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Rose Wilder Lane
Born	(1886-12-05)December 5, 1886 De Smet, Dakota Territory
Died	October 30, 1968(1968-10-30) (aged 81) Danbury, Connecticut
Occupation	Writer, political theorist
Nationality	American
Period	1914–1963
Notable work(s)	The Discovery of Freedom
Influences Isabel Paterson, Laura Ingalls Wilder

Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886, De Smet, Dakota Territory – October 30, 1968, Danbury, Connecticut) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. She is noted (with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson) as one of the founders of the American libertarian movement.^[1]

Early life[link]

Rose Wilder Lane was the first child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder (and their only child to survive into adulthood). Lane's early years were difficult ones for her parents, the result of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, Lane moved with her family several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida, briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota, before the family finally settled in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where her parents eventually established a dairy and fruit farm. Lane attended high schools in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana, (where her father's sister, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, had settled), graduating in 1904. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one, and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite this academic success, her parents' financial situation placed college out of reach and her formal schooling was over.

Early career, marriage and divorce[link]

After high school graduation she returned to her parents' farm and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station where the station master was the father of a school friend. Before she was eighteen Lane was working for Western Union in Kansas City as a telegrapher. She worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California for the next five years.

In 1909, she married salesman and occasional newspaperman Clare Gillette Lane. Around 1910, Lane bore a son who was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left Lane unable to bear more children. The details of the child's death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters, written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.

For the next few years Lane and her husband traveled around the US working various marketing and promotional schemes. Letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence with both Lane and her husband traversing the US several times and working a variety of jobs, both together and separately. However, in diary entries and subsequent published autobiographical pieces concerning this time, Lane described herself as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tension arising from the recognition that her intelligence and interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform, only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.

Keenly aware of her lack of a formal education, during this time Lane read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs that earned much needed extra cash. Between 1912 and 1914, Lane - one of the earliest female real estate agents in California - and her husband sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. It made sense for the two to work separately to earn separate commissions, and Lane turned out to be the better salesperson of the two. The marriage foundered, there were several periods of separation, and eventually an amicable divorce. Lane's diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years after her divorce, but she never remarried.

The threat of America's entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend's offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, Rose Wilder Lane's photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Her first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.

Also in 1915, Lane's mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, visited for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; many details of this visit and Lane's daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder's letters to her husband and are available in West from Home, published by Lane's heir in 1974. Although Lane's diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, Wilder's letters do not indicate this. Gillette Lane was recorded as living with his wife, although unemployed and looking for work during his mother-in-law's two month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up for her mother's visit, or had not yet involved separate households.

Freelance writing career[link]

By 1918, Lane's marriage was officially ended and she had quit her job with the San Francisco Bulletin to launch a career as a freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane's work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.

Lane was also the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. She was a friend and defender of Hoover for the remainder of her life, and many of her personal papers are now in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. Lane's papers contain little actual correspondence between Hoover and herself, but the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Lane correspondence that spans from 1936-1963.^[2]

In the late 1920s, she was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends figures such as Herbert Hoover, Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, Lane's compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, Lane would easily find work as a ghostwriter or "silent" editor for other well-known writers.

Lane's occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-WWI Europe and continued though 1965, when at the age of 78, she was reporting from Vietnam for Woman's Day magazine, providing "a woman's point of view." She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane, Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named "Zenobia". An account of the journey, Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983. Lane became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta, who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek; she later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England.

In 1928, Lane returned to the U.S. to live on her parents' farm and there she took in and educated two local orphaned brothers. In 1938, Lane purchased a rural home outside of Danbury, Connecticut, where she spent the remainder of her life.

Literary collaboration[link]

Lane's exact role in her mother's famous Little House on the Prairie series of books (the basis for the television show, Little House On the Prairie) has remained unclear. A contributing factor was the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane's and her parents' investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with Lane's encouragement and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to generate ideas for her own writing projects.

In late 1930, her mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, entitled Pioneer Girl. Lane, using her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Laura as she matured from ages five to eighteen. Despite Lane's efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was resoundingly rejected, although one editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on this project, thus producing "Little House in the Big Woods", which was accepted by Harper & Row in late 1931. The success of the book resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura Ingalls into young adulthood.

It remains unclear whether Laura Ingalls Wilder was a naturally skilled novelist who never discovered her talents until her sixties, with Lane's only contribution to her mother's success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world, or if Lane essentially took her mother's unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrote the series of books we know today. The truth appears to lie somewhere between these two positions — Wilder's writing career as a rural journalist and a credible essayist began more than two decades before the Little House series, and Lane's formidable editing and ghostwriting skills are well-documented. The existing written evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane's extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder's own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder's confidence in her own writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to her mother, despite much documentation to the contrary.

Whatever the extent of Lane's help to her mother in writing the books, it certainly played some role. Wilder did not keep copies of her correspondence with Lane, but Lane kept carbon copies of virtually everything she ever wrote—including the correspondence with her mother concerning the Little House Books. The correspondence shows that Wilder sometimes adamantly refused to accept some of her daughter's suggestions, and at other times gratefully accepted them.

Lane's editing skills brought the dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization needed to make the stories publishable in book form. In fact, this collaboration benefited Lane's career as much as her mother's – many of Lane's most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from her mother's recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore—Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) and Free Land, both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century, and how the "free land" in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday Evening Post paid Lane large fees to serialize both novels, and both were also adapted for highly popular radio performances.

