redemption— not to mention intensities and cadences of speech that raise the temperature in the body politics.60

Since we cannot give up prophecy, he continues, we have to imagine “political counterprophecy, democratic forms of prophetic speech.” His goal is to recover prophecy’s “living poetry open to infusions of new meaning.” Advocates of political change cannot afford to dismiss narrative practices with such ability to seize not just the attention but the imagination of audiences, to animate their longings and energize the political possibilities made real in part by the act of naming them. Prophets invoke heartbreaking losses, thus incurring the risk of nostalgia; they offer hope for redemption, thus segueing readily into the messianic. The possibilities are always already glued to the risks. Yet, Shulman urges, we can intervene in these relations, “chasten dogmatism,” and “stage redemption as a problem.”61 Goldman was called to anarchist prophecy. She could not be still. In a 1935 letter to Van Valkenburgh, she lamented, “Since I returned it was borne in on me that life without activity no matter how fierce the struggle is slow stagnation.”62 Longing for the U.S., she wrote in a June 29, 1937 letter to her comrade Harry Kelly: It is because I have felt on alien soil everywhere [,] unable to do all I longed to do for our ideas [,] that I have so missed my old field. Since the Spanish Revolution I have missed the States as one in prison misses the sunshine. If only I could have remained in Spain, A[merica] would have ceased to have that sickening nostalgia.63

She had found the soil she needed in the United States, then lost it in Russia, and found it again in Spain. I want to conclude this book by examining this process of loss and reclamation.

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SPEECH AND SILENCE As I wrote in chapter 3, Goldman discovered her political voice through the offices of her mentor, Johann Most, who sent her on a speaking tour to her hometown of Rochester, New York, six months after she arrived in New York City in 1889. In her autobiography she describes the “sinking feeling that had come upon me when I had first tried to speak in public.” Most told her all that was required was “my dramatic feeling and my enthusiasm,” since “all I would have to do would be to memorize the notes he would give me.” The three comrades in her “little commune”—Berkman, Fedya, and their friend Helen Minkin—took over the domestic labor that Goldman had been performing, she writes, and “I devoted myself to reading.” The tour had mixed results, but long-lasting formative impact on Goldman’s development as a speaker. She recalls her memorable first performance: When I faced the audience the next evening, my mind was a blank. I could not remember a single word of my notes. I shut my eyes for an instant: then something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime. The last words of August Spies rang in my ears: “Our silence will speak louder than the voices you strangle today.”64

Inspired by this vision, she began to speak: Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity; they painted images of the heroic men on the gallows, their glowing vision of an ideal life, rich with comfort and beauty: men and women radiant in freedom, children transformed by joy and affection. The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song.65

After her experience of being seized by the revolutionary spirit, she felt “hurled down from my exalted heights, crushed.” The audience applauded enthusiastically, but Goldman, from her recollection, had strayed from her topic, was unable to answer questions, and felt confused and exasperated that she had lost her way. Despite her disappointment, her description of heights and depths, exaltation and release, is erotically charged, as though she had ridden her words to a climax and then was spent. She basked in a new revelation: “I could sway people with words! Strange and magic words that welled up from within me, from some unfamiliar depth. I wept with the joy of knowing.”66 Her talents blossomed, making it all the more remarkable when she was silenced. There were a few times in her life when she could not speak, when words literally failed her; for someone so invested in verbal communication,

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it must have been hell. The last was the consequence of a massive stroke on February 17, 1940; she lived for three more months without regaining her speech. While she could understand what was said to her, the only words she spoke were “Stella” and “Sasha.”67 Her friends as always rallied around her; those soliciting help included John Dewey, Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, David Dubinsky, Fannia Cohn, Freda Kirchway, Elizabeth Irwin, Arthur Garfield Hays, and many others. After a second stroke, Goldman died on May 14, 1940. Finally allowed back into the United States, her coffin was wrapped in the flag of the International Anti-Fascist Solidarity organization for the Spanish anarchists (the SIA-FAI), and she was buried in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago on May 18, 1940. Thousands paid tribute. Stella Ballantine and Rose Pesotta put some of her flowers on Voltairine de Cleyre’s nearby grave, while Ben Reitman placed some of Goldman’s red roses into the arms of the Haymarket statue. By far the most profound loss of voice occurred for her in Russia, as she faced the devastating disappointment of a revolution betrayed. The story is well known: Goldman and Berkman went to the newly created U.S.S.R. full of enthusiasm for the revolution, willing to work with the Bolsheviks to create the new society. Over time, as they observed the growth of conspicuous inequalities, arbitrary state power, and sheer bureaucratic ineptitude, their disquiet grew. Wexler notes that Goldman’s difficulties in Russia suggest that she was seriously depressed during this time, over both her loss of her home in the United States and the failure of the revolution.68 The last straw was the Bolshevik attack on the anarchist sailors and workers at Kronstadt; formerly heroes of the revolution, they had become inconvenient challenges to Bolshevik hegemony. She felt paralyzed, “literally unable to speak.”69 She could hear the military assault on Kronstadt, dragging on for ten days and nights, until “Kronstadt had been subdued—tens of thousands slain—the city drenched in blood.”70 Goldman was “overcome with grief and anger” at both the authorities and the intellectuals who failed to protest the slaughter.71 She and Berkman decided to leave Russia, initiating several years of wandering, with each settlement temporary and government harassment pervasive, until they settled more or less well in the south of France. Goldman’s situation became more tenable when she married an elderly Welsh coal miner, James Colton, and secured a British passport; Berkman remained a stateless person and fought endless battles with the French authorities to be allowed to remain until his death in 1934. When the Spanish revolution broke out in 1936, it re-energized Goldman, helping her recover from Berkman’s death and once again regain her political voice. Coming at the end of her life, the Spanish Revolution immersed her in a devastating crisis in which the considerable anarchist forces were fatally squeezed between the fascists and the Communists. She located her

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reflections on Spain within the concrete dilemmas and limited options facing those involved in the struggle. Contradictions that more distant observers could ignore, or evade with facile resolutions, provoked complex reflections from her as an engaged, critical participant. Vastly troubled by the anarchists’ decision to join the government and accommodate the duplicitous Communist Party, she yet recognized the paramount need to fight the fascists. Biographer Richard Drinnon sees Goldman’s troubled ambivalence as a “fall from principle”; he calls it “a retreat from her most effective political role, that of uncompromisingly honest criticism.” He attributes her “fall” to “her motherly forgiveness, which had caused her to stray from her real political vocation.”72 I suggest, on the contrary, that David Porter is correct in seeing Goldman’s reflections on Spain as a maturing of her thought, not a weakening of it. Operating as a theorist in the streets, Goldman’s letters from this time are among her most thoughtful and nuanced reflections about political transformation. Several factors stand out in her writings on Spain: her emphasis on constructive actions; her reflections on revolutionary spirit; and her conclusions about the relation of political thinking to life. Constructive Political Work Goldman’s passionate advocacy of the Confederación Nacional de TrabajoFederación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI), the main organizational expression of anarchism during the Spanish Civil War, was anchored in her enduring respect for their accomplishments in reorganizing their society. The Spanish anarchists formed collectives in agriculture, transport, wood, textiles, garments, dairy, and other areas.73 In the midst of a bloody civil war their consistent focus was on economic reconstruction, on building new participatory institutions to order collective life. The ability of ordinary workers and peasants to create and run anarchist collectives was the historical evidence Goldman held up to the world that a different, better way of living was possible. While Goldman made three trips to revolutionary Spain, her organizational contribution was primarily to help build the SIA, the International Anti-Fascist Solidarity organization. In this capacity she raised money for refugees fleeing the country after the victory of Franco’s troops. Always an effective fundraiser, she recruited high-profile intellectuals including George Orwell, Havelock Ellis, Sir Herbert Read, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Cunard, Laurence Housman, Rebecca West, and others to become sponsors of the SIA. Goldman’s emphasis was on anarchism’s potential and actual creativity, its ability to imagine and to enact alternative social arrangements. She visited flourishing agricultural and industrial cooperatives in Catalonia, including fifty-two villages in regions controlled

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by the anarchists. Her comrades in Spain won her consistent support not because she always agreed with them, but because “they have made the first halting steps towards the beginning of a new social structure”74 In an October, 1, 1936 letter to Robert and Eugenie Sandtröm, she reported visiting a metal works, transportation departments, the railway works, oil and gas yards, and textile factories that the anarchists controlled and the workers ran themselves.75 Goldman praised the Barcelona anarchists for preserving the means of production that they collectivized, eschewing destruction or revenge; “I was told that the workers felt they had produced the wealth and that it would have been nothing short of stupidity to destroy anything that can now be made accessible to all who labor.”76 The redirection of revolutionary rage into constructive efforts to reorganize production was, for Goldman, the epitome of anarchist political accomplishment. Goldman was well aware of the irony of her position: her cherished ideal of anarchism was widely held to be destructive, criminal, entirely negative, opposed to everything, embracing nothing. In her final public speech in London on March 24, 1939, she argued that it was the Spanish anarchists’ ability to create workable alternative institutions that provoked opposition from all sides: I was amazed at the tremendous constructive work that the Spanish workers achieved side by side with their struggle, with the loss of life, with hunger, with all sorts of things against them; and that is what was feared the most. Don’t you see, don’t you realise, to demonstrate that Anarchists, who are decried by all sorts of people, working men, liberals, labour people, the capitalistic class, as criminals who go about with bombs in their hands or pockets, and with knives and with poison, and who can only be appeased if they destroy the children of the capitalists and hang the priests on the nearest lamp-post—that such Anarchists, hated by everyone, condemned by everyone, attacked by everyone, were able to show a new line of procedure in revolutionary struggle—what greater crime or offence? And that is why it was necessary to do everything possible in order to destroy that marvelous beginning.77

When, toward the end of the civil war, the collectivized villages around the city of Lerida were overrun by the Nationalist army, she was bereft.78 Yet despite the loss, her ability to experience a successful anarchist revolution was an act of homecoming, perhaps even of grace. Revolutionary Spirit Few ideas are as prominent in Goldman’s reflections on the Spanish revolution as the notion of spirit. She repeatedly emphasizes the passion of the Spanish anarchists, their love for liberty, their commitment to creating a

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more just world. As we saw in chapter 3, the idea of spirit in Goldman’s reflections roams across a rich conceptual landscape, engaging various metaphoric and rhetorical registers. Sometimes she evokes spirit as something like a Platonic virtue, a kind of reasoning informed by courage and vision: “the spirit of the people, their great courage and their high aims.” Sometimes spirit is the source of political change: “this sublime spirit is giving birth to a new conception of the dignity and value of every man, woman and child in the new Spain.”79 Spirit here is creating political consciousness, producing an enhanced revolutionary sensibility. Other times she sketched spirit as the outcome of political change, created in Spain through years of political organizing among workers and peasants. Twenty-five years of grassroots organizing in Catalonia, she described to Welsh writer John Cowper Powys, created a “remarkable organization” and a “living force” that flourished in spite of state persecution. She “found in some villages four generations steeped in Libertarian Communism.”80 Goldman’s focus on the historical creation of the circumstances for successful anarchist organizing leavens the sometimes overwhelming rhetoric of nature in her accounts of revolutionary politics. In an enthusiastic description of a collective farm community, Albalate de Cinca, she finds the workers to evince a “natural wisdom” as “toilers of the soil” who enjoy “unspoiled and uncorrupted fellowship.”81 A less melodramatic rhetorical strategy invokes climactic rather than pastoral imagery to suggest the extremity of revolutionary change: Revolution in society is exactly what a cloudburst, an earthquake or a tornado is in the atmospheric realm. Nature breaks loose as a result of the elemental forces that have accumulated to the breaking point. I therefore maintain and have maintained that revolutions are inevitable, whether we are in favor of violence or against it.82

This same letter expresses the heavy telos accompanying her imagery of natural elements: like a tornado, the revolution will sweep over us if we are in its way. . . . if any fundamental change is to take place the awakened masses must needs put themselves in harmonious rapport with the revolution instead of standing passively in its way. . . . The function of anarchism in a revolutionary period is to minimize the violence of revolution and replace it by constructive efforts.83

In the end, she declared, history will deliver: “every revolution brings humanity nearer to the libertarian ideal.”84 Yet alongside the predictable teleological faith that nature metaphors tend to generate, Goldman offered a complex political argument about collective action and political struggle.

