THE REAL EMMA GOLDMAN
by Charles Erskine Scott Wood, of Portland
Oregon
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| Above: Emma Goldman. Below: C.E.S.Wood (click here) was probably the most famous Oregon writer, or Oregonian for that matter, who ever lived. He watched Abe Lincoln go to his inaugaration, yet also lived to be friend and publisher of Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, and the poet Robinson Jeffers. A West Point graduate who pursued Chief Joseph, it was Wood who wrote Joseph's speech down ' will fight no more forever') and remained Joseph's close friend and defender until Joseph's death. He was a poet, painter, and lawyer, considered the peer of his friend Clarence Darrow, and was married to the famous Suffragette, Sara Bard Field (click here). |
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When some crazed fanatic commits some political crime, the police, to
prove their vigilance and justify their existence, arrest Emma Goldman. From her viewpoint it is laughable comedy. hut as a
display of American tyranny and ignorance, it is tragical. Emma Goldman never exhorted to
violence in her life. She doesn't believe in violence. First, because it is against the tenets of the anarchistic creed. which condemns all force against peaceable men. Second, because it is useless and only begets a distrust and prejudice. It strengthens the side so attacked. Understand me.
Emma Goldman does not believe the people should cower like sheep while the Cossacks gallop their horses over the breasts of women, neither do I. and if some grief-crazed wretch strikes at Czar or Governor he has her pity and
mine. Emma Goldman has never advocated an act of violence. It is said sh e instigated the
Haymarket bomb—throwing. She was seventeen years old at that time, and knew nothing of the affair.
It is said she incited Czolgosz. She did not even know him. She was arrested at that time by the intelligent police and discharged with censure of the police for a
wholly groundless arrest. Emma Goldman is a trained nurse (click here
for the Emma Goldman clinic—educated in Vienna—who all her life has gone about doing good, nursing the poor and seeking to lessen the distress of the wretched. if the half-baked fanatics of the pulpit and the press who shriek along the surface of things, would follow in her footsteps for a time, they might be of some real benefit to sad humanity. They would also discover that, as I have said, her whole discourse is an appeal to justice through the intellect, and she never said a syllable of violence in her life. They would also discover what would be more potent than truth to them. that she is the friend of Prince Kropotkin. Think of it! a real Prince, closer in blood—right to the throne of Russia than the Czar
himself. They would discover that this woman who, before she has uttered a word, is hauled off the stage by such cheap American thugs as Chief Shippey of Chicago, is met in England by Edward Carpenter. the poet, and taken to her lectures in his automobile: that the people she knows abroad are the dramatists, poets, literary men. musicians, people of brains who move the world. I know Bernard Shaw would laugh that the YMCA of Portland and the Avon Society refused her their halls use in the belief that she is a murderess, a wild animal going up and down the land seeking whom she may devour.
I hope he wilt hear of it and give one more sarcastic illumination of our insular American Ignorance—our provincialism. In England, Emma Goldman lectures as anyone else would, to a quiet audience, without a policeman in sight. In Free America she is dogged by detectives and hauled to jail by opera bouffe policemen till we are ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And this, too, after years and years of careful detective work and failure to convict her of an improper, dangerous, or unlawful word. It is a comedy. If she says anything contrary to the peace and dignity of society, why is she not arrested after each lecture? Why is she never tried? I repeat, the whole thing is so shallow and silly that if Miss Goldman had organized it as an advertising dodge she would make herself ridiculous. Portland has reason to congratulate herself on the sanity of her Mayor, Chief of Police and Police Commissioners, who in effect laughed at the hysterics of those who wanted this dangerous woman arrested and thrown into a dungeon in advance, and pointed to the Oregon constitution, which says: “Any person shall have the right to freely express himself on any subject whatsoever, being responsible for an abuse of such right.” And they said wait till she abuses the right of free speech and violates the law, then we will act. The consequence was, her five lectures in Portland were as uneventful as
prayer meetings. Not a policeman was visible, and there was no need for one. The Rev. Mr. Eliot, too, in the interests of free speech and sanity of judgment, offered the Unitarian Church if necessary—but it was not needed. Plenty of halls were available. Compare Portland’s sanity and American spirit of action with Butte, where all hall-owners were notified not to give her room “under penalty of the law,” whatever that may mean. Curious law they must have in Montana. But the same spirit prevails in Chicago, where the police dare to prohibit hall-owners from letting their halls to her use. This, you will please remember, when her lectures are printed and may be read—when in all her addresses not a solitary charge can be brought against her. I heard lawyers say: “She is a damned anarchist and ought to be hung!”—without trial, I suppose. Nice lawyers. They only exposed their ignorance—this detestable, bourgeois ignorance of anything but money. They admitted they had never heard her speak nor read a line she had written. Her full five lectures in Portland were reported and nothing even sensational found in them. If you ask why does she have this reputation, then? I ask why did the Abolition Yankees have horns and hoofs? Why did the early Christians sacrifice infants and eat their flesh? Why do the Jews in Russia and Poland drink the blood of Christian babes? Why, in the early Christian times, were all murders, all fires, all plagues, all riots, laid at the door of the Christians? Why did Virgil give a recipe for breeding bees from carrion? Why was Dreyfus convicted? Why does the average reporter and average newspaper print a sensation rather than the truth? Why all the lies and superstitions of the world?
