Emma Goldman

Anarchist Beginnings

Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For” (1911)

August 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR Emma Goldman Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood, Thou art the grisly terror of our age. “Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude, “Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.” O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven The truth that lies behind a word to find, To them the word’s right meaning was not given. They shall continue blind among the blind. But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure, Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken. I give thee to the future! Thine secure When each […]
The Sex Question

Newspaper Clippings: Beer for Baptism (1901)

June 21, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Beer for Baptism. Emma Goldman Mocks Religious Rite in Mining Town. Milwaukee, Wis., Sept. 16. – A curious story of Emma Goldman, which is vouched for by a Milwaukee man is being told. It was in 1897 that the man in question happened to visit the mining town of Spring Valley, Ill., one of those forlorn, prairie mining towns where there is a good deal of actual misery and lots of underground hard work. At the time of the visit of the Milwaukee man Emma Goldman was there, holding nightly meetings and drawing large crowds. Just before leaving the town, […]
The Sex Question

Frank Harris, “Emma Goldman, the Famous Anarchist (1923)

June 13, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Men stone the prophets still, and persecute those sent to them to point the upward way! In prison oft, this female St. Paul, an exile now and outcast from her own, living in Berlin even on sufferance from six months’ permission to six months, and no asylum, no place of rest in the wide world, if this be denied her; yet courageous still, and uncomplaining, full, indeed, of joyous energy and pregnant with plans of work. Think of it. She might be rotten to the teeth with self-indulgence, one foul infectious sore, leprous or syphilitic, and men would take her […]
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 […]
The Sex Question

Floyd Dell, from “Women as World-Builders” (1913)

May 30, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
CHAPTER V BEATRICE WEBB AND EMMA GOLDMAN THE careers of these two women serve admirably to exhibit the woman’s movement in still, another aspect, and to throw light upon the essential nature of woman’s character. These careers stand in plain contrast. Beatrice Webb has compiled statistics, and Emma Goldman has preached the gospel of freedom. It remains to be shown which is the better and the more characteristically feminine gift to the world. Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Canadian railway president. Born in 1858, she grew up in a time when revolutionary movements were in the making. She […]
The Sex Question

William C. Owen, “Why Attack Emma Goldman?” (1922)

May 30, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
WHY ATTACK EMMA GOLDMAN? The man is starving, but he may not pluck so much as a turnip to save his life. The wind cuts to the marrow of his bones, but out in the open he must he if he cannot purchase shelter. This is the lot of the modern proletariat reduced to destitution. It is the condition thousands of unemployed and penniless continually must face. This very day, in every ” civilised” country, thousands will have gone without a meal. This very night thousands will shiver on park benches, or huddle themselves into a fitful sleep within some […]