Journalism[link]

During World War II, Lane had one of the most remarkable, but little studied, phases of her career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American black newspaper.^{[citation needed]}

Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, she seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interests of her audience. Her first entry glowingly characterized the Double V Campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in American history. "Here, at last, is a place where I belong," she wrote of her new job. "Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom." Her columns highlighted black success stories to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Vann and Henry Ford. Vann's rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion" while Ford's showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of jobs ... putting even beggars into cars."^[3]

She combined advocacy of laissez faire and antiracism. The views she expressed on race were strikingly similar to those of black writer, and fellow individualist, Zora Neale Hurston. Lane's columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of 'race,' [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century", it was time for all Americans (black and white) to "renounce their race". Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal 'class' distinction." The collectivists, including the New Dealers, were to blame for filling "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government."^[4]

[edit] The Discovery of Freedom

In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial writing and became known as one of the most influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, perceived "creeping socialism," Social Security, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. She cut her income and expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury, Connecticut. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged the move to Connecticut, where she would be only "up country a few miles" from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.^[5]

A staunch opponent of communism after experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her Red Cross travels, Lane wrote the seminal The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Paterson's The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, and the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.^[6]

Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane's and Paterson's nonfiction works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally ... They don't fumble and fiddle around--every shot goes straight to the centre." Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.^[7]

In 1943, Lane was thrust into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would ultimately destroy the US. The subsequent events remain unclear, but wartime monitoring of the mails eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her farmhouse (supposedly at the request of the FBI) to question her motives. Lane's vehement response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, "What is this, the Gestapo?," that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights, despite the wartime exigencies.

There was an FBI file compiled on Lane during this time, which is now available under the Freedom of Information Act.

As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified as a fundamentalist libertarian, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. She broke with her old friend and political ally, Isabel Paterson in 1946,^[8] and, in the 1950s, had an acrimonious correspondence with writer Max Eastman.^[9]

Later years[link]

During the 1940s and through the 1950s, Lane played a hands-on role in launching the "libertarian movement", a term she apparently coined, and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writers Frank Meyer and Ayn Rand.^[10] Lane wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at, and gave generous financial support to, the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.^[3]

With her mother's death in 1957, use of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the surrounding land. The local townfolk put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds, for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to her mother, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family's belongings to help establish what became a popular museum which still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield.^[11] Her lifetime inheritance of Wilder's growing Little House royalties put an end to Lane's self-enforced modest lifestyle; she began to travel extensively again, and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, Lane revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her remarkable tour of the Vietnam war zone in late 1965.

Lane wrote an immensely popular book detailing the history of American needlework (with a strong libertarian undercurrent) for Woman's Day and edited and published On The Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother's original 1894 diary of their six week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. This book was intended to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, for those many fans who since Wilder's death were now writing to Lane asking, "what happened next?". She contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund, and continued to work on extensive revisions to The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed.

Lane was the adoptive "grandmother" and mentor to Roger MacBride, best known as the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for President of the United States. MacBride was the son of one of Lane's editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a young boy; she later admitted that she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, he also became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multi-million dollar franchise that he built around it after Lane's death.

The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the young girl's intelligence, she helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.^[12]

Lane died in her sleep at the age of eighty-one, on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour.

After inheriting the rights to the literary works of both Lane and her mother, MacBride agreed to the commercialization of the books via the "Little House on the Prairie" television series, and approved the miniseries The Young Pioneers, which was based on a compilation of Lane's two best-selling novels.

MacBride also was the author of the spinoff The Rose Years Little House Series, a multi-part semi-fictional re-telling of Rose's life from the age of seven to nineteen.

Controversy came after MacBride's death in 1995, when the local library in Mansfield, Missouri, contended that Wilder's original will gave her daughter ownership of the literary estate for her lifetime only, all rights to revert to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library after her death. The ensuing court case was settled in an undisclosed manner, but MacBride's heirs retained the rights.

Bibliography[link]

• The Story of Art Smith (1915) (biography)
• Henry Ford's Own Story (1917) (biography)
• Diverging Roads (1919) (fiction)
• White Shadows on the South Seas (with Frederick O'Brien) (1919) (non-fiction travel)
• The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920) (biography)
• The Peaks of Shala (1923) (non-fiction travel)
• He Was A Man (1925) (fiction)
• Hillbilly (1925) (fiction)
• Cindy (1928) (fiction)
• Let the Hurricane Roar (1932) (fiction) now better known as Young Pioneers.
• Old Home Town (1935) (fiction)
• Give Me Liberty (1936)
• Credo (1936) shorter version of Give Me Liberty published in Saturday Evening Post
• Free Land (1938) (fiction)
• The Discovery of Freedom (1943) (political history) adapted in 1947 as The Mainspring of Human Progress
• "What Is This: The Gestapo?" (1943) (pamphlet)
• "On the Way Home" (1962)
• The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963)
• Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford (1983) (with Helen Dore Boylston, ed. William Holtz ISBN 978-0-8262-0390-8
• The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist (2007) (ed. Amy Mattson Lauters)

In the media[link]

Lane was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by :

• Twins Jennifer and Michele Steffin
• Terra Allen (part 1) and Skye McCole Bartusiak, Christina Stojanovich (part 2), in the miniseries Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

There are eight novels written by Roger Lea MacBride, telling of Lane's childhood and early youth. Despite assertions of the accuracy of the locations, dates, and people mentioned, there is heavy debate on the degree of authenticity. At least some events may be accurately represented, as MacBride was a close friend of Lane's.

