EMMA GOLDMAN

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in Kovno, Russian Empire (now Kaunas, Lithuania). She immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager. The year after she arrived, the Haymarket Affair in Chicago (4 May 1886)--particularly the executions of anarchists following their deeply flawed convictions--ignited her political activism.

Following a failed marriage, Goldman moved to New York City. On her first day there, she met anarchist Alexander “Sasha” Berkman (1870-1936), who became her long-time friend and lover. Through him, she quickly transformed into a sought-after speaker for the anarchist cause.

She worked for a while in Springfield with Berkman’s cousin, Modest Stein (1871-1958), who was sketching portraits from photographs, and then moved with him to Worcester, where the three lived together. She and Berkman owned and operated a successful luncheonette/ice-cream parlor there: “Ben & Jerry’s” could have been “Emma & Alex’s”. But the Homestead Steel Strike in Pennsylvania interfered.

That strike, in July 1892, ended up crippling unionization efforts. To the strikers and their supporters, the face of the oppression was the massively wealthy industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849-1914)of, among much else, the Frick Collection, a trove of European art. In July 1892, Berkman walked into Frick’s Pittsburgh office and shot Frick, in the neck; the bullet travelled to Frick’s back. A second shot also struck Frick in the neck. A third shot was foiled when Frick and another man tackled Berkman. In the ensuing tangle, Berkman stabbed Frick’s leg four times with the sharpened file he’d brought. Frick was soon back in his office, and Berkman, convicted, was sentenced to 22 years in prison (of which he served 14).

Efforts to implicate Goldman in the Frick episode failed, but Goldman and Berkman were convicted in 1917 under the Espionage Act for inducing men not to register for the draft. They were released during the Red Scare of 1919-20, and deported to Russia. Goldman never returned, alive, to the U.S. She died in Toronto on 14 May 1940, aged 70, following several strokes. Her interment in the U.S. was allowed: she was buried in Forest Park, Illinois, near the graves of her early inspirations, those executed following the Haymarket Affair.

Goldman, more than a century ago, was advocating for such causes as free speech, birth control, women’s rights, and unionism, and against militarism. She doesn’t seem all that radical.