Emma Goldman

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Emma Goldman : biography

df=y March 6 – 14 May 1940

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?

The jury saw it differently, and found them guilty; Judge Julius Marshuetz Mayer imposed the maximum sentence two years’ imprisonment, a $10,000 fine each, and the possibility of deportation after their release from prison. As she was transported to Missouri State Penitentiary (now Jefferson City Correctional Center), Goldman wrote to a friend: "Two years imprisonment for having made an uncompromising stand for one’s ideal. Why that is a small price."Wexler, Intimate, p. 235–244.

In prison she was assigned once again to work as a seamstress, under the eye of a "miserable gutter-snipe of a twenty-one-year-old boy paid to get results".Quoted in Chalberg, p. 141. She met the socialist Kate Richards O’Hare, who had also been imprisoned under the Espionage Act. Although they differed on political strategy—Kate O’Hare believed in voting to achieve state power—the two women came together to agitate for better conditions among prisoners.Chalberg, pp. 141–142. Goldman also met and became friends with Gabriella Segata Antolini, an anarchist and follower of Luigi Galleani. Antolini had been arrested transporting a satchel filled with dynamite on a Chicago-bound train. She had refused to cooperate with authorities, and was sent to prison for fourteen months. Working together to make life better for the other inmates, the three women became known as "The Trinity". Goldman was released on September 27, 1919.Wexler, Intimate, p. 253–263.

Deportation

Goldman and Berkman were released during America’s Red Scare of 1919–20 when public anxiety about wartime pro-German activities had morphed into a pervasive fear of Bolshevism and the prospect of an imminent radical revolution. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s General Intelligence Division, were intent on using the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918 to deport any non-citizens they could identify as advocates of anarchy or revolution. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman," Hoover wrote while they were in prison, "are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and return to the community will result in undue harm."Quoted in Drinnon, Rebel, p. 215.

At her deportation hearing on October 27, she refused to answer questions about her beliefs on the grounds that her American citizenship invalidated any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only against non-citizens of the U.S. She presented a written statement instead: "Today so-called aliens are deported. Tomorrow native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that native American sons to whom democracy is a sacred ideal should be exiled." Louis Post at the Department of Labor, which had ultimate authority over deportation decisions, determined that the revocation of her husband’s American citizenship in 1908 had revoked hers as well. After initially promising a court fight, she decided not to appeal his ruling.Post, pp. 13–14.

The Labor Department included Goldman and Berkman among 249 aliens it deported en masse, mostly people with only vague associations with radical groups who had been swept up in government raids in November.McCormick, pp. 158–163. Buford, a ship the press nicknamed the "Soviet Ark," sailed from New York on December 21. Some 58 enlisted men and four officers provided security on the journey and pistols were distributed to the crew.Post, p. 4. Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake."Murray, 208-9 The ship landed her charges in Hanko, Finland on Saturday, January 17, 1920. Upon arrival in Finland, authorities there conducted the deportees to the Russian frontier under a flag of truce.Murray, pp. 207–208.Post, pp. 1–11.