Ships of stone, sails of lead

Revolution comes for America

Woodrow Wilson hoped World War I would make the world safe for democracy. By its end it appeared to have made the world safe for communism and other offspring of revolution. The Russian revolution of 1917 toppled the czar and replaced him with Bolshevik commissars. The German revolution of 1918 brought down the kaiser and put up a council of people's deputies.

American radicals took heart. Emma Goldman, an immigrant from Lithuania, had been preaching anarchism since the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, for which four anarchists were hanged, probably wrongly. Her lover and fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1892 tried to assassinate steelman Henry Clay Frick during a strike. Berkman was imprisoned for attempted murder, and Goldman found herself under constant surveillance.

She defended Leon Czolgosz, the 1901 assassin of William McKinley, whom Goldman called “the president of the money kings and trust magnates of this country.” When conservatives in America decried the murder as evil, and even the socialists denounced it as counterproductive, Goldman called it brave and generous. “While thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant. What is it that drives him to commit the act, while others pass quietly by? It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others. It is, therefore, not cruelty, or a thirst for blood, or any other criminal tendency, that induces such a man to strike a blow at organized power. On the contrary, it is mostly because of a strong social instinct, because of an abundance of love and an overflow of sympathy with the pain and sorrow around us.”

Such sentiments marked Goldman as dangerous and deluded, in the minds of American authorities. She was repeatedly arrested and often imprisoned. After American entry into World War I, she and Berkman were arrested on charges of obstructing the draft. She defended their actions as in keeping with the very principles Wilson had articulated as reason for going to war. “We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America,” Goldman told the court." How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?" 

The jury wasn't impressed. She and Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison.

While in prison she learned of the European revolutions. Her decades of hard work were paying off, she concluded, for a blow against oppression anywhere struck for freedom everywhere.

Yet the success of those revolutions caused the keepers of American institutions to bolster their own defenses. In the spring of 1919, more than a dozen bombs were discovered in the American mail system, addressed to American political and business leaders. In June 1919 an Italian-born anarchist detonated a bomb in front of the Washington home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general.

Palmer survived and led a counterattack. Federal and local authorities coordinated to arrest thousands of anarchists, immigrants and individuals unlucky enough to be in their vicinity. Goldman and Berkman had just been released from prison, but the feds had their eye on them. J. Edgar Hoover, head of what would become the FBI, called them “two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country.” They were rounded up in the Palmer raids.

Congress had passed a law authorizing the expulsion of alien anarchists. Goldman protested that she was not an alien but a naturalized citizen, by virtue of having married an American citizen years earlier. The justice department rejected her claim. Her former husband’s naturalized citizenship had been revoked on account of anarchist activities. That revocation invalidated Goldman's citizenship, the department said.

Goldman appealed, but while her appeal was pending she learned that the government had chartered a ship, the Buford, to transport arrested radicals to Russia. Conservative commentators lampooned the vessel as the “Red Ark,” yet Goldman greeted it as her ride to the country of the future. “I expect while in Soviet Russia to shortly read of American-born citizens being deported from America to the island of Guam or some other colonial possession of America, despite the Constitution,” she said in choosing exile over a likely return to prison on trumped-up charges.

America was glad to see her and the other radicals go. A remark by actor, author and veteran of the war Guy Empey was widely repeated: “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell.”

The ship made it safely to Finland, whose authorities hustled the radicals to Russia. Goldman was reminded of the difference between anarchism and communism when she discovered that the ruling Bolsheviks were as intolerant of dissent as any capitalist regime. Disillusioned, she and Berkman left Russia.

They bounced around Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Berkman developed maladies that left him in constant pain. Despairing of improvement, he killed himself in 1936. Goldman suffered a series of strokes and died in 1940.