If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution — Emma Goldman (misquoted).
//
1890. Emma’s First Speech, Germania Hall, Rochester
Emma's fingers tingle. She sits in a sturdy wooden chair to the side of the stage, waiting for her introduction. Her sister's words kindle themselves in her thoughts like small fires: Where did you get the courage? Our people will never get over the shock.
The pine floors in Germania Hall must have a laminated tint, recently shined. Emma must stare at the floor between her knees, see her face reflected back, see her thick circular spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose, her thick curls tumbling over themselves like rogue waves. Or perhaps her eyes are closed. Perhaps she sings to herself, in her head.
The hall is packed with German socialists, their thick winter coats slung over the backs of their chairs. In the center of the room, a coal stove fumes with warmth, the room smelling of cigar smoke. The men speak loudly, speak with their hands, their thick German syllables punctuating smoky oxygen. They go quiet as a stocky man with a thick beard begins to introduce the speaker. They are eager to hear about the eight-hour workday movement.
As Emma waits to be called to the stage, the men must eye Emma up and down, eye her frilly dress, eye her short stature—they have never had a woman deliver a lecture to them, especially in their home tongue.
Emma Goldman! echoes between the wood-panelled walls. The audience begins to clap. Emma opens her eyes, steps onto the stage, begins to speak.
//
May 4, 1886
Perched atop a haywagon in Haymarket Square, Chicago, August Spies preaches, collecting muggy warmth in his curled mustache. Sooty clouds crowd the evening sky. He shrieks into the crowd, a rolled-up newspaper pressed around the edges of his mouth. 2,000 workers stand in the cobbled square in lopsided rows, erupt in lyrical chants that rise over wide factory buildings like smog. An army of cops waits in the visible distance.
WORKINGMEN, TO ARMS, the flyer reads, MAY 4th, 1886. The original leaflet declared, WORKING MEN ARM YOURSELVES AND APPEAR IN FULL FORCE, but only a few hundred copies were released.
The police flaunt their warlike preparations on behalf of their so-called 'law and order.' But this meeting has not been called to incite a riot. We aim to explain the eight-hour workday movement. We aim to explain the relentless police and societal violence in connection with it.
At ten p.m., a swarm of police descend to disperse the crowd, light drizzle now dotting their pressed uniforms. The 75 officers, batons drawn, right hands resting on Colt revolvers. From the crowd of protesters, a bundle of dynamite encased in a lead cylinder soars and lands in the center of the officers' battalion. A blast. A shudder. Eardrums buzz and glass shatters. Orange flames spit heat at the cops. Behind a curtain of smoke, police fire recklessly into the crowd, who disperse like locusts.
Silence now, gun barrels cooling. Groans between warehouse fronts. Broken glass dangles from shop windows like spiders from crooked webs. The smell of nitroglycerin, sweet and metallic and acrid. The smell of singed flesh. Eight officers have burned to death, three times as many protesters have been shot dead.
Over the next three months, labor organizers and anarchists and bomb-makers and foreign-born radicals are rounded up by police and held without bond. Little evidence links them to the bomb. In August 1886, eight men are labeled violent anarchists and convicted by a patriotic jury without credible evidence.
November 11th, 1887, four men—including August Spies—are publicly hanged at Cook County Jail, Chicago. Noose around his neck, Spies: The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today! The floor drops out from beneath him.
//
November 11, 1887
Emma's husband mutters to himself, his brow narrowed into a scowl, pacing the slender width of the cramped apartment they share with Emma's sisters in Rochester. He has just gambled the last of their savings again. An 18-year-old Emma probably faces away from him, desperately trying to ignore his brittle threats of violence.
She opens the Friday morning paper: FOUR ANARCHISTS TO BE HANGED THIS MORNING IN CHICAGO
Background noise fades like radio static, only Emma and the vortex of the paper and anger barbing her tastebuds like gunpowder. The corners of her mouth grow hotter with each sentence. Emma feels the spiritual tug of The Cause coming over her like an infection.