A Portland paper gave an interview with Emma Goldman, commencing by calling her the “arch-priestess of dynamite,”—a thing utterly false, and for which no foundation existed in the interview or anywhere else. So this myth has gone from paper to paper, from mouth to mouth, simply because Emma Goldman is an “anarchist”—a misconception of what the word means. She is an anarchist as Tolstoy is, and Kropotkin, Prudhon, Shaw, Carpenter, and the Americans, Warren, Thoreau, Tucker. Bolton flail, Byington, Lysander Spooner. Dynamite! Bombs! Assassination! Rubbish! 1 have called it comedy. But the colossal American ignorance and gullibility is too tiresome to be comic. Let some one convict Emma Goldman of encouraging violence before we talk any more about it. ‘[here are plenty able and willing to do it if it can be done. The fact that it is not done, and a horde of police camping on her trail, is conclusive evidence.
The identical lectures she gives are printed and may be read by any one. These are evidence. Her magazine, “Mother Earth,” is evidence. Reporters haunt her, these are evidence. Why is nothing ever done? Only those who do not hear her, but speak from hearsay, keep alive this absurd bugaboo. ‘[hat Emma Goldman advocates violence is a pure myth. That she was associated with the Haymarket bomb-throwing or with Czolgosz are pure myths. An instance of this pitiful ignorance and reckless assertion is an article by one Broughton Brandenburg in the June issue of the “Broadway Magazine,” “The Menace of the Red Flag.” His very tide proclaims his ignorance. The anarchists have no flag, no organization. The red flag is the socialist’s symbol., and when Jack London raised it at a gathering in California he was nearly mobbed. Ignorance again. For it means, as I have said, only the blood common to all men—brotherly love, universal brotherhood, Christianity made practical. It floats freely over every socialist gathering in Europe. A gentleman told me he had seen it waving over a large assemblage in Hyde Park, London—an orderly assemblage and no policeman visible.
Despotic Britain! free America! Brandenburg’s article is rather briefly and contemptuously reviewed in “Mother
Earth” he asserts that Michael Bakunin was a Frenchman; that he was the author of a code for assassination, and that a copy of the code was found among Czolgosz’ effects, In truth Bakunin was a Russian. He wrote no such code, none was found among Czolgosz’ effects, and the trial made manifest that Czolgosz had no effects.
These were the very things the police did not find, and which the prosecution could not produce. Not a scrap. Not one line or word. Czolgosz was a poor fellow, who brooded alone till he went insane. He testified that he was utterly alone, and the most rigorous investigation by willing detectives and in a time of high excitement, failed to disclose any associates or even friends. That Brandenburg does not know his subject, and has been too lazy to learn, is shown by his ignorance of names. He refers to William McQueen as Peter; Bresci as Brescia; classes socialists like Hunter (whose book was reviewed in this department last month). Patterson of Chicago, Phelps Stokes, the New York wealthy reformer, as anarchists; does not even mention such active and well known American anarchists as Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews. Lysander Spooner, David Thoreau, Benjamin ft. Tucker, Joseph Labadie, and others. Mr. Broughton Brandenburg is an ignorant writer of sensational space.
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