 |
|
     |
|
|
By Russell Schoch There's nothing like a front-page story in the New York Times to bring worldwide attention to a quiet research project. That's what happened in January to the Emma Goldman Papers, where for decades director Candace Falk and a team of researchers have been gathering and cataloguing tens of thousands of documents related to the prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman. An impassioned and articulate advocate of free speech, women’s rights, and social freedom, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1885. She emerged from the radical ranks of anarchists in New York City's Lower East Side to became a national figure--both celebrated and reviled--before being imprisoned for her protests against the draft preceding World War I and then deported under the Immigration Act of 1918. Last December, Candace Falk prepared her annual appeal for funds to "Emma’s List," individuals who have supported the always financially precarious project at Berkeley, which was founded by Falk in 1980. She included two quotes from Goldman, one on the suppression of free speech from 1902, the other from 1915 warning of "war fever" and urging people to resist it. But those quotes were stricken from the fundraising letter by the office of Berkeley's Vice Chancellor of Research, which saw them as "a political statement about current U.S. politics that is inappropriate in an official university communication." Free speech denied? "I didn't, and don't, see it as a free speech issue," says associate vice chancellor Robert Price, M.A. '64, Ph.D. '71 who, with vice chancellor for research Beth Burnside, deleted the quotations. Price, who was one of two graduate students to serve on the Steering Committee of Berkeley's 1960s Free Speech Movement, says he maintains his belief in free speech. Nevertheless, he insists that letters sent from the University should not take political positions. Falk vehemently disagreed with the decision, but dutifully removed the Goldman remarks from her letter. When the New York Times got wind of and published the story about the dispute, editorialists around the country took delight in chastising Berkeley, "the home of free speech," for its "censorship." Later, at her own expense, Falk included the offending quotations in a thank-you letter to those who had contributed. After the incident, Chancellor Robert Berdahl said he thought his administrators had made a mistake. "Despite the embarrassment we have all felt at the national spotlight this has attracted," Berdahl told the campus community in mid-January, "I think we can be heartened by the many voices that have been raised in defense of freedom of expression and know that, because of those voices, it will remain a sacred principle at Berkeley." Coincidentally, in the wake of all this publicity, this month the University of California Press is publishing the first of four planned volumes of the Emma Goldman Papers, edited by Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran '99. Volume One of its documentary history of the American years of Emma Goldman's life is titled Made for America and covers the years 1890 to 1901. The 650-page book includes personal correspondence, newspaper articles, government surveillance reports, court transcripts, and other documents, with a comprehensive introduction by Falk. Editor Candace Falk was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father's family, interestingly enough, came from Emma Goldman's birthplace, Kovno, a small town in what is now Lithuania. It was Falk's interest in feminism and anti-war activities while she was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s that first led her to read Goldman. Falk and members of the "love generation" were attracted to the wild and free spirit they saw in the anarchist who purportedly said: "If I can't dance, it’s not my revolution." In 1975, Falk's life was changed permanently when, traveling across the country, she stopped in Chicago to visit a friend at a guitar shop. Falk was accompanied by her dog, named "Red Emma Goldman." In good anarchist fashion, Emma refused to obey Falk's order to stay outside the shop and came bounding in. The guitar-shop friend asked the dog's name and, after hearing it, fetched a large box full of letters from the back of the shop. These were from a passionate ten-year correspondence between Goldman and her manager-lover, Ben Reitman. Falk turned her chance discovery into a Ph.D. dissertation at UC Santa Cruz and a well-received book, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (1984). The correspondence, and Falk's book, showed a different side of Emma Goldman--one hopelessly in love and caught between her intellectual and emotional understandings of "free love." "I saw a more vulnerable side of Emma Goldman's life," says Falk of her first book. Today, after 23 years of digging deeply into those papers and that life, Falk says that Volume One presents yet another side of Goldman, one marked by an association with violence that many had been unaware of. The new book opens with the attempted assassination of anti-union industrialist Henry Clay Frick by Goldman's close friend and fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman; it