American Experience (1988) s16e07 Episode Script

1
NARRATOR:
On a cold December morning
in 1919, just after 4:00 a.m.,
Emma Goldman,
her companion Alexander Berkman
and more than 200 other
foreign-born radicals
were roused from their
Ellis Island dormitory beds.
In the freezing darkness,
the deportees began a journey
into exile.
Thrown out of the United States
for her opposition
to the First World War,
and especially for
her political beliefs,
Goldman claimed she was proud
to be selected
for the honor of deportation.
Privately, she was devastated.
GOLDMAN ( dramatized):
One does not live in a country
34 years and find it easy to go.
I found my spiritual birth here.
All I know I have gained here.
Through the porthole,
I could see the great city
receding into the distance.
It was my beloved city,
the metropolis of the New World.
NARRATOR:
For nearly 30 years, Goldman
taunted mainstream America
with her outspoken attacks
on government,
big business and war.
Goldman condemned capitalism,
denounced marriage
and crusaded for birth control.
The newspapers called her
a "modern Joan of Arc,
"a heretic, a woman possessed
of uncompromising
single-mindedness."
Personally she could be
obnoxious.
She could be ruthless,
she could be vindictive.
MAN:
A plain Russian Jewish girl,
but with some magnetism.
MAN:
I think she was
a serious political theorist
who actually thought,
through an anarchist movement
you could create this kind
of self-governing world.
MAN:
Whenever the state
became too powerful,
when it became too intrusive
in people's life,
when it became too cruel,
Emma's voice was there.
Anarchism was often associated
with violence and terrorism,
and that's the image
that people have today.
( gunshot)
I think her whole life
was operatic
Meaning flamboyantly
larger than life.
NARRATOR:
Goldman's story is one
of passionate defiance;
the story of a life dedicated
to free speech, free thought,
free love;
the story of
an exceedingly dangerous woman.
MAN:
I think she was, um
a difficult person,
maybe a dangerous woman,
to everybody.
She was totally unacceptable.
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NARRATOR:
Emma Goldman crossed three seas
to reach the promised land.
In 1885, the feisty
16-year-old Russian girl
had just escaped
an arranged marriage
by threatening to drown herself
in the Neva River.
America, she hoped,
would be her salvation.
MAN:
A land of hope,
a land of opportunity,
a land of infinite possibility.
When you come into this country,
all things are possible for you.
All things are possible.
You can forget the past.
You can have a brave new world.
And for a radical
like Emma Goldman,
a revolutionary
like Emma Goldman,
the volatility of this country
seemed like a great opportunity
for creating
a genuinely new world,
for creating whatever was going
to come after capitalism.
And I think
that she entered this world
As did many sort of politicized
people, political radicals
Coming here feeling
that this was the place
where the revolution
could be born.
GOLDMAN:
It was the 15th of August,
the day of my arrival
in New York City.
All that had happened in my life
until that time
was now left behind me, cast off
like a worn-out garment.
NARRATOR:
Cast off was a miserable
childhood in St. Petersburg,
where she lived under the
tyranny of a czarist regime
and under the thumb of a father
anxious to rid himself
of this unwanted,
rebellious daughter.
She had also just walked away
from four years of factory work
in upstate New York,
and walked out
on a brief, loveless marriage
to an immigrant like herself.
GOLDMAN:
I was 20 years old.
My entire possessions consisted
of five dollars
and a sewing machine.
I had no friends,
but I carried the address
of Die Freiheit,
an anarchist newspaper.
NARRATOR:
Within a day of her arrival,
Goldman walked into Sach's Café.
MAN:
She's walking into a place
one can imagine it
Tumultuous, full of people,
writers, working men,
printers, people working
in textile shops,
all there after a day's work,
from a political meeting,
talking about politics,
the hubbub, the smell of beer,
the amazing number
of languages being spoken.
She came home
when she came to Sach's.
NARRATOR:
Sitting at a nearby table
was Alexander Berkman.
Berkman, called "Sasha"
by his friends,
had been in the country
only a year.
He would become
the still point of her life.
MAN:
He was quite standoffish
at first.
He didn't think women
were reliable revolutionaries.
He thought women attended
radical meetings
in order to look for a man,
and once they found men
they were gone
and took the men with them.
He's young, he's ferocious,
he's charming, he's dedicated,
he he lives
and breathes anarchism.
She's aware that something's
happening in her.
She may not even be aware of it;
maybe we're saying too much.
You've suddenly changed
and you're there
and now you are
with other people;
you're not alone.
It must have been
a fantastic time for her.
NARRATOR:
Soon the German anarchist Johann
Most entered Goldman's life.
Most would become her mentor
and her idol.
PATEMAN:
Most seems to have been
a brilliant orator
Sarcastic, biting, funny, witty,
vicious use of language.
"The reptile brood,
extirpate the reptile brood,"
he'd say about the middle class
and the upper class.
And Emma says of him
that he stirred her very soul
when she heard him speak.
NARRATOR:
An advocate of insurrection
and revolutionary violence,
Johann Most had a large
and devoted following
within the American
anarchist movement.
As a group, American anarchists
were idealistic, articulate
and organized.
Though few in number,
they had surprising influence.
PATEMAN:
It was an enormously powerful,
well-directed movement.
They talked about
equality of everyone,
regardless of race and sex.
They talked about
the free production of goods
on a cooperative
associative level.
They talked about getting rid
of the state.
And they also talked
about the need for education
Equal education regardless
of who you were.
They were astonishing claims
in 1883.
NARRATOR:
In 1886, the anarchist movement
captured headlines
around the country.
Falsely accused of a bombing
in Chicago's Haymarket Square,
four men all anarchists
Were put to death.
Their trial and execution
became a rallying point
for firebrands like Johann Most
and galvanized
a new generation of radicals.
Emma Goldman is baptized
by violence, so to speak,
or at least that's the way she
sees her career as an anarchist.
She becomes an anarchist
after the five Haymarket martyrs
are executed.