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The attunement that she urged us to seek in relation to political hurricanes rejected any vanguard role for political activists and instead cautioned anarchists to soften the probable violence attendant to massive social change. Porter comments: Goldman viewed social revolution as a volcanic explosion, a wild hurricane, an overwhelming tidal wave of simultaneous and essentially spontaneous human revolt. Like these other natural phenomena, social revolutions have roots in concrete reality; they could not emerge from a void.85

Like other titanic forces of nature, revolutions are not predictable and cannot be directed by self-appointed leaders. Rather, such cataclysmic changes bubble up from the grassroots, offering opportunities to advance society toward anarchism through constructive efforts. She had concluded, in the aftermath of their attentat against Frick, that the means of achieving liberation must be “identical in spirit and tendency” with the ends sought.86 Yet, she never became a pacifist; seeing violence as necessary to defend the revolution, she profoundly regretted the loss, attendant to even justified violence, of some of our humanness. The necessity of political violence, combined with the likelihood that such violence will degrade us, leading us to become like our enemies, haunted Goldman. Witnessing the trial and condemnation of counterrevolutionaries in her beloved Spain, she was unwilling to serve as judge or executioner even for the bitterest enemy. Caught in the tragedy of advocating armed struggle to defend an anarchist revolution that valued the opposite of the violence that the war entailed, she did not resolve the tension by embracing pacifism.87 Nor did she escape the contradiction via facile platitudes that the end justifies the means. Initially, she despaired: More and more I come to the conclusion that there can be no Anarchist Revolution. By its very violent nature Revolution denies everything Anarchism stands for. The individual ceases to exist, all his rights and liberties go under. In fact life itself becomes cheap and dehumanized.88

Taking refuge in a retreating teleological promise, she continued: Perhaps it is due to the fact that Anarchism is too far ahead of its time. Whatever the reason it is certain, as Spain has again proven, that nothing remains of Anarchism when one is forced to make concessions that undermine the ideal one has struggled for all one’s life.89

Her despair over the unpalatable choices her situation offered, her determination to keep going within circumstances that defied resolution, go beyond the constraints of the nature metaphors she favored to suggest a more ironic approach to living within incompatible political urgencies. While pastoral

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and atmospheric images proliferate in Goldman’s reflections on spirit, they are accompanied and contested by other grammars and rhetorics. Metaphors of nature and the elements mix with erotic tropes to form a heady rhetorical brew. As discussed in chapter 4, Goldman’s practices of desire leave few distinctions between eros and politics. Sometimes spirit means longing, “the restless spirit of man for freedom, for harmony.”90 Sometimes the revolutionary spirit is a woman, and Goldman embraced “her strength, her gentleness as well as her rugged harshness.”91 Sometimes it is a child, embodying the capacity to dream into existence a new world.92 Sometimes it is her lover: “Like a grand passion it holds me tightly clasped in her arms.”93 Other bodily images are more organic and maternal, calling on images of flesh, blood, and milk. The Spanish received anarchism, Goldman wrote to her niece, “with their mother’s milk. It is now in their very blood.”94 And again: “The most simple peasant has them in his very blood.”95 Given the extensive attention Goldman gave to the history of anarchist organizing in Spain, and her emphasis on grassroots political education as a necessary foundation for revolutionary change, these images can be read not as a careless naturalization of the Spanish but an organic shorthand for an historically constituted way of life. As irresistible lover, devoted mother, and beloved offspring, the spirit of the Spanish anarchists beckoned. A final rhetorical valence through which spirit is calibrated in her thinking is that of creativity, awareness, the nascent hope for change that the prophet aims to both release and create. It is “the spirit to bring out the best in man.”96 Revolutionary spirit can be awakened in the masses, whom she defined as “all those who create.”97 A revolutionary sensibility is both parent and child of political struggle: Those still capable of independent thinking will now be compelled to see that Revolution does not express [only] the overthrow of institutions, necessary as that may be, but also the inner growth as well of conscious intelligent understanding for the individual and collective life.98

Spirit can be taken as an embodied consciousness, what Claude Lefort calls “the flesh of the social,” created by as well as creating the circumstances of its own possibility.99 Most of Goldman’s writing and speaking about the Spanish revolution took place either in Spain or in England, where she organized support for the Spanish anarchists. In his thoughtful reflections on the spatial dimensions of Goldman’s thinking, Porter addresses her “geographicalpsychological location” as a writer: she was more distant and critical in London, more enthusiastic in Spain. Porter writes, ironically this shifting overall combination of distancing and immediacy in Goldman’s writings adds much to the richness of her perspective, to the

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fullness of her attempt to describe and analyze the Spanish events, to the poignancy of her own agony in attempting to maintain an authentic centered perspective through it all.100

Porter sees a zigzag between purity and compromise as Goldman, along with many other radicals, rides a political pendulum that swings between stress on the personal consistency of their ideas, even if their purity is isolated, and temporary compromise when they are participating in movement politics. While Goldman tended to contrast cold England with warm Spain, the underlying distinction was between the lively and unpredictable political space inhabited by the Spanish anarchists versus the reserved and privatized space of the British Left. In England the movements Goldman cherished were degenerating or dormant; not much was happening in the streets. What was available was a more personal politics, a stress on living one’s life as a political act even if in relative isolation. In Spain a very different political space beckoned, precisely the kind of dynamic space in which Goldman did her best political thinking. Porter is right to note the importance of location to her thinking, but the contrast between Britain and Spain was only the most literal expression of that difference. More profound was the contrast between corrosive isolation and energizing collective space. Goldman’s ideas flowed most freely when based in the streets, the barricades, the courtroom, the jailhouse, in active political fronts. Goldman’s words about the Spanish revolution are almost entirely found in letters; correspondence with thirteen persons makes up two thirds of Porter’s edited volume.101 These were hastily typed, error-filled, urgent messages to her world, often addressed to cherished friends and family members. Her essays often came from those letters. An epistolary approach to words might be a question of circumstance or personal style, but it is also a methodological gesture, a narrative strategy producing a particular kind of political discourse, one that is embedded primarily in concrete relationships and constructed over time though those sustained personal connections. Goldman was aware of her method. Reflecting on the process of gathering over one thousand letters in order to write her autobiography, she remarks: “at no time does one reveal oneself so much as in one’s intimate correspondence.”102 Yet there is more to her methodology than the contrast between a sincere close-up versus a less revealing public voice. Her missives can be attended as a kind of body writing, always addressed to someone in particular, anchored in that relation, moving outward from that base while sustaining that concrete connection. Her letters were often simultaneously rough drafts for articles, speeches, or other letters. Her letters were part of her performance, part of the vehicle of self-expression she crafted. She wrote herself to others.

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“Life is stronger than theory.”103 Porter praises Goldman for reminding us “of the greatest need constantly to attend to our principles.”104 Goldman was part of a movement that was often obsessed with its own purity, especially when purity was all they had. Goldman’s version of the demand for purity was often expressed through a recurrent rhetorical gesture toward consistency: “All my life I have insisted” she proclaimed in a letter to Evelyn Scott.105 “I stand today where I always have . . . [on] my life-long ground” she announced in a letter to Mollie Steimer.106 Any accusation of ideological inconsistency from her correspondents provoked stinging rebukes in subsequent letters. She saw herself and her comrades as “dedicated to one purpose in life.”107 When Kropotkin gave his support to the Entente in World War I, Goldman saw it as a “breach of principle” rather than a change of argument.108 Her proud claim to have never changed her mind on anything important harbors a dangerous desire for mastery. It suggests Stirner’s fixed idea, a reified concept that blocks fresh perception. Yet Goldman’s own struggles with contradictory situations and incompatible necessities inhabit a more complex terrain, one in which the demand for ideological consistency is mixed with the capacity to change and to be open to surprise. Goldman’s own growth as a political thinker often came with such surprises, usually when unexpected personal encounters caused her to reframe her understanding of people and their circumstances. Her encounters in Spain, where secure political formulas and pat judgments were unsatisfying or unavailable, amplified her openness to change. In a letter to Dutch anarchist William Jong on April 8, 1937, she wrote: “Now it is all very well, dear comrade, to remain consistent and to be tied by theories when one is far away from a battlefield, but REALITY imposes many things not provided in one’s ideology nor in theoretical hair-splitting of this or that idea.”109 At the same time, political ideals are not the opposite of reality; she insisted to CNT leader Mariano Vázquez that their shared vision of a better world was as “real” as the material conditions in which they pursued their goals.110 The Spanish Revolution provoked Goldman’s resistance to fixed ideas. She shifted her attention not so much to maintenance of a consistent political position, but to the maintenance of human relationships and the gathering of resources to continue the struggle. After the defeat of the Spanish anarchists, the anarchist movement compressed its political debates into corrosive internal animosities and recriminations characterized by endless judging. Goldman despaired at the “ever-lasting fault-finding.”111 After the International Workingman’s Association (IWMA) congress in Paris in 1937, she wrote to German anarchist Helmut Rudiger: “I’m still all sick and discouraged from the sessions—the petty frictions and the demented

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incapacity to understand man and events in a generous way.”112 Among the Spanish refugees in France after the collapse of republican Spain, she found “sickening disintegration . . . hatred, jealousies and greed. . . . The one question is ‘how does [one] live?’”113 She felt caught between those like anarchist historian Max Nettlau, who insisted on complete loyalty to the CNT-FAI, and Russian anarchist Alexander Schapiro, who was highly critical of their compromises. She was deeply disturbed to find her friends Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin expressing dogmatic bitterness toward the Spanish comrades, unwilling or unable to take the revolutionaries’ point of view. Weighing the cost of unpalatable alternatives, she combined generosity toward her comrades’ motives with critical scrutiny of their actions. “Life is more intricate, more contradictory and more compelling than any theory or philosophy about life,” she wrote to Rudolf Rocker.114 While she worried about her “revolutionary integrity,” she recognized that, had she been in Spain during the crises, “I cannot honestly say what I would have done.”115 In a letter to Ethel Mannin on September 27, 1937, she elaborated: I realize that when one is in a burning house one does not consider one’s possessions, one tries to jump to safety even if it means death. The possessions of my comrades have been their sterling quality, their staunch adherence to fundamentals. But they are surrounded by consuming flames and they feel if they hold on to every part of their past they would lose everything. Hence the compromises of which they are only too painfully aware.116

Porter characterizes Goldman’s position as “a middle stance of strong but non-dogmatic critique.”117 It could also be apprehended as fatigue with the emotional and political costs of the movement’s recurrent will to power over truth. Goldman never ceased to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competing political strategies, but she longed for more constructive and forgiving venues that would “not make us so bitter.”118 Perhaps Goldman devoted so much of her time to campaigning for the safe release for political prisoners because the saving of individual lives focused her on concrete persons and relations rather than abstract declarations and judgments.

E.G., FOR EXAMPLE Goldman sustained herself by creating epistolary political space; she wrote herself by writing letters. Her labor producing herself as an anarchist was not inspired primarily by belief that others would follow her example: after many disappointments in “the movement,” she concluded, “I no longer consider comrades capable of learning by good example.”119 Her anarchism is better thought of as an example for herself, a textual space within which she wrote meaning onto life, and perhaps as an example for

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the future. Her letter writing, far from being a waste of time, was a precise technology of self-production. The Drinnons estimate that Goldman wrote some 200,000 letters in her lifetime.120 She based her autobiography on ten volumes of collected correspondence, “veritable mountains of letters” sent back to her by her friends.121 To some extent this reflects the endemic circumstances of those in exile, yearning to hear from home. To Marjorie Goldstein on August 7, 1935, Goldman wrote, “Fact is my correspondence is the only link with my past, with all that has color and meaning in my life.”122 Yet not all exiles, in fact rather few exiles, produce the extraordinary network of communication that Goldman generated. Further, Goldman’s epistolary production pre-dated her exile—she was always a prodigious letter-writer, even at the height of her lecturing successes in the United States. She made extraordinary investments in the relations which her letters sustained: often, at the end of a demanding day, she would write a quick note to a comrade or lover, even if she had already written a lengthy letter to the same person earlier that day. During long periods of their lives, she wrote to Berkman nearly every day, often pamphlet-sized epistles covering a range of topics: friends; acquaintances; their health; former, present and future lovers; the destruction of the revolution in Russia; the place of violence in anarchist struggles; relations between women and men; the vagaries of the masses; articles and speeches they helped each other write; finances; books; government harassment of exiles; their own enduring friendship. Berkman consistently wrote back, sharing in what Michel Foucault calls “a soul service,” “a round of exchanges with the other and a system of reciprocal obligation.”123 This service, Foucault suggests, “permit[s] individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” Acting on oneself to “get prepared” entailed “a process of becoming more subjective.” It required a practical set of activities, “not abstract advice but a widespread activity, a network of obligations and services to the soul.”124 This network was constitutive of a social self, a self-in-relation. One “occupied oneself with oneself”125 through types of activities: “training, meditation, tests of thinking, examination of conscience, control of representations.”126 Such techniques entailed “an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together.”127 Contrary to Wexler’s suggestion that Goldman wasted her time in letters, I view the letters as a poignant example of Foucault’s arts of the self. While Goldman may not have been consciously attentive to the provocative pun her initials suggest, we can see her epistolary labors as efforts to produce the political example she needed. She signed many of her letters as E.G.