See also[link]

conservatism portal

• Shamakhi dancers, mentioned in a book she translated

References[link]

About Lane[link]

• Holtz, William V., 1995. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. University of Missouri Press 1977
• ———, ed., 1991. Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship Letters, 1921-1960. University of Missouri Press other books
• Lauters, Amy Mattson, 2007. "The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist." University of Missouri Press 2007
• Beito, David T. Beito and Beito, Linda Royster. "Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty Independent Review 12 Spring 2008).
• Miller, John E., 1998. Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. University of Missouri Press. Contains extensive material on Rose and Laura's literary collaboration, including facsimiles of their correspondence.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Rose Wilder Lane

• Works by Rose Wilder Lane at Internet Archive
• Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), from the Cato Institute.
• Rose Wilder Lane: Pioneer of Liberty, by Amy Lauters, from Legacy.com.
• "The Libertarian Legacy of Rose Wilder Lane" by Jeff Riggenbach
• Lane's 1923 expedition in the Syrian Desert

Jeff Riggenbach (born January 12, 1947) is an American libertarian journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator.^[1]

Riggenbach's first book, In Praise of Decadence (1998), argued that the baby boomers turned out to be far more libertarian in their personal philosophy than had been expected.^[2]

His second book, Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), argued that political events and trends in late 20th Century America had led to a rebirth of popular interest in revisionist accounts of American history. In this study of American revisionists, Riggenbach identifies three distinct phases within American revisionism.^[3]

Works[link]

• Berkeley's Radical Slumlords, Photocopied article taken from Reason, (Oct. 1986): 22–29.(1986)
• In Praise of Decadence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), ISBN 1-57392-246-3
• Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009)

See also[link]

• Antiwar.com
• Historical revisionism
• LewRockwell.com
• Ludwig von Mises Institute
• Reason (magazine)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Preface to Why American History Is Not What They Say
• Review/Essay on Ayn Rand's posthumous Art of Nonfiction, 2001.
• Meeting Murray Rothbard On the Road to Libertarianism, 2003.
• Obituary Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947–2004), 2004.
• Obituary Joan Kennedy Taylor, 1926–2005, 2005.
• The Libertarian Tradition Archive at Mises.org
• Review/Essay on Stephen Cox's biography of Isabel Paterson, 2005.
• Review/Essay on three new books on Voltairine de Cleyre, 2006.
• Review/Essay on Barry Eisler's John Rain thrillers, 2006.
• Review/Essay on Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism, 2007.

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Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre in Philadelphia, 1901 (age 35)
Born	(1866-11-17)November 17, 1866 Leslie, Michigan
Died	June 20, 1912(1912-06-20) (aged 45) St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois
Occupation	writer and tutor

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to individualist anarchism but evolved through mutualism to an "anarchism without adjectives." She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not involve force. However, according to anarchist author Iain McKay, she embraced the ideals of stateless communism.^[1] She was a colleague of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of her essays were in the Collected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth in 1914.

Life[link]

Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan, she was placed as a teenager into a Catholic convent in Sarnia, Ontario by her father, because he thought it would give her a better education. This experience had the effect of moving her towards atheism rather than Christianity. Of her time spent there she said, "it had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days".^[2] She attempted to run away by swimming to Port Huron, Michigan, and hiking 17 miles; but she met friends of her family who contacted her father and sent her back. She graduated and received a gold medal from the school, which she can be seen wearing in the picture.^{[clarification needed]}

Family ties to the Abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, the harsh and unrelenting poverty that she grew up in, and being named after the philosopher Voltaire all contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, de Cleyre began her intellectual involvement in the strongly anti-clerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals.

A flier advertising a memorial event held a few days after De Cleyre's death.

During her time in the freethought movement in the mid and late 1880s, de Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Clarence Darrow. Other influences were Henry David Thoreau, Big Bill Haywood, and Eugene Debs. After the hanging of the Haymarket protesters in 1887, however, she became an anarchist. "Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury," she wrote in an autobiographical essay, "After that I never could".^[2]

She was known as an excellent speaker and writer – in the opinion of biographer Paul Avrich, she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist"^[3] – and as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause, whose "religious zeal," according to Goldman, "stamped everything she did."^[4]

She was close to and inspired by Dyer D. Lum, ("her teacher, her confidant, her comrade" in the words of Goldman^[5]), although she gave birth to a son, Harry on June 12, 1890, fathered by freethinker James B. Elliot. The child was taken from her when she refused to live with Elliot, and Lum committed suicide in 1893.

De Cleyre based her operations from 1889 to 1910 in Philadelphia, where she lived among poor Jewish immigrants, and where sympathy for anarchist beliefs was common. There, she taught English and music, and she learned to speak and write in Yiddish.^[6]

Throughout her life she was plagued by illness and depression, attempting suicide on at least two occasions and surviving an assassination attempt on December 19, 1902. Her assailant, Herman Helcher, was a former pupil who had earlier been rendered insane by a fever, and whom she immediately forgave. She wrote, "It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain".^[7] The attack left her with chronic ear pain and a throat infection that often adversely affected her ability to speak or concentrate.

Voltairine de Cleyre died on June 20, 1912, at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois from septic meningitis. She was buried near Emma Goldman, the Haymarket defendants, and other social activists at the Waldheim Cemetery (now Forest Home Cemetery), in Forest Park, a suburb west of Chicago.^[8]

Political beliefs[link]

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v t e

Voltairine de Cleyre's political perspective shifted throughout her life, eventually leading her to become an outspoken proponent of "anarchism without adjectives," a doctrine, according to historian George Richard Esenwein, "without any qualifying labels such as communist, collectivist, mutualist, or individualist. For others, … [it] was simply understood as an attitude that tolerated the coexistence of different anarchist schools."^[9]

For several years de Cleyre associated primarily with the American individualist anarchist milieu. Her early allegiance to individualism can be seen in the way she differentiated herself from Emma Goldman: "Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should."^[10]

Despite their early dislike for one another, Goldman and de Cleyre came to respect each other intellectually. In her 1894 essay "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation", de Cleyre wrote in support of the right of expropriation while remaining neutral on its advocacy: "I do not think one little bit of sensitive human flesh is worth all the property rights in N. Y. city … I say it is your business to decide whether you will starve and freeze in sight of food and clothing, outside of jail, or commit some overt act against the institution of property and take your place beside Timmermann and Goldmann."^[10]