And she feels great affinity
with these five men.
She later on in life calls them
her parents,
intellectual parents.
For Goldman, it must have seemed
that and for Berkman,
it must have seemed
that they finally had
their founding stone.
It was the place
where they took their oath.
WOMAN:
Very quickly
she found her own voice
and found that people
responded to her
because she spoke
with such great conviction.
CODRESCU:
I think on stage
she was possessed.
From what I've read
about her performances,
I I think of her as a speaker
who let herself go
and inspired herself.
I think she was from the school
of "I can't wait to hear
what I'm going to say next."
NARRATOR:
At her first speaking
engagement, Goldman panicked.
Unable to remember her topic
The campaign for
the eight-hour day
She spoke instead of her
great ideal: anarchism.
GOLDMAN:
I could sway people with words,
words that welled up from within
me, from some unfamiliar depth.
NARRATOR:
To Goldman, anarchism combined
an optimistic faith
in human nature
with an intense distrust
of authority.
She defined anarchism
as "a new social order
based on liberty and
unrestricted by manmade law."
In this anarchist world,
government would be replaced
by a spirit of free cooperation:
from each according
to his ability,
to each according to his needs.
That, I think we have to accept,
was Goldman's bedrock belief
when she moves into anarchism.
That's the tradition
that she's drawing on.
So you've got this ideal which
is the most extreme of all.
You can't vote in anarchism,
you know.
You can't get coalitions
with various other groups
to get anarchism.
Anarchism is
the most extreme of all.
And and therefore,
how that balances
with the needs and the feelings
and the routines
of everyday life
was a huge problem
for American anarchists
and anarchists worldwide.
Well, how can I deal
with the fact
that I haven't got any rent?
That's a huge gap.
Anarchism as a political
philosophy
is almost jaw-droppingly naive.
If freedom is
a good inclination,
suspicion of state power
is a good inclination,
the question is
how is that to translate
into practical politics?
MAN:
I think she was a serious
political theorist
who actually thought,
through an anarchist movement,
you could create this kind
of self-governing world.
Anarchism is sort of
the noblest of all dreams.
It seems to me in some ways
it's almost a profoundly
Christian dream,
though people never talk
about it that way.
Well, why do people stick
with their god?
It's what they have.
That was her god,
that revolutionary ideal.
She was a very religious woman,
if you think about it.
NARRATOR:
But Goldman also believed
that to create
a more perfect society,
acts of political violence
were occasionally justified
A belief shared by her friend
and lover, Alexander Berkman.
Violence would soon begin
to dog her every step.
June 1892.
A strike at the Andrew
Carnegie-owned steel plant
in Homestead, Pennsylvania,
escalated into one
of the bloodiest labor battles
the country had seen.
The Homestead strike came during
a period of intense unrest.
Thousands of men and women
fought for the right to strike,
to form unions, and to establish
a 40-hour work week.
They were met with force
from police, from soldiers,
and from the hired armed guards
of the Pinkerton
Detective Agency.
On June 25,
workers called a strike.
Henry Clay Frick, plant manager,
closed the mill
and locked them out.
Then he called in
the Pinkertons.
Two weeks later,
in the middle of the night,
300 Pinkertons
crammed onto barges
and were towed ten miles up the
Monongahela River to Homestead.
Armed workers were waiting
on the riverbank.
At dawn,
a pitched battle broke out.
( gunshots)
Twelve hours later,
three Pinkertons
and seven strikers lay dead.
GOLDMAN:
To us, it sounded
like the awakening
of the American worker,
the long-awaited day
of resurrection.
NARRATOR:
In Alexander Berkman,
it stirred something deeper.
It was the moment
for what anarchists called
"propaganda by the deed"
A political assassination.
His target: Henry Clay Frick.
FRANKEL:
Emma and Sasha and their friends
live in virtual reality.
There is therefore
a sort of an element of folly
in their attempt to solve
this country's problems
by going to Pennsylvania
and getting rid
of this industrialist.
And they do believe that
by getting rid of Frick
they'll ignite a revolution.
But what neither of them have
Sasha, Emma
or any of their friends
Is a cultural translator,
someone to explain to them
the intricacies of this culture,
the indigenous culture, in part
because it's a blind spot.
They really don't understand
that there is a difference
between living in United States
and living in czarist Russia.
NARRATOR:
In the basement of their
crowded tenement building,
Goldman kept watch as Berkman
mixed the explosives.
GOLDMAN:
What if anything
should go wrong?
But then, did not the end
justify the means?
What if a few
should have to perish?
The many would be made free.
Yes, the end in this case
justified the means.
NARRATOR:
Berkman tested his homemade bomb
on a remote beach
on Staten Island.
It failed.
He decided to use a gun instead.
Goldman wanted to accompany him.
But he insisted
she remain behind
to explain his action
to the world.
It's Berkman
who goes to kill Frick.
It's Berkman who is obviously
the chosen one.
I mean, one senses in Berkman
a great desire to be a martyr,
to go down that road.
This was going to be
an act of suicide.
In other words,
he was a suicide bomber.
That's how
he envisioned himself.
And the idea of this act was
that he was going
to sacrifice himself.
He was going to try
to assassinate Frick,
again, who he saw as being
a murderer essentially.
NARRATOR:
Posing as an employment agent
for strikebreakers,
Berkman gained entrance
to Frick's office.
He pointed his revolver
at Frick's head and fired.
The bullet struck Frick
in the shoulder.
Berkman lunged at Frick,
managing to stab him
with a sharpened steel file
before being dragged away.
Frick stopped a deputy sheriff
from shooting Berkman.
"I do not think I will die,"
he gasped,
"but whether I do or not,
the company will pursue the same
policy, and it will win."
Berkman is a bit of a klutz.
He tries his hands at, you know,
making bomb; he can't do it.
He gets a revolver;
he can't do it either.
It's a bit of
a radical pulp fiction
with very crude elements
and great emotions
but very little experience
and very little understanding of
the place and also of the time.