She knows she will one day leave her husband. Marriage has strangled me, she thinks, I feel as if I were buried alive. She knows she will one day board a train to New York City, where she arrived by boat from Lithuania at the age of 16, fleeing the gray choke of pogroms, the hand of a father who believed obedience to be love.
//
Her father's violence
Her husband's violence
Her system's violence
one violence threading into the next
//
Emma's Possessions When She Arrived in NYC From Rochester in 1889 (Age 20)
—a purse, cotton fraying
—an old sewing machine
—a five-dollar bill
She knows she's done answering to her husband, done with the shackles of that swollen apartment.
//
"The most dangerous woman in America" — J. Edgar Hoover.
"I am a disciple of Emma Goldman. Her words set me on fire" — Leon Czolgosz, President William McKinley's assassin.
"A police fabrication… No living soul ever heard Czolgosz say that" — Emma Goldman.
//
August 15, 1889
The night she arrives in NYC, Emma sits drinking coffee in Sachs Café, a hub for radicals on the Lower East Side. Sasha Berkman orders a steak. The server notes it’s rare he can afford a full meal. As Emma introduces herself to Sasha, an anarchist organizer listens to the sharpness of her voice. Its undeniable power.
//
Emma garment factory worker
Emma as labor organizer
Emma as lecturer
Emma as ice cream shop manager
Emma as lecturer to the unemployed
Emma as women's nurse
Emma as lecturer on unionizing
Emma as drama student
Emma as lecturer to inmates
Emma as anarchist literary mag editor
Emma as union spokesperson
Emma as lecturer on sexual freedom
Emma as lecturer
//
Early July, 1892
Emma and Sasha hold tight attention to the news of the steelworkers' strike in Homestead, Pittsburgh. Henry Clack Frick has been placed in charge of Carnegie Steel Company and refuses to negotiate with unions, decreasing their salaries to minimum wage. To counter the strike, Frick locks the doors to his own mills. "Not a strike, but a lock-out."
In the paper, Emma sees pictures of the workers and their families being removed from company housing, sheriffs dragging young mothers out into the street by their quaking forearms. That old coal lump in Emma's throat, molten and raw and scarring.
Homestead! Sasha fires out of his hickory chair, anger curling like smoke above his eyes. We must go tonight! I will kill Frick and I shall be condemned to death. I will die proudly.
That evening, Emma puts Sasha on a train to Pittsburgh. She promises to procure the funds he needs—by any means necessary.
//
Emma on Violence
"As long as every institution of today, every social relationship represents violence in a concentrated form, is it any wonder that violence persists in the individual and in society?"
"It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom."
//
Warehouse outside of Pittsburgh. Sasha compacts gunpowder into long, crimson sticks. Sweat stings his eyes.
In the gut of New York, Emma hangs between his words,
his clarity
his calmness,
his fire, his
sacred fire of the ideal
Emma: "What if a few should have to perish? — the many would be made free."
Sasha's dynamite sticks go blank upon testing, but that glowing, sacred fire stokes within Emma now.
Emma and Sasha have a few dollars between them to cover:
—Sasha's lodging
—Sasha's food
—Sasha's gun
A Greater Cause
Emma writes to relatives, begs them to mail money, sends funds to Sasha by courier.
//
July 23, Early Morning
Emma's roommate wakes her with the paper, shakily presses the crumpled parchment into her hands, ink smudged from tears and sweat. Emma rubs her eyes until she sees purple stars dance.
YOUNG MAN BY THE NAME OF ALEXANDER BERGMAN SHOOTS FRICK—ASSASIN OVERPOWERED BY WORKING-MEN
The paper was lying! He did the act FOR the working men!
//
The Daily Press:
—ASSASIN ALEXANDER BERKMAN
—IMMEDIATELY OPENED FIRE
—FRICK FALLEN TO THE GROUND WITH THREE BULLETS IN HIS BODY
—THEY THOUGHT FRICK WAS DEAD. THEN A CRY WAS HEARD FROM HIM
—BERKMAN CRAWLED NEAR ENOUGH TO STRIKE FRICK WITH A DAGGER IN THE THIGH
Frick, near death, lying in a hospital bed, not believed to make it through the night. Slowly, he regains his health. Emma concludes that Frick is recuperating only because of the attention he's getting. The greatest surgeons in America called to his bedside. In the end, it was Frick's wealth enabling him to recover.