Eventually, however, de Cleyre was moved to reject individualism. In 1908 she argued "that the best thing ordinary workingmen or women could do was to organise their industry to get rid of money altogether" and "produce together, co-operatively rather than as employer and employed."^[11] In 1912 she argued that the Paris Commune's failure was due to its having "respected [private] property." In her essay, "The Commune Is Risen", she states that "In short, though there were other reasons why the Commune fell, the chief one was that in the hour of necessity, the Communards were not Communists. They attempted to break political chains without breaking economic ones…".^[12]

"Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all compatible with my notion of freedom."^[13] Instead, she became one of the most prominent advocates of anarchism without adjectives. In The Making of an Anarchist, she wrote, "I no longer label myself otherwise than as 'Anarchist' simply".^[14]

Some disagreement exists as to whether or not de Cleyre's rejection of individualism constituted an embrace of pure communism. Rudolf Rocker and Emma Goldman made such an assertion, but others, including biographer Paul Avrich, have taken exception.^[15] Cleyre, herself, in response to claims that she had been an anarchist communist, asserted in 1907 that "I am not now, and have never been at any time, a communist."^[16] Anarchist author Iain McKay argues that de Cleyre's subsequent 1908 advocacy of a money-less economy was communism.^[17]

"Direct Action", her 1912 essay in defense of direct action, is widely cited today. In this essay, de Cleyre points to examples such as the Boston Tea Party, noting that "direct action has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people now reprobating it."^[18]

In her 1895 lecture entitled Sex Slavery, de Cleyre condemns ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies and child socialization practices that create unnatural gender roles. The title of the essay refers not to traffic in women for purposes of prostitution, although that is also mentioned, but rather to marriage laws that allow men to rape their wives without consequences. Such laws make "every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passions."^[19]

She also adamantly opposed the standing army, arguing that its existence made wars more likely. In her 1909 essay, Anarchism and American Traditions, she argued that in order to achieve peace, "all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army, and require that all who wish to make war do so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade."^[20]

Legacy[link]

Voltairine de Cleyre, Philadelphia, Christmas 1891

Voltairine de Cleyre was a prominent American anarchist, and as one of the few women of stature in the anarchist movement she was acclaimed by Emma Goldman as "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced".^[15][21] Today she is not widely known, something biographer Sharon Presley attributes to the shortness of her life.^[15] Her life was chronicled in the book An American Anarchist, written by Paul Avrich and published by the Princeton University Press in 1978. A collection of her speeches, The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895–1910, was published by the Libertarian Book Club in 1980 and in 2004, AK Press released The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader.^[22] In 2005, two more collections of her speeches and article were published – Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine De Cleyre – Anarchist, Feminist, Genius, edited by Presley and Crispin Sartwell and published by SUNY Press,^[23] and the other, Gates of Freedom: Voltairine De Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind, from University of Michigan Press.^[24]

See also[link]

• Eugene Debs
• Emma Goldman
• Haymarket affair
• Bill Haywood
• The writing on the wall -- her last poem "Written in Red"
• Thomas Paine
• Henry David Thoreau

Citations[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Voltairine de Cleyre

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Voltairine de Cleyre

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Voltairine de Cleyre

• Free audiobooks of Voltairine de Cleyre at LibriVox
• Voltairine.org – Web site about Voltairine de Cleyre, including articles and biography
• Works by or about Voltairine de Cleyre in libraries (WorldCat catalog)^{[dead link]}
• Voltairine de Cleyre entry at the Anarchy Archives
• Poems by Voltairine De Cleyre from the Daily Bleed
• In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation by Voltairine de Cleyre
• At the Molinari Institute - (near the bottom of the page)
• Voltairine de Cleyre: Penitent Priestess of Anarchism by Jeff Riggenbach

Emma Goldman

Goldman circa 1911
Born	(1869-06-27)June 27, 1869 Kovno, Russian Empire
Died	May 14, 1940(1940-05-14) (aged 70) Toronto, Canada
School	Anarchism
Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Most, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Max Stirner, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Oscar Wilde, Voltairine de Cleyre
Influenced Margaret Sanger, Noe Ito

Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15] 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.^[1] Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.^[1] She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.^[2] Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

Family[link]

Emma Goldman's Orthodox Jewish family lived in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas (called Kovno at the time, part of the Russian Empire).^[3] Goldman's mother Taube Bienowitch had been married before, to a man with whom she had two daughters—Helena in 1860 and Lena in 1862. When her first husband died of tuberculosis, Taube was devastated. Goldman later wrote: "Whatever love she had had died with the young man to whom she had been married at the age of fifteen."^[4]

Taube's second marriage was arranged by her family and, as Goldman puts it, "mismated from the first".^[4] Her second husband, Abraham Goldman, invested Taube's inheritance in a business that quickly failed. The ensuing hardship combined with the emotional distance of husband and wife to make the household a tense place for the children. When Taube became pregnant, Abraham hoped desperately for a son; a daughter, he believed, would serve as one more sign of failure.^[5] They eventually had three sons, but their first child was Emma.^[6]

Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869. Her father used violence to punish his children, beating them when they disobeyed him. He used a whip only on Emma, the most rebellious of them.^[7] Her mother provided scarce comfort, calling only rarely on Abraham to tone down his beatings.^[8] Goldman later speculated that her father's furious temper was at least partly a result of sexual frustration.^[4]

Goldman's relationships with her elder half-sisters, Helena and Lena, were a study in contrasts. Helena, the oldest, provided the comfort they lacked from their mother; she filled Goldman's childhood with "whatever joy it had".^[9] Lena, however, was distant and uncharitable.^[10] The three sisters were joined by brothers Louis (who died at the age of six), Herman (born in 1872), and Moishe (born in 1879).^[11]

Adolescence[link]

Emma Goldman's family in St. Petersberg, Russia in 1882. From left to right: Emma, standing; Helena, seated, with Morris on her lap; Taube; Herman; Abraham.

