Late last eve—it’s like I had been socializing excessively of late—out with the boys one night—then on Thanksgiving feasting on turkey and stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, smashed turnips, mushroom and pine nut gravy at my Irish-pub hangout—so late last eve I was relaxin’, not sleepy, in the mood for something visual as I relaxed. As is normal with me, I switched on the reality view of what’s outside and I came across what proved to be a fairly thoroughly good docudrama thing on Emma Goldman, one of the freest women to have ever lived.
Henry Miller wrote that Emma Goldman was the most powerful and moving speaker he’d ever had the luck to hear. He went on to say his attending one of her lectures changed his life and changed the way he thought of writing even.
Her life was a novel. Fighting for workers's rights against the rich bastards who to her acted as though just because they were rich they had the right to kill anyone they wished, even women and children (Emma went and witnessed the famous Ludlow, Colorado, miners’s strike where the Rockefellers, who owned the coal mines, called in the Colorado National Guard and they came under the command of a gung-ho drugstore general who so hated the mostly Italian immigrant miners so much he ordered his horse troops to trample over them and shoot them at will and that’s just what that National Guard unit did, they trampled ‘em and shot ‘em as they trampled ‘em, or they shot 'em as they ran to try and get away from the trampling. It's the good old Amurican way or treating workers, scumbag lowlifes who do "those jobs real Americans find beneath them"--does that sound familiar in terms of today's immigration hatred that is building again. The National Guard, though created as a people's militia, has historically been against the ordinary American citizen.
After seeing what happened in the Homestead, Pennsylvania, strikes of the Frick Steel interests, Emma believed it became a worker's duty to rid society of the rich bosses who so hated their workers, especially Henry Frick, of the Pittsburgh Fricks, a true crazy bastard of a fop, who hired three barge loads of murdously-intending Pinkerton goons to sail quietly up the Monongahela River in the early morning hours and attack the striking workers at Homestead. Emma and her lover, Alexander Berkman, also a Russian immigrant like Emma--Emma had come to the US of A when she was sixteen; Berkman later--decided to kill Frick.
Berkman dressed up like a employment agent and got admitted into Frick’s private office and an audience with Frick himself. Rather than shake hands with the devil, Berkman pulls out a pistol and shoots two rounds point blank at Frick’s chest. His shots miss their target and hit Frick in the shoulder only wounding him. Berkman was a miserable F-up; as one of the teevee show’s commentator’s pointed out he F-ed up because he was still thinking like a Bolshevek and a Communist and as such was terribly naïve about how you needed a different strategy to deal with revolutionary ideas in this country.
Berkman was arrested and taken to jail for attempted murder but Frick said not to kill him, so they put him in a Federal dungeon for 14 years. Though Emma had been part of the plot and could have been busted for murder as an accomplice, Berkman never involved her and took full blame for the attempt.
Then when the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley—a rich tool of Mark Hanna the millionaire political boss—said that he was so strongly influenced by an Emma Goldman speech he was driven to shoot the president Emma's backers and fans turned on her, though her defense of the guy was in terms of the conditions that drove him to do the deed and not because he was an evil man.
The Palmer Raids were the government’s reaction to the Russian Revolution—the beginning of the commie scare during the beginning of WWI. The Palmer Raids gave the fed cops and others the right to arrest commies, Wobblies, anarachists without warrants, arrests that were meant to rid this country of reds and anarchists, including Emma Goldman, who was arrested this time with Alexander Berkman, except this time the government was meanly serious and Emma realized she was going to be deported—a whole mess of these suspects including Emma and Sasha Berkman were imprisoned on Ellis Island where they were jailed to await their deportation orders. For Emma, after living here for thirty years, after becoming an American citizen, it meant they were shipping her back to Russia, and in the early morning before-daylight hours of December 21st, Emma was put on a ship in New York Harbor and off she went back to Russia, which by then was Soviet Russia under a Communist government headed by V.I. Lenin. Pundits all over the country started quipping, “With Prohibition coming in and Emma Goldman going out, it's going to be a boring country.”
Emma was quiet surprised on arriving in Petrograd in the Soviet Union to find the place devastated, totally in messy ruin, the realizing that the whole of Russia was still amuck with the destruction left behind by the Revolution and then WWI. Petrograd was aflame with the foulings of famine, starvation, disease, and death. Then when she went before Lenin and asked him why there was no free speech in Russia he replied that there could be no free speech in Russia because no one trusted anybody especially among the Bolsheviks and that free speech couldn’t be allowed; it was too dangerous--Lenin told her she had a very naive attitude about what was going on in Russia at that time--she had been spoiled by the imperialists in the USA.
Emma couldn’t take Russia after that, so she and Alexander Berkman escaped it after Emma was given a cottage high in the mountains above Saint Tropez in the South of France by Peggy Guggenheim the American millionaire playgirl who was a big helper of artists. Saint Tropez at that time was an obscure fishing village. It was in France that Emma learned one day that Alexander "Sasha" Berkman had committed suicide--shooting himself in the chest--how about that for an irony.
After France, Emma lived in London and then ended up in Canada. She did return to the US to promote her autobiography but she wasn’t allowed to stay.
She spent her last years in Canada. On February 17, 1940, while playing bridge with friends, Emma had a stroke that left her helpless. In May of 1940, she died.
Friends got permission to bring Emma’s body back to the US and she’s buried in Chicago’s famous Waldheim Cemetery near the graves of the Haymarket 7.
Quiet a life. Quiet a story. I’ve just skimmed over her life in order to rekindle a remembrance of her.
misterremembrance
for The Daily Growler
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