//
Emma set to speak in Baltimore. As she takes the stage, she's handed a yellow slip of paper. A telegram.
SASHA CONVICTED OF ATTEMPTED MURDER, SENTENCED TO 22 YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON
the yellow piece of paper in my hand was a glowing coal
its fire searing my heart
flaming it into passionate expression
I would live
for Sasha
Sasha in prison, Emma his lifeline. Writing letters in code, Emma keeps Sasha abreast of developments in the movement. There was to be no despair. Emma keeping Sasha's spirit alive with the edge of her voice.
//
Emma on Anarchism
"ANARCHISM: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made laws… all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful."
//
August 21, 1893
Emma delivers a speech in Union Square. Four thousand assemble. Desperate unemployed workers, sweat gluing clothes to skin. Women in the front brandish a wide red banner.
Do you not realize that the State is your worst enemy?
Fifth Avenue is laid in gold
You have a right to share your neighbor's bread
If they do not give you work, demand bread
If they deny you bread, TAKE IT
It is your sacred right!
The afternoon paper: RED EMMA HAS A SWAYING POWER | HER VITRIOLIC TONGUE JUST WHAT THE MOB NEEDED TO TEAR DOWN NEW YORK
Ten days later, Emma is pulled out of a Philadelphia crowd by police and placed in tight, glinting cuffs.
//
Emma's Arrests
1892 — Questioned after Frick's botched assassination; released
1893 — Union Square speech; inciting riot (sentence: one year, Blackwell's Island Penitentiary)
1901 — Questioned after President McKinley's assassination; released
1906 — Charged with unlawful assembly; case dismissed
1916 — Birth control lecture; Comstock Act (sentence: 15 days)
1917 — Anti-draft organizing; Espionage Act (sentence: two years, Missouri State Penitentiary)
//
Emma asks the holding cell guard for reading material. She is given a bible. She lobs the bible at the guard.
//
September, 1893
Over dinner in a train car from Philadelphia to New York, a silver-tongued sergeant tells Emma her charges can easily be dropped—and she could walk away with a considerable sum of money. She calmly waits to hear what he really wants.
—All you have to do is provide a periodic report of what's going on in radical circles on the East Side.
—You miserable cur! Emma bellows, Not enough to act as Judas, you try to turn me into one. I'll take prison for life. But no one will ever buy me.
Emma picks up her glass of ice water and tosses it in his face.
//
October 4, 1893
Emma takes the stand in court, plays with the ridges of the worn wooden platform in front of her. For thirty minutes, she preaches morality, free love, anarchism. The judge looks at her, amused, which only stokes the sparks in he heart, charges the electric static in her voice. Her voice whittles to a rasp and she propels straight through it.
The newspaper: EXTRA! EXTRA! EMMA GOLDMAN'S SPEECH IN COURT!
One year at Blackwell's Island Penitentiary.
//
Emma on Prison
"Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less, ship-wrecked crew of humanity… their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence."
//
Emma placed in charge of the sewing shop in Blackwell. Each day, she stitches cloth and teaches women how to sew. One day, the head matron confronts her.
—The women working under you are doing less work than under your predecessor.
—I am no damn slave driver! It is precisely because I hate slavery as well as its drivers that I was sent to prison. I am one of the inmates, not above them. I prefer punishment.
Emma is reassigned to the hospital ward. Grueling work, though Emma's happy to bring joy to the female patients in the 16-bed infirmary. At night, she massages the blisters on her feet, pustules shaped like little burns. She claws at the bedbugs, nails leaving crooked trails in her skin like smoke signals. She thinks of Sasha, serving 22 years in Federal Prison. She thinks, If Sasha can survive 22 years, I can surely survive one.
//
1894
Papers print: EMMA GOLDMAN IS FREE
Emma is invited to speak in Rochester, on behalf of the garment-industry wage slaves' strikes, the industry that exploited her labor for $2.50 a week.
