Emma Goldman: Anarchism, Free Speech, and the Deportation of 1919

At 4:20 in the morning on December 21, 1919, Emma Goldman checked her watch in a locked cabin aboard an aging Army transport ship easing out of New York harbor, the Statue of Liberty sliding past the porthole as the current took hold. She was one of 249 people the United States government put on that ship before dawn: 246 men crammed into the hold and, with her, two other women, Ethel Bernstein and Dora Lipkin. None of them had a return ticket. Goldman had lived in the country for thirty-four years, and no court had ever convicted her of a violent act. What got her deported was three decades of lectures, essays, and organizing as an anarchist, two prison terms for the words alone, and a Justice Department that had just spent months building a legal case to put her on that boat.

Kovno to the Rochester sweatshops

Goldman was born June 27, 1869, in Kovno, then part of the Russian Empire and now Kaunas, Lithuania. She immigrated to the United States in December 1885 at sixteen and found work in a Rochester, New York garment factory. In February 1887 she married a fellow immigrant, Jacob Kershner, which under the marriage law of the period made her an American citizen in her own right without a naturalization hearing of her own. That citizenship would matter more than either of them could have guessed.

Nine months later, on November 11, 1887, Chicago hanged four anarchists convicted in the Haymarket bombing on evidence that never actually tied them to the bomb. Goldman later wrote that the executions were what turned her toward anarchism. In 1889, at twenty, she moved to New York City, met Alexander Berkman in the city’s immigrant radical circles, and the two became lifelong comrades, and for years, lovers.

Homestead, 1892

During the 1892 Homestead steel strike outside Pittsburgh, one of the era’s landmark clashes between organized labor and an armed company, plant manager Henry Clay Frick brought in Pinkerton guards, and the resulting battle left workers and guards dead on both sides. Berkman decided to shoot Frick in retaliation. Goldman, by her own account in Living My Life, agreed with the plan and tried to help pay for it. With no money for a gun or the clothes to pass as a gentleman caller, she went to Fourteenth Street on July 16, 1892 to try streetwalking. An older man approached her, saw through the attempt at once, and handed her ten dollars without any transaction, telling her plainly that she lacked the aptitude for the work and should go home. She kept the money. Seven days later, on July 23, Berkman shot and stabbed Frick, who survived. Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison.

Arrested for talking

Goldman’s own arrests, over the next three decades, trace almost entirely to free speech rather than violence. In August 1893, addressing a crowd of unemployed New Yorkers during a national depression, she told them what a court would later call incitement to riot:

Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right

A judge sentenced her on October 18, 1893 to one year on Blackwell’s Island. She served most of it. Eight years later, on September 10, 1901, she was arrested again after President McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, turned out to have attended one of her lectures. She was held on twenty-thousand-dollar bail for two weeks; the case against her was dropped for lack of any evidence connecting her to the shooting. Authorities investigated her for other people’s violence, never proved her own, and jailed her anyway for the speaking.

Mother Earth and the birth control fight

In 1906 Goldman founded Mother Earth, a monthly magazine of anarchist and radical writing that she and Berkman kept going for over a decade through subscriptions and lecture-tour receipts. On February 11, 1916, she was arrested again, this time for lecturing publicly on birth control in violation of the Comstock laws. Offered a hundred-dollar fine or fifteen days in a Queens jail, she chose the jail.

Two years for opposing the draft

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Goldman and Berkman formed the No-Conscription League to organize resistance to the new draft. They were arrested June 15, 1917. The trial opened June 27, her forty-eighth birthday, and on July 9 a jury convicted them of conspiracy against the Draft Act. The judge gave them the legal maximum: two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine each. Goldman served hers at the federal penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Mother Earth did not survive the same wartime crackdown that would send Eugene Debs to prison the following year for a speech in Ohio, and that helped push Helen Keller toward co-founding the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, the year after Goldman’s boat sailed.

The case a 24-year-old built to deport her

Goldman’s citizenship had rested since 1887 on her marriage to Kershner, and the government found its opening there. Officials reopened his three-decade-old naturalization file, discovered he had been seventeen, and therefore underage, when he was naturalized, and voided it, arguing that his revocation erased her citizenship too, since she had never been naturalized independently. The case drew the personal attention of J. Edgar Hoover, a 24-year-old Justice Department official and the bureau’s rising star. On August 23, 1919, Hoover wrote in a memo:

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and if permitted to return to the community will result in undue harm.

Goldman left the Missouri penitentiary on September 28, 1919, “only technically free,” in her own words: the government held her on a $15,000 bond while the immigration inquiry continued. Her deportation hearing, twice postponed, finally happened October 27. On December 5 she and Berkman surrendered at Ellis Island as ordered, and sixteen days later she was on the Buford, one of 249 people deported that morning under the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act, a law built for exactly this: a way to expel an alien radical without ever proving a crime.

Did she really say “if I can’t dance”?

The line “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” shows up on t-shirts and tote bags with Goldman’s name attached, and she never wrote or said those words. What she actually recorded, in the 1931 autobiography Living My Life, was a night early in her career as an organizer when a young cousin of Berkman’s pulled her aside and told her, gravely, that her dancing “with such reckless abandon” did not behoove a serious agitator and would hurt the Cause. Furious, she told him to mind his own business, then said what she meant:

I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.

The four-word bumper-sticker version came later, condensed by admirers into something punchier than anything in the original paragraph. The honest version is longer and, if anything, more useful: a working anarchist’s actual argument for why the movement had no right to demand she stop enjoying her life.

Exile, and the grave she chose

Landing in Finland in January 1920, Goldman went into Soviet Russia hopeful and came out disillusioned within two years, especially after the Red Army crushed the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. She left Russia that December and spent the rest of her life in European exile, writing two books on her disillusionment and, in 1936, traveling to support the anarchist militias fighting in Spain. She wrote her two-volume memoir, Living My Life, published in 1931 and 1934, the fullest record of everything above, in her own words, decades before anyone paraphrased her for a t-shirt.

She died of a stroke in Toronto on May 14, 1940, at seventy. The country that deported her let her body back in, and she was buried, at her own request, in Forest Park, Illinois, beside the men hanged over Haymarket in 1887, the event that had started all of it. The stonecutter carved the wrong death year into her marker, 1939 instead of 1940, and it has stood uncorrected for more than eight decades, a small documented error on the grave of a woman the government spent years documenting in order to throw her out.