Introduction
You often confront a world where social injustice, grueling labor conditions, and state oppression crush individual freedom. You might wonder how to fight these powerful forces without sacrificing your personal autonomy or your capacity for joy.
True revolutionary dedication requires an uncompromising commitment to personal autonomy, direct economic action, and the refusal to let dogma replace human freedom.
This book records a lifelong journey through radical awakening, imprisonment, and international exile. You will explore the ethics of direct action, the defense of free speech, and the painful disillusionment with state tyranny.
- How do you balance militant political dedication with personal freedom?
- Can you maintain revolutionary ideals when the state demands your silence?
- What happens when a regime you supported turns into a bureaucratic tyranny?
1. Immigration and Radical Awakening
You arrive in New York on August 15, 1889, as a twenty-year-old immigrant with five dollars, a small handbag, and a sewing machine. You walk from West Forty-second Street to the Bowery before finding temporary refuge with the Minkin sisters.
Arriving as an impoverished immigrant in America, you confront grueling factory conditions and social injustice that transform the execution of the Chicago anarchists into a permanent radical calling.
On your very first night in New York, you attend a meeting addressed by Johann Most, whose eloquent denunciation of American conditions and the Haymarket execution leaves you spellbound. The unjust trial and execution of the men accused of the Haymarket bombing serve as a radicalizing catalyst. You are profoundly moved by Johanna Greie's lecture on the case in Rochester and react with fierce outrage when a woman in your father's house mocks the executed men.
Garson and Mayer's clothing factory demands ten and a half hours a day of labor for two dollars and fifty cents a week. You quit your job after your employer refuses your request for a wage increase and after you defend Tanya, a coworker who fainted from exhaustion, against a brutal foreman.
2. Anarchist Ethics and Agitation
You learn that dedication to the Cause demands subordinating personal comfort, rejecting legal marriage for free unions, and mastering stage fright to agitate the masses.
Alexander Berkman demonstrated this by quitting his job after a dispute with a foreman over shop solidarity, declaring that personal matters did not matter compared to fighting injustice and exploitation. Berkman fought with his foreman in a cigar-making shop to stand up for other workers and promptly left his job.
Advanced revolutionaries rejected traditional marriage, advocating instead for free unions based solely on mutual love and voluntary association. You concluded from your own failed marriage and observation of domestic misery that binding people by law or religion is wrong, and true love must be free to begin and end without permission. You declared that if you ever loved a man again, you would give yourself without being bound by the rabbi or the law.
Novice agitators can overcome severe physical symptoms of stage fright through intense dedication to the revolutionary movement. You experienced severe physical distress, including fainting sensations, trembling knees, and a racing heart whenever you tried to speak publicly, but you forced yourself to address trade unions to invite them to the Cooper Union commemoration. When you visited various trade unions to invite workers to the commemoration, you always spoke in trepidation with trembling knees and a racing heart.
Johann Most insisted that you embark on a lecture tour to Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland, giving you three weeks to study. He instructed you to speak on the futility of the eight-hour workday campaign and to rely on boldness and personal impression rather than memorized notes. Most arranged a speaking tour and advised you to make people laugh and talk as you did when describing your first opera.
- Do not memorize notes parrot-like
- Use core ideas and present them in your own way
- Make people laugh to make sailing easy
- Be bold, arrogant, and brave on stage
3. Independent Thought and the Right to Joy
You discover that parroting dogmatic teachers is a betrayal of independent thought, and that true anarchism champions the right to personal joy, radiant expression, and non-possessive love.
During your first public tour, you mechanically repeated Johann Most's attacks on workers fighting for the eight-hour struggle. Only when an elderly worker challenged you in Cleveland did you realize you were parroting dogma and committing a crime against yourself and the workers.
In Cleveland, a lean, white-haired worker stood up and argued that older men who would never live to see the overthrow of capitalism deserved a few less hours of work daily to enjoy reading or fresh air, which exposed the falsehood of Most's absolute rejection of the eight-hour struggle.
