Emma Goldman by Vivian Gornick

Author:Vivian Gornick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Part III

Exile

As for my fame and your infame, I would be

willing to exchange a good deal of mine for a bit

of yours. It is not hard to write what one feels as

truth. It is damned hard to live it.

—EUGENE O’NEILL TO ALEXANDER BERKMAN,

January 29, 1927

THE 1917 sedition trial of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, which ended with a two-year prison term for each, followed by deportation, ranks among the more egregious events in the history of political repression in the United States masquerading as protection of the democracy. For thousands of Americans, it was the distortion of the national ideal that hurt the most. “Who that heard it,” the radical journalist John Reed wrote, “will ever forget the feeling of despair he experienced when Judge Mayer charged the jury, ‘This is not a question of free speech, for free speech is guaranteed under the Constitution … but free speech does not mean license.’” Margaret Anderson assured her readers that Reed’s despair was not confined to radicals: “One newspaper reporter told me that this trial was making a good Anarchist of him; a university professor who came to all the hearings told me that he had always had a respect for the law until now; one of the biggest lawyers in the city said the prosecution hadn’t a leg to stand on; a recognized intellectual remarked that ‘Russia has never had cause for such rebellion as we are now facing.’”

On the eve of the First World War the decades-long struggle between American radicals and vigilante patriotism reached fever pitch. In a state of near hysteria, the government enacted one repressive law after another, each one more abusive of guaranteed civil rights than the last. First came the May 1917 Selective Service Act, and with it the sudden activation of a conspiracy law already in place that made it a felony to object to conscription. A month later the Espionage Act was passed and within a year the equally infamous Sedition Act of 1918, both of which broadly defined sedition to include any sort of open dissent from government policy. These laws carried the threat of penalties of up to ten thousand dollars in fines and twenty years in prison and were, in effect, designed to muffle any and all criticism of the war or the government’s execution of it. Under these laws, from 1917 to 1921—one of the most politically ignominious periods in American history—between four and ten thousand people were arrested on charges of disloyalty; ultimately, less than six hundred of these charges were upheld in court.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1917 government suppression of antiwar dissent escalated so swiftly and so recklessly that civil libertarian heads were swimming. Then in October, when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, both state and federal governments “turned the country into a lunatic asylum” (as Emma put it), with wholesale raids and arrests and sentences of incredible severity being carried out daily.

The leadership of the IWW (some 165 strong) was arrested in

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