On June 15 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in the office of Mother Earth at 20 East 125th Street. On June 27 they were arraigned for trial. On July 9 the jury pronounced them guilty of having attempted to obstruct the draft. Judge Mayer thereupon sentenced Berkman to two years in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Goldman to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri for two years, and fined each of them $10,000. It was a stiff blow to organized anarchy—the maximum sentence possible, and the judge followed it by directing the District Attorney, Harold A. Content, to notify the Commissioner of Labor of the conviction, in order that when the two emerged from prison, they might be deported as aliens convicted of two or more crimes to the country from which they came, bringing uplift to down-trodden America.
Their work has since been carried on in a more or less desultory way. They, too, have become official martyrs to the cause, whose names will be inscribed along with those of Brescia, the Haymarket murderers, and a score of others, on the anarchist service flag. The undercurrent of opposition appeared spasmodically during the war and it became necessary for an Alabama Judge, sitting in the District Court of New York, on October 25, 1918, to impose maximum sentences under the espionage act upon three more advocates of unrest, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman and Hyman Lachnowsky, the ringleaders of a group who circulated leaflets denouncing armed intervention in Russia and advocating a general strike. They were sentenced to twenty years apiece; a fourth member got three years and a $1,000 fine. A woman in the group, Mollie Steiner, was sentenced to fifteen years.
The efforts at “demonstration” which the imported anarchists in America have employed are neither as picturesque nor as popularly received as those of their comrades in the old world. Anarchy is out of tune in America. Prussianism has already had its answer from the United States. Bolshevism is not for a well-educated, deep-breathing nation like ours. And anarchy, the poorest wretch of the three, must make terrifying faces through some other window than that of a country full of people who are going to continue to make this democracy safe for itself.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.
Transcribers improved readability of some numbers in some illustrations, and switched the transcribed sequence of the text of one pair of “random pages” (following page 26) to make it easier to follow.
Transcriber corrected the Title page misspelling of “SMALLL, MAYNARD & COMPANY” to “SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY”, which is how it appears on the Copyright page. Transcriber removed redundant book title just above the title of the first chapter.