Emma Goldman 2.pdf

Women’s History Review, Volume 11, Number 1, 2002

Emma Goldman: passion, politics,

and the theatrics of free expression

CANDACE FALK

University of California, Berkeley, USA

ABSTRACT The article is an exploration of the ways in which Emma Goldman

was both a virtuoso of political theatrics – especially effective in a period

when challenging ideas were suppressed – and an advocate of politically

conscious theater. Goldman was among the first to bring awareness of

European modern drama to the USA. Her appreciation for the theater was an

integral part of her intellectual development and a strategic component of a

political strategy that aspired to embrace all aspects of the human experience.

The themes addressed in the plays about which she lectured and wrote served

an integrative role – crossing class, ethnic, and national boundaries. Goldman

herself lived with a high sense of drama, and played an imposing role on the

political stage, which resonates even today.

Theatrical and sensuous outrage was the playful yet pungent strategic

trademark of turn-of-the-century political luminary, Emma Goldman. A

staunch supporter of freedom in all spheres of life, her anarchist vision

extended to women, workers, and to all those hampered both by individual

social prejudice and the heavy hand of the state. The gusto and eloquence

with which she challenged convention became her hallmark. At a time when

dissent was often suppressed, it was Goldman’s theatrical flair that conveyed

her message perhaps even more effectively than her speeches themselves. A

spectacle to behold, her appeal went beyond the predominantly ethnic

immigrant enclaves – of Jews, Russians, Germans, and Italians – that

constituted her anarchist audience as she added her voice to the

‘Americanization’ of the radical movement. People flocked to hear her lash

out against hypocrisy wherever she found it. Goldman spared no one. Even

the well-meaning hosts of lecture engagements were fair game for Goldman’s

biting wit. For example, at a gathering in a labor hall in Detroit in 1919,

Emma Goldman was introduced by an auto union official with the following

words:

Candace Falk

Because she is such a good talker and because she speaks so

eloquently, the first syllable of her name is ‘Gold’, and because she

speaks so vehemently, because she speaks with such authority, the last

part of her name is ‘man.’ I want to introduce Emma Goldman.[1]

Goldman stepped up to the podium and addressed the crowd:

Friends: By the introduction of our good chairman, I can see that he is

a man. The conceit of the male that when you think deeply and express

yourself with intensity, you must be manly and not womanly. I want to

tell him that I know any amount of men who neither think nor express

themselves in any shape or form![2]

It was this kind of feisty, provocative irreverence that attracted audiences

(sometimes numbering thousands) to her lectures. In one of the most

embattled periods of America’s social history, when police and government

routinely intervened violently in labor disputes, when battles were waged on

the streets and in the factories, and women were an organized presence in

the workforce without the right to vote, it took tremendous courage to

speak out as Emma Goldman did. An anarchist who felt deeply committed to

the belief that social harmony was within reach, Goldman took her message

to the people wherever they might be, crossing class, ethnic, and language

barriers to reach them. She delivered her lectures in large community halls

and university lecture rooms as well as from open cars in crowded squares,

and even in the backs of barrooms. She was as likely to deliver a lecture on

the social significance of modern drama to an exclusive women’s drama club

one night as to give the same lecture to coal miners in a mine shaft the next

day. A firm believer that the message of the modern dramatists needed to be

heard by working people, she sometimes slotted her talk into a lunch break

to accommodate those who lacked the luxury of time and money to attend a

theatrical performance, or a long afternoon or evening presentation. Her

drama lectures became a staple of her tours from 1907 to 1916 and a

vehicle for expressing an array of otherwise taboo and threatening topics.[3]

Emma Goldman was so accustomed to being banned from speaking

that she always carried a book to her lectures, lest she spend a night in jail

without something to read. In an era when the United States’ Constitution’s

first amendment was honored in principle but often not in practice – subject

to the whims and political persuasion of the local mayor or the Police Chief

– Goldman rarely could predict how or whether her talks would be received.