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Alexander Berkman referred to her as E.G. in his own letters. When she went underground, her alias was E.G. Smith. Emma Goldman was always “for example,” producing herself as the expression of the ideals for which she worked. Writing late in 1931, E.G. assured Berkman that she wrote often, and she described her weariness of life, her fatigue at the “useless labor” of writing hundreds of letters: “But it is the only link in my life, to keep in touch with our friends in America. And so I keep at it.” After a time she began to create a sort of impromtu newsletter by “broadcasting[ing] carbon copies to a wide circle of correspondents.” Goldman claimed she did this because “I find much typing sheer torture beside being a rotten typist!”128 Yet the practice did not seem to lessen the amount of time she spent typing, only to amplify the number of people to whom she was connected. Writing to British novelist Evelyn Scott, she noted “I must say I find it infinitely easier to express myself in letters than in books. My thoughts come easier though not always worthwhile.”129 The Drinnons speculate that E.G.’s prodigious letter-writing was the nearest substitute, under conditions of exile, for the speeches, lectures, and conversations that had been her forte in the United States: Letters became Emma Goldman’s medium primarily because she was an exile and because in them the gap between the written and the spoken word was at its narrowest. A short stride over the gap enabled her to express her great strength as a speaker and conversationalist: It was as though she were responding to an earnest questioner after a lecture or having her say after a fine meal in someone’s apartment.130

Both kinds of activities were no doubt readily imaginable by most of her correspondents, many of whom had seen her at work in both contexts, holding crowds spellbound in lecture halls and holding forth to her friends. “Speech itself,” Judith Butler observes, “is a bodily act with specific linguistic consequences. Thus speech belongs exclusively neither to corporeal presentation nor to language, and its status as word and deed is necessarily ambiguous.”131 Goldman used this ambiguity to good effect in both her speeches and her letters, anchoring her language in her vigorous physical presence and extending that presence through her remarkable web of word/deeds. Her speeches and letters constitute, in Foucault’s language, “the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself [sic] qua subject.”132 She was a public intellectual in a unique sense, creating a public and herself within that public through a network of connecting. The Drinnons continue: This “proclivity to spread myself in letters,” for which she was chided by Berkman and others, meant that her distant friends had access to her con-

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tinuous present and to her self-revelation of different aspects of character to different correspondents. Her letters gave them immediate data on how she was living her life and were in a sense invitations to live as much of it as they could with her.133

At least one historian, Max Nettlau, appreciated her epistolary style. He wrote to her in 1929 that, while “tiptop up to date otherwise,” in her mode of communication “you are eighteenth century, doing honor to the good old art of letter writing.” Nettlau contrasted the “rapid talk” of “the wire and telephone” with E.G.’s “thoughtful way of communication by letter,” a practice more widely utilized two centuries earlier.134 We can think of her letter writing, in Foucault’s terms, as continuous “self-exercise”: Writing was also important [along with meditation] in the culture of taking care of oneself. One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed.135

Had exile not intervened, perhaps E.G. would have maintained the priority of the oral communications at which she excelled, with letters second to speaking and publishing in her repertoire of public practices. But exile forcibly relocated her, and her many thousands of letters were her determined effort to relocate herself once again, by sheer force of will and tenacity to maintain herself within her community, to take care of herself and her community. Her letters were a kind of self-craftsmanship, working on/ with her interior resources and her circumstances to constitute herself as a political subject. Through what Nietzsche called “much obstinate, faithful repetition of the same labors, the same renunciations,” she both marshaled the self that was there and articulated the self that could be there.136 The labors of this “art of existence,” according to Foucault, include “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an ouvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.”137 Letters facilitate the dialogic capacity of language, offering sites of conversation taking full advantage of the etymological promise of that word: con is Latin for together, with; verse means turn; ation means act of, state of, or result of something. Conversation, then, is an act of turning together. Correspondents turn toward each other, and also toward others, working together on themselves and their relations. As with the practices of prophecy, the techniques of self-production are double-edged. The technologies of self-care, through which one makes oneself into a subject, bear an uneasy relation to the technologies of domination, through which one is subjected to the prevailing regimes of power/ knowledge. Foucault points out that they “hardly ever function separately,

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although each one of them is associated with a certain type of domination . . . each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals.”138 The distinction here is not a clear-cut dyad between being a subject versus being an object, but rather a less clear contrast between writing oneself and being written as a self. Power, Foucault has consistently maintained, does not just say no. It does its work by saying yes, by constituting identity and desire. Since technologies of domination do their work constitutively, not just prohibitively, the affirmations involved in crafting the self are intertwined uneasily with those involved in policing it. E.G. and her colleagues spent a great deal of their time discussing how to live the revolution. Ironically, her most revolutionary act could be seen as having little to do with bringing herself into ideological line, and everything to do with constituting herself as a revolutionary in exile. Those 200,000 letters she wrote created a network of critical thinking, a set of lives interconnected in resistance. As the Drinnons note, “She spoke [in her letters] with directness and intensity from the current edge of her thinking, feeling, experiencing—and not incidentally therewith effectively revoked the official edict of separation from all she held dear.”139 It was the ultimate act of anarchist creativity, of the sheer will to deny the state its victim, to find a way to maintain the self-creating connections at the heart of her technologies of the self. Her remarkable ability and willingness to carry on in the face of defeat, to find some satisfaction in the process of rebelling even if she never won: that indefatigability is in fact what allowed her to win. She beat the authorities in that she re-created the political space they tried to take away. Responding to Berkman’s despair, E.G. replied in her letter of November 18, 1931, by locating herself in the energy created by the friction between a bitter sense of futility and an unreasoning determination to persevere: I too have come to the conclusion, bitter as it is, that hardly anything has come of our years of effort. And that the mass is really hopeless as far as real progress and freedom are concerned. The trouble is the recognition of a fact does not make it easier to reconcile oneself to it. For instance, I have come to see that nothing I can do in the way of bringing our ideas before the people will leave much trace or make a lasting impression. Yet I never was in greater revolt against my being gagged as I am now. What sense is there to continue living when I have no outlet of any sort? Even if I had material security, which of course I have not, nor do I expect to get it from Living My Life, it would still be inane to go on merely eating, drinking, and having a roof over my head. I can’t stand the thought of it. So you see, my dear, though “Du has mir aus dem Herzen gesprochen” [“you have spoken my deepest belief”] as regards the masses, the inherent love of power to dominate others whoever wields that power, anarchists and syndicalists included, the still voice in me will not be silenced, the voice which wants to cry out against the wretchedness and injustice in the world.

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She compared her anarchist life to one withdrawn from public life (“merely eating, drinking, and having a roof over my head”) and found the latter unthinkable. She heard “a voice within herself” that was detectable through the labor that it took to produce it. E.G. continued: I can compare my state with that of a being suffering from an incurable disease. He knows there is no remedy. Yet he goes on trying every doctor, and every kind of quack. I know there is no place where I can or will gain a footing and once more throw in my lot with our people who continue in the struggle of liberation. Yet I cling to the silly hope as a drowning man does to a straw.

Yet she did find that place again, regained her footing and threw in her lot with the Spanish anarchists in the civil war. Berkman did not. E.G. offered Berkman that same lifeline, that same performative space in which political resistance continues because it continues, because it is a space of identity, of becoming, because that is how E.G. happens: Fact is, dear heart, you do the same. You say in yours of the 15th that if you have to get out of here, you’ll go to Spain. You know as well as I that you could do nothing there. Yet you want to go because you want to be close to the activities of our comrades and if possible make yourself felt among them. It is no use, Sash, you and I have been in battle too long to content ourselves with a humdrum existence. And yet we both know how little we have achieved in the past and how little we will leave behind when we go.140

She held up to her old comrade the twin opportunities of relationship and agency, “to be close to the activities of our comrades” and “make yourself felt among them.” In Berkman’s case, these strategies were, in the end, insufficient: suffering from ill health and political despair, he committed suicide on June 28, 1936. E.G. lived for four more years, dying on May 14, 1940, in Montreal, while campaigning to stop the deportation of some Italian activists. She was buried on the anniversary of the day Berkman was released from prison. Acting on yourself through yourself, articulating yourself in passionate connection with others, doing the things that create being: Emma Goldman lived as an example of anarchism. Goldman did not simply believe more persistently than others, or insist harder. She talked and wrote herself by the artful practices that modified her, muted her loneliness, created and sustained her connections. She created herself, flamboyantly, persistently, often painfully, through long-lasting techniques of self-production, a “permanent exercise” in anarchism.141 Her self-in-relation was constituted through the intimate relations and political spaces she helped to create. Exile did not deprive her of that space nor render her incapable of creating it.

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Goldman’s epistolary strategy anchors her ideas in ongoing relationships with concrete others, her immediate circle of friends, family, and comrades serving as the point of creation for her larger audience. She wrote herself and her politics from within a web of living connections. Her rhetorical strategies favored metaphors of bodies, birth, nature, and desire, and while these sometimes have the effect of naturalizing her arguments they also energize her politics. Insisting on fierce independence from her mentors and her comrades, she made anarchism her own. Goldman spent her adult life involved in anarchist activities, but she refused to join anarchist organizations, perhaps finding them overpopulated with posturing male egos and endless petty bickering; she remarked in a letter to Harry Kelly in 1938 that “anarchists’ congresses have never been pleasant affairs.”142 Instead she involved herself in small, intimate anarchist groups, such as the editorial collective for Mother Earth, and in coalitions with like-minded anarchist, liberal, and socialist allies, such as her work with the Wobblies, the free speech movement, and the mobilization against the draft. Her enduring criteria for political success was organizational creativity, the ability to build a collective space within which anarchism could, for at least a time, flourish. She wrote best from those places of intense engagement where confrontations and collaborations produce street-level political actions. Toward the end of her life, anarchism became less clear-cut, more of a puzzle, but always an inspirational vision. Finding, in the end, that the contingencies and incompleteness of life exceeded her ability to articulate them, she continued to dream that things could be better than they are. *

*

*

In a letter from Goldman in Jefferson City to Harry Weinberger, October 6, 1918, Goldman complained sarcastically that the children at the Modern School were canning vegetables to raise money for the Red Cross. “I guess [Hugh] Pentecost was right when he said, ‘It is hard enough to live decently, but still harder to be dead decently.’ It is amazing what deciples [sic] will do to the lifes [sic] dream of their prophets.”143 This letter provokes my own wondering about what Goldman would think of this book that I have written about her political thinking. My own inclination to think about reformist applications for anarchist ideas would surely make her cringe as much as did the defection of the Modern School children into the hands of the Red Cross. Never one to take criticism well, I imagine Goldman bristling at my critique of her approach to theater and film as well as her inadequate understanding of race in American history. Even my treatment of the elements of her thinking that I find most compelling—including her trenchant analysis of violence against labor, her remarkable ability to produce political space, her radical analysis of gender

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and sexuality, and her way of doing ectopic political theory—might not please her, because I approach these practices not as an anarchist but as a political theorist coming to terms with anarchism. Given her lifelong scorn for college professors—those “pygmies who are infesting the American colleges”—I can readily picture her rolling her eyes with impatience as I bring the tools of my own trade to bear on her ideas.144 Yet, I harbor a suspicion that she would consider it a decent death to be taken seriously as a political thinker and to be claimed for feminism as a needed radical voice.