Mr. Garson, garment factory industrialist, comes to see her, drives up in his personal carriage. slips his black silk hat off his head. Takes a puff of his fat, lit cigar. The blue smoke dances, swells in musical curves. He begs Emma to tell his workers to empathize with him. Times are tough, Garson says. Can you explain to my employees, the grumblers?
—I saved penny by penny and accumulated a little money, Garson explains. But we don't dictate how our workers spend their money—whether they are careful or spendthrift.
—You were able to put aside penny by penny because you had people working for you. It is the labor of your 'hands' and their ruthless exploitation that has created your wealth. There is no excuse for you, Mr. Garson.
—I would like to prove my gratitude to you with a little gift. Miss Goldman, you are a woman; you must love beautiful things.
Emma smiles sweetly, bares the tips of her teeth.
You've come to the wrong person. You cannot buy Emma Goldman.
//
Emma's Famous Speeches
Union Square — speech to the unemployed (1893)
Chicago lecture circuit — anarchism, labor, freedom to love whomever one wants (1901-1908)
Carnegie Hall — anti-conscription (1917)
Lawrence Textile Strike — labor uprisings, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (1912)
Denver, NYC, Rochester — birth control, family planning, sexual education, marriage (1915)
Hyde Park, London — against capitalism, against Bolshevism (1920)
Prison cells — lectures to inmates on capitalism, labor, equality, justice
Street corners, basements, rented halls — any platform where her words may form spikes
//
When Emma speaks, perhaps she knows she's home. Alone with her thoughts, Emma's fists still clench, fingernails marking rivets in her palms. Chest still heavy, mind still dancing through a carbon microphone on that stage. Loving, perhaps the only way she can switch that voice off, the voice that smarts in that loud quiet. She gets tired of men quickly.
When Kropotkin, a Russian communist and dear friend, argues Emma shouldn't waste so much space discussing sex, Emma responds: "All right, dear comrade, when I have reached your age, the sex question may no longer be important to me. But it is now."
Alone, the fading sound of clapping is perhaps the only thing that lulls her to sleep.
//
Mother Earth
Emma releases the first issue of Mother Earth, an anarchist literary magazine, in March 1906. 300 copies are printed.
"My room was the living-room, dining-room, and Mother Earth office, all in one. I slept in a little alcove behind my bookcase."
Topics Covered in Mother Earth:
anarchism, capitalism, organized religion
labor, unions, class struggles, wage slaves
free thought, education as liberation, religious indoctrination
war, military, the draft
free speech, police surveillance, censorship
literature, arts, poetry, fiction
women's emancipation, women's rights
sexual freedom, birth control
Sasha becomes editor-in-chief of Mother Earth after his early release from Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. The Mother Earth office moves to downtown Harlem, placed under constant Bureau of Investigation surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover's orders.
//
Emma on Homosexuality
A woman approaches Emma after her talk on homosexuality, on free and unconditional love.
A woman tells Emma that she's never liked touching men.
She thought there was something wrong with her.
Woman hugging Emma. Woman crying.
"My lecture set her free; I had given her back her self-respect."
Emma's comrades criticize her openness about homosexuality:
—You shouldn't be treating such unnatural themes as homosexuality
—Anarchism is already misunderstood enough without further depravity
Emma: "Censorship from comrades had the same effect on me as police persecution; it made me surer of myself."
//
Birth Control Lecture, 1916
Arrested mid-sentence
she'd do it again, again, again
anyone who would listen (again)
In defiance of the Comstock Act, Emma lectures across the U.S. on contraception, women's autonomy, free love. Handcuffed in NYC after one such talk. 15 days in jail. Again.
Emma: "Children should be the result of love, not compulsion."
//
No-Conscription League, WWI
Emma and Sasha
Anti-draft manifestos
A violence
A violence
One violence braiding into the next.
WE oppose conscription because WE are internationalists, because WE are antimilitarists, because WE are opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments. WE will fight for what
WE choose to fight for. WE will never fight simply because WE are ordered to fight.
