Biography
Emma Goldman was a Russian-born anarchist writer, editor, and orator who emigrated to the United States in 1885 and became one of the most influential and most prosecuted radicals in American history. She founded and edited the magazine Mother Earth, lectured nationally on anarchism, free love, women's suffrage, birth control, and opposition to war and conscription, and was repeatedly arrested across more than three decades. In 1893 she served ten months on Blackwell's Island for telling the unemployed of New York to demand bread by force if necessary. In 1916 she was sentenced to fifteen days in the workhouse for publicly discussing contraception. After Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, she and her longtime comrade Alexander Berkman organized the No-Conscription League, distributing tens of thousands of antiwar leaflets and holding mass rallies. Both were arrested on June 15, 1917 and tried in federal court in New York under the newly enacted Espionage Act for conspiring to obstruct the draft. Both were convicted, fined the maximum $10,000, and sentenced to two years in federal prison. Goldman served her sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Released in September 1919, she was rearrested by the Bureau of Investigation under the Anarchist Exclusion Act and on December 21, 1919, deported with Berkman and 247 other immigrant radicals aboard the U.S. Army transport Buford — the so-called 'Soviet Ark' — to Russia. Disillusioned by the Bolshevik suppression of dissent, she left Russia in 1921 and lived the rest of her life in exile in Europe and Canada. She died in Toronto in 1940 and was permitted, in death, to be returned to the United States and buried in Chicago at Waldheim Cemetery near the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Immigrated to the United States in 1885 and became an anarchist in the wake of the Haymarket Affair. Goldman soon emerged as one of the most prominent anarchist propagandists in the country, known for her lectures, writings, and advocacy on issues including syndicalism, free speech, birth control, and antimilitarism. Over the course of her career, she was arrested at least thirteen times for her political activities. In 1906 she founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth, which she published until its suppression in 1917. That year, she co-founded the No-Conscription League and, together with Alexander Berkman, was arrested in June under the Espionage Act for interfering with the military draft. Both were convicted, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, and fined $10,000. Upon her release, Goldman was deported to Soviet Russia aboard the Buford on December 21, 1919.
In Russia, Goldman and Berkman initially collaborated on collecting materials for a Museum of the Revolution. Following the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921, both broke decisively with the Bolshevik regime. They left Russia in December 1921 and Goldman lived thereafter in Germany, France, England, and Canada, continuing anarchist activism and publicly condemning Soviet authoritarianism. In 1934 she was permitted to return briefly to the United States for a lecture tour. During the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Barcelona in 1936 and undertook speaking and organizing tours across Europe on behalf of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. She died in Toronto in February 1940.
