Part 3

Emma Goldman was unquestionably the most active and audacious rebel of her time. An idealist to the core of her being, cherishing liberty as the most precious of human possessions, completely dedicated to the full and free life for all mankind, she early became the object of concentrated contumely and brutal abuse on the part of the defenders of the status quo. Her threat to society lay not so much in her revolutionary doctrine as in her attacks upon the abuses of capitalism. B. R. Tucker and other individualist anarchists were equally opposed to authority, but they were not molested so long as they did not concern themselves with economic exploitation. Emma, however, had made it her duty to fight against injustice toward the worker and the nonconformist. Consequently she organized mass-meetings and marches against unemployment; she became a picket-leader and fund-raiser, and protested openly and persistently against violations of free speech and against police brutality. This activity, especially effective because of her untiring zeal and bold eloquence, gave her pre-eminence as a dangerous enemy of capitalism and subjected her to persecution by the authorities until she was driven out of the country.

Quite a few Americans, however, respected her for her honest idealism and valued her as a goad stinging the social conscience of our complacent public. One of them, William Marion Reedy, called her "the daughter of the dream" after a meeting with her in 1908 and added: "She threatens all society that is sham, all society that is slavery, all society that is a mask of greed and lust." Floyd Dell spoke for many in the blithe year of 1912 when he wrote: "She has a legitimate social function--that of holding before our eyes the ideals of freedom. She is licenced to taunt us with our moral cowardice, to plant in our souls the nettles of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely in the brutal artifice of present-day society."

For all her courage and iconoclasm, she was deeply feminine in outlook and behavior. Her strongest attribute was of an emotional rather than intellectual nature: she felt first and thought afterwards. She had an extraordinary capacity for believing whatever suited her ideological or personal purposes. Rationalization and ratiocination merged in her mind very readily. Thus in her autobiography she was punctilious in recording the details of her love affairs, presumably in the belief that everything she did and felt affected her revolutionary development. Yet at all times she was ready to sacrifice her own happiness for the good of anarchism.

On her fiftieth birthday, while in prison for obstructing the draft, she took stock of her past. "Fifty years--thirty of them on the firing line--had they borne fruit or had I merely been repeating Don Quixote's idle chase? Had my efforts served only to fill my inner void, to find an outlet for the turbulence of my being? Or was it really the ideal that had dictated my conscious course?" She had not the slightest doubt, however, that her life had not been lived in vain. She had fought valiantly, and was to remain on the firing line for another twenty years. And while it is in the very nature of an ideal to fail of achievement, its mere existence gives life its impetus and its reward. Emma's quotation from Ibsen, made while waiting for deportation in 1919--"that it is the struggle for the ideal that counts, rather than the attainment of it"--may well be her epitaph.

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