Emma Goldman

Before dawn on 21 December 1919 an old army transport, the Buford, slipped away from Ellis Island in New York harbour with 249 people aboard whom the United States government had decided to deport to Russia. The newspapers called it the "ark of the soviet."¹ The best known of the passengers was a woman of fifty who had lived in America for thirty-four years and had been in its prisons more than once. "This government has signed its death warrant in these deportations," she told a reporter, and promised not to stop her work as long as she lived.²³ A congressman who rode down the bay with the deportees remarked, "I might say they are traveling de luxe."⁴ A New Jersey paper headed its editorial "Good Riddance," and added, "It is too bad to inflict the Goldmans and Berkmans on poor Russia."⁵

Emma Goldman was deported for her politics, not her religion. But her unbelief and her politics grew from the same root, and in her own mind they were one thing. This chapter follows that root from a Jewish household in the Russian empire to a prison on an island in the East River, and on to a revolution she found she could not believe in either.

A ruler and a strap

She was born on 27 June 1869 in Kovno, in the Russian empire, to Jewish parents.⁶ She grew up in a small Baltic town where her father kept an inn.⁷ Her family, she wrote in her memoirs many years later, kept the Jewish rites and went to synagogue on the sabbath and holidays, but rarely spoke to the children about religion; her ideas of God and the devil, sin and punishment, came from a German nurse and the Russian peasant servants.⁸ There was no crisis of faith in her life, because there was never much faith to lose. What she met instead was religion as discipline.

As a small child she was sent to school at Königsberg, where her grandmother lived.⁹ The city's rabbi, a distant relative, arranged her schooling and demanded monthly reports on her behaviour, which she hated as a humiliation.¹⁰ The school's teacher of religion, she remembered, beat the girls' hands with a ruler, and she paid him back with pins in his chair; when she needed a certificate of good character from him to enter the higher school, he told the whole class that she would end on the gallows as a public menace.¹¹¹² At home her father beat her too.¹³ These are her memories, written down in her sixties, and they are the only account we have. But they explain the shape of her later argument: that the God of her childhood, the father with the strap and the teacher with the ruler were the same authority in three forms.

The hanged Nihilists

In 1881 the revolutionaries who had killed Tsar Alexander II were hanged. Her mother said such people should be exterminated; the girl of eleven, she remembered, felt instead a mysterious compassion for them and wept over their fate.¹⁴ The family moved to St Petersburg in 1882, where she worked in a corset factory and a glove factory.¹⁵¹⁶ A young teacher told her the story of Vera Zasulich, who had shot the governor of the city, and she read Turgenev and Chernyshevsky's forbidden novel What Is to Be Done?, and understood, she said, her "instinctive sympathy" with the executed men.¹⁷ Her friend and biographer Hippolyte Havel wrote that Russian radical literature took the place of the German romances she had loved, and that only her elder sister understood her.¹⁸

Here, if anywhere, is her doubt: not an argument about God, but a turn of sympathy away from the authorities and toward the people they hanged. It came through politics and pity, and the unbelief followed.

Haymarket

At the end of 1885, after a quarrel with her father, she and her sister left for America.¹⁹ In Rochester, New York, she sewed coats for two and a half dollars a week.²⁰ In February 1887 she married a fellow worker, Jacob Kershner, "by a rabbi, according to Jewish rites"; the marriage failed, and the same rabbi gave the divorce.²¹

That year she followed the case of the Chicago anarchists accused of a bomb thrown at police in the Haymarket in May 1886. She went to German socialist meetings and read the anarchist paper Die Freiheit, and the Rochester press's violence against the accused turned her sympathy toward them.²²²³ On 11 November 1887 the Chicago anarchists were hanged. She was crushed.²⁴ Havel wrote that the Haymarket tragedy "developed her inherent Anarchist tendencies: the reading of the Freiheit made her a conscious Anarchist," and that she vowed then to join the revolutionary working class.²⁵²⁶ In August 1889 she moved to New York, met the anarchist orator Johann Most and a young Russian named Alexander Berkman, who had been expelled from his school in Russia for an essay against religion.²⁷²⁸

In those early New York years the young radicals held a ball on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, as a protest against orthodoxy, with speeches on free thought and dancing in place of fasting and prayer; religious Jews attacked it, and Berkman led the defence.²⁹

"Atheist"

In 1893, during a depression, she told a crowd of unemployed in Union Square to ask for work, then to ask for bread, and if they were given neither, to take bread. She was arrested, tried for incitement to riot, and sentenced to a year on Blackwell's Island.³⁰ At the trial, she remembered, the district attorney questioned her about religion, free love and morality, and she tried to expose the Church as an instrument of enslavement.³¹ When she entered the prison, the head matron asked her religion. By her own account she answered that she had none and was an atheist; told that she would have to go to church, she refused, saying she would not be a hypocrite. When a matron later brought her a Bible instead of the book she had asked for, she threw it at the woman's feet; the matron told her she had desecrated God's word and would burn in hell.³²³³³⁴ Her own words for this scene are in her memoirs of 1931, which this book will quote when they enter the public domain in 2027.³⁵ The fact itself is clear: by 1893 at the latest she called herself an atheist, plainly and in public.