//
The WWI Conscription bill becomes law, registration set for June 5th, 1917. The Espionage Act makes it illegal to obstruct military recruitment. Hordes flock to the Mother Earth office in Harlem, beg Emma and her comrades to tell them whether to register. Most, young boys and their mothers, desperate, fear collecting in their eyes. Some, government decoys, attempting to bait Emma into an explicit response, to be directly told not to enlist.
frightened youths / helpless creatures
breathless mothers / write, call, visit, beg
beg Emma for an answer.
I have no right to tell them what to do.
cops arrest:
anti-patriots / anti-Americans
draft dodgers / scared children
//
Anti-Draft Speech
Packed house, thunderous applause—before the government made her words into a crime. Emma calls for resistance to conscription.
"I shall speak English because I want those representing the State and Militarism and the Courts and Prisons to understand what I have to say… no matter how great the cause it is never great enough to sacrifice millions of people in the trenches and on the battlefield in the name of democracy."
//
June 15, 1917
The click of her typewriter, Emma's fingers hovering above the metal keys. She turns over Mother Earth headlines in her mind, their white noise filling her. (Anyone who would listen.) And then—a loud crunch, wood splinters before a black, metal battering ram. Vibrating beneath her, sets of boots rush up narrow stairs, stomp floorboards. A thick leather boot bursts through the door of her office. A police marshal grabs her arm; she can smell the humidity on his clothes.
—I hope you get the medal you crave, she winks. Show me your warrant.
The marshal holds up a June copy of Mother Earth.
—Are you the author of the No-Conscription article? He asks.
—Obviously, since my name is signed to it. Now, where is your warrant?
Handcuffs are placed on Emma's wrists. Desks are overturned. Books are thrown into piles, tossed paper levitates in the air before falling. Records are scattered and lists are confiscated.
—Where is your No-Conscription list? The marshal sneers at Emma.
—You will never find such a list in our offices.
//
Sasha Berkman and Emma Goldman take the stand on Emma's 48th birthday. No lawyers accompany them. Sasha questions jurors with such ferocity they slink in their seats. Emma questions jurors on birth control, marriage, divorce, sexual education. The judge questions Emma's lack of relevence. Emma smiles.
A stocky prosecutor addresses the jury:
Mr. Sasha Berkman tried to give you the definition of "anarchist," but I assume you don't speak Greek. The word "Arche" means government; thus, "anarchy" means absence, abolition of government. It means chaos. This is what Berkman and Goldman stand for—chaos.
Emma is called to testify. The prosecutor fans copies of Mother Earth, his eyes feral. He questions Emma and Sasha about their 'No-Conscription manifesto.' Cheerfully, they admit their authorship of every word.
//
Flies buzz. Humid courtroom. All stand. A hung jury stirred, relented, decided. Guilty, inevitable. Two years. Ten-thousand-dollar fine. Maximum sentence. Court records to be sent to immigration for review once prison sentences end.
Emma bows, thanks the judge for His ‘leniency,’ winks.
His Honour grows white
His Honour
anger spreading over His
face, papers fumbling, lips moving, lips
moving as if to speak
then abruptly turns and leaves
the bench.
//
Missouri State Penitentiary
Visitation, mail, hours of recreation.
Forced labor, inmates required to work regardless of health.
Punishments:
—deprivation of recreation
—bread and water diet
—48-hour dungeon stays; no bed, no food, no lights
Emma: Most inmates had "been driven to crime by conditions that had greeted them at birth."
//
October, 1919
Emma and Sasha rearrested almost immediately after released, placed on the U.S.S. Buford, nicknamed the Soviet Ark. Shipped to Russia, shipped away, something greater.
//
Emma's Disillusionment
Soviet Ark, a boat listless drawn in, Lenin's hand a tide, the slow magnet
of home. As Emma sails, Lenin's Secret Police quietly silence voices.
A boat, listless Emma's voice glimmers like a lighthouse.
Choppy, black water the Arctic Ocean stained blood-gold.
A permanent blotch, frozen in fabric.