Amplifying the political prejudice against anarchists, anti-obscenity laws,

under the stewardship of postal inspector Anthony Comstock, broadened the

definition of obscenity to include printed matter alluding to sexuality – with

educational material on human reproduction especially suspect. Birth

control advocates who critiqued the economic system that perpetuated the

cycle of poverty were particularly vulnerable to arrest. Once, in Portland,

EMMA GOLDMAN

Oregon, in 1915, Goldman gave a lecture on the revelance of Friedrich

Nietzsche’s political philosophy to the issue of war. Three days later, after

local authorities caught wind that birth control leaflets had been illegally

distributed at the event, they showed up at her next talk, waiting to catch

her in the act. Just as she opened her mouth to begin her formal lecture on

the subject of birth control, she was carried off the stage. After one too

many such events, Goldman came up with the idea of chaining herself to the

platform. An apocryphal story circulated about a time when Goldman

acquired a strong, heavy lock and chain, wound it around herself and the

podium, then threw it out the window to have it attached to a pole outside.

She anticipated that it would take the police so long to release her that they

couldn’t possibly interrupt her lecture. According to reports in the Yiddish

press, on this one occasion, the police never showed up! To emphasize the

cumulative effect of the suppression of free speech, Goldman sometimes

stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth and sat gagged before the audience on

the stage during an evening lecture in which she was barred from speaking.

Her theatrical stunts were not limited to the lecture platform. Goldman

poked fun at her own kin – the Russian-Jewish community – some of whom

considered her pranks endearing, others antagonizing. She and the Yiddish

anarchists often staged Yom Kippur picnics on the holiest of Jewish holidays

designated for fasting and atonement. Once, when the Masses magazine held

its annual holiday ball, Goldman was reported to have come in costume as a

nun – dancing ‘the nun’s slide’ into the small hours of the night with great

abandon. (Perhaps Goldman’s penchant for dancing led to the popular

expression attributed to her, ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!’[4])

Like stage actors, most successful public speakers are performers,

political entertainers skilled in the art of creating a strong connection with

their audience. But unlike most political lecturers, Emma Goldman identified

with performing artists, studied the dramatic form, and on the lecture

platform, she integrated both the theory and practice of political theater

throughout her flamboyant career. Under the name E.G. Smith, Goldman

even took on the role of tour and publicity manager for the Russian theater

troupe of Pavel Orlenov and Alla Nazimova in the period shortly after her

unjust implication in the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.

From 1904 to 1906, she promoted their work and arranged for their

performances. In gratitude, before returning to Russia, a benefit show

provided the seed money for the founding of Goldman’s Mother Earth

magazine.

She was so committed to the advancement of theater in America and

convinced of its crucial role in the political awakening of the country that

she not only incorporated modern drama into her lecture series, but

encouraged the training of young performers. In 1914, Goldman proposed

the creation of Little Theaters in each town and city along her lecture tour

Candace Falk

route throughout the country. She hoped these companies would produce

modern plays with socially significant themes and also eventually overthrow

the ‘one star’ system. This interest in developing local dramatic talent was

inspired in part by the model of English stage societies, and the music talent

spawned by a recent association of music teachers in Los Angeles.[5]

People gathered by the thousands to hear Goldman’s voice – ‘the

power of the Ideal.’ Often press reporters were swayed by her message,

humored by her free flowing jabs at the hypocrisy of big government and of

conventional norms – all grist for wonderfully entertaining newspaper

articles. Roger Baldwin, the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties

Union, attributed his political awakening and commitment to free speech to

Emma Goldman, who admonished her audience that free speech meant

either the unlimited right of expression or nothing at all. She warned that

the moment any man or set of men could limit speech, it was no longer free.

In his recollections, Baldwin wrote that in his youth he came to hear

Goldman speak only upon a dare by a friend who thought that he was too

proper a Harvard gentleman to handle her notoriously bawdy and irreverent

public lectures.[6]

Vulnerable, yet intrepid, in the early 1910s, few other women shared

the radical spotlight. (Among those who did were socialist peace activist

Crystal Eastman, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and I.W.W.

