Emma Goldman.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVI, Issue 8, 22 February 1911, Page 2

Emma Goldman.

"NOTE.—A cablegram from New York on January 19th stated that at the Conference of the United Mine Workers of America, the delegates decided to refuse entrance to the Convention to Emma Goldman, the anarchist.

gMMA GOLDMAN, the leading anarchist of the United States, , has had a life of struggle. She is one of the most striking examples of the “strenuous life.” She was born in the land of spiritual struggle, Russia, forty years ago, and felt, as a child, the idealistic unrest expressed by writers sueh as Dostoyrevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoi. A passionate desire for human freedom is the note of revolutionary Russia. As Emma Goldman is a Jewess, a member of a race systeBiatically oppressed in the land of the zar, her intensely revolutionary character is all the more explicable. She went to America when she was about sixteen, and lived for three years in Rochester, N.Y., where she married. She was a natural Nihilist and aggressively questioned, even as a young girl,

the anarchistic doctrine. liiea?”', anarchism is opposed to all force. It opposes the government, because the government is based on force. Tolstoi’s doctrine of non-resistance to evil is an anarchistic principle. These idealists believe that, if it were not for law and government, human beings would unite into social organisations freely, without compulsion, and that there need be no law, except the laws of Nature and the law of universal love. But they also believe in the right of the individual to" act as his conscience dictates, and if the individual assassinates as the result of the dictates of his conscience, the anarchists, although force is contrary to their essential doctrine, neither condemn nor approve. They do not feel called upon to judge. As a result of the suspicion attaching to her from Berkman’s attempt to kill Henry C. Frick as a result of the strike at the Carnegie steel works, in 1892, and

ad traditions and conventions. Warfare between her and her parents, then between her and her husband, was constant and vigorous. One day, like Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” she left her husband, escaped by the window, and went to New York City alone, with two shill* ings in her pocket, prepared to test herself and the world. She secured a “job” in a corset factory, and knew intimately the life of the slum, At the. same time, she began her career of political and social agitation. She met John Most, Voltairine de Cieyre, Alexander Berkman, all anarchists, and became perhaps the most aggressive of them all. Her first speech was made in 1890, three years after the Chicago anarchists were hanged —an event which had played its part in the formation of her anarchistic principles. It marked one step in the development of her hatred for government. For the last twenty years she has continued her revolutionist and propagandist activity, begun publicly in 1890, with the utmost devotion to her ideals and under the most unfavourable conditions. Assassination is not a logical part of

for which he received 14 years’ imprisonment, Emma Goldman found, herself an outcast;, she was shunned by nearly everybody, and was literally without a bed to lay her head; for a time the only place where she could hire a room was in a .“.disorderly” ..onse. But she was not discouraged. Nothing can discourage her. . She continued her agitation, and in 1893 she was arrested as a result of speaking in an open-air meeting in Union Square, in favour of the-striking cloakmakers. She was convicted of “inciting to, riot,” and spent ten months in the prison on Blackwell’s Island, where sha acted as nurse, an occupation she afterwards developed into a profession—ona of the many ways by which she has helped to earn a precarious living. That was the only time that Emma Goldman has been convicted. She has been arrested some fifty times, hauled from platforms where she was speaking, and locked up in prison cells. After President McKinley’s assassination, she became even more the object of police attention, although the evidence shows that she was hardly acquainted with the assassin Czolgosz. Her attitude toward*

Jits.act would logically be the same as that she -held- towards the act of Berkman; not as an advocate of it, in fact, Theoretically against it, but, believing that the individual should be left to his conscience, she would not actively condemn. With greater experience and maturing years, she has become more philosophical and less extreme in her utterances. The idealistic anarchist rather than the immediate revolutionist predominates at present in her nature. Her friends adore her and believe her to be an incarnation of virtue and wisdom. She Jias had a severe struggle to exist and do her chosen work, and she extends a jielping hand to others who are in need. JVfany persons have been and are dependent opon her for moral and intellectual encouragement as well as financial aid. Her home is open to the many of ’’radical” faith who are “down and out." 3t is a kind of “saloon,” a forum for unpopular ideas, held together by her great (energy and unfailing belief in the •’cause.” • Endowed with remanrable courage and a will like iron, her cnaracter fits in beautifully with our conception of , what constitutes the strenuous soul. Though Jnost of us believe that none of her main ideas are founded on the facts, yet Those persons who know her recognise tier idealistic .devotion, energy and unconquerable determinatiqii.