In 1924 Emma was permitted to make her home in England. At once she busied herself with plans to rouse the people against the Bolsheviki, but found herself either snubbed or scorned. The liberals refused to support her for fear of endangering Soviet Russia's precarious relations with Great Britain; the radicals insisted on the need of bolstering the Bolsheviki during the period of revolutionary experimentation. Her lectures were poorly attended; her audiences failed to be impressed. After two years of discouragement she decided to leave England altogether. Shortly before her departure she married James Colton, an old rebel, for the convenience of British citizenship.
A vacation in France preceded a lecture tour through Canada. Again on American soil, she resumed the old pattern of agitation. But the Dominion did not provide sufficient scope for her seething energy. And when friends, who had long urged her to write her autobiography, provided her with funds for that purpose, she returned to France.
Living My Life appeared in 1932. It is a lively story, palpitating with strong feeling and epitomizing the blazing years of her anarchist activity. The writing is vivacious, forceful, exciting. The narrative is colorful and wholly uninhibited. Emma's strong personality stamps every page. She was as dynamic in her numerous amours as in her work for human freedom, and she discusses both with equal zest. Her unrepressed egotism prompts her to relate personal incidents which have little bearing on her own development and none on that of anarchism—incidents that sometimes reveal petty malice and that might better have been left unrecorded. The final impression, however, is of her generous character, her profound devotion to the ideal of liberty, her extraordinary energy, her great courage, and her successful insistence on living her life in her own way.
When Emma had completed her long book and was ready to resume her role as lecturer and agitator, the menace of fascism drove the Bolshevik betrayal from the forefront of her mind. A tour through Germany and other parts of Europe convinced her that the Nazis were the greater threat to freedom and must be fought without let. Late in 1933 she returned to Canada and addressed large audiences on such topics as "Hitler and His Cohorts," "Germany's Tragedy," and "The Collapse of German Culture." With Cassandra-like foresight she argued that England and Germany's neighbors were blind to the danger confronting them and that if the Nazis were not ousted from power they would destroy civilization.
In January 1934 she was granted permission to visit the United States for ninety days. Friends arranged for a two-month lecture tour. Her audiences were large, though a good percentage came more out of curiosity than to pay homage to her anarchist leadership. Some hotels refused to admit her, and detectives and policemen were as conspicuous within the halls as in former times. Communists heckled her, but there was comparatively little of the excitement and defiance of her previous "tours of agitation." In truth neither Emma nor her hearers bothered much about the doctrine of anarchism. The immediate menace had become not the capitalistic state but fascist authoritarianism (to Emma, Bolshevism was "only left-wing fascism"); and she attacked it not as the apostolic anarchist but as the passionate libertarian. The end of April came all too soon, and again she had to depart from the land in which she had spent her best years. Nor did the fact that she was an old woman without roots elsewhere make leavetaking any easier.
The following year she sojourned in Canada, lecturing, writing, hoping in vain for readmission to the United States. In the spring of 1935 she went to France. Berkman was already there, and the two old friends again saw much of each other. The day after her sixty-seventh birthday their lifelong intimacy was abruptly ended by his suicide; he had been ill for some time and characteristically preferred death to a wretched old age. The tragic event oppressed her grievously.
The Spanish Civil War, beginning shortly after, provided her with much-needed distraction. With energies renewed she at once went to Spain. Her previous friendly association with Spanish anarchists made her a welcome addition to their ranks. For the next two years she devoted herself to bolstering the cause of the Loyalists. Since England's sympathy was of crucial importance, she went to London to work in behalf of the Spanish government. The callous and undiscerning attitude of the ruling Tories deprived her of the last atom of hope. She returned to Spain in 1938, wishing to stand beside her comrades during their final futile efforts to hold back the fascist inundation.
Early in 1939, with darkness rapidly enveloping the whole of Europe, Emma returned to Canada. There she died on May 13, 1940, clinging tenaciously to the shreds of her revolutionary ideal until her last gasp.
Emma Goldman was unquestionably the most active and audacious rebel of her time. An idealist to the core of her being, cherishing liberty as the most precious of human possessions, completely dedicated to the full and free life for all mankind, she early became the object of concentrated contumely and brutal abuse on the part of the defenders of the status quo. Her threat to society lay not so much in her revolutionary doctrine as in her attacks upon the abuses of capitalism. B. R. Tucker and other individualist anarchists were equally opposed to authority, but they were not molested so long as they did not concern themselves with economic exploitation. Emma, however, had made it her duty to fight against injustice toward the worker and the nonconformist. Consequently she organized mass-meetings and marches against unemployment; she became a picket-leader and fund-raiser, and protested openly and persistently against violations of free speech and against police brutality. This activity, especially effective because of her untiring zeal and bold eloquence, gave her pre-eminence as a dangerous enemy of capitalism and subjected her to persecution by the authorities until she was driven out of the country.