closes shortly after self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz's assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Newspapers claimed that Czolgosz was inspired to his violent act by hearing one of Goldman's fiery lectures. Goldman was arrested as an accomplice but released for lack of evidence. We talked to Falk about anarchism, free speech, and fundraising in the converted dentist's office a block from campus that houses the Emma Goldman Papers. What is anarchism? Anarchism doesn't have a single meaning or definition but, certainly for Emma Goldman, the central concept of anarchism was freedom--from the constraints of social convention as well as from government and economic coercion--in order to create an equitable world. Most of us think primarily of bombs and broken windows when we hear the term "anarchist." That element exists and is documented in our volumes in the context of rampant anti-labor violence. But it's important to differentiate between defacing property by breaking windows at Starbucks and actually killing innocent people with a bomb. I've found at its root that anarchism is a desire not to destroy but to create--to trust the individual in a state of freedom and under conditions that are conducive to creative development and to fulfilling the basic needs of life. Anarchists believe that you don't need policing and the state to make that happen. What was Goldman's relation to the violent side of anarchism? I think, as an anarchist, she was much closer to people who practiced violence than I was aware of when I started the project. We have collected 30,000 to 40,000 documents, and have microfilmed 20,000 of them. It wasn't until we were putting together Volume One of the Emma Goldman Papers that the details of her militancy at the end of the 19th century were documented with such precision. I never thought she was just about peace and love. But my understanding of her didn’t include many of the clandestine shadows of her personality and her work, which I now understand was part of the world in which she lived. How so? Did you see the movie Gangs of New York? That was about a period decades before Emma's, but her world was even more violent. Workers--primarily Eastern European immigrants--could be killed in labor disputes without even having their names recorded. If striking workers were shot, there was often no investigation; things just carried on. To Emma Goldman and the anarchists of the time, it seemed there was a social war going on, one between labor and capital. And just as in a period of war citizens will feel patriotic in a conventional sense and support the soldiers who are killing in their name--in the same way, Goldman and her comrades believed they were fighting a war, and she supported her "troops," including those who inflicted violence. She even came to the defense of Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley's assassin, which would seem tantamount to defending Osama bin Laden today. I don't like that comparison. One was the assassination of a political figure; the other was a mass slaughter. I think Goldman would have been far more critical of bin Laden, who was fueled not just by a critique of American hypocrisy but also was driven to such acts in the name of religion. In Czolgosz's case, she wanted to understand what led him to commit such an act. What levels of oppression and misery are necessary to provoke the taking of a leader's life? I suppose it is comparable to asking, today, What conditions lead to violence throughout the world, including those committed by terrorists? What did anarchists want for society? A key question for anarchists is how society should be organized economically. All her life Emma Goldman was an anarchist-communist. Which means what? The best example I can give would be that, when there's a coal miner's strike and people send in donations, they are given to people according to their need--how many children they have, if there are old people living with them or if there's a single parent. The need is graded accordingly, and people come together to work out the distribution. Another thread of anarchism that Goldman incorporated was: How are people to live together? She believed in what we might call "free love," in the right of people to live together without the sanction of the church or state--that is, without marriage. Yet another element I find interesting in Goldman was her belief that liberation started in the soul. In other words, you had to fight your own inner demons, your own ways of internalizing the structure and the mores of your time, the ways in which you imprison yourself. This sounds, today, rather benign. What was the problem? The problem was that Goldman's model existed outside of the state, and also outside of capitalism and religion. Those are notions that terrified people. Goldman was a purist who never took part in the state; she didn't vote. She believed that even a democratic state, when challenged, would be as violent and oppressive as totalitarianism. How so? If you said, as she did prior to the U.S. entry into World War I, that you think that war is dreadful, is slaughter, and is being waged for economic gain, then you would be put in prison. That's what would