Part 16

“We believe in violence and we will use violence.... How many people are going to refuse to conscript? I say there are enough. I could count fifty thousand, and there will be more.... They will not register! What are you going to do if there are 500,000? It will not be such an easy job, and it will compel the government to sit up and take notice, and therefore we are going to support, with all the money and publicity at our hands, all the men who will refuse to register and who will refuse to fight.

“I hope this meeting is not going to be the last. As a matter of fact we are planning something else.... We will have a demonstration of all the people who will not be conscripted, and who will not register. We are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen, and no power on earth will stop us.... If there is any man in this hall that despairs, let him look across at Russia ... and see the wonderful thing that revolution has done....

“What is your answer? Your answer to war must be a general strike, and then the governing class will have something on its hands....”

She wound up her speech with an appeal for funds, and said that her paper, _Mother Earth_, was going to support the rebellion against the draft law which had been signed by the president that very day. _Mother Earth_ spoke, in her next issue, which appeared shortly before registration day, June 5, and spoke in fairly disapproving terms toward conscription. But the sun went down into New Jersey on registration day without having witnessed the greatest demonstration New York City ever saw, or any demonstration whatever save the quiet, cheerful enrollment of what later became a heroic national army.

On June 15 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in the office of _Mother Earth_ at 20 East 125th Street. On June 27 they were arraigned for trial. On July 9 the jury pronounced them guilty of having attempted to obstruct the draft. Judge Mayer thereupon sentenced Berkman to two years in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Goldman to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri for two years, and fined each of them $10,000. It was a stiff blow to organized anarchy--the maximum sentence possible, and the judge followed it by directing the District Attorney, Harold A. Content, to notify the Commissioner of Labor of the conviction, in order that when the two emerged from prison, they might be deported as aliens convicted of two or more crimes to the country from which they came, bringing uplift to down-trodden America.

Their work has since been carried on in a more or less desultory way. They, too, have become official martyrs to the cause, whose names will be inscribed along with those of Brescia, the Haymarket murderers, and a score of others, on the anarchist service flag. The undercurrent of opposition appeared spasmodically during the war and it became necessary for an Alabama Judge, sitting in the District Court of New York, on October 25, 1918, to impose maximum sentences under the espionage act upon three more advocates of unrest, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman and Hyman Lachnowsky, the ringleaders of a group who circulated leaflets denouncing armed intervention in Russia and advocating a general strike. They were sentenced to twenty years apiece; a fourth member got three years and a $1,000 fine. A woman in the group, Mollie Steiner, was sentenced to fifteen years.

The efforts at “demonstration” which the imported anarchists in America have employed are neither as picturesque nor as popularly received as those of their comrades in the old world. Anarchy is out of tune in America. Prussianism has already had its answer from the United States. Bolshevism is not for a well-educated, deep-breathing nation like ours. And anarchy, the poorest wretch of the three, must make terrifying faces through some other window than that of a country full of people who are going to continue to make this democracy safe for itself.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

Transcribers improved readability of some numbers in some illustrations, and switched the transcribed sequence of the text of one pair of “random pages” (following page 26) to make it easier to follow.

Transcriber corrected the Title page misspelling of “SMALLL, MAYNARD & COMPANY” to “SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY”, which is how it appears on the Copyright page.

Transcriber removed redundant book title just above the title of the first chapter.