Year: 2016

The Sex Question

Phrenological Examinations of Emma Goldman and Marie Louise (1895)

June 13, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
CHARACTER IN UNCONVENTIONAL PEOPLE. A PAIR OF ANARCHISTS. From Personal Examinations By The Editor. We trust that the readers of The Journal will not be alarmed at the introduction of the two somewhat noted opponents of the existing order of society which we present herewith. We can vouch for their harmlessness in the shadows we print, however dangerous they may be in person and at short range. As it is only by carefully studying and comparing all the elements of human nature, both agreeable and disagreeable, that we can hope to acquire accurate and comprehensive knowledge, we propose here to […]
The Sex Question

Margaret C. Anderson, “The Challenge of Emma Goldman” (1914)

June 12, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
EMMA GOLDMAN has been lecturing in Chicago, and various kinds of people have been going to hear her. I have heard her twice — once before the audience of well-dressed women who flock to her drama lectures and don’t know quite what to think of her, and once at the International Labor Hall before a crowd of anarchists and syndicalists and socialists, most of whom were collarless but who knew very emphatically what they thought of her and of her ideas. I came away with a series of impressions, every one of which resolved somehow into a single conviction: that […]
The Sex Question

Guido Bruno, “Anarchists in Greenwich Village” (1916)

June 12, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Have you ever seen a real live anarchist? Just to be honest, you never wanted to see one. Is it because the B follows the A in the alphabet or because of a close association of ideas for which you are not responsible, you think immediately of bombs? Bombs and anarchists are inseparable in the minds of most of us. Mysterious destroyers of life and of property, merciless men who have pledged their lives, their knives, or their guns to some nefarious cause or another, who assemble in cellars lighted with candles or in road-houses which seem uninhabited and in […]
The Sex Question

Guido Bruno, “Emma Goldman—Fighter and Idealist” (1917)

June 11, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
So far as a man thinks, he is free. Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are. and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper Preamble like a “Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or act. —EMERSON. “Get Miss Goldman,” cried the pale-faced, thin-lipped matron to another white-clad attendant behind the bars of the Tombs. It was a few days after Emma Goldman’s arrest as “the head of a country-wide conspiracy to resist conscription.” I stood in a small, triangular hallway. […]
The Sex Question

Bruce Calvert, “In the Jungle” (1908)

June 11, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
But I started out to tell you of my intellectual bat in the city. The jag opened with ‘Gene Debs’ lecture at Orchestra Hall, where the idol of the socialists received the plaudits of three or four thousand enthusiasts. Then I listened to prim and scholarly John Spargo, another socialist speaker and writer, well known to students of economics. Spargo looks for all the world like a Presbyterian deacon, tho he doesn’t talk like one by a darn site. I heard Arthur M. Lewis, also, at the Garrick Theater, and a lecture by ex-Senator Billy Mason on the postal savings […]
biography

Lois Waisbrooker: Eighty Years Young

June 10, 2016
LOIS WAISBROOKER. ANTIOCH, CAL. Eighty Years Young and a Human Dynamo. In reply to your request I would say that I was born in the lower strata of life. My father worked by the day or by the job to support his family. My mother was a quiet retiring woman who died at the age of thirty-six. I have no noted ancestry. I have worked in people’s kitchens year in and year out when I never knew what it was to be rested. Finally I added enough to the little schooling I received in childhood to enable me to meet […]
Blazing Star Library

William Batchelder Greene, Letter to Orestes Brownson (1849)

June 6, 2016
From Orestes A. Brownson’s Middle Life from 1845-1855 (1899): Another Unitarian minister, the son of an old friend, one in whom Brownson had taken a great interest, had his reasonings and speculations submitted to a severe, but not unfriendly criticism, at about the same time as Channing. This was William B. Greene, whose name, however, did not appear as the author of the book to which he refers in the following letter: BROOKFIELD, MASS., Jan. 24th, 1849. DEAR SIR:—I Send you herewith a copy of my “Remarks on Science of History, etc.” I requested Mr. Crosby to send you a […]
Blazing Star Library

Annie Field, from “Whittier: Notes Of His Life And Of His Friendships” (1897)

June 6, 2016
“Whittier: Notes Of His Life And Of His Friendships” From Annie Field’s Authors and Friends It was Whittier’s sad experience to be deprived of the companionship of all those most dear to him, and for over twenty years to live without that intimate household communion for the loss of which the world holds no recompense. For several years, before and after his sister Elizabeth’s death, Whittier wore the look of one who was very ill. His large dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and contrasted with his pale brow and attenuated figure. He had a sorrowful, stricken look, and found […]
Blazing Star Library

William Batchelder Greene, “The Right of Suffrage” (1875)

June 6, 2016
TOWN and State paupers are persons notoriously incapable of supporting themselves, because demonstrably devoid of the faculties demanded for a successful administration of their own private affairs. Being incompetent to acquit themselves with credit in matters with which they are presumably conversant, they cannot be trusted to exercise sovereignty in matters pertaining to the general welfare. Paupers are persons and people; but they are not voting people. Insane persons and idiots are notorious for their incapacity for self-government, and have, by law, and on account of their incapacity, guardians appointed over them to prevent them from injuring themselves and others. […]
Blazing Star Library

George Willis Cooke, “William Batchelder Greene”

June 5, 2016
“WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE” from George Willis Cooke’s Historical and Biographical Introduction to the Rowfant Club reprint of The Dial (Cleveland, 1902) [NOTE: There is considerable disagreement among sources about the particulars of Greene’s literary output. Titles and dates in this account may be unreliable. In particular, poetry volumes attributed to Greene, such as “Imogen,” may be the work of his son, also William Batchelder Greene. In the third number of the second volume of “The Dial” was printed an article on “First Principles” by William Batchelder Greene, then minister of the Unitarian church at Brookfield, Mass. This was his only […]