have happened to you in Russia or Germany, countries that were identified in American culture as totalitarian. And yet that's exactly what happened to Emma Goldman in America. If anarchists don't take part in the electoral process, what can they do? Goldman believed very strongly in education, and that the most dangerous element in society is ignorance. She believed you have to educate people, and that people can learn there is something better. The second thing is, again, the matter of violence. Goldman argued very strongly that violence was the prerogative of the state, and that you have a right to respond to it. If you're living in a world where you're being threatened and frightened, it's a natural human reaction to fight back. Along with many anarchist-communists at the time, Goldman believed that change was going to come, and that violence was inevitable. Is her advocacy of violence what brought about the suppression of Goldman's free speech? Violence was part of it. But one thing we've discovered in producing Volume One was that, in many cases, magazines and radical newspapers sent through the mail were not stopped by the government because they professed violence; they were stopped for advocating what we would call free sexuality. Why was this such a threat? The family, the church, and the state were considered the foundation for the stability of the country. If the family unit was "corrupted," it was assumed that this would weaken and possibly even topple the whole country. The fact that Emma Goldman was such a strong speaker on these subjects made her terrifying because she could tap into desires that were much more universal than purely anarchist politics. She found an undercurrent of support for freedom and against the hypocrisy of the culture and religion, against the narrow constraints of marriage--which she called "economic prostitution." People were not allowed to even learn the basics of birth control, topic Goldman advocated and addressed in her lectures. So I think that people responded to Goldman, even if they weren't anarchists, because of their longing for freedom and for free choice. Even if we can agree with her on some matters, it's her opposition to the state that remains unsettling. Doesn't the state guarantee order? It does guarantee order, but often at the price of individual freedom. For Goldman and other anarchists the state was the cause of economic, social, and emotional pain. This perception was reinforced by her experiences in Russia after her deportation from the United States in 1919. She had always been bitter and sarcastic toward the socialists, and eventually concluded that their idea of the state was even more overwhelming and suffocating than a democratic-capitalist state. What was her vision of a better society? She had a deeply held view of the potential of a society without government, because the order imposed by government, especially at that time, was imposed by violence and fear. She thought that, freed from the encumbrances of the law, people could create a society that reflected a more positive and enlightened vision of human nature--and act responsibly toward each other by choice. One of the sources we draw on in Volume One is a periodical from the 1890s called Liberty. It says that liberty is "not the daughter, but the mother of order." I think that encapsulates a lot of what we're putting back on the map in our work, which is a history and a context for Emma Goldman's life as an anarchist. She says, in Volume One: "I, as an Anarchist, want to awaken in all people an appreciation for all that is beautiful and good." What did she mean? If you believe, as she did, in the creative and cooperative potential of all individuals, then the "beautiful and good" of individuals would be possible in a world not ruled by competition, greed, power relations, hierarchy, and government coercion. She didn't think that her vision would take hold in her lifetime--perhaps not for 500 years. But she fervently believed that the idea of cooperation outside of law and force was something to strive for. What is Emma Goldman's greatest legacy? I would say it's her fight for free speech and the free expression of ideas. She believed that free expression was the greatest and only safety in a sane society. Of course for her it was a necessary element for voicing dissent--whether it was about state-capitalist violence against workers, about birth control and free love, or about anarchist ideas generally. It was a principle that was essential to every aspect of her work. What was the condition of free speech during Goldman’s years in America? Didn't the First Amendment guarantee the right of free speech? It did, but at that time there was no consistent enforcement of that right. It was left to the whims of local government and local police. Our documentary history presents something like a local history of free speech as it follows Goldman around the country--speaking in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, San Diego, and so forth. If she was in a town that felt threatened by her ideas, her right to speak was denied, and she likely would be thrown in jail for making the attempt. If it was a more progressive town, a large auditorium would be made