Workers had not risen
in rebellion.
Quite the contrary.
They were appalled by it.
This was an outsider
who had come into the middle
of their struggle
and had managed
almost single-handedly
to undermine the support
that they had.
BAKER:
The workers wanted better wages,
job security,
better working conditions,
recognition of their union.
In other words,
everything the workers wanted
were ways in which
they could advance
in American capitalist society.
They wanted a fairer America.
Emma Goldman
and Alexander Berkman
wanted a different America,
a different world.
NARRATOR:
Within six months,
the Homestead strike collapsed.
Berkman was sentenced
to 22 years.
He and Goldman kept her role in
the plot against Frick a secret.
On a balmy fall day,
Berkman began his sentence.
BERKMAN ( dramatized):
All is quiet.
What will become of me?
I don't know.
The future is dark.
My hand gropes blindly,
hesitantly.
I clutch desperately
to the thread
that still binds me
to the living.
It seems to unravel in my hands.
They were united
by a great crime.
And that is
a life-binding event.
The world begins,
in effect, with a crime
which leads to
the expulsion from paradise
and the constant need
to return to it somehow.
So there are symbolic moments
in her life
that define almost the whole.
GOLDMAN:
Often, I wanted to run away,
never to see him again,
but I was held by something
greater than the pain:
the memory of his act, for which
he alone had paid the price.
I realized
that to my last breath,
it would remain the strongest
link in the chain
that bound me to him.
NARRATOR:
A year after Homestead,
the United States was on
the verge of economic collapse:
600 banks closed,
56 railroads went bankrupt,
15,000 companies shut down,
and the number of unemployed
soared from 800,000
to more than three million.
MAN:
I think the panic of 1893
is the most important phenomenon
in the development
of modern American history
and particularly modern
American radicalism.
The depression leads
to the discovery
that industrialization
is creating a gap
between the rich and the poor,
a chasm between the rich
and the poor,
and that it's very dangerous,
and it's very unsafe,
and it's very unfair,
and it's very unpatriotic.
NARRATOR:
Goldman helped organize
mass meetings
and hunger demonstrations.
On August 21, 1893,
she led a march of a thousand
to New York's Union Square,
carrying a red banner.
GOLDMAN:
Go into the streets
where the rich dwell.
Ask for work.
If they do not give you work,
ask for bread.
If they do not give you work
or bread, then take bread.
You want bread? Go and take it.
You're starving? Go and take it.
Make restaurants feed you.
Make bakeries give you food.
And she'd been very powerful
to the extent that people
had been very, very impressed
by her oratory and her power.
NARRATOR:
Just 24, Goldman
was already recognized
as a professional agitator.
Her talk of insurrection,
of doing without government,
of encouraging the unemployed
to take matters
into their own hands,
of thousands of workers going
door to door demanding food
was terrifying to authorities.
She was arrested and charged
with "inciting to riot."
Anarchism is an immensely
exciting, poetic,
intoxicating, fantastical idea.
And so of course she scared
the shit out of people.
I mean, you know.
And she intended to.
THELEN:
I think what made her so scary
to those people
to whom she was scary,
and probably is exactly
what made her appealing
to those people
who found her appealing,
which is that she was
an incredibly free spirit.
FRANKEL:
She's in the public eye.
She's famous, she's notorious.
She's often referred to
as the "famous anarchist."
She's visible.
And there's something about that
that she enjoys;
but there's something about it
that also is
politically important
because it's also a way
to talk about anarchism.
NARRATOR:
Goldman was sentenced
to one year in prison.
She used the time
to educate herself,
reading Emerson, Thoreau
and Whitman.
She also trained as a nurse.
When she was released
in the summer of 1894,
Goldman was met
by a crowd of 2,800.
She told them she'd been
imprisoned for talking.
She would soon begin
talking again,
this time about psychological
repression and Sigmund Freud.
She began speaking
about marriage,
female emancipation and sex.
FRANKEL:
Emma Goldman was
the big bogeyman
of turn-of-the-century America,
especially since
she combined this danger
of being militant and volatile
and out of control
and prone for violence
with this doctrine of free love
that people in their mind
associated with also free sex,
so this combination
of violence and sex
was very titillating,
very interesting.
GOLDMAN:
I demand the independence
of woman,
her right to support herself,
to live for herself,
to love whomever she pleases
or as many as she pleases.
I demand freedom
for both sexes
Freedom of action, freedom in
love and freedom in motherhood.
MAN:
She was totally unacceptable.
Not just to the status quo,
not just to the bureaucrats,
but to the progressive people,
to the educated people,
to everybody.
NARRATOR:
She was aware of her ability
to generate strong passions.
"You cheer for me,
you follow me,"
she told a reporter
in the spring of 1901,
"but you'd hang me
if your mood changed."
In May 1901,
Goldman gave a lecture
entitled "The Modern
Phase of Anarchy,"
an incendiary talk
on political assassination
and the glory of martyrdom.
Leon Czolgosz,
a young would-be anarchist,
sat in the audience,
listening attentively.
Four months later,
at the Pan-American Exposition
in Buffalo, New York,
Czolgosz worked his way
through the crowd
and shot President William
McKinley twice in the chest
at point-blank range.
BAKER:
Czolgosz told the authorities
that Emma Goldman
had set him on fire
when he went to hear her speak.
And this immediately led
to a condemnation of Goldman
throughout the country.
She was actually
in danger of her life,
and it led to the arrest
of any anarchist
or any perceived radical the
police could get their hands on.
NARRATOR:
Goldman was arrested
and interrogated.
After the death of McKinley,
and after authorities
failed to turn up evidence
connecting her to the
assassination, she was released.
To the horror
of a grief-stricken public,
she threw herself into
an impassioned defense
of Leon Czolgosz.
GOLDMAN:
As an anarchist,
I am opposed to violence.
But if people want
to do away with assassins,
they must first do away
with the conditions
which produce murderers.
BAKER:
Goldman's defense of Czolgosz
I think very much damaged
the anarchist movement.
