Figure 1.--.

Emma Goldman became involved in the Americn Labor Movement as a fevent Anarchist, earning the nick name "Red" Emma. She was born in in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania to middle-class Jewish parents (1869). Her parents ran a small inn. Anarchists assasinated Tsar Alexander II (1881). His reactionary son, Alexander II, launched terrible pogroms against Jews. The family feeling threatened moved to St. Petersburg when she was 13 years old. She got a job in a corset factory, an interesting choice given the feminst princiles she later expoused. It was in the factory that she was first exposed to radical socilaist and anarchist thought. One concept that that made sence to her was the use of revolutionary violence to bing about social change. This concept attracted many young Russians because there was no legal oposition to the Tsar permitted and the Tsar's secret police, the Okrana, was very effective in supressing such oposition. Chernyshevsky's book, What Is to Be Done deeply influenced her. Goldman She emigrated to the United States at age 17 (1885). She was one of millions of Eastern European Jews that immigrated to America at this time. While enduring poverty and anti-Semitism, it was an arranged marriage that drove her to America. She wnt to Rochester New Yotk where here sister lived and found work in a factory. She married a fellow factory worker Jacob Kershner (1887). Emma was outraged when four anarchists were hanged in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot (1886). Sge decided to commit herself at age 20 to the revolutionary movement. She left her family nd moved first to New Haven, Connecticut and then to New York City. She divorced Kershner. She becme at a very young age a persuasive speaker for issues like workers'rights, birth control, and free love--quite an incendiary combination in the 1880s. She became close to anarchist Alexander Berkman. When Berkman shot and stabbed factory manager Henry Clay Frick during the Homested strike (1892), Emma defended him, convinced that such targeted acts of violence were the only way to change the system. In fact the attack on Frick turned popular opinion shrply against the workers. Authorities correctly concluded that Emma was aware of the attack in advance. Berkman and others, however, refused to implicate her. She traveled throughout Ameruca giving sppeches and publishing articls supporting the workers anbd feminist issues she expoused becoming known as "Red Emma". She played an important role in development anarchist political philosophy in the United States. She was convicted twice, once for inciting to riot (1893) and then during World War I for promoting resistance to the draft (1917). Authoritie in the United States arrested and deported a number of immigrant radicals after World war I. Authorities deported Goldman to the new Soviet Union (1919). She was at first optimistic about the Revolution. She met Lenin, but was shocked with Lenin cracked down on Russian anarchists with a brutality far beyond what she had experienced in America. She left Russia after only 2 years, totally disilusioned. She spent the rest of her life traveling, living both in Western Europe and Canada. The irony of her life is that this eloquent spokesman for anarchism cme to see herself as an America, the center of world capitalism. She lived several years in the south of France , writing her autobiography, Living My Life, a fascinating account of her tumultous life. Her last major cause was the Spanish Republic which she attempted to support in London (1936). She died in Canada (1940). She has been lionized as an early feminist spokesman and criticism for her promotion of political murder and other violent acts. Goldman like other radicals at the time failed to preceive the importance of law and the democratic system in acieving worker rights. Her experiebces Soviet Russia, a society completely devoid of law, came as a great shock to her.

Created: 8:17 PM 9/1/2006
Last updated: 12:02 AM 9/2/2006