Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination. Everett Marshall
and her activity has never flagged since then. She has been a prolific writer for all publications in this country that would give space to her articles upon anarchy, and has devoted much of her time to lecturing.
Miss Goldman had frequently lectured in Chicago, but until the attack on President McKinley, the police found no reason to arrest her.
The lectures in Chicago attracted little attention, seldom having been announced in an obtrusive manner. Her reputation was such, however, that the management of Hull House refused to permit her to speak in that establishment.
In 1893 New York police arrested Miss Goldman on a warrant charging her with “inciting to riot.” The arrest was a result of her activity during the famous Debs strike, and it was followed by her imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island for a term of one year, which was shortened to seven months on account of good behavior. She formerly had led a strike of the Waist and Shirt Maker Girls’ union in New York, but without attracting much attention.
In an extended interview which Miss Goldman gave out a few months ago while in New York she told many things about her life and her views on social and political questions which have a special interest at the present moment. She said:
“I am a Russian through and through, although little of my life was spent there. I was born in Russia, but was brought up in Germany and graduated from a German school. All that didn’t make a German of me. I went back to Russia when I was 15 years old, and felt that I was returning to my home. My family was orthodox. None of my revolutionary tendencies was inherited—at least my parents were not responsible for them and were horrified by them.
“While I was in Germany I did not think much about anarchy, but when I went back to St. Petersburg my whole attitude toward life changed, and I went into radicalism with all my heart and soul. You see, things are different in Russia from what they are here or anywhere else. One breathes a revolutionary thought with the air, and without being definitely interested in anarchy one learns its principles. There was discussion and thought and enthusiasm all around me, and something within me responded to it all.
WOMAN’S EQUALITY IN RUSSIA.
“There is no other place in the world where woman has what she has in Russia. There the women have not only the same rights in law as the men, they have the same liberties and the same social and intellectual freedom. There man respects woman, looks upon her as his equal, is her good chum—yes, that is the word. Nowhere are men and women chums as they are in Russia.
“A woman student in Russia may receive visitors all day and most of the night, discuss all vital subjects with them, go with men when and where she pleases, and yet she will not be criticised, and no landlady would dream of insinuating that there was anything wrong with her morals. What is more, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with them. The standard of morals in the student class is phenomenally high, and the average intelligent Russian woman’s mind is as pure as it is broad.
“The relation between the sexes in Russia is the most ideal of any I know about. That is why young Russian women learn to think. And because they think they become Anarchists.
“I was an Anarchist when I left Russia to come to America, but I had hardly formulated my belief. The final influence that crystallized my views was the hanging of the Chicago Anarchists in 1887. I followed that case carefully and it made me an active Anarchist. I was living with my family in Rochester then, and the nearest thing to a radical society the town had was a Social Democratic society, tame as a house cat. I came away to New York and went to work in a factory. That showed me a new side of life. My family had been well-to-do, and I hadn’t come in actual contact with the want and suffering of the world until I joined the wage-earners.
“Of course the experience strengthened my revolutionary ideas. When the Waist and Shirtmaker Girls’ union went out in 1888 I led the strike. That is, in a way I led it. I have never been an Anarchist leader. I cannot afford it. A leader must be a diplomat. I am not a diplomat. A leader of a party makes concessions to his party, for the sake of holding his power. He must give way to his followers in order to be sure they will sustain him. I can’t do all that, I am an Anarchist because I love individual freedom and I will not surrender that freedom.
“You know I am a professional nurse. It has always been the dream of my life to be a doctor, but I never could manage it—could not get means for the study. My factory work undermined my health, so I thought that if I couldn’t be a doctor I could at least be a little part of the profession. I went through the training for a nurse, did the hospital work, and now nurse private cases.
“When I came out of prison on Blackwell’s Island I was nervous. I decided to try a change and go to Europe for a year. I could lecture for the cause and take a course in massage and in midwifery in Vienna. There is no good training for either here, though we have the best training schools for nurses in the world.
“Well, I went and did my studying and then went to Paris to study and wait for the Anarchists’ congress. You know the government prohibited the congress. We had it all the same, but the meetings were secret. I received the honor or dishonor of especially strict surveillance. I was to give a series of lectures, but after the third the authorities warned me that if I gave any more I must leave France, and as I wanted to attend the congress I kept quiet.
“Finally, detectives escorted me to the station and saw my luggage checked to the steamer and then notified the government that the dangerous woman was on her way out of France.”
Leon Czolgosz, the murderer of President McKinley, asserted immediately after his arrest, that he was led to undertake the assassination of the President by a speech delivered by Emma Goldman, the leader of the Anarchist propaganda in America. This speech was delivered in Cleveland, O., the home of Czolgosz, May 6. In it Miss Goldman outlined the principles of anarchy, and detailed the methods whereby she expected to secure the establishment of anarchy throughout the world. Her talk was full of forceful passages, in some cases more notable for their strength than for their elegance.
“Men under the present state of society,” she said, “are mere products of circumstances. Under the galling yoke of government, ecclesiasticism, and a bond of custom and prejudice, it is impossible for the individual to work out his own career as he could wish. Anarchism aims at a new and complete freedom. It strives to bring about the freedom which is not only the freedom from within but a freedom from without, which will prevent any man from having a desire to interfere in any way with the liberty of his neighbor.
“Vanderbilt says, ‘I am a free man within myself, but the others be damned.’ This is not the freedom we are striving for. We merely desire complete individual liberty, and this can never be obtained as long as there is an existing government.
“We do not favor the socialistic idea of converting men and women into mere producing machines under the eye of a paternal government. We go to the opposite extreme and demand the fullest and most complete liberty for each and every person to work out his own salvation upon any line that he pleases. The degrading notion of men and women as machines is far from our ideals of life.
“Anarchism has nothing to do with future governments or economic arrangements. We do not favor any particular settlement in this line, but merely ask to do away with the present evils. The future will provide these arrangements after our work has been done. Anarchism deals merely with social relations, and not with economic arrangement.”
The speaker then deprecated the idea that all Anarchists were in favor of violence or bomb throwing. She declared that nothing was further from the principles they support. She went on, however, into a detailed explanation of the different crimes committed by Anarchists lately, declaring that the motive was good in each case, and that these acts were merely a matter of temperament.
Some men were so constituted, she said, that they were unable to stand idly by and see the wrong that was being endured by their fellow-mortals. She herself did not believe in these methods, but she