She came out in August 1894 having read Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson in prison.³⁶ In Vienna she trained as a nurse and midwife and read Nietzsche and Ibsen.³⁷ In 1906 she founded her own monthly, Mother Earth.³⁸

Religion, property and the State

In her book of 1910, Anarchism and Other Essays, she put religion in its place in her system. "Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct."³⁹ The three were one tyranny in three forms, just as they had been in her childhood.

In April 1913 she published "The Failure of Christianity" in Mother Earth. She said plainly whose argument she was following: Nietzsche and Stirner, who had attacked Christianity as a morality for slaves. "I believe, with them, that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day."⁴⁰ She was not interested, she said, in "the theological Christ," the Christ the scholars had already taken apart, but in the Christ of ethics and society.⁴¹ "Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society, whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of dependence and misery, must turn his back on Christianity."⁴² "Much as I am opposed to every religion," she wrote, "I yet feel that no other religion had done so much harm or has helped so much in the enslavement of man as the religion of Christ."⁴³

The Philosophy of Atheism

Her fullest statement came in February 1916, in the middle of the First World War, under the title "The Philosophy of Atheism."⁴⁴ "The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity," it began.⁴⁵ Religion, she argued, was a business: "the trade-marks of the largest, the most corrupt and pernicious, the most powerful and lucrative industry in the world, not excepting the industry of manufacturing guns and munitions."⁴⁶ The war was its refutation: "Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other."⁴⁷ To the charge that there could be no morality without God she answered that the brave defenders of truth, justice and fidelity had nearly always been "the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them."⁴⁸

But the essay's centre was not a denial. "Already there are indications that theism, which is the theory of speculation, is being replaced by Atheism, the science of demonstration; the one hangs in the metaphysical clouds of the Beyond, while the other has its roots firmly in the soil. It is the earth, not heaven, which man must rescue if he is truly to be saved."⁴⁹ And it ended with an affirmation: "Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty."⁵⁰

That same month she was arrested for giving information about birth control in her lectures; a writer in Mother Earth ranked her with Bradlaugh and Besant in England as people who braved the law for it.⁵¹

Conviction and deportation

In June 1917, two months after the United States entered the war, she and Berkman spoke against the new draft law, and they were arrested for conspiring against military registration.⁵²⁵³ They conducted their own defence. "I have publicly held my ideas for 27 years," she told the jury. "Nothing on earth would ever make me change my ideas except one thing; and that is, if you will prove to me that our position is wrong."⁵⁴ The jury deliberated thirty-nine minutes.⁵⁵ Judge Julius Mayer sentenced each of them to two years and a ten-thousand-dollar fine, and gave them a judge's backhanded tribute: they had "shown remarkable ability, an ability which might have been utilized for the great benefit of this country had they seen fit to employ themselves in behalf of this country rather than against it." "For such people as these, who would destroy our Government and nullify its laws, we have no place in our country."⁵⁶⁵⁷ The federal marshal who arrested them said, "This marks the beginning of the end of Anarchism in New York."⁵⁸

She served her sentence in the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri, and was released in September 1919, to be deported.⁵⁹ A law of 1918 allowed the government to deport any alien anarchist, and it argued that she had lost her citizenship with her former husband's.⁶⁰ At her hearing on Ellis Island she read a statement and refused to answer questions about her opinions; a young official of the Justice Department named J. Edgar Hoover wrote the government's brief and was present at both hearings and at the sailing.⁶¹ The Buford left in December.¹

The revolution's church

She went to Soviet Russia full of hope. "I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise," she wrote in 1923.⁶² It took her "fifteen long months" to get her bearings. "Then came Kronstadt. It was the final wrench. It completed the terrible realization that the Russian Revolution was no more."⁶³ When she described what she had seen, she reached for the language of religion. She recorded the old anarchist Peter Kropotkin's verdict that "the Bolsheviki were the Jesuits of the Socialist Church: they believed in the Jesuitic motto that the end justifies the means," and described a Communist official who "reasoned like a nun dedicated to the service of the Church."⁶⁴⁶⁵

On her timeline, this is where her revision falls, and it is not a softening. She did not go back to any faith. She discovered that the habits she had fought in religion, obedience, dogma, the end justifying the means, could live in a revolution that had abolished God. In 1936, in Spain, she defended the anarchist unions when churches were burned, blaming "the sinister influence of the church on the Spanish masses, the superstitions fostered, the toll exacted and the alliance of the church with the monarchist and military as well as the capitalist interests."⁶⁶ That defence, and her claim that the burnings followed attacks by priests, are her own and are contested.⁶⁷ She died in Toronto in 1940.⁶⁸

Did her unbelief change shape?

It never had to be won, and it never wavered. Emma Goldman did not lose a faith; she grew up with religion as a ruler on the palm and a rabbi's monthly report, and she left it behind as she left behind every authority she met. Her atheism arrived as part of her anarchism, was a flat statement by the time she was twenty-four, and became an argument in the essays of 1913 and 1916, where it is less a denial of God than an insistence on the earth: "It is the earth, not heaven, which man must rescue." What changed was her sense of where religion's habits could hide. In Russia she found them in a revolution, and she said so as bluntly as she had said everything else.

Ernestine Rose, the Jewish-born orator who had made the case for atheism on American platforms half a century before her, has her own chapter in this book, and so do Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, whose fight over birth control she continued.