Emma's eyes pick up a cold lurch when the Ark docks, a heavy iron of return. Soviet soldiers greet her gleefully. Different kind of land, different kind of lie. One state robs Emma of her citizenship with no legal explanation. Another hands her citizenship on a silver dish as if she's royalty.
When she picks it up, the silver rubs off with her sweat,
leaves her a stripped, raw element,
a copper graveyard.
Emma helps structure workers' quarters: months and months of planning — building — fixing — cleaning for show, for visitors, a spotless showroom. A lie. Copper bruising polyester, Emma a stained moth.
Emma interviews Lenin. "There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period," he tells her. Emma's red-hot excitement glows outward, coal embers grow cold.
The Bolsheviks crush dissent. The Bolsheviks crush unification. The unification between peasant and worker, crushed. Oppression masquerading as revolution. Starving peasants plow fields of wheat they will never taste. Instead, earth tastes their brittle bones. Flavorless gray. The revolution, a hollow performance, its symbols charged with power, stripped of sacred heat.
compulsory labor // workplace fear // the gulag // the gulag
protests met with bullets // dissent met with bullets
the gulag // a bullet
surveillance everywhere, fear a product all its own
Emma addresses no one, voice goes nowhere. Emma staring at a brick wall, her very own microphone painted rust-red. Speak into it, the State says, Speak into the wall as if it is your congregation.
Emma:
The terrible story I'd listened to broke over me like a storm. Was this the Revolution I had believed in all my life, yearned for, and strove to interest others in? Or was it a caricature — a hideous monster that had come to jeer and mock me?
She will wonder, for years, whose lie was worse.
Authoritarianism disguised as pragmatism.
Emma leaves Russia, knows she will not return. Emma writes the book My Disillusionment in Russia.
//
Emma's Exiles
Russia — young Jewish girl escaping pogroms
America — deported on the Soviet Ark
Soviet Russia — disillusioned, heartbroken
Germany
United Kingdom
France
Spain
Canada
Emma wandering, finding no nation but in the consonants held within her words, her words a type of home.
//
June, 1936
Emma is called to Sasha's bedside in Nice, France. Her lifelong friend, her tether. Self-inflicted bullet dug beneath his heart, into his lung. Sasha’s hand dies inside Emma's.
Emma writes, "I have lost my most precious possession—my faith in the invincibility of the Spirit of Sasha."
//
Spanish Civil War, Late 1936
Speaking to thousands of comrades in Spain. "I have come to you as to my own, for your ideal has been my ideal for forty-five years and it will remain to my last breath."
Emma in Spain, Emma in combat helmet and boots caked in red clay
Emma in Hyde Park, shouting, shouted over, voice covered up by white noise
Emma's weakening health
Emma the wanderer
Emma the purist
Emma the anarchist
until the end
//
Saturday, February 17, 1940. Toronto.
Emma suffers a devastating stroke. Hearing intact, blood vessel bursting in her Broca's area, the brain's language center. Emma Goldman's voice.
Red Emma Speaks // Thousands to Hear Emma Speak // Emma Goldman's Speech // Emma Goldman's Words // Red Emma's Swaying Power // Red Emma's Vitriolic Tongue // Emma Goldman's Speech in Court // Emma's Speech in Union Square // Emma's Speech at Carnegie Hall // Emma's Speech in Hyde Park // Emma's Speech in Denver // Emma's Speech in Rochester
A friend: "Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter a word."
Perhaps Emma wonders, her voice now quietly floating along friends' audio waves, if her revolution was a success. If she created lasting change, if things were different, better now. If her voice had carried far enough to transform. Perhaps she wonders what will become of her voice now, how long her words will sound before swallowed by static.
In 1973, anarchist printer Jack Frager raises funds for The Cause. He examines a scene in Emma's autobiography. She's dancing at a party, losing herself in the euphoric noise of it all, eyes closed, music using her. Sasha's cousin accosts her, suggests her frivolity will hurt The Cause. It does not behoove an agitator to dance.
Emma:
—I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business.
—I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice should demand the denial of life and joy.
—If it meant that, I did not want it.