You faced severe criticism from fellow comrades, including Sasha's cousin, for dancing with reckless abandon during the strike campaign. A young cousin of Sasha pulled you aside during a strike dance to tell you that an agitator should not dance with reckless abandon because it hurt the Cause. You rejected the notion that an agitator must act like a nun or turn the movement into a cloister, insisting that anarchism stands for the right to beautiful, radiant things.
Total dedication to a revolutionary ideal can lead you to consciously renounce the deeply rooted desire for biological motherhood. You remembered your harrowing late-1881 escape across the Russian-German border at age thirteen, wading through a half-frozen brook in deep snow while carrying her little brother, which caused a lasting physical trauma. Faced with a severe physical condition stemming from childhood trauma and a freezing border crossing, you consulted a specialist who recommended an operation that would cure your pain and allow you to have a child. Recognizing that millions of children are born unwanted into poverty and wishing to remain entirely unhampered for your mission, you chose not to undergo the operation, finding an outlet for your mother-need in the love of all children.
When you confessed your love for the artist Fedya to Sasha, Sasha overcame his possessive tendencies rooted in his bourgeois background. He recognized that Fedya was both his friend and a comrade in battle, proving that love for a companion and dedication to the revolution could coexist harmoniously. Sasha embraced Fedya and joined in a late-night discussion where they formed a pact to dedicate themselves to the Cause in a supreme deed or die together if necessary. You can apply these choices directly:
- Dedicate oneself to the Cause in a supreme deed
- Die together if necessary or continue to live and work for the ideal
4. Propaganda of the Deed and the Homestead Strike
When corporate management crushes striking workers with armed force, you support Alexander Berkman's plan to execute Henry Clay Frick as propaganda of the deed.
In May 1892, trouble broke out between Carnegie Steel Company and its employees. Andrew Carnegie handed over management to Henry Clay Frick, who abolished the sliding wage scale, refused to recognize the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, and locked out thousands of skilled workers in Homestead near Pittsburgh.
Frick fortified the mills and brought in armed Pinkerton detectives on a barge via the Monongahela River to introduce strike-breakers. Pinkerton thugs opened fire without warning from the barge, killing a little boy and a number of men on the shore, and wounding scores of others.
Alexander Berkman resolved to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an attentat designed to awaken the masses. Berkman forced his way into Frick's private office in Pittsburgh on July 23, 1892, and shot him three times, subsequently striking him with a poisoned dagger when the working-men subdued him.
Personal sacrifice and extreme measures are sometimes undertaken by revolutionaries to fund violent political actions.
Emma Goldman, aged 23, was desperate to raise money for Berkman's journey and weapons. She walked Fourteenth Street on Saturday evening, July 16, 1892, considering turning to prostitution. An older man of 61 recognized she was a novice and gave her a ten-dollar bill to cover expenses, telling her she had no knack for the trade.
5. Trial, Imprisonment, and Prison School
Amid economic crisis, evictions, and widespread starvation, you organize a massive demonstration at Union Square. In your speech, you condemn the State as the protector of the ruling class and urge workers that if denied work and bread, they have the sacred right to take bread from their neighbors.
You carry a crimson banner at the head of marching columns of women and girls to Union Square before delivering your provocative speech.
Following a fiery speech to the unemployed in Union Square, you are sentenced to Blackwell's Island Penitentiary, where prison becomes your most vital school for human understanding.
Represented by liberal jurist A. Oakey Hall, your trial on September 28 challenges police methods and false testimony by Detective Jacobs regarding your speech. The 10 days duration of the trial ends when a compromised press report from a New York World reporter influences the jury to find you guilty, resulting in a 1 year sentence to Blackwell's Island Penitentiary.
When the head matron demands that you extract more work from the women in the sewing-shop, you firmly refuse to become a slave-driver, declaring that you consider yourself an inmate rather than a boss above them.
After you refuse to act as a boss in the sewing-shop, inmates from your tier visit you on Sunday, with laundry workers offering to wash your clothes and others offering to darn your stockings.
Reflecting on your incarceration as your release approaches with nearly two hundred and ninety nights remaining in your sentence, you realize that prison is the best and most vital school. By bringing you close to the human soul, it allows you to see life through your own eyes rather than relying on Sasha, Most, or Ed, five years since you first met Sasha. You compare your relatively mild incarceration with Alexander Berkman’s solitary confinement and complete isolation in the Allegheny purgatory.
