Miss Goldman was taken to the office of Chief of Police O’Neill and served with a warrant charging her with having conspired with other Anarchists then under arrest, to kill the President.
She detailed her meeting with the assassin in Chicago.
“I was at the house of Abraham Isaak. Yes, the house at 515 Carroll street. I was preparing to take the Nickel Plate train for the East with Miss Isaak. A ring came at the door. I answered the bell and found a young man there. He asked for Mr. Isaak. The latter had left the house, promising to meet us at the station and say good-by. I so told the young man and I further told him that he might go to the station with us and meet Mr. Isaak there. So you see,” she asserted, “he would not even have been with me for thirty-five minutes had I not asked him to go to the train.
“The young man—yes, it was Czolgosz, who shot the President—said that he had met me before. He said he had heard me lecture in Cleveland. I had delivered a lecture there on May 6, but I can’t remember all the people who shake hands with me, can I? I had no remembrance of him. We went to the station on the elevated train and this man accompanied us. I asked him where he had heard of Mr. Isaak. He said he had read the latter’s paper, Free Society. He did not talk to me about a plot. I never heard of him from that time until McKinley was shot.”
Emma Goldman’s ideas on anarchy are contained in an interview had with her some months before President McKinley’s assassination. She said:
“If a man came to me and told me he was planning an assassination I would think him an utter fool and refuse to pay any attention to him. The man who has such a plan, if he is earnest and honest, knows no secret is safe when told. He does the deed himself, runs the risk himself, pays the penalty himself. I honor him for the spirit that prompts him. It is no small thing for a man to be willing to lay down his life for the cause of humanity. The act is noble, but it is mistaken. While I do not advocate violence, neither do I condemn the anarchist who resorts to it.
“I was an anarchist when I left Russia to come to America,” she continued, “but I had hardly formulated my belief. The final influence that crystallized my views was the hanging of the Chicago anarchists in 1887.
“I am an anarchist because I love individual freedom, and I will not surrender that freedom. A leader must sooner or later be the victim of the masses he thinks he controls. When I definitely entered the work I gave myself a solemn pledge that I would study, that I would make passion bow to reason, that I would not be carried away from the truth by sentiment. I soon saw that the safest and wisest way to keep myself free was not to be a leader. That is why I am connected with no party. I am a member of no group. Individual freedom and responsibility—there is the basis of true anarchy.
“No, I have never advocated violence, nor do I know a single truly great anarchist leader who ever did advocate violence. Where violence comes with anarchy it is a result of the conditions, not of anarchy. The biggest fallacy going is the idea that anarchists as a body band together and order violence, assassinations of rulers and all that. I ought to know something about anarchy, and I tell you that is false—absolutely false.
“There is ignorance, cruelty, starvation, poverty, suffering, and some victim grows tired of waiting. He believes a decisive blow will call public attention to the wrongs of his country, and may hasten the remedy. He and perhaps one or two intimate friends or relatives make a plan. They do not have orders. They do not consult other anarchists.