NOTES 1. Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 223. 2. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 243. 3. Barry Pateman, personal conversation, August 10, 2004. 4. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 134. 5. Goldman to Martha Gordon Crotch, April 28, 1937, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1990), reel 40. To think about what she might have found in Palestine, see James Horrox, A Living Revolution; Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009). 6. Ann Lord to Goldman, July 31, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 35. 7. Goldman to Herbert Read, October 7, 1939, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, reel 46. 8. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, June 16, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 9. Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover, 1970), 652–53. 10. Ibid., 658–68, 66. 11. Ibid., 674. 12. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, July 25–27, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11; Living My Life, 673. 13. Goldman, Living My Life, 660. 14. Ibid., 692. 15. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 5–7, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: a Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 16. Goldman, Living My Life, 654, 663. 17. Goldman to Ben Capes, September 23, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 18. Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969, 125. 19. For political prisoners, see chapter 2. For her call to end “the legal and moral hounding of the prostitute” to “ameliorate present conditions,” see “The Traffic in Women,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 194.

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20. Goldman, “Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice,” in Red Emma Speaks, third edition, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 89, 91 (italics in original). 21. Ibid., 91. 22. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 57, 79. Note that Rocker says socialism, but he means anarchism; like Landauer, who called his book on anarchism On Socialism, he tended to interchange the two terms. 23. Goldman, “Syndicalism,” 92. 24. Stansell, American Moderns, 131; Litwack, “Foreword,” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, Made for America, 1890–1901, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xx. 25. Goldman, Living My Life, 956. 26. Ibid., 787. 27. Goldman to Roger Baldwin, February 6, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 28. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 6. 29. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 62. 30. Don Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism and Pedestrian Liberalism,” Political Theory 35, no. 3 (June 2007): 319. 31. Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publishing, 1969), 206. 32. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 19, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 33. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, October 10, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 34. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, November 3, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 35. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, July 6, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 36. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, March 23, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 37. Goldman to Louis Kramer, August 12, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 38. Goldman, Living My Life, 957. The context was her decision to marry for legal papers. 39. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, September 13, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 40. Martha Solomon, Emma Goldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 62, 63. 41. Shulman mentions Goldman and Eugene Debs as prophetic voices, but does not pursue this insight, as his focus is on prophets of race rather than labor. George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 24 42. Ibid., 5 (italics in original).

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43. Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Collier Books,1985,) 2. 44. Shulman, American Prophecy, 5. 45. Ibid., xii, xii, 234. 46. Ibid., 41 (italics in original). 47. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, April 20, 1919, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray et al., reel 11. 48. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publications, 2004), 183. 49. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, January 13, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 33. 50. Shulman, American Prophecy, 244, 247, 29, 32. 51. Stansell, American Moderns, 132. 52. Shulman, American Prophecy, 247. 53. Stansell, American Moderns, 140. 54. Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 115. 55. Agnes Inglis to Goldman, July 5, 1931, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 24. 56. Margaret Anderson, “Emma Goldman in Chicago,” Mother Earth IX, no. 10 (December 1914): 320, 324. 57. Shulman, American Prophecy, xiii. 58. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1901), 358 (italics in original). 59. Shulman, American Prophecy, xv. 60. Ibid., xv. 61. Ibid., xv, 3, 6, 250, 252. 62. Goldman to Van Valkenburgh, July 2, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 35. 63. Goldman to Harry Kelly, June 29, 1937, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 40. 64. Goldman, Living My Life, 51. 65. Ibid., 51. 66. Ibid., 51. 67. Theresa and Albert Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman (Toronto: Subway Books, 2001), 201. 68. Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 44–45. 69. Wexler, Exile, 45. 70. Goldman, Living My Life, 886. 71. Wexler, Exile, 47. There are significant scholarly differences regarding Goldman’s and Berkman’s uncompromising criticism of the Bolshevik takeover of the revolution. Wexler says Goldman got the U.S.S.R. wrong: “Conflating the emergency measures of War Communism with Bolshevism as a whole, Goldman helped lay the foundations for a caricature of Russian history that served interests profoundly hostile to her own” (Exile, 80). By this reading, Goldman did not acknowledge the artistic creativity, intellectual openness, and economic progress of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s, instead, “contributed to a far more

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enduring Western myth of Bolshevism as a monolithic, unchanging, static tyranny, irrevocably determined by a Marxist ideology that was inherently totalitarian and repressive” (Exile, 81). At the time, most European and American leftists took Wexler’s position, and were desperate to maintain their hope in the Russian Revolution. Herzog, in contrast, says Goldman got the U.S.S.R. right: in fact, it is just about the only thing she got right, in his reading. While I have argued that Herzog trivializes Goldman in other respects, I agree with his interpretation on this count. Goldman and Berkman offered a path of radical transformation distinct from the Communist party; this was a major contribution to nourishing transgressive thought. 72. Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise, 310. 73. See Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974); Chris Ealham, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010). 74. Goldman to Tom Bell, July 1, 1937, in Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter (New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983), 228. 75. Goldman to Robert and Eugenie Sandström, October 1, 1936, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Editon, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 38. 76. Goldman, Radio Address, Barcelona, September 23, 1936, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 216. 77. Goldman, London Speech, March 24, 1939, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 276. 78. Goldman to John Cowper Powys, April 9, 1938, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 42. 79. Goldman, Radio Address, Barcelona, September 23, 1936, 217. 80. Goldman to Welsh writer John Cowper Powys, August 16, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 34. While Goldman was captivated by the energy and vitality among the Spanish anarchists, she was thoroughly frustrated by their “utter lack of decisiveness . . . in anything that requires system, promptness or speed they are hopeless.” (Letter from Goldman to Stella Ballantine, December 16, 1936, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 28.) 81. Goldman, “Collectivized Agriculture,” in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 64, 68. 82. Goldman to Roger Hall, May 27, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 236. 83. Ibid., 236. 84. Ibid., 239. 85. Porter, “Anarchists, Violence and War,” in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 213. 86. Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Apollo Books, 1970), 261. Originally published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co. in 1922. 87. Goldman to Helmut Rudiger, January 24, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 231. 88. Goldman to Mark Mratchny, January 24, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 234. 89. Ibid., 234 90. Goldman to Roger Hall, May 27, 1938, 239. 91. Goldman, “Durruti,” Spain and the World, November 24, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 38. 92. Goldman, no title [on Mon Nou], December 9, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 78–79.

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93. Goldman to Milly and Rudolf Rocker, September 27, 1939, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 14. 94. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, October 28, 1936, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 28. 95. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, November 14, 1936, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 29. 96. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, November 22, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 318. 97. Goldman, Toronto Speech, April 27, 1939, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 244. 98. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, January 8, 1939, in Porter, Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 243. 99. Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 35. 100. Porter, “Introduction: Emma Goldman’s Life and Involvement with Spain,” in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 14. 101. Porter, “Preface,” in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, xii. 102. Goldman, Living My Life, vi. 103. Goldman to Tom Bell, July 1, 1937, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, ed. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 40. 104. Porter, “Introduction,” 18. 105. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, November 22, 1938, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 240. 106. Goldman to Mollie Steimer, September 10, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 272. 107. Goldman to Van Valkenburgh, February 16, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 289. 108. Goldman, “Where I Stand,” Spain and the World, July 2, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 31. 109. Goldman to William Jong, April 8, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 221. 110. Goldman to Mariano Vázquez, February 27, 1939, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 275. 111. Goldman to Joe Goldman, July 31, 1934, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 287. 112. Goldman to Helmut Rudiger, December 30, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 306. 113. Goldman to Milly and Rudolf Rocker, March 31, 1939, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 36. 114. Goldman to Rudolf Rocker, May 10, 1939, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 125. 115. Goldman, “Where I Stand,” 32. 116. Goldman to Ethel Mannin, September 27, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 110. 117. Porter, “Collaboration with Statist Forces,” in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 112. 118. Goldman to Martin Gudel, November 15, 1937, in Vision on Fire, ed. Porter, 301. 119. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, November 23, 1928, in Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 96. 120. Drinnon and Drinnon, “Introduction,” Nowhere at Home, xiv. Think what she could have done with email! But we might not have the record of it.

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121. Goldman, Living My Life, vi. 122. Goldman to Marjorie Goldstein, August 7, 1935, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 35. 123. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 54. Not all of her intense relations were so mutually serviceable; her tortured correspondence with the hapless Ben Reitman was often self-justifying and manipulative. See Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman. 124. Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18, 35, 27. 125. Ibid., 20. 126. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 74. 127. Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 51. 128. Drinnon and Drinnon, “Introduction,” xiii, xv, xv. 129. Ibid., xv. 130. Ibid. 131. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, second edition (New York: Routledge, 1999), xxv. 132. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 6. 133. Drinnon and Drinnon, “Introduction,” xv. 134. Ibid., xv–xvi. 135. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 27. 136. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, quoted in William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988),163. 137. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 10–11. 138. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 18. 139. Drinnon and Drinnon, “Introduction,” xv. 140. Goldman to Berkman, November 18, 1931, in Nowhere at Home, eds. Drinnon and Drinnon, 50. 141. Foucault, Care of the Self, 49. 142. Goldman to Harry Kelly, January 1, 1938, in Vision of Fire, ed. Porter, 307. 143. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, October 6, 1918, in The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, eds. Falk with Zboray, et al., reel 11. 144. Goldman, “Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard,” Mother Earth IV, no. 12 (February 1910): 390.

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Note: Sources from the following reference volumes have been shortened to title, volume number, and editors’ last names: Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol I, Made for America, 1890–1901. Edited by Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909. Edited by Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition. Edited by Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990. Ackelsberg, Martha A. Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Ackerman, Carl W. “Emma Goldman Mentor of Czolgosz, McKinley’s Slayer, Declare U.S. Investigators.” The Washington Post, December 22, 1919. In The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition. Edited by Falk with Zboray, et al. Reel 64. Adamic, Louis. Dynamite! The Story of Class Violence in America, second edition. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1960. Originally published in 1934. Adams, Jason. Non-Western Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global Context. Johannesburg, South Africa: Zabalaza Books, 2003. Adams, Thomas Sewell, and Helen L. Sumner, eds. Labor Problems. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Adrian, Lynne M. “Emma Goldman and the Spirit of Artful Living.” In Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman. Edited by Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger, 217–226. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Agent 302. Report to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 6, 1939. In The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition. Edited by Falk with Zboray, et al. Reel 66. 313

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LETTERS All letters with a reel number are from The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition. Edited by Candace Falk with Ronald J. Zboray, et al. Alexandria, VA: ChadwyckHealey, Inc., 1990. Other letters are from: Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909. Edited by Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Drinnon, Richard, and Anna Maria Drinnon, eds. Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Porter, David, ed., Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution. New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983. Berkman, Alexander, to Goldman, March 12, 1905. Emma Goldman, vol II, 150–54. Berkman, Alexander, to Goldman, February 24, 1927, reel 17. Berkman, Alexander, to Goldman, November 24, 1935, reel 35. Commins, Saxe, to Goldman, February 18, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Agnes Inglis, April 11, 1930, reel 23. Goldman to Albert de Jong, June 7, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, July 26, 1911, reel 5. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, September 4, 1925, in Nowhere at Home, 130–33. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, November 23, 1928, in Nowhere at Home, 96. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, February 20, 1929. In Nowhere at Home, 144–46. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, August 22, 1931, reel 24. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, November 18, 1931, in Nowhere at Home, 50. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, March 14, 1934, reel 30. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, February 5, 1935, reel 33. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, February 12, 1935, reel 33. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, February 17–18, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, September 4, 1935, in Nowhere at Home, 130–33. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, November 9, 1935, reel 35. Goldman to Alexander Berkman, November 19, 1935, reel 35. Goldman to Ann Lord, August 14, 1935, reel 35. Goldman to Anna Strunsky Walling, July 8, 1916, reel 10. Goldman to Ben Capes, September 23, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Ben Reitman, January 2, 1911, reel 4. Goldman to Ben Reitman, July 29, 1912, reel 6.