6. European Journeys and Intellectual Awakening
Travel to Europe introduces you to veteran revolutionaries like Peter Kropotkin and Louise Michel, while encounters with modern European literature and psychoanalysis expand your psychological insights.
You meet Louise Michel, known to the French masses as Mère Louise, bien aimée, and La Vierge Rouge. At sixty-two years of age, she remains a radiant and uncompromising figure who survived the Paris Commune, imprisonment in New Caledonia, and a shooting attack in Havre. When shot in the back of the ear and through her hat during a meeting in Havre, Michel tried her hardest to have her assailant released so his young daughter would not become fatherless.
You also visit Peter Kropotkin in Bromley, where the theorist of anarchist communism proudly shows you the table, bench, and shelves he crafted with his own hands. Kropotkin argues that women's equality has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with brains, believing intellectual equality would automatically bring freedom. You strongly disagree with him on this point.
Exposure to modern European literature and the early teachings of Sigmund Freud provides you with profound insights into human psychology and sex repression. After struggling through confusing lectures by older professors on topics like Urnings and Lesbians, you find clarity and brilliance in Sigmund Freud's simple and earnest explanations.
Comrade Tom Bell demonstrates that open-air speaking is feasible in Paris despite police bans by chaining his wrist to a lamp-post with padlocks, continuing his speech until his voice failed, and leaving authorities unable to prosecute him due to public laughter. Tom Bell served fourteen days in jail in France before being expelled. Victor Dave has completed forty years of anarchist activities.
- Distribute handbills announcing an open-air meeting on your own responsibility.
- Select a lamp-post with an ornamental base and a cross-piece.
- Quickly chain and automatically padlock your wrist to the cross-piece when police approach.
- Deliver the speech until your voice gives out, then open the padlock with your own key and depart.
7. Persecution and the McKinley Assassination
When Leon Czolgosz shoots President McKinley, you face a national panic, violent police interrogation, and intense social ostracism that test your resilience.
Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley at the Buffalo Exposition, leading to Goldman's voluntary surrender in Chicago and her grueling interrogation at police headquarters by Captain Schuettler. Following the shooting, police arrested anarchists without bail, subjected Goldman to days of sleep deprivation, blinding lights, and false claims of confession to manufacture a conspiracy. Publisher William Randolph Hearst offered large financial sums for exclusive interviews to exploit the situation, while mainstream newspapers attempted to link publishers and anarchists to the crime to manipulate public opinion. Hearst offered Justus Schwab twenty thousand dollars for an exclusive interview with Goldman to railroad her and simultaneously whitewash his own publication from accusations of having incited Czolgosz.
- 200 detectives sent across the country to track down Emma Goldman
- 5 days the time Goldman spent in custody before receiving a friendly visit from Police Chief O'Neill
- 20000 dollars the sum offered by Hearst for an exclusive interview with Goldman
Goldman deduced that Czolgosz must have read the charge in Free Society labeling him a spy, which deeply wounded his spirit when he sought inspiration from anarchists, driving him to prove his sincerity through violence against McKinley. Free Society had previously published a retraction after Goldman demanded proof regarding the spy charge against Nieman, whom she later recognized as Czolgosz. On October 29, 1901, moments before his execution in Auburn Prison, a warden made a final plea for Czolgosz to confess and blame Goldman, but Czolgosz insisted she had nothing to do with his act. Czolgosz replied from under his black mask in Auburn Prison that it did not matter what Goldman said because he acted entirely alone for the American people.
Choosing night duty in impoverished immigrant communities allows a nurse to provide proper care free from the interference and anti-fresh-air prejudices of grieving relatives.
Nursing among the poorest Jewish and Italian families on the East Side involves difficult and painful conditions due to overcrowding and tiny living quarters, but night duty gives Goldman a free hand to open windows, administer care, and use coffee and books to stay awake. An old lady berates Goldman for opening a sick-room window, accusing her of wanting to kill the child, illustrating the domestic ignorance and hostility night nurses had to bypass.