But it damaged it in a sense
of once again going back
to the central question of:
were anarchists for violent
overthrow of the government
or not?
This is the trail, the thread
that leads constantly
through anarchism's debate
over just what it was
and how it intended
to bring about its utopia.
To my mind, there is no question
that she romanticized Czolgosz
as an isolated, lone,
heroic individual.
She identified him,
I think, with Berkman,
and that was one of the reasons
why she couldn't bring herself
to criticize him.
NARRATOR:
In a speech to Congress,
the new president,
Theodore Roosevelt, declared,
"The anarchist is
the enemy of humanity,
the enemy of all mankind."
Goldman was vilified.
Many labor unions distanced
themselves from the anarchists
to safeguard
the modest successes
they'd won over the years.
Some of Goldman's
own comrades accused her
of causing the movement
irreparable harm.
Even Berkman denounced Czolgosz,
who was put to death
in the electric chair.
In 1902, Goldman withdrew
from the movement
that had been
the center of her life.
Now 32, she began
working as a nurse
in the tenements
of the Lower East Side.
Her patients knew her
as "E.G. Smith."
GOLDMAN:
It was bitter hard
to face life anew.
Our movement
had lost its appeal for me.
Still more harrowing
was the gnawing doubt
of the values I had
so fervently believed in.
I had lost my identity.
NARRATOR:
Goldman's isolation
didn't last long.
She soon made her way back
to the lecture platform,
even though she'd been branded
the "high priestess of anarchy"
and was still considered
the most dangerous woman
in the country.
BAKER:
Only in America could somebody
who'd been associated with
the death of a beloved president
be able to come back and have
a career as a public speaker.
NARRATOR:
She began speaking
in union halls, ladies' clubs
and private homes
all across Manhattan.
Among her new passions
was an old subject:
the struggling
revolution in Russia.
In 1903, the czarist regime
began a wave of pogroms
against its Jewish population.
Hundreds of Jews
were killed in Kishinev alone.
Two years later,
on a day forever known
as "Bloody Sunday,"
political dissidents
demonstrating in front
of the winter palace
were massacred by troops.
( rifle shots)
The events stunned the world.
GOLDMAN:
Now that I had greater access
to the American mind,
I determined to use
whatever ability I possessed
to plead the heroic cause
of revolutionary Russia.
NARRATOR:
For the next two years,
she toured the country
drumming up support
for her homeland.
Her talks on Russia,
on the rights of workers,
on civil liberties
and even on anarchism
drew large, sympathetic crowds.
WEXLER:
She found the world
was catching up with her.
Here were people
with an interest
in what Emma Goldman had to say,
because there was
this growing awareness
of really the social costs
of capitalism.
NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1906,
Goldman revived a dream
to publish a magazine
devoted to politics
and literature.
"Its high-spirited prose,"
she wrote,
"would voice without fear
every unpopular cause."
She called her new magazine
Mother Earth.
WOMAN:
Goldman, in thinking about
making herself
into a practitioner
of arts and letters
A woman, an emigrant Jew
Was really ahead of her time.
The title "Mother Earth"
speaks to Goldman's ambitions,
but I think also more deeply
to her monumental
fantasies of herself.
NARRATOR:
Goldman's Manhattan apartment
at 210 East 13th Street
became the informal headquarters
of her new magazine.
It also served as a haven
to an extended family
of writers, artists
and journalists.
Goldman called it
"the home for lost dogs."
CODRESCU:
She was an earth mother
A term that in the '60s
really came to mean
the bountiful woman
at the center of the commune
that feeds everybody
and makes sure they don't,
um eat too little.
DUBERMAN:
I think it was
her sheer force of personality.
Plus she was
a very motherly person.
I mean, she took care of people.
She told them what to do.
She told them, you know,
how to run their lives.
She told them what was needed.
She enveloped them.
NARRATOR:
The circle of friends
and associates
who congregated
in Goldman's apartment
would soon be joined
by Alexander Berkman.
In May 1906,
Berkman walked out of
the Allegheny County Workhouse.
For the first time in 14 years,
he was a free man.
BAKER:
When Berkman comes
out of prison finally
he's much more oriented toward
trying to achieve anarchism
through the labor movement,
which he sees
great possibilities in.
Goldman's orientation is much
more for a kind of movement
that cuts across class lines,
that attracts the middle classes
to anarchism.
BERKMAN:
Her mind has matured,
but her wider interests
antagonize
my old revolutionary traditions.
I sense a foreign element
in the circle
she has gathered about her
and feel myself
a stranger among them.
GOLDMAN:
I was a woman of 37.
I no longer fitted
into the old mold
as he had expected me to.
Sasha felt it
almost immediately.
And that his release was
such a relief in some ways
and so much less than what
she had hoped it would be.
Always a sense that she loved
him more than he loved her
I don't know if that's fair
But that she carried a torch
in a certain sense
all the way through,
that he mattered to her
in a certain way
as a man and as a body
that she didn't necessarily
matter to him.
NARRATOR:
Berkman and Goldman
briefly attempted
to resume their romance,
but it was not to be.
He assumed day-to-day management
of Mother Earth.
She returned
to the lecture circuit.
In the spring of 1908,
now 40 years old,
Goldman met someone else,
a flamboyant young doctor
ten years younger than herself.
A man of considerable
life experience,
he was a budding
social reformer,
a whorehouse physician
and a former hobo.
WEXLER:
Ben Reitman was
a doctor and a hobo.
She fell in love with him
almost instantly
and there was really, you know,
a great magnetic flash
between them.
It was another one
of those Goldman flashes,
like coming to New York
and finding what she wanted
the very first day.
It was apparently
love at first sight,
or certainly alchemy
at first sight.
CODRESCU:
There is something
very American about Reitman,
because he was filled
with a kind of raw energy.
He didn't give a damn
about what people thought,
and he was a great manager.
So there was a great deal
of charm to this creature
who was also weak and insecure
and a mama's boy
and all the flaws
that she recognized
as being so truly awful.