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Bibliography

Goldman to Ben Reitman, October 1, 1914, reel 8. Goldman to Ben Taylor, February 1, 1936, reel 36. Goldman to Ellen Kennan, July 17, 1913, reel 7. Goldman to Ellen Kennan, October 3, 1917, reel 10. Goldman to Ellen Kennan, July 28, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Ellen Kennan, May 25, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Ellen Kennan, March 11, 1923, reel 13. Goldman to Emily Holmes Coleman, June 5, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Emmy Eckstein, June 10, 1931, in Nowhere at Home, 163–65. Goldman to Ethel Mannin, September 27, 1937, in Vision on Fire, 110. Goldman to Ethel Mannin, December 10, 1938, reel 44. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, November 22, 1938, in Vision on Fire, 240, 318. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, January 8, 1939, in Vision on Fire, 243. Goldman to Harry Kelly, June 29, 1937, reel 40. Goldman to Harry Kelly, January 1, 1938, in Vision on Fire, 307. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, June 16, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, September 22, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, October 6, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, November 3, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, November 24, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, March 2, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, March 23, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, May 25, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, July 6, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Harry Weinberger, September 13–14, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Helmut Rudiger, December 30, 1937, in Vision on Fire, 306. Goldman to Helmut Rudiger, January 24, 1938, in Vision on Fire, 231. Goldman to Henry Alsberg, April 21, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Herbert Read, October 7, 1939, reel 46. Goldman to Joe Goldman, July 31, 1934, in Vision on Fire, 287. Goldman to John Cowper Powys, April 9, 1938, reel 42. Goldman to John Cowper Powys, August 16, 1938, in Vision on Fire, 34. Goldman to Leon Malmed, September 18, 1917, reel 10. Goldman to Leon Malmed, April 20, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Louis Kramer, August 12, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Margaret Sanger, May 1, 1914, reel 8. Goldman to Mariano Vazquez, February 27, 1939, in Vision on Fire, 275. Goldman to Marjorie Goldstein, August 7, 1935, reel 35. Goldman to Mark Mratchny, June 2, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Mark Mratchny, January 24, 1938, in Vision on Fire, 234. Goldman to Martha Gordon Crotch, April 28, 1937, reel 40. Goldman to Martin Gudel, November 15, 1937, in Vision on Fire, 301. Goldman to Max and Gertrude Zahler, May 11, 1935, reel 34. Goldman to Max Nettlau, February 8, 1935. in Vision on Fire, 254–65. Goldman to Mildred Mesirow, January 13, 1935, reel 33. Goldman to Milly and Rudolf Rocker, March 31, 1939, in Vision on Fire, 36. Goldman to Milly and Rudolf Rocker, September 27, 1939, in Vision on Fire, 14.

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Goldman to Mollie Steimer, September 10, 1937, in Vision on Fire, 272. Goldman to Pauline Turkel, November 8, 1938. reel 44. Goldman to Rebecca Shelley, December 4, 1917, reel 10. Goldman to Robert and Eugenie Sandström, October 1, 1936, reel 38. Goldman to Roger Baldwin, February 6, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Roger Hall, May 27, 1938, in Vision on Fire, 236–239. Goldman to Rudolf Rocker, May 10, 1939, in Vision on Fire, 125. Goldman to Saxe Commins, February 15, 1935, reel 33. Goldman to Sharney Vladek, February 12, 1935, reel 33. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, June 30, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 1, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 19, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 26, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 19, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, October 10, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, November 24, 1918, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, January 7, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, January 14, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, January 19, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, March 2, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, March 6, 1919 reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, March 30, 1919 reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, April 3, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, April 13, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, April 20, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, May 11, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, June 8, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, July 25–27, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, August 2, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, August 30, 1919, in Nowhere at Home, 6–8. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, September 5–7, 1919, reel 11. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, October 28, 1936, in Vision on Fire, 28. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, November 14, 1936, in Vision on Fire, 29. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, December 16, 1936, in Vision on Fire, 28. Goldman to Stella Ballantine and Fitzi Fitzgerald, November 3, 1920, reel 12. Goldman to Theodore Schroeder, April 16, 1916, reel 9. Goldman to Tom Bell, July 1, 1937, reel 40. Goldman to Van Valkenburgh, July 2, 1935, reel 35. Goldman to Van Valkenburgh, February 16, 1937, in Vision on Fire, 289. Goldman to William Jong, April 8, 1937, in Vision on Fire, 221. Inglis, Agnes, to Goldman, July 5, 1931, reel 24. Lord, Ann, to Goldman, July 31, 1935, reel 35. Van Valkenburgh to Emma Goldman, September 16, 1917, reel 10.

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Index

Chinese, 97, 231, 232–33, 280; classics of, 15, 35, 148–50, 154, 158, 231; clubs, 73, 75, 81, 82–83, 85–86, 89, 206n38; colonies, 73, 75, 89, 90, 102, 103, 104, 105, 111, 120, 123n120, 269, 271; communist, 8, 19n56, 138, 145, 148–49, 156, 164, 217, 232–33, 295; criminalization of, 23–26, 30, 31–32, 79, 80, 83, 85, 91, 109, 294; as disease, 182, 189, 227–28; by example, 16, 140, 157, 300, 301–02, 305–06; feminism, 2, 9, 16, 71, 115, 131, 144, 178, 152, 249–54, 258–59, 261; fictional, 6, 77, 84; and film, 96, 182–88, 197, 199, 268, 306; as foreign, 14, 22, 27, 29, 30, 222, 238; framing Goldman within, 8–9, 10, 13, 18n39, 39; free speech in, 1, 9, 28, 35, 40, 213, 251, 268, 271, 286, 306; German, 80–81, 84, 99, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127n212, 144, 145, 152, 164, 253; global, 15, 21, 77, 115, 127n212, 134, 151, 222, 229–38, 240, 283; habitus,14, 16, 75–76, 89, 265–67, 270; against hierarchy, 152, 164, 261, 175n204, 250, 260, 284; and human nature, 140, 162, 165; immigrant, 21, 23,

Abbott, Leonard, 74, 110, 114, 189, 195, 268 African American(s), 222; in anarchism, 221; Goldman’s knowledge of, 218–22, 241, 279, 281; lynching of, 45–46, 54, 109, 212, 217, 284; migration of, 214, 254; and otherness, 228, 259; politics, 15, 68, 216–22, 237–38, 241, 277, 282–83; press, 213–15, 218, 237; in prison, 219, 279–81; and prostitution, 261; and religion, 219, 220–21; silence on, 15, 212–14, 220; slavery of, 215–16, 217, 220, 221; and strikebreaking, 54. See also race, unions American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2, 4, 10, 95 anarchism/anarchist(s): in academy, 5, 7, 278, 307; in Africa, 222, 230, 232; African Americans in, 221; and art, 11, 88, 189, 207–08n74, 231, 254–55; in Asia, 133, 231, 232, 233; Asians in, 54, 99, 214, 218, 222, 241; beer halls, 83–85, 101; bookstores, 105–06, 107; cafés, 87, 138, 160, 226–27, 251; in China, 88, 127n212, 221, 232–234, 236; 337

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Index

30, 34, 37, 38, 71, 81–82, 87, 88, 96, 110, 115, 117n18, 144, 231–32, 288; individualist, 19n56, 105, 148–49, 151, 153, 155, 159–60, 164, 175n204, 184; insurgents in, 33, 38, 40, 44–45, 55; Italian, 11, 33, 81, 82, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 232; Japanese, 97, 221, 230, 233, 234, 236, 238, 246n116; Jewish, 15, 75–76, 81, 132, 138, 144, 152, 212, 213, 223–29, 239, 268; and leisure, 82, 84–85, 157; location of, 81, 93–94; metaphors, 149, 153, 159, 162–64, 166, 174n197, 225, 255, 267, 295–97, 306; Mexican, 217–18, 221, 230–31, 232, 234–36, 238; and middle class, 40, 86–88, 183; in Middle East, 232; and music, 2, 81– 82, 85, 89, 98, 143, 155, 161, 224; mutualist, 148–49, 153; numbers of, 81; open-endedness of, 129, 162, 299; orators, 73, 76, 96, 143, 251; as “outside,” 14, 21–22, 30–32, 116, 227; picnics, 81, 223–24, 251, 268; raids on, 11, 25, 28–29, 74, 106, 108–09; relation to reform of, 281–86; relation to socialism of, 173n151, 285–86, 308n22; Russian, 82, 102–03, 113, 115, 131–32, 144, 148, 151–52, 161, 227, 231, 242–43n31; signs of, 14, 55, 130–31, 135, 137, 145, 157–60, 166; social imaginary of, 14, 72, 80, 107, 203, 222, 233; in South America, 231–32; Spanish, 2, 102, 116, 231, 279, 292– 95, 297–300, 305, 310n80; spies in, 6, 80, 119–20n54; spokeswoman for, 37; syndicalism, 144, 150, 152, 202, 231–33, 282, 304; and theory, 7, 8, 68; time, 7, 98, 99–101, 106–08, 112n93, 122n93, 136, 185–88, 251; translator/translation of, 34, 102, 105–06, 134, 153, 155, 158, 195, 232, 234, 236, 261; as “type,” 32, 61, 78–79, 86, 88, 122n93; unemployed workers in, 6, 31, 34, 88, 90, 91–92, 97, 138, 152, 271; as vocation, 288,

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293, 304–05; and wage slavery, 215, 217, 221, 225, 237; and war, 40, 46, 139, 211, 230, 231, 240, 256, 259, 293–94, 296; without adjectives, 15, 19n56, 148, 164; women, 12–13, 16, 31, 76, 84, 96–98, 122n109, 123n120, 144, 251–52, 265–66, 268–72. See also attentat, danger, education, love, parrhesia, sensorium Anderson, Margaret, 8, 53, 92, 95, 102, 111, 148, 288, 289; and modernism, 188, 190–91, 193, 198 anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism, 15, 102, 221, 222, 229–33, 236, 246n116 anti-Semitism, 29, 152, 211, 224, 239–40 anti-war campaign, 1, 35, 38, 46, 88, 148, 232, 251, 269, 286 apprentice: in anarchism, 14, 79, 145, 159, 162, 252, 267, 277; being forced to think, 137, 147; with Berkman, 138, 140–41; reading signs, 129–132, 166 archive: effect, 9–13, 109, 270, 272; and printers, 103 Armory Show, 189, 196 art, 5, 38, 105, 163, 185, 188, 204, 309n71; censorship of, 255; cover, 107, 243n34; critic, 74, 84; at Ferrer Center, 87–89, 95, 122n106, 189–90, 208n75; film as, 182, 199; rhetorical, 24, 40; of the self, 267, 301, 303–05; signs of, 154, 157, 159–60, 162, 166, 267; spirit of, 155–56, 161; of typesetting, 102–04 artist, 8, 191, 193, 195–96, 207–08n74, 231; performance, 96, 197. See also modernism, realism, romanticism assassination. See attentat Atabekian, Alexandre, 102, 232 attentat, 12, 33, 40–44, 56, 63n119, 64– 65n144; in anarchism, 43–44, 143, 145–46, 149, 150, 234; Czolgosz’s, 38, 62n93, 141; Goldman’s and Berkman’s, 34, 39, 61n81, 81, 90, 131, 138, 142, 151, 172n126,

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Index 173n168, 296; psychology of, 35–36, 62n92 avant garde, 11, 184, 187–88, 190, 193. See also modernism Baginski, Max, 38, 54, 148, 253; at Amsterdam Congress, 164–65, 246n118; journals of, 73, 111 Bakunin, Mikhail, 15, 77, 148, 155, 164, 216, 233; influence on Most of, 143, 144, 152; organic metaphors in writing of, 153; on revolution, 151–52 Baldwin, Roger, 2, 4, 10, 54, 95, 284, 285, 292 Ballantine, Stella Comyn, 76, 91, 119, 211, 219, 251, 257, 285, 287, 292; and Mother Earth, 74, 109, 113 Berkman, Alexander, 32, 37, 105, 164, 227, 236, 271; arrest of, 35, 106; and Bakunin, 151–52; death of, 116, 304–05; deportation of, 22, 28, 117n17, 142, 201, 228, 279; and Ferrer Center, 87, 88, 108; and Haymarket, 133, 135; imprisonment of, 81, 83, 88, 90–91, 124n124, 141, 240, 281; J. Edgar Hoover on, 9, 22, 25, 27; journals of, 73–74, 90, 108–109, 112, 114, 151, 226, 235; and Kropotkin, 149–50, 152, 230; and Landauer, 154, 156; and Most, 143, 145–46, 152, 170n88; and printers, 101, 102, 103, 232; relation to Goldman of, 13–15, 38–39, 62, 77–78, 86–87, 108–09, 138–42, 169n53, 170n68, 178, 204, 291, 301–02; on revolution, 117n17, 139–40, 141; in U.S.S.R, 201–02, 272, 292, 309–10n71. See also attentat, The Blast birth control, 77, 40; in anarchist feminism, 16, 249, 251–52, 258; coalitions around, 10, 38, 73, 87, 286; criminalization of, 25, 39, 64n127, 259; lectures on, 1–2, 27, 87, 98, 258; other activists, 86, 269, 270, 271