When Emma was a young girl, the Goldman family moved to the village of Papilė, where her father ran an inn. While her sisters worked, she became friends with a servant named Petrushka, who excited her "first erotic sensations".^[12] Later in Papilė she witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout in the street. This event traumatized her and contributed to her lifelong distaste for violent authority.^[13]

At the age of seven, Goldman moved with her family to the Prussian city of Königsberg (then part of the German Empire), and she enrolled in a Realschule. One teacher punished disobedient students—targeting Goldman in particular—by beating their hands with a ruler. Another teacher tried to molest his female students and was fired when Goldman fought back. She found a sympathetic mentor in her German teacher, who loaned her books and even took her to an opera. A passionate student, Goldman passed the exam for admission into a gymnasium, but her religion teacher refused to provide a certificate of good behavior and she was unable to attend.^[14]

The family moved to the Russian city of Saint Petersburg, where her father opened one unsuccessful store after another. Their poverty forced the children to work, and Goldman took an assortment of jobs including one in a corset shop.^[15] As a teenager Goldman begged her father to allow her to return to school, but instead he threw her French book into the fire and shouted: "Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children."^[16]

Goldman pursued an independent education on her own, however, and soon began to study the political turmoil around her, particularly the Nihilists responsible for assassinating Alexander II of Russia. The ensuing turmoil intrigued Goldman, even though she did not fully understand it at the time. When she read Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863), she found a role model in the protagonist Vera, who adopts a Nihilist philosophy and escapes her repressive family to live freely and organize a sewing cooperative. The book enthralled Goldman and remained a source of inspiration throughout her life.^[17]

Her father, meanwhile, continued to insist on a domestic future for her, and he tried to arrange for her to be married at the age of fifteen. They fought about the issue constantly; he complained that she was becoming a "loose" woman, and she insisted that she would marry for love alone.^[18] At the corset shop, she was forced to fend off unwelcome advances from Russian officers and other men. One persistent suitor took her into a hotel room and committed what Goldman called "violent contact";^[19] two biographers call it rape.^[18][20] She was stunned by the experience, overcome by "shock at the discovery that the contact between man and woman could be so brutal and painful."^[21] Goldman felt that the encounter forever soured her interactions with men.^[21]

Rochester, New York[link]

Emma Goldman in 1886

In 1885, Helena made plans to move to New York to join her sister Lena and her husband. Goldman wanted to join her sister, but their father refused to allow it. Despite Helena's offer to pay for the trip, Abraham turned a deaf ear to their pleas. Desperate, Goldman threatened to throw herself into the Neva River if she could not go. He finally agreed, and on December 29, 1885, Helena and Emma arrived at New York's Castle Garden.^[22] They moved into the Rochester home Lena had made with her husband Samuel. Fleeing the rising antisemitism of Saint Petersburg, their parents and brothers joined them a year later. Goldman began working as a seamstress, sewing overcoats for more than ten hours a day, earning two and a half dollars a week. She asked for a raise and was denied; she quit and took work at a smaller shop nearby.^[23]

At her new job, Goldman met a fellow worker named Jacob Kershner, who shared her love for books, dancing, and traveling, as well as her frustration with the monotony of factory work. After four months they married in February 1887.^[24] Once he moved in with Goldman's family, however, their relationship faltered. On their wedding night she discovered that he was impotent; they became emotionally and physically distant. Before long he became jealous and suspicious. She, meanwhile, was becoming more engaged with the political turmoil around her—particularly the fallout of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago and the anti-authoritarian political philosophy of anarchism. Less than a year after the wedding, they were divorced; he begged her to return and threatened to poison himself if she did not. They reunited, but after three months she left once again. Her parents considered her behavior "loose" and refused to allow Goldman into their home.^[25] Carrying her sewing machine in one hand and a bag with five dollars in the other, she left Rochester and headed southeast to New York City.^[26]

Most and Berkman[link]

Goldman enjoyed a decades-long relationship with her lover Alexander Berkman.

On her first day in the city, Goldman met two men who would forever change her life. At Sachs's Café, a gathering place for radicals, she was introduced to Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who invited her to a public speech that evening. They went to hear Johann Most, editor of a radical publication called Freiheit and an advocate of "propaganda of the deed"—the use of violence to instigate change.^[27] She was impressed by his fiery oration, and he took her under his wing, training her in methods of public speaking. He encouraged her vigorously, telling her that she was "to take my place when I am gone."^[28] One of her first public talks in support of "the Cause" was in Rochester. After convincing Helena not to tell their parents of her speech, Goldman found her mind a blank once on stage. Suddenly,^[29]

something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime.... I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity.... The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song.

Enchanted by the experience, she refined her public persona during subsequent engagements. Quickly, however, she found herself arguing with Most over her independence. After a momentous speech in Cleveland, she felt as though she had become "a parrot repeating Most's views"^[30] and resolved to express herself on the stage. Upon her return in New York, Most became furious and told her: "Who is not with me is against me!"^[31] She left Freiheit and joined with another publication, Die Autonomie.^[32]

Meanwhile, she had begun a friendship with Berkman, whom she affectionately called Sasha. Before long they became lovers and moved into a communal apartment with his cousin Modest "Fedya" Stein and Goldman's friend, Helen Minkin, in rural Woodstock, Illinois.^[33] Although their relationship had numerous difficulties, Goldman and Berkman would share a close bond for decades, united by their anarchist principles and commitment to personal equality.^[34]

Homestead plot[link]

One of the first political moments that brought Berkman and Goldman together was the Homestead Strike. In June 1892, a steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania owned by Andrew Carnegie became the focus of national attention when talks between the Carnegie Steel Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) broke down. The factory's manager was Henry Clay Frick, a fierce opponent of the union. When a final round of talks failed at the end of June, management closed the plant and locked out the workers, who immediately went on strike. Strikebreakers were brought in and the company hired Pinkerton guards to protect them. On July 6, a fight broke out between three hundred Pinkerton guards and a crowd of armed union workers. During the twelve-hour gunfight, seven guards and nine strikers were killed.^[35]