And yet she loved him so.
GOLDMAN:
I dreamed that Ben
was bending over me,
his face close to mine,
his hands on my chest.
Flames were shooting
from his fingertips
and slowly enveloping my body.
I made no attempt
to escape them.
I strained towards them, craving
to be consumed by their fire.
WEXLER:
He was quite a liability.
He was compulsively
unfaithful to her.
He ran around with other women.
He humiliated her,
he embarrassed her.
I think that she had
a very idealistic view
of how people should act,
and then her feelings
didn't always go along
with her theories.
And one of the things
that's appealing about her
is that she didn't
put theories over life really.
She tried to
live up to her ideal
but often found
that she couldn't do that
and was very honest about it.
It was hard to reconcile
this particular passion
with her stated ideology
about free love
and the right of everyone
to move as they please.
And I think she tried
to feel no jealousy
and she tried to think
of Reitman as a creature apart
and tried to think of him
as someone who was hers
when they were together
on the road.
At the same time, she fell prey
to the most sentimental
romantic claptrap
The same stuff that
she denounced in her talks.
NARRATOR:
For almost a decade,
Goldman and Reitman spent nearly
half of every year on the road,
maintaining a relentless
schedule of radical agitation
from coast to coast.
In one six-month period,
she delivered 120 lectures
before 40,000 people
in 37 cities.
With Reitman as her manager,
she became
one of the most sought-after
public speakers in America.
Her messages reached
beyond the faithful,
attracting middle-
and upper-class audiences.
Her lectures also drew the
attention of police detectives.
FRANKEL:
There's a kind of
aura around her.
There's a kind of expectation
that something will happen
when she comes to town
Wonderful things, hilarious
things, horrific things.
DUBERMAN:
I think Emma Goldman frightened,
or at the very least
puzzled a lot of people,
because first of all,
she was a powerful woman
and a powerfully built woman,
especially as she got older.
She put on considerable weight.
I mean, she appeared
like a tower of concrete
up on the platform.
CODRESCU:
She has something
in common, I think,
with American tent preachers,
with great con men and
hucksters of the 19th century
who were able to sell
snake oil to an audience
by bringing them to a frenzy.
FRANKEL:
Being in the public sphere
is action, is a deed,
is a way to transform people,
to make them change their lives,
change their opinions.
NARRATOR:
She lectured on anarchism to
Congregationalists in Cleveland,
on violence
to single taxers in Houston
and about sex
to lumberjacks in Eureka.
GOLDMAN:
Society considers the sex
experiences of a man
as attributes of
his general development,
while similar experiences
in the life of a woman
are looked upon
as a terrible calamity.
I intend to speak
in Philadelphia.
I intend to insist
on my right of free speech.
If the police stop me, then it
is up to them to explain why.
As long as I live,
I must be a crusader.
What I think, what I feel
I must speak.
Not for 100, not for 500 years
will the principles
of anarchy triumph,
but what has that to do with it?
She must have
tapped into something
Some stream running through
American society at that time
Because she gained converts,
if not to anarchism
then to her ideas,
especially about free speech,
from all classes and from
all areas of the country.
NARRATOR:
Goldman's celebrity status
didn't wash with everyone.
Her closest comrades criticized
her new circle of friends.
One worried the movement
was becoming too middle class.
"Instead of organizing
the unemployed," he argued,
"we rent comfortable halls
and charge ten cents admission."
Even government agents
sent to spy on her
understood her appeal.
"She is womanly, a remarkable
orator, tremendously sincere,"
one wrote in a report.
"She is doing
tremendous damage."
At home in New York,
unemployed workers,
trade unionists and socialists
kept up a daily round
of rallies and demonstrations.
One of the biggest,
the revolt of the unemployed,
was brutally suppressed.
Conflicts between capital
and labor escalated.
In Lawrence, Massachusetts,
striking workers faced the rifle
butts of the state militia.
At the Standard Oil Company
in Bayonne, New Jersey,
workers striking for
humane treatment on the job
and a living wage
were shot by hired guards.
And in Ludlow, Colorado,
striking coal miners
and their families
were gunned down
by the local militia.
It seemed that
whatever happened,
you could get away with
if you were rich.
You could do anything.
You could you could kill
women and children
and nothing would happen to you.
"Ah, there you go tough."
And so it just created
this desire to strike back.
BERKMAN:
Anarchists have taught people
that violence is justified
in the struggle
of labor against capital.
Labor will ultimately knock
the last master off the back
of the last slave.
DOCTOROW:
Things were so bad
that the radical reaction
was in inverse proportion.
The more violent
and dangerous life was,
the more violent and dangerous
the radicals would be.
They were always
a mirror of disast
of the ongoing disaster.
They were more extreme then.
And there was less rueful
historical knowledge
about the final
counterproductive nature
of violence.
NARRATOR:
Goldman's position on violence
was never totally clear.
She rejected violence
intellectually,
but always her sympathies
went to the motivations
of those who committed
acts of violence.
"Violence never has
and never will bring
constructive results,"
she wrote,
"but my mind and my knowledge
of life tell me
that change
will always be violent."
COLE:
She felt that violence
sometimes was necessary
because of
the implacable opposition
of governments and
industrialists to workers.
Over time she recognized
that almost invariably, however,
those acts were
counterproductive.
"You are giving them a sword
if you talk about
using a sword yourself."
NARRATOR:
In 1915, Alexander Berkman
started a publication
of his own.
He named his new magazine
The Blast.
Goldman went back on the road
with Ben Reitman,
this time to campaign
for birth control.
This tour would be
their most successful ever.
It was also quite illegal.
Talking about sex and
contraceptives in public
was a crime.
PATEMAN:
She sees birth control
as a social issue.
For her it was almost
a sense of freedom for the woman
to have whatever
relationships they wanted
and whatever life they wanted.
It was critical.
And it was also critical
in terms of social change,
of empowering poor women.