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black. See African American Blast, The, 74, 90, 108–09, 114, 138, 235, 237, 270 body/bodies, 23, 46, 61n69, 67, 83, 130, 218; in anarchist feminism, 16, 250–52, 259, 265; Goldman’s, 14, 30, 32, 37, 75–77, 79, 93, 118–119n49; in habitus, 69–71, 80, 203, 265–68, 270; in Laudauer, 155, 157; of law, 25; in media, 185, 187, 199; metaphors of, 163, 228, 290, 297, 306; in sensorium, 67–68, 86, 101, 104, 108, 196; of unions, 215; writing, 298, 301–03 Bolsheviks, 127n212, 141, 150, 201, 228, 309n71; fighting anti-Semitism, 240; and Kronstadt rebellion, 2, 201, 292; and Jews, 227 bomb(s), 29, 33, 37, 41–44, 52, 55, 78, 89, 115, 120; in fiction, 191; Goldman’s response to, 35, 39, 294; government, 184; Haymarket, 30, 133, 167n15, 222; plots, 27, 59n33, 103; Preparedness Day, 43, 136 Bortolotti, Arturo, 11, 103, 305 Bourdieu, Pierre, 69–70, 251–52, 265–67 Brady, Ed, 15, 146–47, 171n91, 178; and Nietzsche, 161 Buber, Martin, 155, 287 camera. See photography capitalism/capitalist, 143, 159, 211, 277, 294; global flows of, 230–31, 234, 238, 251; and labor, 43–44, 54, 56–57, 156, 215, 217; and militarism, 46, 139; and patriarchy, 77, 177, 254–56, 259, 261, 280; and the press, 87, 141; and race, 217, 218–22, 283; and reform, 35, 87, 238, 240; and the state, 11, 36–37, 54, 194, 164, 284 Carpenter, Edward, 106, 148 child(ren): in anarchism, 81, 88–90, 98, 104, 177, 178, 181, 191, 271, 291, 295, 306; Goldman and, 1, 78, 118–19n49; Goldman as, 131, 135,

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Index

201–02, 223, 271; immigrant, 223, 224, 226; killed and maimed, 30, 49, 51, 294; labor of, 224, 226; as metaphor, 95, 219, 255, 297; raising, 21, 78, 251, 256, 259, 262; in strikes, 49, 51. See also birth control Commins, Saxe, 74, 120, 192, 208– 09n96 communism, 2, 292–93, 309–10n71. See also Bolsheviks Comstock laws. See laws counterpublic. See public creativity, 155–60, 211, 261, 297, 304; in circulation of texts, 105; and freedom, 35, 139, 189, 204; and materiality, 130; and participation, 150, 151, 284, 293–94, 306; in school, 89; and signs, 160, 162, 166; vs. synthesis, 7, 149 critic(s): art, 74, 84; of communism, 2, 309–10n71; of drama, 183, 188, 190–95, 206n34; feminist, 178–82, 197–201; of individualism and community, 162; on race, 237, 283; of society, 30, 40, 44 Czolgosz, Leon, 30, 38, 42, 43, 57, 62n93, 141, 146, 267 danger, 26–29, 92, 156, 214; anarchists as source of, 31–32, 55, 61n76, 106, 228, 234; to anarchists, 80, 92, 116, 118n38, 229; of art, 190, 192; of compromise, 286; construction of, in discourse, 22–25, 28, 31–33, 44, 54– 55; denial of, 34–35; Goldman as, 9, 18n40, 29–30, 32, 38–40, 44–45, 54–55, 97; of ideas, 34–35, 38, 40, 55, 299; to labor, 14, 22, 36, 45, 57; mechanical images representing, 163; prophets of, 286, 290; and science, 31–33; and sexuality, 255, 259; of spies, 119–20 n. 54. See also attentat, violence Darwin, Charles, 100, 150 Debs, Eugene, 85, 133, 213, 285 de Cleyre, Voltairine, 133, 218, 234, 251, 265, 292; and anarchism

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without adjectives, 19n56, 148; and assassination of McKinley, 62n93; feminism of, 249; and Magón brothers, 234–35; as orator, 73, 76 Deleuze, Gilles, 70, 169n62; and lines of flight, 83; and sensuous signs, 133–35, 158–59, 166; and signs, 14, 130–31, 137, 141, 167n4; and signs of art, 154, 156–57; and signs of love, 147; and time, 185–86; and worldly signs, 132, 137, 145, 154, 158–59. See also apprentice deportation: of Goldman and Berkman, 2, 22, 27, 54–55, 58n17, 109, 138, 142, 163, 228–29; J. Edgar Hoover’s role in, 25; of Italian anarchists, from Canada, 11, 103, 305; of miners, 50, 51; play about, 279, 281; Louis Post’s role in, 28; of John Turner, 168n30 desire, 146, 139, 162, 297, 299, 304, 306; to appeal to mass audience, 183, 190; for freedom 159, 261; for love, 199–202 Dewey, John, 54, 67, 292 difference: and equality, 16, 250, 260; racial, 213, 219, 220, 228, 229; sexual, 260 discourse, 23–25, 44, 57, 182, 298; of danger, 22–24, 32, 45, 55, 62n93; medical, 14, 31–33; and publics, 73, 75, 95, 99–100, 115; racializing, 227; and sensory experience, 68, 100. See also anarchism, danger dyslexia, 124n123 Eastman, Max, 113, 285 Edelman, Rebecca, 76, 112, 251 education, 11, 87; of Berkman, 138; with Brady, 15, 146; Goldman as, 2, 9, 73; of Goldman, 15, 96, 124n124, 129, 132, 140, 186, 192, 198, 223; of Goldman’s audience, 198; of immigrants, 223–24, 226, 227; of Magón brothers, 236; with Most, 15, 144–45; in prison, 147–48, 183, 191, 219; reform of, 9, 10, 105; sex, 35, 262, 264; for social change, 41,

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Index 44, 87–90, 105, 108, 144, 150, 152, 157, 165, 188, 251, 297; for women, 261, 268. See also Ferrer Center, Modern Schools Ellis, Havelock, 101, 263, 293 Esteve, Pedro, 58–59n21, 102, 112 exile, 88, 142, 143; Goldman and Berkman in, 81, 90, 102, 105, 116, 184, 223, 228, 278, 301; lectures in, 16n1, 97, 183; Paris communards in, 232; to silence dissent, 27, 47; spread of anarchism in, 153, 229, 231, 232, 234; writing in, 165, 302–05 feminism, 13, 71, 240, 250, 259, 277; anarchist, 2, 7, 9, 71, 115, 131, 144, 152, 204, 240, 254, 266; and birth control, 77, 249, 251, 252, 258–59; contemporary, 1, 3, 15, 38–39, 55, 211, 241n1, 277, 307; and crime, 279, 281; and difference, 16, 152, 250, 260; and domestic labor, 78, 132, 147, 272, 291; and domestic violence, 250, 280–81; first wave, 250, 257, 288; Goldman’s, 1, 9, 16, 55, 204, 241n1, 249–52, 256–61, 281; and Ibsen, 191–92; and intersectionality, 15, 16, 250, 258– 59, 261; and protection racket, 250, 256; and suffrage, 220, 254, 257, 259–60, 264, 274n48, 285, 288. See also body/bodies, critics, women Ferrer, Francisco, 10, 105, 107–108, 136 Ferrer Center, The, 14, 87–88, 102, 112, 119–20n54, 268; art classes at, 95, 189–90, 207–08n74; school at, 88– 89, 104, 127n212, 201; slumming at, 122n109; women at, 268–69. See also Modern Schools film(s), 78, 205n51; about anarchism, 268; Goldman in, 185–86; as media, 197, 199, 277; vs. theater, 15, 182– 88, 306; on white slave traffic, 254 Firebrand, The, 102, 114, 195, 215 Fischer, Adolf, 41, 102, 111 Fitzgerald, M. Eleanor (“Fitzie”), 74, 109, 138, 251

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Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 251, 270 Foucault, Michel, 11, 12, 32, 45, 104, 161, 250; on discourse, 23; on fearless speech, 22, 24, 39–40; on techniques of self–care, 301, 303–04 Fraye Arbeter Shtime [Freie Arbeiter Stimme], 4, 58–59n21, 102, 110, 226 free speech, 251; within anarchism 35, 40; in coalitions, 87, 306; fights for, 1, 9, 37, 49, 92, 97, 213, 268, 271, 286; of union organizers, 28 Free Speech League, 2, 10, 54, 86 freedom, 56, 88, 97, 130, 175n204, 188, 195, 204, 231, 260, 291, 304; Bakunin on, 153; and beauty, 195; and community, 139–40, 144, 159, 164–65, 201; and labor, 152, 156; Ricardo Magón on, 236; and the masses, 304; from poverty, 143, 268; Justus Schwab on, 84; sexual, 85, 98, 157, 177–81, 190, 191, 193, 200–02, 253, 256–57, 264–65; from slavery, 214, 215, 219; spirit of, 55, 297; of speech, 9, 24, 28, 35, 38–39, 40, 46, 73, 87, 92, 267, 283–84; of thought, 85, 108, 183. See also free speech, schools, theater Freiheit, Die, 102, 112, 125n160, 133, 138, 144, 145, 151, 215, 229 Freud, Sigmund, 148, 161, 190, 257 garment workers, 1, 78, 101, 223–25, 250, 256, 293 gender, 15, 16, 181, 211, 237, 241; in anarchism, 144, 249, 251, 307; and class, 129, 258–59, 277; dualism, 260; habitus, 265–66; metaphors, 201; perspective, 257–58; relationships, 254 genre, 15, 75, 186, 190, 200; of film, 182, 197, 277; and gender, 181–82; in publics, 99, 115 globalization, 21, 26, 54, 230–31, 222, 238, 251, 253. See also anarchism, global Grave, Jean, 100, 102, 232

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habitus, 69–71, 265–66; anarchist, 14, 16, 75, 76, 78, 251–52, 265–67, 270; of Modern Schools, 89; of the poor, 79 Hapgood, Hutchins, 77, 189, 223 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 74, 84, 122n109 Havel, Hippolyte, 74, 102, 110, 113, 178, 189 Haymarket, 1, 15, 129, 133–35, 191, 292, 167n15, 252; and anarchists, 81,144, 292; effect, 134–38, 222; and fear of immigrants, 30, 222; Kropotkin on, 138; martyrs, 41, 47, 77, 87, 101, 107, 143; Most on, 143; novel about, 191; Carl Sandburg on, 136–37 Haywood, Big Bill, 77, 86, 133 hexis, 70, 104, 108, 267, 270 Hillquit, Morris, 25, 82, 170n73 Hochstein, Helena, 118–19n49, 132, 271 homosexuality, 85, 98, 211 Hoover, J. Edgar, 9, 22, 25, 27, 227 house of the people, 87, 90 Ibsen, Henrik, 77, 106, 155, 161, 164, 184, 193–94, 205n31, 206n38; campaign for, 191–92 ideal: affirming an, 3, 140, 154–56, 194; beautiful, 24, 38, 56, 129, 159, 166, 180, 239, 294–96; and behavior, 15, 180–81, 299; as dangerous, 38; failure of an, 202; fixed, 158–59; living an, 84, 131, 135–36, 148, 178, 180–81, 200–02, 302. See also anarchism immigration, 21, 38, 261, 282; agents, 98; of anarchists, 133, 229, 232; and education, 226; and Haymarket, 133, 222; Jewish, 1, 75, 81, 91, 138, 183, 222–23, 228; laws, 27, 214, 228, 233, 235; and nativism, 29, 214, 222, 223, 228; and prostitution, 261–63; and race, 214, 223, 237, 254, 263; and strike breaking, 54 Indian(s): revolutionaries, 217, 221, 232, 234; violence against, 46, 54, 228, 238, 241