[Industrial Workers of the World] leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.) Goldman’s

anarchist stance separated her from those linked more closely to specific

issues, tempering their comprehensive social critique in the name of

pragmatism. Her voice emerging from the outer fringes of respectability

allowed her the freedom to be outrageous. She engaged the audience in a

unique spectacle of political theater– often combining emotional catharsis

with imminent danger – and a healthy, humorous repartee with the

audience that was so lively that she was even solicited for a vaudeville act.[7]

Making fine distinctions between political theater and the vulgarity of the

vaudeville stage, Goldman cringed at the prospect of being placed between

two animal acts, no matter how desperate for money she may have been.

Goldman’s capacity to emulate high drama was in part inculcated by

her lifelong love of opera and the theater – and her desire to be lifted to a

more profound plane. The theater as a critical integrative force with her

political beliefs, however, came with the formative tutelage of the dramatic

public speaker and popular German anarchist theorist, Johann Most, whom

Goldman referred to in her autobiography as ‘the leader of the masses, the

man of magic tongue and powerful pen.’[8] Johann Most had been an actor

himself, wrote plays, and believed that had he not been afflicted with a facial

malformation, he would have found his place among the great thespians of

his day. He was the first to recognize Goldman’s talents. Her ability to relate

the story of her early life with such a finely tuned sense of drama and

EMMA GOLDMAN

emotion made him determine to mold her in his image as ‘a great speaker’,

perhaps even to take his place when he was gone. A complex and turbulent

relationship between Goldman and Most developed. (One may recall from

Living My Life that she horsewhipped him when he criticized Alexander

Berkman’s attempt on steel magnate, Henry Clay Frick’s life, who had been

responsible for the shooting of striking workers.[9]) Intoxicated by her newly

discovered oratorical power, she was shocked and disgusted to realize that

Most’s overriding interest in her was more sexual than political.

Thrusting herself into the world of anarchist speakers, gradually

Goldman addressed issues of internal as well as external oppression and

thus broadened the class and ethnic base of her audience. As a woman, she

felt comfortable traversing a terrain of issues much later identified with the

construct, ‘the personal is political.’ Frustrated with the rhetoric of her

radical political colleagues whose words ‘economic determinism’ or ‘class

consciousness’ alone could not move the masses [10], Goldman linked her

thoughts with emotions and rooted her beliefs in the politics of daily life –

issues addressed so naturally in the contemporary plays of Europe and

Russia. Appealing to the whole person, she believed that a play could reach

people more deeply and more emphatically than the ‘wildest harangue of the

soapbox orator.’[11] Especially for those whose lives were relatively

untouched by poverty and persecution, a forceful dramatic production on

the subject could elicit sympathy for the suffering masses with disarming

authenticity. Goldman saw the theater as an arena in which profound

feelings could be linked to political thought because she believed that the

theater ‘mirrors every phase of life, and embraces every strata of

society.’[12] As a lecturer, she too aspired to ‘embrac[e] the entire gamut of

human emotions’ [13] in the manner of the theater.

As an orator, Goldman’s attraction came in part from her charisma, in

part from the range of issues she addressed, and her provocative belief that

the measure of one’s freedom was proportional to one’s capacity to

‘question authority.’ She moved easily from a discussion of labor issues to

issues of women’s sexual and reproductive freedom, the education of

children, religious moralism, the drama, war, and the economy. Emma

Goldman’s lectures were varied – issues of personal life always on a par with

those more conventionally associated with politics. No topic was taboo. She

discussed ‘The Place of the Church in the Economic Struggle’ on the same

bill with ‘Sex, the Great Element in Creative Work.’ Goldman dared to

advocate ‘Birth Control,’ and defend ‘The Intermediate Sex’ (a phrase used

to describe homosexuality), and explain ‘Why and How Small Families are

Desirable,’ and in the spirit of the present debate over when life technically

begins, address ‘The Child’s Right Not to be Born.’ Goldman was among the

first birth control pioneers in America. In fact, she acted as a mentor to

Margaret Sanger. The Emma Goldman Papers feature letters between the

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