NARRATOR:
In February 1916,
Goldman was arrested in New York
and sentenced to 15 days
in the workhouse.
Ten months later,
Reitman was arrested.
He received
a six-month sentence
The longest sentence served
in the United States
by a birth control advocate.
After his release, Reitman
confessed he'd fallen in love
with a young woman he'd met
in New York two years before.
"I had been seduced
by an ordinary man's desire
for a home, a wife
and a child," he wrote.
His love affair
with Goldman was over.
In 1917, Ben Reitman and
Anna Martindale were married.
Goldman was stunned.
GOLDMAN:
I felt unutterably weary,
possessed only of a desire
to get away somewhere
and forget the failure
of my personal life,
to forget even the cruel urge
to struggle for an ideal.
NARRATOR:
Between the summer of 1916
and the spring of 1917,
the mood of
the country darkened.
The war in Europe was
dragging into its third year
A year of military stalemates,
trench warfare and mud.
When America entered
World War I in April 1917,
Goldman saw it as a disaster.
PATEMAN:
You cannot support
any country in war
when innocent
As she would see it
Men would be slaughtered.
Innocent families would
have brothers, husbands
taken away from them
and slaughtered.
No, you can't do that.
That's the basis
of your anarchism.
DOCTOROW:
The idea of nationalism
appalled her.
She thought nationalism
was a big scam.
Her point of view was
that these wars were a matter
of property interests
of the upper classes
that were sending the working
classes out to fight for them.
And that didn't make sense for
a butcher's assistant in Hamburg
to fight a butcher's
assistant in London.
NARRATOR:
Goldman was far from alone
in her opposition to the war.
Dozens of organizations
throughout the country
had argued the war
was morally wrong.
FRANKEL:
The First World War was marked
by the insecurity
of the administration.
This is an administration
that promised
not to enter the war.
Once it decided otherwise,
it became very, very
defensive, insecure
and therefore insisted
on consensus
Consensus by any means.
We're not a liberal society
when we go to war.
During the Civil War,
we weren't.
Abraham Lincoln,
one of our great presidents,
arrested hundreds of people
who wrote against the war.
And during the First World War,
it became
there was a combination
of vigilantism
and official repression.
NARRATOR:
In June, the Espionage Act
went into effect.
It decreed stiff fines
and prison terms
for anyone
who obstructed the draft.
A year later, the Sedition Law
threatened those who defied
the government with expulsion.
J. Edgar Hoover,
a 23-year-old law clerk
enjoying a meteoric rise
in the Justice Department,
collected information
on foreign-born radicals.
Hoover was anxious to bring
what he called
"intellectual perverts"
like war resistors
and anarchists to justice.
He reserved a special
loathing for Goldman.
Once again, Emma Goldman
and Alexander Berkman
joined forces
to organize resistance.
Their lectures drew
large, contentious crowds.
In May 1917, they launched
the No-Conscription League.
It opposed all wars waged
by capitalist governments.
GOLDMAN:
We believe that
the militarization of America
is an evil that
far outweighs any good
that may come from America's
participation in the war.
We will resist conscription
by every means in our power.
NARRATOR:
In its short life, the league
organized three protest rallies.
8,000 people attended
the first meeting in Harlem.
PATEMAN:
Those meetings
are crackling with tension.
By the time those speakers
get onto that stage,
there are catcalls,
there are shouting,
and there is an electric feel.
( crowd singing)
There's 5,000, 6,000,
10,000 people
outside some of these meetings,
singing the "Internationale,"
shouting insults
and trading insults with
those supporters of the war.
It's an electric atmosphere.
( crowd singing and cheering)
NARRATOR:
"The way in which
Goldman and Berkman
faced the war fury of 1917,"
said a friend, "was the most
stirring manifestation
of sheer physical courage
I have ever seen."
But to the government,
America's most famous anarchists
had to be stopped.
CODRESCU:
Free speech is always at risk,
and one of her
great contributions
is really to have pushed it
as far as it did go.
She used it a bit like her toy,
to see what she could
do with it before it broke.
And then it did
break in her hands.
NARRATOR:
On the afternoon of June 15,
a federal marshal and his
deputies bounded up the stairs
of Goldman's
East 125th Street address
and ransacked the place.
The raiders made off with a
wagonload of Goldman's papers,
including what
one detective called
"a splendidly kept
card index of Reds"
The subscription list
of Mother Earth.
Goldman and Berkman were charged
with conspiracy
to violate the draft act
A federal offense.
At trial, Goldman pointed out
the contradictions
between fighting for
freedom and liberty abroad
and suppressing them at home.
"If America had entered the war
to make the world safe for
democracy," Goldman insisted,
"she must first make democracy
safe in America."
After 39 minutes
of deliberation,
the jury announced a verdict.
Guilty.
Goldman and Berkman
spent 22 months behind bars,
much of it
tracking events in Russia.
The "Great October" of 1917
had ended three centuries
of Romanov rule
virtually overnight.
It was the culmination
of a dream
by both anarchists and Marxists
and a time to place
partisan rivalries aside.
Goldman and Berkman put
their trust in the Bolsheviks.
FRANKEL:
There was great hope
that the Russian experience
will lead to this future
idealistic kind of society
that she was hoping for.
From the vantage point of 1919,
that seemed quite feasible.
At last
the great moment arrived.
Russia has started something
that could leak
into this country,
that could take hold
of this country
and make it another
Communist/Socialist country.
And the people
that we must target
must be those who support
the Russian Revolution,
the Bolshevik Revolution.
And they did.
NARRATOR:
Throughout the autumn of 1919,
Attorney General
A. Mitchell Palmer
directed roundups of radicals
in what would come to be known
as the "Palmer raids."
Thousands of arrests
were made without warrants.
Those arrested were held
for weeks without bail,
without access to counsel,
even without notification
of their families.
Before it was all over,
an FBI official declared,
"I believe that with these raids
the backbone of the radical
movement in America is broken."
COLE:
The government wanted
people like Goldman and Berkman
out of the country
because they could be catalysts
for what was seen
as a potentially disruptive
reinvigorated labor movement.