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indigeneous people, 117n18, 217, 240, 282. See also Indians individual, 69, 202, 221, 300; in American transcendentalism, 217; and community, 74, 140, 151–53, 154–55, 162–65, 184, 200–01, 204; and creativity, 158–59; dangerous, 22–23, 31–33, 44–45; freedom, 24, 38, 97, 144, 193, 231; and revolution, 296–97 intellectual(s), 29, 30, 89, 131, 154, 180, 236, 261; development, 11, 67, 71, 84, 90–91, 129, 142, 146, 149, 153, 160–61, 202, 216, 226–27; histories, 3–5, 7–8, 14; and labor, 87, 90, 105, 115, 151, 189–90, 282–83; public, 2, 302; support of, for anarchism, 134, 292–93 International Anarchist Conference, Amsterdam, 1907, 38, 164–65, 215, 218, 230, 233, 246n118 International Workers of the World (I.W.W.), 37, 49–53, 54, 63n99, 86, 102, 111, 112, 233, 234, 306; in court, 28; at Ferrer Center, 87; and Goldman, 97, 227; women and, 271 Ishill, Joseph, 101, 103, 104, 105, 126n162 I.W.W. See International Workers of the World Jews, 32, 78, 132, 243n50, 229, 239–41; in anarchism, 138, 144, 152, 155, 224, 232, 268; cultural heritage of, 212–13, 224–25, 287; hostility toward, 29, 75–76, 132, 152, 227– 29, 240; as immigrants, 1, 75–76, 91, 138, 144, 183, 222–23, 225–27, 229; as intellectuals, 131, 227; and labor, 78, 222–25, 227, 241, 243n50; and memory, 127n209; pogroms against, 234, 240; as printers, 101, 103; and prostitution, 253, 262–63; publications of, 103, 226; as a race, 15, 144, 216–17, 222, 228–29, 240; Russian, 144, 152, 223–24, 226; segregation of, 81, 224, 239; and sexuality, 259, 263; surveillance

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Index of, 227; and theater, 183–84, 226; women, 268, 271–72; and writing, 127n209. See also immigration journals, 14, 90, 118n38, 128n225, 149, 151, 152, 155, 215, 226, 232–36; circulation of, 14, 74–75; creation of publics with, 12, 100; lists of, 13, 109–15; in New York, 81; printers of, 101–104; in prison, 138, 148; time of, 99, 107–108, 185 Kelly, Harry, 62n19, 74, 250, 290, 306; journals of, 12, 102, 112, 113, 127n208, 234 Kronstadt, 2, 201, 292 Kropotkin, Peter, 15, 77, 100, 101, 102, 106, 148, 151, 216; anarchism as way of living in, 82, 152, 157; on collectivization of housework, 78; on evolution, 150; global influence of, 232, 233; on Haymarket, 138; journals of, 115, 145; on Cesare Lombroso, 32; organic metaphors in, 153, 159, 162; on sex, 151, 252; on syndicalism, 150, 152; translations of, 105, 155, 236; and revolution, 38, 41, 149–50, 153, 164; on war, 151, 230, 299 labor, 92, 260, 138, 282; in anarchism, 140, 152, 155–56, 164, 166, 231–32, 294; domestic, 3, 6, 78, 132, 147, 272, 291; division of, 77–78, 150, 231, 232, 234; epistolary, 300–03, 305; exploitation of, 57, 139, 194, 196, 217, 218, 224, 259, 261; Goldman’s, 1, 225; halls, 96, 134; immigrant, 45–46, 54, 66n161, 86, 186, 196, 221, 224, 230; leaders, 84, 134, 225, 233; Mexican, 230, 234–35; of printers, 101–05; prison, 91–92, 152, 225, 280–81; and race, 218, 220, 222, 224–25, 227, 237, 308n41; radical, 71, 82, 115, 220, 133; realism on, 196–97; and Red Scare, 27–28; of remembering, 12, 53, 56, 108, 134; romanticism on, 194–95; skilled, 82, 101–105, 223,

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231, 243n50; struggles, 44, 53–54, 56, 96, 98, 133, 215, 221–22, 234; studying, 10, 33, 56–57, 64–65n144; of thinking, 3, 166, 228; of translators, 105–06; violence against, 12, 22, 27, 37, 31, 45–54, 55–56, 64–65n144, 107, 241, 306; wage, 101, 150, 158, 195, 225, 262, 264; of women, 250, 251, 253–54, 256, 257, 259–62; of writing, 35, 74–75, 105. See also child(ren), garment workers, unions Landauer, Gustav, 15, 82, 148, 159–61, 173n151, 195, 216, 232; as prophet, 287; and spirit, 153–58; as translator, 105 law(s), 137, 139, 155, 214; regarding anarchism, 30, 58n14, 58n20, 58n21, 81, 83, 99, 109, 168n30, 170n73, 223, 229, 235; Comstock, 25, 37, 86, 106, 195, 259; enforcement of, 23–25, 26–27, 32, 43, 45, 54, 93, 230; regarding prostitution, 262, 264; and race, 217, 218, 221, 237, 240, 254. See also Red Scare lecture(s), 84, 87–89, 105–06, 160, 161, 226, 302; on birth control 1, 27, 87, 258, 272; on drama, 183–84, 190, 193–94, 198, 207n55; in Jewish community, 226–27; on love and sex, 85, 178, 289; Most’s, 143, 146; as provoking thought, 4, 225; segregated, 81, 120n62, 224; suppression of, 34, 61n76, 106, 236; talent for giving, 145; as topical public, 72–75, 106–08, 185, 218; tours, 2, 37, 39, 77, 80, 82, 92–93, 95–100, 185, 212, 269, 278 letters, 1, 37, 74, 96; arts and, 194, 197; to Berkman, 204; destruction of, 106; in journals, 106–07, 109, 235, 236; love, 178; from prison, 191, 211–12, 219, 257, 280–81, 285; on the Spanish revolution, 4, 16, 201, 279, 293–95, 298; as technique of selfproduction, 16, 116, 278, 300–06 Liberty, 110, 151

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Lingg, Louis, 41, 134 Little Review, The, 186, 188, 190–91 love: and comradeship, 141; free, 85, 98, 177–82, 190, 191, 200, 202, 251, 261, 265; in Kropotkin, 150; in Landauer, 155–56; for power, 259, 304; for revolutions, 15, 199–204; for theater, 15. See also Deleuze Luxemburg, Rosa, 8, 68, 90, 156, 203, 265, 270 Magón, Ricardo Flores and Enrique Flores, 234–36, 238; journal of, 111 Makhno, Nestor, 102, 127 Malatesta, Errico, 100, 106, 233, 246n118; and armed insurrection, 41, 149; and global anarchism, 115, 230–32; and International Bureau, 233; and Mother Earth, 100, 106; and war, 151, 230 map: cognitive, 199; of Goldman’s lectures, 13, 93, 94; of urban space, 23, 25 marriage: contradictions concerning, 179, 199; critique of, 2, 16, 177, 194, 249, 252, 255–56, 262, 277; Goldman’s, 132, 133, 178, 202, 291 Masses, The, 25, 89, 110, 113, 186, 188, 207n74, 285 media, 139, 180, 284; anarchist, 115; and genre, 15, 181–82, 277; globalization of, 253; new, 184–86; representations of anarchists in, 14, 24, 25, 29–30, 45, 61n76; of theater, 199; and white slave traffic, 254, 275n69 metaphors, 10, 162, 295; in anarchism, 14, 267; of the bourgeoisie, 78; of disease, 227; erotic, 201; organic, 149, 153, 159, 163, 166, 255, 295– 97, 306; in Red Scare, 28; of slavery, 225; spatial, 8 Michel, Louise, 41, 76, 146, 149, 270 militarism, 35, 38, 98, 171; and capitalism, 46, 54; German, 151 militia(s), 53; strike-breaking by, 37, 45–46, 47

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Mill, John Stewart, 84, 124n124, 141, 147 Modern Schools, 10, 87–90, 108, 113, 127n212, 306; printing at, 101, 104– 05; spies in, 119–20n54; students in, 88–89, 104, 201, 271, 306 modernism, 189–90; aesthetic of, 182, 188, 190, 199, 288; and anarchism, 11; Goldman on, 15, 122n93, 190– 94, 197, 277 Most, Johann, 61n69, 73, 133, 138, 142, 146–48, 152, 170n73, 178; and firebug story, 30; and Goldman’s education, 15, 95, 143–46, 291; journals of, 112, 125n160, 138, 151; and theater, 82, 196, 224 mother(s): free, 181, 191, 252, 256, 258, 261; of Goldman, 132, 271; Goldman as, 78, 118–19n49, 147, 219, 233, 293; Goldman’s cruelty to, 118–19n49; of Modern School children, 89, 271; thinking through our, 1–3, 277; in writings on Spain, 297. See also Ibsen Mother Earth, 112, 127n208; aesthetics of, 188, 190, 207n74; announcements in, 85–86, 90; birth control in, 39, 258; circulation of, 1, 87, 100; Criminal Anarchy Law printed in, 83; fund-raising for, 93; global anarchism in, 233–37, 238; labor in, 37, 53, 54; model for, 115; printing of, 102; raids on office of, 11, 35, 106, 108–09; reports of lecture tours in, 92, 100; sales of, 95; subscribers to, 268; techniques of reflexivity in, 106–07; writers and producers of, 73–74, 80, 138, 186, 257, 268–69, 275n92, 306; writing on attentats in, 36 Mratchny, Mark, 102, 211, 239 narrative/narration, 7, 56, 83, 190, 199, 253; chronological, 15, 182, 185; conversion, 129, 135, 257; crystalline, 185–86, 188; organic regime of, 185; personal, 39, 132,

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Index 137; prophetic, 287, 290; and sensorium, 68 Nettlau, Max, 252, 300, 303 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 77, 100, 148, 154– 59; Goldman’s use of, 160–62, 164– 65; and metaphors, 162–63, 166 O’Hare, Kate Richards, 58n17, 89, 118– 19n49, 280, 285 Palmer raids, 25, 28 Paris Commune, 107, 136, 232 parrhesia, 24, 33, 39–40, 54–55 Parsons, Albert, 102, 111, 134, 143, 285 Parsons, Lucy, 111, 251 patriarchy, 218, 238; in anarchism, 253; division of labor in, 77–78; marriage in, 177, 255–56, 262, 280; norms of, 179–81; why women embrace, 257, 259; women’s sexuality in, 79, 254, 259, 261–62 Pesotta, Rose, 251, 275n93, 292 Peukert, Joseph, 138, 145, 152 photography, 79, 89, 268; of Haymarket men, 136; of Jacob Riis, 78; and time, 182, 185–88, 207n55 phrenology, 79; examination of Goldman, 31–32, 60n57 Pinkertons, 44, 46, 90, 167n15 Pittsburgh Manifesto, 143, 152 printer(s), 12, 13, 74, 102–03, 106, 109, 125n161; respect for, 103–04, 184; sensorium of, 104; tramp, 101, 102, 126n164; women, 101–02 prison, 80, 115, 120, 155, 165, 195, 233; African Americans in, 219–20, 280; attentaters in, 34, 36; Berkman in, 62n93, 81, 88, 90–91, 101, 108–09, 116, 117n26, 141–42, 146, 305; Brady in, 146; breaks, 38, 100; Goldman in, 2, 15, 26, 27, 34, 39, 58n17, 76–77, 88, 90–91, 95, 109, 141, 147–48, 271, 285; Kotoku Shusui in, 233; labor in, 91–92, 152, 225, 280; Laudauer in, 155; leadership in, 91, 141, 279;

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Magóns in, 234–35, 236; Most in, 143, 170n73; O’Hare in, 119, 285; as political space, 6, 73, 75; prostitutes in, 255, 262; as public, 6, 73, 75, 90–91, 114; reading in, 124n124, 147–48, 183, 191; and sensorium, 92; Tarrida del Mármol in, 115; women in, 16, 90, 219, 250, 279–81; writing, 138, 169n53 prisoners: in Palmer raids, 29; political, 1, 2, 6, 54, 62n93, 83, 90–91, 98, 103, 281–82, 285, 300; women, 16, 90, 219, 220, 250, 279–81 prophet/prophecy, 16, 266, 286–90, 297, 303, 306, 308n41 prostitution, 249–50, 252 , 261, 277; and decriminalization, 264, 282, 307n19; immigrants as, 262–63; in plays, 187, 191; and Puritanism, 255; recruitment into, 253–54 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 15, 82, 101, 105, 139, 148; and art, 189; Goldman’s use of, 153, 155, 157, 164 public(s): counter, 12, 24, 69, 71–75, 87, 90, 92, 99, 101, 106, 107, 115– 16, 118n39; creating, 67, 69–71, 77, 86–87, 90–95, 107–08, 277, 302–03, 305; discourse, 33, 56, 75, 95–96, 98, 99, 100; general, 21, 22, 27, 30– 31, 37, 57, 62n93, 78, 91, 133, 268, 284; of homes, 77, 93; intellectuals, 1–2, 302; multiple, 40, 99; officials, 28; prophets in, 16, 286–87, 289; and prostitution, 253, 258, 261–62, 264–65; revolutionary, 139; secret, 118n38; security of, 26; speaking in, 4, 16, 24, 76, 78–80, 95, 98, 108; and subcultures, 71–72, 81, 226; textual, 73–75, 99–101, 106–07, 110–15, 226; topical, 72–73, 75, 80, 90, 96, 98; women in, 2, 38, 75–76, 79, 83, 251–52, 266, 270, 272, 291. See also printer(s) Questione Sociale, La, 58–59n21, 102, 114, 215