Goldman and Berkman believed that a retaliatory assassination of Carnegie Steel Company manager Henry Clay Frick (pictured) would "strike terror into the soul of his class" and "bring the teachings of Anarchism before the world".^[36]

When a majority of the nation's newspapers came out in support of the strikers, Goldman and Berkman resolved to assassinate Frick, an action they expected would inspire the workers to revolt against the capitalist system. Berkman chose to carry out the assassination, and ordered Goldman to stay behind in order to explain his motives after he went to jail. He would be in charge of the deed; she of the word.^[37] Berkman tried and failed to make a bomb, then set off for Pittsburgh to buy a gun and a suit of decent clothes. Goldman, meanwhile, decided to help fund the scheme through prostitution. Remembering the character of Sonya in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866), she mused: "She had become a prostitute in order to support her little brothers and sisters.... Sensitive Sonya could sell her body; why not I?"^[38] Once on the street, she caught the eye of a man who took her into a saloon, bought her a beer, gave her ten dollars, informed her she did not have "the knack", and told her to quit the business. She was "too astounded for speech".^[38] She wrote to Helena, claiming illness, and asked her for fifteen dollars.^[39]

On July 23, Berkman gained access to Frick's office with a concealed handgun and shot Frick three times, then stabbed him in the leg. A group of workers—far from joining in his attentat—beat Berkman unconscious, and he was carried away by the police.^[40] Berkman was convicted of attempted murder^[41] and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison;^[42] his absence from her life was very difficult for Goldman.^[43] Convinced Goldman was involved in the plot, police raided her apartment and—finding no evidence—pressured her landlord into evicting her. Worse, the attentat had failed to rouse the masses: workers and anarchists alike condemned Berkman's action. Johann Most, their former mentor, lashed out at Berkman and the assassination attempt. Furious at these attacks, Goldman brought a toy horsewhip to a public lecture and demanded, onstage, that Most explain his betrayal. He dismissed her, whereupon she struck him with the whip, broke it on her knee, and hurled the pieces at him.^[44][45] She later regretted her assault, confiding to a friend: "At the age of twenty-three, one does not reason."^[46]

"Inciting to riot"[link]

When the Panic of 1893 struck in the following year, the United States suffered one of its worst economic crises ever. By year's end, the unemployment rate was higher than twenty percent,^[47] and "hunger demonstrations" sometimes gave way to riots. Goldman began speaking to crowds of frustrated men and women in New York. On August 21, she spoke to a crowd of nearly 3,000 people in Union Square, where she encouraged unemployed workers to take immediate action. Her exact words are unclear: undercover agents insist she ordered the crowd to "take everything ... by force",^[48] while Goldman later recounted this message: "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."^[49] Later in court, Detective-Sergeant Charles Jacobs offered yet another version of her speech.^[50]

Goldman (shown here in Union Square, New York in 1916) urged unemployed workers to take direct action rather than depend on charity or government aid.

A week later she was arrested in Philadelphia and returned to New York City for trial, charged with "inciting to riot".^[51] During the train ride, Jacobs offered to drop the charges against her if she would inform on other radicals in the area. She responded by throwing a glass of ice water in his face.^[52] As she awaited trial, Goldman was visited by Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World. She spent two hours talking to Goldman, and wrote a positive article about the woman she described as a "modern Joan of Arc".^[53]

Despite this positive publicity, the jury was persuaded by Jacobs' testimony and scared by Goldman's politics. The assistant District Attorney questioned Goldman about her anarchism, as well as her atheism; the judge spoke of her as "a dangerous woman".^[54] She was sentenced to one year in the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary. Once inside she suffered an attack of rheumatism and was sent to the infirmary; there she befriended a visiting doctor and began studying medicine. She also read dozens of books, including works by the American activist-writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; poet Walt Whitman, and philosopher John Stuart Mill.^[55] When she was released after ten months, a raucous crowd of nearly three thousand people greeted her at the Thalia Theater in New York City. She soon became swamped with requests for interviews and lectures.^[56]

To make money, Goldman decided to pursue the medical work she had studied in prison. However, her preferred fields of specialization—midwifery and massage—were not available to nursing students in the USA. Thus, she sailed to Europe, lecturing in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. She met with renowned anarchists like Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, and Peter Kropotkin. In Vienna, she received two diplomas and put them immediately to use back in the US. Alternating between lectures and midwifery, she conducted the first cross-country tour by an anarchist speaker. In November 1899 she returned to Europe, where she met the anarchist Hippolyte Havel, with whom she went to France and helped organize the International Anarchist Congress on the outskirts of Paris.^[57]

McKinley assassination[link]

Leon Czolgosz insisted that Goldman had not guided his plan to assassinate US President William McKinley, but she was arrested and held for two weeks.

Propaganda published in the Chicago Daily Tribune, September 8, 1901, blaming Emma Goldman for inspiring Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President William McKinley.