- Take night shifts to avoid daytime interference from relatives and their horror of fresh air
- Maintain strict standards of professional pay despite the poverty of the patients
- Use a book and a large pot of coffee to stay alert through the night hours
Elizabeth and Alexis Ferm translate radical educational ideas into practice at their school, the Playhouse, where neighborhood children are bound by neither rules nor textbooks and learn freely from observation and experience. Visiting the Ferms' home and school reveals a harmonious relationship between the educators and children, showcasing an anarchist approach applied to child-rearing.
- Allow children freedom to come and go without strict rules or textbooks
- Enable children to learn organically from observation and experience
Faced with incessant domestic complaining and verbal nagging, Ed adopts a practical method of pulling out his watch, giving a strict time limit, and retiring to a locked room if the complaints continue. Ed explains to Goldman that he takes out his watch, gives the complaining person five minutes to finish, and if they continue, he leaves the room and locks the door, which works like magic.
- Take out a watch when domestic nagging begins and set a five-minute limit
- Leave the shared space and lock your personal room if the verbal complaints do not stop within the allotted time
8. Free Speech Fights and Professional Management
You lead tireless campaigns to defend free speech against state suppression, aided by professional tour logistics that extend your reach across dozens of American cities.
Congress passed the Federal Anti-Anarchist Law on March 3, 1903. The statute barred anyone opposed to organized government from entering the country. John Turner became the first victim under this law.
John Turner was arrested immediately after speaking on Trade Unionism and the General Strike at Murray Hill Lyceum on October 22 and detained on Ellis Island before his case reached the Supreme Court. Goldman and other radicals formed the Free Speech League, raised funds, and engaged Clarence Darrow and Hugh O. Pentecost to take the case. Bail was set at five thousand dollars.
Local authorities and police chiefs used various tactics to suppress radical lectures. During the month of May, you were stopped by the police in 11 different places.
- 37 cities: locations visited during your comprehensive tour managed by Ben Reitman
- 25 States: states covered during the tour
- 120 times: total number of lectures delivered on the tour
- 25,000: number of paid admissions to the lectures
- 10,000: pieces of literature sold during the tour
- 5,000: pieces of literature distributed free of charge
Soldier William Buwalda completed 15 years of military service before he was court-martialled. He was sentenced to 5 years in the military prison on Alcatraz Island for attending an Emma Goldman lecture in uniform and shaking the hand of a dangerous anarchist woman.
William Buwalda served 10 months imprisonment in the military prison on Alcatraz Island before being pardoned by President Roosevelt following protests organized by your defense committee.
9. Wartime Conscription and Deportation to Russia
President Woodrow Wilson pushed the United States into World War I and instituted rapid conscription, destroying civil liberties while claiming to champion democracy abroad. Wilson declared war and pushed through conscription within a month, while middle-class pacifists and pseudo-radicals collapsed under the tide of militarism. It took Great Britain eighteen months to resort to conscription.
Your opposition to World War I and conscription leads to imprisonment under the Espionage Act and eventual deportation on the Buford to revolutionary Russia.
Anti-war activists formed the No-Conscription League and organized massive public rallies to register moral resistance against forced military registration. Ten thousand people filled the Harlem River Casino on May 18, 1917, the anniversary of Berkman's release from prison. At this gathering, you defused a hostile soldier by publicly granting him the right to speak.
When put on trial for conspiring against the draft, you and Berkman decided to turn the courtroom into a public forum for propagating anarchist ideas rather than offering a conventional legal defense. On June 27, 1917, your forty-eighth birthday, the trial began before Judge Julius M. Mayer. Berkman rigorously questioned talesmen on social and political views, and you highlighted historical figures who acted outside the law. After thirty-nine minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict, resulting in a two-year prison sentence and a ten thousand dollar fine for each defendant.
