Emma Goldman, Anarchism, and War Resistance

Emma Goldman, Anarchism, and War Resistance

Howard Zinn delivers this talk at Radcliffe College, tracing how his encounter with Emma Goldman's life led him from historical research into contemporary political engagement, then pivoting to argue against the war following the September 11 attacks. Zinn recounts that despite holding a doctorate in history from Columbia, he had never encountered Emma Goldman's name or writings in his formal education. He first learned of her through a chapter in an old book, Critics and Crusaders, then more substantially through historian Richard Drinnon, whom he met at a conference in Pennsylvania. Drinnon had written a biography of Goldman, Rebel in Paradise, which astonished Zinn and led him to her autobiography, Living My Life. Zinn later assigned the autobiography to a class of four hundred students, who responded strongly to Goldman's free-spirited, authority-defying character. Having long been interested in theater, Zinn wrote a play about Goldman in 1975 during a lull in his other commitments. He describes the challenge of selecting material from her long life, beginning with her as a teenage immigrant factory worker in Rochester, New York. Her political awakening came with the 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago, where a bomb thrown during a police crackdown on a labor protest led to the conviction of eight anarchists under conspiracy law, despite no evidence tying them to the bombing; four were hanged despite international appeals, including one from George Bernard Shaw. Goldman left Rochester for New York, joining an anarchist collective and meeting Alexander Berkman, who became her comrade and lover. Following the deadly 1892 Homestead strike against Carnegie Steel, in which Pinkerton agents killed strikers, the group resolved to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as a symbolic act. Berkman shot and wounded Frick, was sentenced to twenty-two years, and later wrote Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. During his imprisonment, Goldman became a nationally known writer and lecturer. After his release, the two founded the anarchist magazine Mother Earth together, though their romantic relationship had ended. Goldman then began a passionate ten-year relationship with Ben Reitman, an unconventional doctor and showman who became her manager and toured with her. Their explicit correspondence later surfaced and informed biographies by Alice Wexler and Candace Falk. Other anarchists distrusted Reitman's individualism; in San Diego he was kidnapped, tarred and feathered, and branded by opponents of the movement. Goldman was repeatedly imprisoned, including on Blackwell's Island for urging the unemployed to take food directly from stores during the 1893 economic crisis, and government agents surveilled her speeches. During World War I, Goldman and Berkman spoke against conscription at a Harlem rally, were arrested, and imprisoned until the war's end. Afterward, during the Palmer raids, both were deported to Russia, the country of their birth. Though initially supportive of the overthrow of the czarist government, they broke with the Bolshevik regime over its authoritarianism and left the Soviet Union, settling on the Mediterranean coast of France. Berkman died in 1936; Goldman died in 1940 during a rare visit to the United States, in Canada. Zinn then shifts to discussing contemporary war resistance, framing Goldman as a model of antiwar dissent. He describes a climate of post-September 11 intimidation, citing FBI visits to citizens for criticizing President Bush and the passage of the Patriot Act, and recounts backlash after he spoke against the war to students at North High School in Newton. He argues against the war in Afghanistan on both pragmatic grounds, questioning its effectiveness against terrorism, and moral grounds, citing unreported civilian casualties from American bombing. He draws on his own observations in North Vietnam in 1968 and 1972 to argue that government claims about targeting only military sites are unreliable, and closes by urging people to speak out against war rather than submit to demands for wartime unity and silence.

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Political Commentary, Historical Biography, Lecture/Academic Essay · 5,418 words

First lines

Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 29, 2002.

Zinn's interest in the life and politics of Emma Goldman led him to write not only a play about her, Emma, but a screenplay that he hoped might one day be turned into a movie. Zinn saw in Goldman someone who defied convention and orthodoxy to live her life fully, passionately, and imaginatively.

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anarchism · war resistance · pacifism · activism · biography · political philosophy · feminism · social movements · civil disobedience · American history · radicalism · historical narrative

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