EMMA GOLDMAN.

Colonist, Volume LXI, Issue 15202, 15 October 1919, Page 2

EMMA GOLDMAN.

"HIGH PRIESTESS OF ANARCHY.'

A Press Association message received a few weeks ago stated that Miss Emma Goldmp-u, the anarchist, who was imprisoned for attempting to obstruct the Army draft, has completed her two years' term, and has been ordered to be deported.

Miss Emma Goldman is commonly known as the "high priestess of anarchy." It was her violent speeches which led the half-witted Pole Czolgosz to murder President McKinley at the opening of the Buffalo Exposition in ■September, 1901, while Bresci, the murderer of Humbert of Italy (1900) ? also came under her influence while m New York.

She is a Russian Jewess by birth. As a child she questioned all traditions and conventions, and warfare between herself and her parents, and later with her husband, was constant and vigorous. She left her husband many years ago raid went to work in New fork. Here she became acquainted with several Anarchist leaders, and was soon the most aggressive of them all. For twenty-six years she has continued her revolutionist and propaganda activity. After the attempted assassination of Mr Henry C. Frick during the steel riots of 1892, she fell under suspicion of having prompted the act, and was shunned by everybody. She continued her agitation however, and in 1893 was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for inciting the striking cloakmakers in New York to violence.

iir .°, • lndel>endent Workers of the World in 1913 conducted a revolutionary j ™st camP<-}ign on the Pacific Slope, and Emma Goldman had a great share m the organisation of the movement. Collisions between the I.W.W. and the police were frequent, and in San Diego, the headquarters of the agitation, the citizens formed committees with the object of keeping it in check. Fearino' that the mob would tar and feather them, as was done on a previous occasion, the police arrested Emma Goldman and Dr Ben Liesman and deported them beyond the Stafe limits . On June 15, 1917, Goldman and Alexander Berknifin, another notorious anarchist, who had been conducting a campaign against all the aspirations and activities of the United States Government, particularly against its part in the war and army conscription, in the course of which they almost preached ed sedition, were arrested Tn- Federal agents in the anarchists' headquarters iii New York. For several weeks previously secret service agents had kept close watch on Emma Goldman and Berkman, and had been known for some days that their arrest would be made immediately the Government obtained evidence of an overt act on their part to interfere with the nation's war programme. When that evidence was forthcoming the Government came into possession of copies of anarchists' publications known as "Mother Earth," which was owned by Emma Goldman, and "The Blast," the editor and .proprietor of which was Berkman. Important as were the prisoners to the Government, they were perhaps not nearly so important as is the mass ,of documents and other written matter which came into the possession of the Department of Justice. A waggonload of anarchist records and propaganda material was seized, and included a complete register of followers of anarchy in Ihc Paitcd States.