available, thousands of people would show up, and there might even be a transcript of her speech in the next day's newspaper. It all depended on local police and city officials. She was so accustomed to random arrests, that she took a book with her to lectures so she wouldn’t have to waste her night with nothing to read in jail. Where are we today in terms of free speech? Oh, I think we have a remarkable amount of free speech--including the academic freedom to publish our historical documentation of the life of Emma Goldman. But I think it also depends on who you are: what color, what class. And, furthermore, whenever ideas challenge the status quo or the perceived security of the nation, the right to free speech is increasingly fragile. I think my recent experience--which is very minor compared to Emma Goldman's lifelong battles--proved to me how many people appreciate having somebody stand up for what they believe is right, at a time when it appears that many of those rights are being eroded. What were the Goldman quotations you were prevented from including in your fundraising letter a few months ago? One was from 1915, before the United States entered the First World War. She said: "In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and women not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." Was this the kind of statement that made Emma Goldman "the most dangerous anarchist in America"? Yes. J. Edgar Hoover made his reputation by calling her that after the United States entered World War I and before she was deported. Goldman was a very articulate spokesperson against the draft. She was dangerously persuasive in his eyes--as she had been to immigrant workers subject to the draft who, after hearing her speak, thought twice before they were ready to kill and perhaps die for a country that otherwise dismissed their concerns. Even before that, in 1897, Goldman believed that free speech existed only for those whose ideas did not conflict with those in power and thus claimed that the authorities determine what constitutes free speech. Although she made tremendous progress in safeguarding the right of free speech early in the 20th century, when the U.S. entered the First World War, even those who worked directly within the democratic system and opposed the war, like Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, were arrested and put in jail. And the second quotation? In 1902, Goldman said: "We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open." I think she was saying that, as a Russian immigrant, she knew what it was like to have her rights suppressed, both in Russia and the U.S., and warned that it was just a matter of time before people who thought they were free might experience the same thing. In the same way, today, all you have to do is look like you're from an Arab nation, and your rights may be taken away. So you did see a relevance to events today in those quotations? I chose the 1915 quote because of its resonance about a pending war; the 1902 quote about the suppression of free speech suggests that there were many earlier variations on the theme of Homeland Security and the U.S. Patriot acts--which at first appeared to protect the nation from harm, but in practice endangered everyone's basic rights.
Always. I've never sent out a letter that didn't have a quote from Emma. What was remarkable in this most recent letter is that we were quoting from the subject of our project to supporters of our project, and the quotes came from the books we're about to publish and were footnoted to say so. But I don't view this as a personal battle between me and administrators. And I am grateful to the chancellor for his statement to the campus supporting the principle of free speech at Berkeley. If our little skirmish has made people at other places hesitate about censoring things, and has pointed out how fear has crept into even the smallest administrative communique, then it's been a good thing. How do you feel after spending 23 years on this project? Emma’s biography was called Living My Life. I've always worried that if I ever wrote an autobiography, it would be called Living Her Life! I think what still most interests and impresses me about Emma Goldman, in addition to her passionate commitment to freedom, is the constant link she saw between her own life and comfort and everyone else's life and comfort. Her goal was to have a world in which what matters is that everyone be able to live a decent life; she thought that anyone's poverty or homelessness or misery hurts everybody else. Given her ideas about the state, she didn't accept national boundaries as barriers between people. Therefore, it mattered as much if someone in China or in Brazil--or anywhere--was in trouble as it did if someone was in trouble here. I believe there's something to be said for such a vision of the world. |
 Photos by Robert Holmgren
| ||||||||||||
| About
CAA Contact
Us
Update
your Address CAA Career Opportunities Privacy Policy |
©2009 California Alumni
Association. All Rights Reserved For questions about CAA: info@alumni.berkeley.edu Technical inquiries: web@alumni.berkeley.edu
|
Alumni House Berkeley, CA 94720-7520 Toll-Free: (888) CAL-ALUM Phone: (510) 642-7026 Fax: (510) 642-6252
|