On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker and registered Republican with a history of mental illness, shot US President William McKinley twice during a public speaking event in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was hit in the breastbone and stomach, and died eight days later.^[58] Czolgosz was arrested, and interrogated around the clock. During interrogation he claimed to be an Anarchist and said he had been inspired to act after attending a speech held by Goldman. The authorities used this as a pretext to charge Goldman with planning McKinley's assassination. They tracked her to a residence in Chicago she shared with Havel, as well as Abe and Mary Isaak, an anarchist couple.^[59][60] Goldman was arrested, along with Abe Isaak, Havel, and ten other anarchists.^[61]

Earlier, Czolgosz had tried but failed to become friends with Goldman and her companions. During a talk in Cleveland, Czolgosz had approached Goldman and asked her advice on which books he should read. In July 1901, he had appeared at the Isaak house, asking a series of unusual questions. They assumed he was an infiltrator, like a number of police agents sent to spy on radical groups. They had remained distant from him, and Abe Isaak sent a notice to associates warning of "another spy".^[62]

Although Czolgosz repeatedly denied Goldman's involvement, the police held her in close custody, subjecting her to what she called the "third degree".^[63] She explained their distrust of him, and it was clear she had not had any significant contact with Czolgosz. No evidence was found linking Goldman to the attack, and she was eventually released after two weeks of detention. Before McKinley died, Goldman offered to provide nursing care, referring to him as "merely a human being".^[64] Czolgosz, despite considerable evidence of mental illness, was convicted of murder and executed.^[65]

Throughout her detention and after her release, Goldman steadfastly refused to condemn Czolgosz's actions, standing virtually alone in doing so. Friends and supporters—including Berkman—urged her to quit his cause. But Goldman defended Czolgosz as a "supersensitive being"^[66] and chastised other anarchists for abandoning him.^[66] She was vilified in the press as the "high priestess of anarchy",^[67] while many newspapers declared the anarchist movement responsible for the murder.^[68] In the wake of these events, socialism gained support over anarchism among US radicals. McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, declared his intent to crack down "not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with anarchists".^[69]

[edit] Mother Earth and Berkman's release

After Czolgosz's execution, Goldman withdrew from the world. Scorned by her fellow anarchists, vilified by the press, and separated from her love, she retreated into anonymity and nursing. "It was bitter and hard to face life anew," she wrote later.^[70] Using the name E. G. Smith, she vanished from public life and took on a series of private nursing jobs.^[71] When the US Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act, however, a new wave of activism rose to oppose it, carrying Goldman back into the movement. A coalition of people and organizations across the left end of the political spectrum opposed the law on grounds that it violated freedom of speech, and she had the nation's ear once again.

When an English anarchist named John Turner was arrested under the Anarchist Exclusion Act and threatened with deportation, Goldman joined forces with the Free Speech League to champion his cause.^[72] The league enlisted the aid of Clarence Darrow and Edgar Lee Masters, who took Turner's case to the US Supreme Court. Although Turner and the League lost, Goldman considered it a victory of propaganda.^[73] She had returned to anarchist activism, but it was taking its toll on her. "I never felt so weighed down," she wrote to Berkman. "I fear I am forever doomed to remain public property and to have my life worn out through the care for the lives of others."^[74]

In 1906, Goldman decided to start a publication of her own, "a place of expression for the young idealists in arts and letters".^[75] Mother Earth was staffed by a cadre of radical activists, including Hippolyte Havel, Max Baginski, and Leonard Abbott. In addition to publishing original works by its editors and anarchists around the world, Mother Earth reprinted selections from a variety of writers. These included the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and British writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Goldman wrote frequently about anarchism, politics, labor issues, atheism, sexuality, and feminism.^[76][77]

On May 18 of the same year, Alexander Berkman was released from prison. Carrying a bouquet of roses, she met him on the platform and found herself "seized by terror and pity"^[78] as she beheld his gaunt, pale form. Neither was able to speak; they returned to her home in silence. For weeks, he struggled to readjust to life on the outside; an abortive speaking tour ended in failure, and in Cleveland he purchased a revolver with the intent of killing himself.^[79][80] He returned to New York, however, and learned that Goldman had been arrested with a group of activists meeting to reflect on Czolgosz. Invigorated anew by this violation of freedom of assembly, he declared "My resurrection has come!"^[81] and set about securing their release.^[82]

Berkman took the helm of Mother Earth in 1907, while Goldman toured the country to raise funds to keep it functional. Editing the magazine was a revitalizing experience for Berkman; his relationship with Goldman faltered, however, and he had an affair with a fifteen-year-old anarchist named Becky Edelsohn. Goldman was pained by his rejection of her, but considered it a consequence of his prison experience.^[83] Later that year she served as a delegate from the US to the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam. Anarchists and syndicalists from around the world gathered to sort out the tension between the two ideologies, but no decisive agreement was reached. Goldman returned to the US and continued speaking to large audiences.^[84]

Reitman, essays, and birth control[link]

For the next ten years, Goldman traveled around the country nonstop, delivering lectures and agitating for anarchism. The coalitions formed in opposition to the Anarchist Exclusion Act had given her an appreciation for reaching out to those of other political persuasions. When the US Justice Department sent spies to observe, they reported the meetings as "packed".^[85] Writers, journalists, artists, judges, and workers from across the spectrum spoke of her "magnetic power", her "convincing presence", her "force, eloquence, and fire".^[86]

Goldman joined Margaret Sanger in crusading for women's access to birth control; both women were arrested for violating the Comstock Law.

In the spring of 1908, Goldman met and fell in love with Ben Reitman, the so-called "Hobo doctor". Having grown up in Chicago's tenderloin district, Reitman spent several years as a drifter before attaining a medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago. As a doctor, he attended to people suffering from poverty and illness, particularly venereal diseases. He and Goldman began an affair; they shared a commitment to free love, but whereas Reitman took a variety of lovers, Goldman did not. She tried to reconcile her feelings of jealousy with a belief in freedom of the heart, but found it difficult.^[87]

Two years later, Goldman began feeling frustrated with lecture audiences. She yearned to "reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused".^[88] Thus she collected a series of speeches and items she had written for Mother Earth and published a book called Anarchism and Other Essays. Covering a wide variety of topics, Goldman tries to represent "the mental and soul struggles of twenty-one years".^[88] In addition to a comprehensive look at anarchism and its criticisms, the book includes essays on patriotism, women's suffrage, marriage, and prisons.