Following your release and subsequent federal red scare raids, you faced expulsion from the country. The Buford, a discarded Spanish-American War transport ship, housed 246 men in cramped, damp steerage compartments with foul air, insufficient toilets, and poor rations. Forty-nine men were cooped up in a space barely large enough for half that number. Alexander Berkman negotiated with Immigration Inspector F. W. Berkshire to improve conditions and place deportee cooks in charge of the bakery to resolve the bad bread crisis. After 19 days of the hazardous cruise before reaching the Kiel Canal, the deportees left behind $45,470.39 in American banks through signed affidavits.
10. Disillusionment and Exile
You witness firsthand the bureaucratic terror, suppression of anarchists, and crushing of the Kronstadt uprising by the Bolshevik regime, forcing you to break publicly with Soviet tyranny.
Soviet Russia was overrun by an immense and inefficient bureaucratic system centered around permits and identification papers called propusks. Bill Shatoff joked about having a whole trunkful of propusks, while Goldman and Berkman faced weeks of delay just to secure travel permits to Moscow.
Leading Bolsheviks and former anarchists justified political terror, censorship, and the dictatorship as unavoidable evils forced upon the regime by foreign blockades and White generals. Bill Shatoff, who had become a Sovietized anarchist ruling Petrograd and even chasing down the slayer of Uritsky, insisted that the Communist State had to be a centralized power to fight off counter-revolutionists.
The bloody suppression of the Kronstadt sailors' strike in 1921 shattered the last remaining illusions about the proletarian nature of the Soviet regime. During the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party while Kronstadt was under siege, Lenin abruptly introduced the New Economic Policy, legalizing free trade and private employment after having executed sailors for demanding similar economic freedoms.
Thirteen anarchists in the Taganka prison launched a hunger-strike to protest their arbitrary detention without charges. Following negotiations involving foreign delegates to the Red Trade Union Congress, the Soviet government agreed to release and deport them from Russia, establishing the ominous precedent of banishing native-born revolutionists. Fanya Baron, who had escaped from Ryazan prison to rescue Aaron Baron, was recaptured and executed along with Lev Tchorny in the Cheka cellar just as arrangements were being finalized.
You must follow these rules when handling the Taganka hunger strike:
- Terminate the hunger-strike upon receiving the committee's advice.
- Prepare to leave Russia for any foreign country of choice with supplied passports and funds.
- Refuse to return to Soviet Russia without the consent of the Soviet Government.
Faced with imminent expulsion, blocked legal channels, and restrictive visa conditions, anarchist exiles resorted to independent clandestine travel and stowaway tactics. In southern Sweden, Goldman arranged with sailors and a motorboat owner to be smuggled across to Denmark, successfully bypassing a police inspector by pretending with her young companion to be destitute lovers taking refuge on the boat until a tip changed the officer's mind.
10 Key Ideas
- Arriving as an impoverished immigrant in America, you confront grueling factory conditions and social injustice that transform the execution of the Chicago anarchists into a permanent radical calling.
- You learn that dedication to the Cause demands subordinating personal comfort, rejecting legal marriage for free unions, and mastering stage fright to agitate the masses.
- You discover that parroting dogmatic teachers is a betrayal of independent thought, and that true anarchism champions the right to personal joy, radiant expression, and non-possessive love.
- When corporate management crushes striking workers with armed force, you support Alexander Berkman's plan to execute Henry Clay Frick as propaganda of the deed.
- Following a fiery speech to the unemployed in Union Square, you are sentenced to Blackwell's Island Penitentiary, where prison becomes your most vital school for human understanding.
- Travel to Europe introduces you to veteran revolutionaries like Peter Kropotkin and Louise Michel, while encounters with modern European literature and psychoanalysis expand your psychological insights.
- When Leon Czolgosz shoots President McKinley, you face a national panic, violent police interrogation, and intense social ostracism that test your resilience.
- You lead tireless campaigns to defend free speech against state suppression, aided by professional tour logistics that extend your reach across dozens of American cities.
- Your opposition to World War I and conscription leads to imprisonment under the Espionage Act and eventual deportation on the Buford to revolutionary Russia.
- You witness firsthand the bureaucratic terror, suppression of anarchists, and crushing of the Kronstadt uprising by the Bolshevik regime, forcing you to break publicly with Soviet tyranny.