And it's completely impossible
to understand that
separate from this Red scare.
They went hand in hand.
NARRATOR:
On September 27, 1919,
America's most famous anarchist
walked out of prison.
Berkman soon followed.
To Goldman, the America
she greeted upon release
reminded her
of the czarist tyranny
she had fled at the age of 16.
By December 5,
Goldman and Berkman
were prisoners again,
this time at Ellis Island.
They had already been served
warrants for their deportation.
PATEMAN:
She knows she's
going to be deported.
She believes it.
Just like she knew that there
was going to be hard, bad times
as World War I
creaked into motion,
she also knew that
she was going to be deported.
There's no question about it.
She knew it,
and she expects to go.
NARRATOR:
From her cell, Goldman wrote
a friend how strange it was
for one who'd lived and worked
in the United States
for more than half her life
to be thrown out of the country
for mere opinion's sake.
GOLDMAN:
Their mad rush in
getting us out of the country
is the greatest proof to me
that I have served
the cause of humanity,
that I have never wavered
or compromised.
WEXLER:
She went with
quite a bit of bravado.
Uh it was very, very tough.
And she had been living here
for over 30 years.
She was an American.
To be kicked out like that
was a tremendous shock.
NARRATOR:
Early in the morning
of December 21,
Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman
and 247 other
immigrant detainees
were suddenly awakened and
told to prepare for departure.
Searchlights swept the island
as they were hurried down
a long corridor.
At 4:00 a.m., the deportees
were loaded onto barges
that ferried them
to the S.S. Buford.
GOLDMAN:
One does not live in a country
34 years and find it easy to go.
All the turmoil
of body and soul,
all the love and hate that
come to an intense human being
have come to me here.
I have helped to sow the seeds
and hope to see their fruition,
even if I will be too far away
to participate in the harvest.
NARRATOR:
As the Buford
slipped from her berth,
a group of newspaper reporters
and congressmen cheered.
"With Prohibition coming in
and Emma Goldman going out,"
one of them quipped,
"t'will be a dull country."
On January 19, 1920,
after crossing Finland
in sealed railroad cars,
Goldman, Berkman
and the other deportees
reached Soviet Russia.
It seems like a great period of
freedom and liberation and hope
that the world
will be different.
If Russia can change,
if Russia can democratize,
if Russia can
give hope to people,
then there's hope for any
any country in the world.
Now, this is at the end
of three and a half years
of a very devastating world war,
a bloodbath of a world war.
NARRATOR:
But what they found
was devastation.
PATEMAN:
When she got to Petrograd,
I think she found the city
to be a total surprise.
And I think that
part of the problem,
before we can even talk
about the political situation,
is the fact
that she was American.
She had become Americanized.
She had become used to
a certain way of thinking,
a certain way of being.
WEXLER:
The economic conditions there
were just
absolutely devastating.
People were dying of hunger.
There was famine,
there was disease.
Russia had been propelled
back into the, you know,
medieval period practically
by the destruction of the war.
Horses lay in the street dead
because there was
nothing to feed them.
Rubbish began to collect
in the cities
because nobody could be
dragooned into clearing them.
Vermin spread.
One could almost say
that the rats
were the only thing left to eat.
NARRATOR:
Faced with growing unrest,
the Bolsheviks
cracked down hard on dissent.
Goldman soon confided
her disillusionment
to a friend
who was close to Lenin.
"Suppression, persecution?"
Goldman wrote.
"Was it for this
the revolution had been fought?"
Her friend arranged for Goldman
and Berkman to meet Lenin.
GOLDMAN:
Lenin sat behind a huge desk.
We were treated
to a volley of questions.
When could the social revolution
be expected in America?
Was the rank and file a fertile
soil for boring from within?
What about the I.W.W.?
PATEMAN:
And they argue for free speech.
What about free speech?
And he looks on them
and he treats them
rather like adolescents who are
learning, you know, about life.
And he says, "Look,
that's a very bourgeois notion,"
he says roughly.
"Here we are surrounded
by enemies on all sides.
"What do you mean, free speech?
"The White Russians
are attacking us.
"We've got traitors inside.
"We've got collaborators inside.
"We've got all sorts of people
operating in this country.
"What do you mean, free speech?
You can't have free speech in
this revolutionary situation."
I think ultimately she's
probably an enlightened fool
in that she intellectualized
a revolution
she didn't really understand
and projected onto Russia
her own hopes of liberation
Hopes which, I suppose,
were rooted in her own
personal trajectories.
And that was
a pretty foolish thing to do.
NARRATOR:
For Goldman and Berkman,
the decisive moment came
on March 16, 1921.
That night, the Bolsheviks
attacked Kronstadt,
a naval base near Petrograd
and the last bastion
of anarchist dissent.
FIGES:
Then to hear the cannon suppress
the very people
who had brought it about,
destroy the idea of democracy
that they still
until that moment
had hoped might emerge
in the revolution
To hear that,
to feel it crushed,
must to a certain extent
have destroyed
something in themselves.
CODRESCU:
I think Russia shattered that.
That was something
very close to her core,
to who she was.
So clearly this was
no place for Goldman.
It was no place for Berkman.
This was not a place
for any kind of joy,
leave alone a place
for any kind of dissent.
This was a place where vodka
very quickly became
a palliative for pain
and not an occasion for dancing.
NARRATOR:
In December 1921,
after two years,
Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman left Russia.
They vowed to tell
the rest of the world
of the Bolshevik terror.
PATEMAN:
She did something
that many of us
find damned hard to do.
She realizes she's been a fool.
She realizes she's been wrong.
She's realized
she's made an error
Not just a casual error,
but an error of
huge, awful magnitude
to support the Bolsheviks.
And she turns
and she accepts that.
She accepts it totally.
NARRATOR:
Revealing the truth
about the Bolshevik regime
became a crusade
for Goldman and Berkman.
Their old enemies on the right
praised their analysis
of a revolution gone wrong.