From this scene, Jack fabricates the quote—borrows Emma's voice—IF I CAN'T DANCE I DON'T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION, prints and sells t-shirts at a Vietnam War protest.
May 8th, 1940, Emma's last stroke. She lives six more days. Friends appear at her bedside as she slips unconscious, edges into white noise. Friends say they are most struck by her silence.
Emma's body is buried in Waldheim Cemetery, Illinois, near the graves of the Haymarket martyrs, the men who inspired Emma. The grave of August Spies. Her tombstone bears the inscription: "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty."
//
1890. Emma's First Speech, Germania Hall, Rochester
Then something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the garment factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime. The last words of August Spies rang in my ears: "Our silence will speak louder than the voices you strangle today."
I began to speak.
Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster.
They came with passionate intensity.
The audience had vanished,
the hall itself had disappeared;
I was conscious only of my own words,
of my ecstatic song.
Notes
Major scenes are constructed from Emma’s two-volume autobiography, Living My Life, though other sources are consulted for context and imagery. Direct quotes are taken from her autobiography, Living My Life, her book Anarchism and Other Essays, and essays she published in Mother Earth.
Italicized lines are near-direct quotes and paraphrases, mostly with minor syntax and grammar changes. Some italicized lines are combined quotes put together for the sake of brevity or lyrical repetition.
Other Sources and Further Reading
General information on Emma Goldman, including her death and speech in Spain:
—Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, by
Alice Wexler, 1984.
—Life Story: Emma Goldman (1869-1940). Women and the American Story, The New
York Historical,
wams.nyhistory.org/modernizing-america/activism-and-the-progressive-era/emma
—Mariam Brody’s introduction of the abridged version of Living My Life, 2006.
—Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman, Richard Drinnon, 1961.
On the Haymarket Affair and subsequent trials:
—“Haymarket Riot,” History.com, https://www.history.com/articles/haymarket-riot
—“The Haymarket Riot and Trial: An Account,” UMKC School of Law,
https://famous-trials.com/haymarket/1181-home
—“Haymarket Affair: Topics in Chronicling America,” Library of Congress, https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-haymarket-affair/selected-articles
—Haymarket Flier, UMKC School of Law,
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/haymarket/attention.html
Notable essays from the collection Anarchism and Other Essays, by Emma Goldman:
—“Anarchism: What it Really Stands For”
—“Marriage and Love”
—“Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure”
—“The Psychology of Political Violence”
—“The Traffic in Women”
—“The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation”
On Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, including his death:
—Emma and Sasha, Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, 2012.
—Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Alexander Berkman, 1912.
On Mother Earth:
—Emma Goldman, Mother Earth, and the Anarchist Awakening, Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu, 2021.
—“Mother Earth,” HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000864035
—“Mother Earth First Volume,” American Experience, PBS.org,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goldman-mother-earth-first-volu
On Emma’s experience in Russia:
—My Disillusionment in Russia, Emma Goldman, 1923.
Emma’s speeches (transcripts, courtroom hearings)
—“Emma Goldman Delivers First Rochester Lecture,” Freethought Trail, https://freethought-trail.org/historical-events/event:emma-goldman-delivers-first-rochester-lecture/
—“Berkman & Goldman: Address of Harold A. Content, Assistant United States Attorney, to the Jury.”
—“We Don’t Believe in Conscription” speech (Delivered at the Harlem River Casino, New York City, May 18, 1917). Transcript by New York City Police Department patrolman William H. Randolph.
Other newspaper headlines and clips
—“Emma Goldman papers, 1909-1941 and undated,” Duke University Libraries,
https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/goldmanemma
“I have lost my most precious possession—my faith in the invincibility of the spirit of
Sasha.”
—From a letter Emma Goldman wrote to Alexander Berkman on March 8, 1933, during
her time in London, included in the collection Nowhere at Home: Letters from
Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
Jack Frager ‘If I can’t Dance’ Quote
—“Invention of a Feminist Sound Bite,” Alix Kates Shulman,
https://lilith.org/articles/invention-of-a-feminist-sound-bite/