When Margaret Sanger, an advocate of access to contraception, coined the term "birth control" and disseminated information about various methods in the June 1914 issue of her magazine The Woman Rebel, she received aggressive support from Goldman. Sanger was arrested in August under the Comstock Law, which prohibited the dissemination of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles"^[89]—including information relating to birth control. Although they later split from Sanger over charges of insufficient support, Goldman and Reitman distributed copies of Sanger's pamphlet Family Limitation (along with a similar essay of Reitman's). In 1915 Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation's attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested in February 1916 and charged with violation of the Comstock Law. Refusing to pay a $100 fine, she spent two weeks in a prison workhouse, which she saw as an "opportunity" to reconnect with those rejected by society.^[90]

World War I[link]

Although US President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan "He kept us out of the war", at the start of his second term he decided that Germany's continued deployment of unrestricted submarine warfare was sufficient cause for the US to enter World War I. Shortly afterward, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required all males aged 21–30 to register for military conscription. Goldman saw the decision as an exercise in militarist aggression, driven by capitalism. She declared in Mother Earth her intent to resist conscription, and to oppose US involvement in the war.^[91]

Goldman was imprisoned for two years after opposing conscription in the US during World War I.

To this end, she and Berkman organized the No Conscription League of New York, which proclaimed: "We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, antimilitarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments."^[92] The group became a vanguard for anti-draft activism, and chapters began to appear in other cities. When police began raiding the group's public events to find young men who had not registered for the draft, however, Goldman and others focused their efforts on spreading pamphlets and other written work.^[93] In the midst of the nation's patriotic fervor, many elements of the political left refused to support the League's efforts. The Women's Peace Party, for example, ceased its opposition to the war once the US entered it. The Socialist Party of America took an official stance against US involvement, but supported Wilson in most of his activities.^[94]

On June 15, 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested during a raid of their offices which yielded "a wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda" for the authorities.^[95] The New York Times reported that Goldman asked to change into a more appropriate outfit, and emerged in a gown of "royal purple".^[95][96] The pair were charged with conspiracy to "induce persons not to register"^[97] under the newly enacted Espionage Act,^[98] and were held on US$25,000 bail each. Defending herself and Berkman during their trial, Goldman invoked the First Amendment, asking how the government could claim to fight for democracy abroad while suppressing free speech at home:^[99]

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. 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 saw it differently, and found them guilty; Judge Julius Marshuetz Mayer imposed the maximum sentence two years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine each, and the possibility of deportation after their release from prison. As she was transported to Missouri State Penitentiary (now Jefferson City Correctional Center), Goldman wrote to a friend: "Two years imprisonment for having made an uncompromising stand for one's ideal. Why that is a small price."^[100]

In prison she was assigned once again to work as a seamstress, under the eye of a "miserable gutter-snipe of a twenty-one-year-old boy paid to get results".^[101] She met the socialist Kate Richards O'Hare, who had also been imprisoned under the Espionage Act. Although they differed on political strategy—Kate O'Hare believed in voting to achieve state power—the two women came together to agitate for better conditions among prisoners.^[102] Goldman also met and became friends with Gabriella Segata Antolini, an anarchist and follower of Luigi Galleani. Antolini had been arrested transporting a satchel filled with dynamite on a Chicago-bound train. She had refused to cooperate with authorities, and was sent to prison for fourteen months. Working together to make life better for the other inmates, the three women became known as "The Trinity". Goldman was released on September 27, 1919.^[103]

Deportation[link]

Emma Goldman's deportation photo, 1919

Goldman and Berkman were released during America's Red Scare of 1919–20 when public anxiety about wartime pro-German activities had morphed into a pervasive fear of Bolshevism and the prospect of an imminent radical revolution. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the U.S. Department of Justice's General Intelligence Division, were intent on using the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918 to deport any non-citizens they could identify as advocates of anarchy or revolution. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman," Hoover wrote while they were in prison, "are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and return to the community will result in undue harm."^[104]

At her deportation hearing on October 27, she refused to answer questions about her beliefs on the grounds that her American citizenship invalidated any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only against non-citizens of the U.S. She presented a written statement instead: "Today so-called aliens are deported. Tomorrow native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that native American sons to whom democracy is a sacred ideal should be exiled."^[105] Louis Post at the Department of Labor, which had ultimate authority over deportation decisions, determined that the revocation of her husband's American citizenship in 1908 had revoked hers as well. After initially promising a court fight,^[106] she decided not to appeal his ruling.^[107]

The Labor Department included Goldman and Berkman among 249 aliens it deported en masse, mostly people with only vague associations with radical groups who had been swept up in government raids in November.^[108] Buford, a ship the press nicknamed the "Soviet Ark," sailed from New York on December 21. Some 58 enlisted men and four officers provided security on the journey and pistols were distributed to the crew.^[109][110] Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake."^[111] The ship landed her charges in Hanko, Finland on Saturday, January 17, 1920.^[112] Upon arrival in Finland, authorities there conducted the deportees to the Russian frontier under a flag of truce.^[113][114]

Russia[link]

Goldman was so disenchanted by her experiences in Soviet Russia that in 1923 she wrote My Disillusionment in Russia.

Here, Emma Goldman delivers a eulogy at Peter Kropotkin's funeral procession. Immediately in front of Goldman stands her lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman. Kropotkin's funeral was the occasion of the last great demonstration of anarchists in Moscow -- tens of thousands of people poured into the streets to pay their respects.

Goldman initially viewed the Bolshevik revolution in a positive light. She wrote in Mother Earth that despite its dependence on Communist government, it represented "the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being".^[115] By the time she neared Europe, however, she expressed fears about what was to come. She was worried about the ongoing Russian Civil War and the possibility of being seized by anti-Bolshevik forces. The state, anti-capitalist though it was, also posed a threat. "I could never in my life work within the confines of the State," she wrote to her niece, "Bolshevist or otherwise."^[116]