Old comrades on the left
condemned them.
FIGES:
So there must have been
a sense of frustration.
Yeah, hell, we've seen it,
but we can't convince people
of how it really is
and we can't uphold any real
belief in socialism anymore.
And that's a very tragic
situation to be in, I think
When you both lose
everything you believe in
and yet have nowhere else to go.
And so she found herself
once again in no-man's-land.
So by her hand, in fact,
she sent herself
into an intellectual exile
as well,
so she she was
a specialist of exile.
NARRATOR:
For years Goldman lived
with old friends
in England, Canada and France.
Then in the spring of 1927,
she received a cable
from the American arts patron
Peggy Guggenheim.
A group of friends had raised
funds to buy her a cottage
in Saint-Tropez,
a then-obscure fishing village
on the French Riviera.
There, she could live and work.
Berkman named it "Bon Esprit."
At Bon Esprit, Goldman generated
a mountain of correspondence
with old friends.
Her letters were filled
with restless energy
and longing
for the United States.
"You may as well know
once and for all,"
she had written a comrade,
"that I will never be able
to free myself
from the hold
America has on me."
PATEMAN:
That's where she had
her own sense of who she was,
was most developed,
when she was in America.
And let's be quite frank.
It's also where she had
the adoring audiences
and where she felt
she could do something.
For a political activist,
sitting in a little hill
on a hillside cottage
in Saint-Tropez
without the glamour that
we associate with it now,
where you can actually effect
hardly anything, is hell.
NARRATOR:
After nearly 40 years
in the public eye,
Goldman was welcome nowhere.
Berkman shared her despair.
"The truth is," he wrote,
"our movement has accomplished
nothing, anywhere."
The bond between
Emma and Sasha grew stronger
during their years of exile,
even though they lived apart.
He was now
in desperately poor health.
BERKMAN:
There is not much
to congratulate oneself on,
is there, dear?
Except that after
all these years,
our old friendship
has remained unchanged
and indeed stronger
and more understanding
and intimate than ever.
And that is a very great deal.
PATEMAN:
They were comrades.
And they were comrades,
and "comrades" is a word
we don't use anymore now
except mockingly maybe,
or half in jest or cynically.
But they were comrades.
Their relationship was
bigger than disagreement,
bigger than sexual
relationships,
bigger than emotional
entanglements.
It was somehow
all of those and more.
And they were bound together.
Emma says of him in 1928,
he was a leitmotif of her life.
GOLDMAN:
My dear, whom else should I
write on this day but you?
Only there was nothing to tell.
I keep thinking
what a long time to live.
For whom?
For what?
But there is no answer.
One thing, I can still find
relief in housework and cooking.
Let me hear from you,
how you are, Sasha dear.
Affectionately, Emma.
P.S. Do you want me to send you
the Manchester Guardian
and the Times
Literary Supplement?
Let me know. E.
NARRATOR:
He never got her letter.
In the middle of the night
on June 28, 1936,
Goldman received a telephone
call from Nice
imploring her to "come at once."
Arriving in Sasha's apartment,
Goldman learned that he had
shot himself in the chest.
He died that night.
PATEMAN:
This great center force
of her life is gone.
I think it must have been,
in her life,
the most devastating
personal loss she ever had.
I don't think that, I know that.
NARRATOR:
Two months after
Berkman's death,
friends came to see Goldman
in Saint-Tropez.
They found her distraught
Even, they thought, on the verge
of a nervous breakdown.
One friend saw her walking alone
in the garden at Bon Esprit,
calling out softly,
"Sasha, where are you?"
NARRATOR:
With the loss of Sasha Berkman,
Goldman wrote that
the largest part of her life
had followed him to his grave.
During two decades of exile,
she returned to the
United States only once,
following the publication of
her thousand-page autobiography.
Throughout her visit,
the 64-year-old activist
was dogged by the FBI.
Even so, she lamented
at the end of her stay,
she would have returned to
America if she'd had the choice.
Emma Goldman spent the last few
months of her life in Canada.
On February 17, 1940,
she'd been sitting with two
friends, laughing and talking,
playing bridge.
Suddenly, she collapsed
in her chair.
COLE:
She suffers a stroke.
An ambulance is called,
friends arrive.
And one of them, Arne Thorn,
remembers her on a stretcher
being taken out.
And the only gesture
she could manage
was to pull her skirt down
over her knee.
To be silenced and to lay there
unable to speak.
And no one else
could do that to her.
Not a government in the world
could do that to her, you know.
Not a government
in the world could.
And she must lay there.
I think it's unbearably sad.
NARRATOR:
On May 14, 1940,
Emma Goldman died.
Denied entry into the United
States for so many years,
she was finally permitted,
in death, to cross the border.
She was buried in Chicago's
Waldheim Cemetery,
near the graves
of the Haymarket martyrs.
She raised
people's consciousness.
You know, she transformed
people's thinking.
She made them ask questions.
She made them question
their own lives
and their political assumptions
and she spoke back to power.
Emma Goldman is recognizable
to me because
because of the attitude,
the chutzpah,
the sense of humor,
the energy,
which is always boundless.
And also her soulfulness,
which is so very Russian
Her ability to dive
into great emotions,
but also to emerge out of them.
There's something comforting
about this persona.
There's something reliable
about Emma Goldman.
It's hard to imagine
how the human heart can sustain
that level of passion
and intense concentration
on the possibility of change
that becomes, you know,
their heartbeat.
We're so sort of stuck
in the gray middle.
And you read her and she
lived her life on fire.
There's something
utterly thrilling about that.
PATEMAN:
If we look at
everything that she did
The fight for free speech,
the fight for women to have
control over their bodies,
the fight the fight against
state intrusion in our life,
the fight against
totalitarianism,
becoming the nettle
of our conscience
She didn't do it for wealth,
she didn't do it for money,
she didn't do it
for personal gain.
She did it for all of us.
And she's awkward, and she's
ornery, and she's a pain.
Great.
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