This is the woman America has hated and persecuted, thrown into jail, deprived of her citizenship, and held up as an example of all that is ignorant, coarse, and base. America will recognize its failure some day, after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the new war has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which Emma Goldman has been pleading for during her years of fighting. But it takes education to produce such awakenings, and there is no immediate hope of such a general enlightenment. The stupidity of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that other prophets have raised their spears to the same heights and have been misunderstood or ignored but not outraged by the peculiar ignorance which Americans alone seem capable of. Had Ibsen appeared among us to lecture on the rightness of Nora’s rebellion or to denounce the pillars of society as he did in his writing, he, too, would have been thrown into prison for free speech or accused of a president’s assassination. The cruelty of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that she has so much work to do which so many people need, and that she cannot break through the prejudice and the superstition surrounding her to get at those dulled ones who need it most. Ten years ago she was preaching, under the most absurd persecution, ideas which thinking people accept as a matter of course today. Now the ignorant public still shudders at her name; the “intellectuals”—especially those of the Greenwich Village radical type—dismiss her casually as a sort of good Christian—one not to be taken too seriously: there are so many more daring revolutionists among their own ranks that they can’t understand why Emma Goldman should make such a stir and get all the credit; the Socialists concede her a personality and condone her failure to attach herself to that line of evolutionary progress which is sure to establish itself. “Unscientific” is their damning judgment of her; her Anarchism is a metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a scientific temperament. And so they all miss the real issue, namely, that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction, and—this above all!—that life in her has a great grandeur.
How do such grotesque misconceptions arise? Why should it have happened that all this misapprehension and ignorance should have grown up about a personality whose mere presence is a benediction and whose friendship compels you toward high goals you had thought unattainable? There is no use asking how or why it happened; it is a perfectly consistent thing to have happened, for it happens to everyone, in greater or less degree, who strives for a new ideal. But if I could only get hold of all the people who are unwilling to understand Emma Goldman and force them to listen to her for an hour:—what a sweet triumph comes with their “Oh, but she’s wonderful!”
And now about her ideas. If you have read Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that punishment is a prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to take the life of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is really misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who have not found their work; that people who work should have some share of their production; that the holding of property is a source of many evils; that possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities; that co-operation and sharing are splendid ones; that there should be an equality between giving and taking; that nothing worth while was ever born outside of freedom; and that men might live together on this basis more effectively than on the present one. Even your “reasonable” man will grant you this premise; but then he plays his trump card: It may all be very beautiful—of course it is; but it can never happen! Oscar Wilde answered him in this way: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”
Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,” she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called “Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it.
These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality. It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy, but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and beautifully.
And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin; to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all.
Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression of our ignorance.—Maeterlinck.
Poems
Maxwell Bodenheim