Emma Goldman and Free Speech
Freedom of expression was a cause Emma Goldman championed throughout her adult life. She was outraged that in the United States, “a country which guaranteed free speech, officers armed with long clubs should invade an orderly assembly.” As an anarchist orator, Emma faced constant threats from police and vigilantes determined to suppress her talks. Undeterred, Goldman continued to assert her right to speak, though she paid dearly for her principles. Arrested and tried in 1893 for urging a crowd of hungry, unemployed workers to rely on street demonstrations rather than on the electoral process to obtain relief, Goldman based her defense squarely on the right of free speech—and lost. She spent ten months in jail, a reminder that in nineteenth century America the right of free speech was still a dream, not a reality.
Following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, tolerance for free speech declined even further. Repression culminated in the passage of the draconian Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, which resulted in long prison terms for those who protested United States entry into the First World War. At the same time, liberal and radical Americans became more vocal in their opposition to the abridgement of first amendment rights. The government’s attempts to suppress Goldman’s unconventional views actually led many who disagreed with her to support nonetheless her right to express her ideas freely.
It was in this context that Goldman began lecturing regularly on freedom of speech and, in 1903, worked with the newly formed Free Speech League. The extremity of the situation sometimes led to amusing results. Once, expecting the police to disrupt a lecture in Philadelphia, Emma chained herself to a podium in order to make it physically impossible for the police to remove her before she finished speaking. But as fate would have it, this time the police did not appear.
Goldman’s insistence on freedom of speech had a profound influence on Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Baldwin heard Goldman speak in 1908 at a working class meeting hall in St. Louis, and what he heard led him to dedicate his life to the cause of freedom. He later told Goldman in a letter, “You always remain one of the chief inspirations of my life, for you aroused in me a sense of what freedom really means.” In his old age, Baldwin said, “Emma Goldman opened up not only an entirely new literature to me, but new people as well, some who called themselves anarchists, some libertarians, some freedom lovers . . . bound together by one principle—freedom from coercion.”
The ultimate irony of Emma Goldman’s crusade for free speech in America is that she was deported to Russia for exercising her right to speak against United States’ involvement in World War I. Undaunted, Goldman risked further political isolation by becoming one of the Left’s most vocal and eloquent critics of political repression in the Soviet Union.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/freespeech.html
No mention of her attempted assassinations and bombing material in the USA nor how she and her fellow anarchist didn’t stay long in Russia. They’re very brave in a country where they get away with blue murder but cowards when they witness real coertion.
- This letter, published in an anarchist periodical, reflects Goldman's early efforts to publicize the continued police suppression of her lectures, and draw the ominous implications for first amendment rights in America. (Lucifer the Lightbearer, December 11, 1902) - Note the publisher - Alice Bailey/Saul Alinsky et al...