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race, 213–14, 254; ahistorical thinking on, 15, 68, 221, 237, 241, 306; and class, 78, 211–12, 216–17, 220, 240, 260, 282; and prophecy, 289; rethinking, 240; riots, 54, 212; and sex, 144, 211, 250; white, 214. See African Americans, Jews Rancière, Jacques, 6, 12, 69, 83, 116, 278, 289 realism, 190–91, 204; and romanticism, 10, 15, 182, 188, 190, 193–97, 199– 200, 288; in theater, 122n93, 188, 193–94, 196, 198–99; in visual art, 189; in Whitman, 195 Reclus, Élisée, 101, 102, 232 Red Scare, 27–29, 30, 99 Reed, Jack, 141, 148 Reedy, William Marion, 29, 250 reform movements, 9, 31, 86, 153, 234, 241, 306; and Haymarket, 135; regarding prostitution, 262–64; relation to revolution of, 15, 16, 56, 144–45, 237–38, 254, 281–84; role of state in, 152, 217–18, 220–21, 229, 240, 284–86; and violence, 32 Reitman, Ben, 74, 85, 292; attack on, 11, 92, 259; and birth control, 259; as manager, 73, 26–27, 73, 96, 97, 184, 218; relationship with Goldman, 147, 178, 180, 184, 202, 312n123 religion, 30, 76, 132, 72; and alcohol, 121n84; anarchism as, 129, 156, 224; and capitalism and the state, 36, 194, 218, 238, 254; and free thought, 39, 85; Jewish, 222, 223, 226; and marriage, 177; in prison, 124n124; and race, 220–21; and spirit, 155; women in, 259–61 revolution, 21, 278; anarchist, 7, 9, 24, 34, 39, 83, 127n212, 295–96, 304; anti-imperial, 222, 229, 231–34; and art, 189, 193; Bakunin on, 151–52, 153; Berkman on, 139–40, 141–42, 202; Chinese, 221, 231, 234; consciousness regarding, 84, 189, 197–98, 236; dancing in, 39,

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55, 66n157, 211; European, 84, 121, 229, 288; feminist, 9, 254, 264; as force of nature, 134, 295–96; ideal of, 97, 131, 180; and Jews, 222, 227; Kropotkin on, 150–51, 164; Landauer on, 155–57, 159; and love, 15, 179, 199–203; Mexican, 221, 230, 231, 234– 36, 246n130; Most on, 143–45; Nietzsche on, 160–61; and reform, 15, 16, 188, 237–38, 264, 281–84; Russian, 2, 6, 38, 102, 129, 141, 201–02, 292, 301, 309–10n71; Spanish, 2, 4, 116, 201, 253, 271, 279, 286, 290, 292–94, 296–300; spirit of, 72, 77, 154, 156, 159, 161, 291, 293–97; and theater, 193–95, 197–98; third world, 222, 231–33; and violence, 32, 38, 43, 45, 55, 62n93, 63n119, 91, 143, 296; women in, 270, 271, 276n103. See also attentat, printer(s) Rocker, Rudolf 102, 151, 155, 253, 300, 308n22; and International Bureau, 233; and kibbutz, 232; and revolution, 201, 282; translation of, 105; and war, 151 romanticism, 131, 194–95, 204. See also realism Sacco and Vanzetti, 4, 51, 81, 103, 107, 136 Sandburg, Carl, 85, 136–37 Sanger, Margaret and William, 10, 55, 66n157, 86, 102, 113, 118–19n49, 263 Sartre, Jean Paul, 186–87 school(s), 38, 57, 75, 81, 90, 109, 132, 223, 226, 269; anarchist critique of, 139, 255; free, 1, 54, 123n112, 234, 251, 269; Goldman in, 132, 223; prison as, 91, 147; Rand, 82, 89; unions as, 282. See also Modern Schools, Ferrer Center Schwab, Justus, 84, 124n124, 147; tavern of, 14, 84, 160 sensorium, 68–71; anarchist, 68, 75, 86, 89, 92, 98, 103–104, 108, 203; of

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Index film, 185; and narrative, 68; of the poor, 79; of theater, 185, 196. See also printer(s) sex/sexuality, 5, 16, 249, 251; other anarchists on, 144, 151, 153, 157, 252; commodified, 261–64; and danger, 23, 35, 255, 259, 263; dualism of, 16, 260; education about, 259, 264; and feminism, 211, 257; freedom in 35, 85, 189, 193; and genre, 15; Goldman’s, 2, 32, 76, 147, 177–80; habitus of, 251, 266; and law, 25, 240; and love, 200; and marriage, 256, 277, 307; and prostitution, 225, 253–55, 261–64, 307; and protection racket, 256; and race, 213, 221, 237, 240. See also birth control, body/bodies, white slave traffic Shaw, George Bernard, 106, 134, 148, 183, 193, 206n34 social imaginary, 70–71, 72, 116; of anarchism, 14, 69, 80, 107, 203, 222, 233; of capitalism, 33, 80, 137, 228; and memory, 56 socialism/socialist, 26, 80, 86, 143, 147, 237, 282; relation to anarchism of, 97, 108, 155–56, 164, 173n151, 207–08n74, 235, 282, 285–86, 306, 308n22; artists in, 207–08n74; cafés, 227; and Mexican radicals, 235; Nietzsche against, 161; publications, 109–14, 119–20n54, 142, 226, 270; schools, 89; and terrorism, 63n119; women, 133, 269. See also The Masses space(s): aesthetics of, 185, 187, 190; anarchist, 8, 14–16, 68–69, 74, 80, 90, 110, 115, 122n93, 140, 145, 306; of anti-colonial struggle, 229; of bodies, 75, 266, 267; of bookstores, 105; ectopic, 6, 278; epistolary, 300; female, 267, 270; of leadership, 141; political, 3, 5, 12, 14, 15, 116, 154, 160, 213, 221, 267, 298, 304–05; of prison, 90–92, 281; private, 77, 93; public, 93, 115, 251; of reading,

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12, 13; sacred, 260; segregated, 224; of signs, 162, 164, 166; of social imaginaries, 69–70, 222; textual, 73, 99, 128n225, 300; of theory, 67–68; topical, 72–73, 75, 84–87, 95; urban, 23, 83 Spies, August, 82, 87, 110, 134, 138, 143, 291 Steimer, Mollie, 73, 76, 113, 251, 300 Stein, Modest (“Fedya”), 61n81, 131, 151, 178, 291 Stirner, Max, 15, 77, 84, 106, 148, 164, 173n168, 216; and fixed idea, 154, 158–160, 254, 299; metaphors in, 162, 166 suffrage, 31, 220, 223, 257, 260, 264, 274n48, 285, 288 Tarrida del Mármol, Fernando, 19n56, 115, 148, 233 terrorism, 29–30, 62n88, 62n93; against blacks, 45; by Bolsheviks, 201; classical age of, 33, 41, 43–44, 63n119, 131; in films, 182; foreign, 14 theater: in anarchism, 73, 84 102, 155, 206n38, 227; Berkman’s translation for, 105; in education, 87, 89–90; vs. film, 15, 182–88, 306; Goldman as, 27, 96, 207n55; Goldman on, 1, 10, 143, 183–88, 191–92, 196–99, 206n34, 207n55; among Jews, 223, 226, 275–76n93; little, 82, 155, 183, 196, 206n38; as public, 72; vaudeville, 79; as venue, 83, 96 theory, 29, 72, 97, 130; anarchist, 35, 181, 217, 249; contemporary critical, 2, 6, 7; for cutting, 11–12; ectopic, 6, 67–68, 233, 259, 277–78, 281, 307; feminist, 211, 250; as hybrid, 149; life is stronger than, 16, 298, 300; located, 5–6, 67–68, 213, 220; and practice, 2–3, 5, 67, 71, 134, 151, 250; and synthesis, 4, 7–8, 131, 149, 164; untimely, 7, 156, 189, 277–78 time: ahead of her, 12, 179, 250–51, 296; anarchist, 7, 68, 107, 122n93;

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in the archive, 11; chronological, 185–86, 188; cinematic, 185–86, 188; crowd, 98–99, 136, 185, 203 Tolstoy, Leo, 77, 100, 184, 191 Tucker, Benjamin, 101, 102; bookstore of, 105; journal of, 110, 151; translations by, 153, 158 Turner, George Kibbe, 253, 263, 264 union(s): anarchist, 63n99, 81–82, 87, 101, 102, 142, 144, 231–33; busting of, 54, 282; conservative, 215, 223; Goldman and, 37, 63n99, 73, 98, 152, 183, 100, 282–84; among Jews, 223, 225; reform vs. revolution in, 282–84; as space for theory, 6, 82; and strikes, 45, 47–53; and unemployed, 281; violence against, 10–11, 28, 45–43, 54, 56, 64– 65n144, 80, 90, 230; violence against blacks in, 54, 212, 221; women organizers in, 270 violence, 218, 222; against anarchists, 14, 80, 134–35, 137; by anarchists, 26, 29, 32–33, 35–36, 37, 38–40, 41–44, 62n93, 64n121, 118n38; against labor, 10–12, 13, 22, 28, 34, 37, 38–39, 40, 41–44, 45–54, 55–57, 64–65n144, 80, 118n38, 241, 277, 296, 306; racial, 214, 217; revolutionary, 91, 143, 149, 156, 295, 296, 301; of sensuous signs, 159, 166; against women, 64n127, 66n161, 250, 280–81. See also attentat wage slavery, 215, 217, 221, 225, 237 Walling, Anna Strunsky, 218, 258 Warner, Michael, 71–75, 95, 99–100, 106, 108, 115–16, 118n38

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white slave traffic, 6, 253–55, 261–64, 275n69 Whitman, Walt, 86, 287; Goldman on, 10, 24, 84, 86, 124n124, 147, 191, 194–95, 217, 271, 287, 288; other anarchists on, 77, 105, 149, 155, 195 Wilde, Oscar, 155, 191, 255 Wobblies. See International Workers of the World Wollstonecraft, Mary, 180, 255 women, 34; African American, 214, 219, 221, 261, 279–81, 282; in anarchism, 16, 249, 265, 268–72; anxiety about originality of, 4; attending Goldman’s lectures, 73, 97, 98, 122, 239, 269; and biography, 8, 68; and children, 30, 64n127, 78, 118–19n49, 223, 239, 250, 251, 262, 272; education of, 144, 152, 226, 250, 261, 262, 264, 268; freedom of, 55, 200, 211, 260, 265, 291; labor of, 225, 250, 256, 264; and marriage, 177, 255–56, 259–60, 262–63, 265; modern, 180–81, 190; moralism of, 257, 259, 268; in patriarchy, 79, 179– 81, 252; radical, 131–32, 251–52, 266, 268; reform for, 31, 253–54, 264, 282; rights of, 38, 260–61; role model for, 15, 179, 200, 204; speaking in public, 76, 96, 203, 291; suffrage, 220, 223, 257, 260, 282, 285; thinking through, 1, 3, 4, 277; traffic in, 59n22, 253–59, 261–65, 275n69, 282; in unions, 53, 63n99, 257, 271; violence against, 54, 218, 250, 256, 280–81. See also feminism, mother(s), prostitution, sex/sexuality, white slave traffic

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About the Author

Kathy E. Ferguson is professor of political science and women’s studies at the University of Hawai‘i, specializing in political theory, feminist theory, and militarism. With coauthor Phyllis Turnbull she wrote a book about militarism in Hawai‘i entitled Oh, Say, Can You See? The Semiotics of the Military in Hawai‘i (1999) and with coeditor Monique Mironesco she edited a volume of essays entitled Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific (2008).

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