Book: Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich. Harvard University Press, 490 pages, 2012.
By David Strom
CHULA VISTA, California — What is an anarchist?
As we know, there are so many different types of Jews that it is safe to conclude that there exist a great variety of anarchists as well. The customary answer to the question, “What is an anarchist?” among the uninformed is that an anarchist is “a bomb thrower who wishes to abolish government.”
What more could we say in response to this sort of stereotype? Little, I suspect. However, after reading the well-researched book Sasha and Emma, by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, readers will have a richer and more nuanced view of anarchism and anarchists.
Sasha (Alexander Berkman) and Emma (Emma Goldman) were famous anarchists at the turn of the twentieth century and into the 1940’s. They were part of the mass immigration from Eastern Europe and met each other at gatherings of radicals of all sorts in New York City’s restaurants. They quickly struck up a friendship that was to last a lifetime. The two fell in love and lived together for many years. They toiled laboriously all of their lives to make anarchism a positive household word among the working class. Eventually the two separated as lovers, but remained close lifelong comrades.
When he learned about the Homestead strike in June of 1892 by workers in Pittsburgh, Sasha hoped that this was the beginning of American workers marching to take destiny into their own hands. For Sasha and his fellow radicals, their battle against Carnegie Steel was like the “shot on Fort Sumter” that began the Civil War. The revolution had started. Emma declared later, “It sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long awaited day of resurrection. The native toiler had risen, he was beginning to feel his mighty strength, he was determined to break the chains that held him in bondage.” For Sasha and Emma this was the day of the great awakening.
Henry Clay Frick, the administrator hired by Andrew Carnegie of the Homestead factory had other ideas. He would fight the striking workers with Pinkerton guards. For four decades, capitalists had used Pinkerton guards as strike breakers to discourage unions and workers from organizing into a cohesive fighting force for better wages and working conditions. A battle ensued when the Pinkertons arrived at Homestead. The workers were ready for them. The fight lasted more than twelve hours. Many workers were killed and wounded, but Pinkertons died and left Homestead defeated. But not for long.
Frick was not done. Although the Pinkertons were beaten and fled town, Frick now turned to the State for help. The governor of the state called out the Pennsylvania National Guard, 8,500 men to rush to Homestead. “Thus began what would be the longest occupation of an American community in the country’s history.” According to the New York Times, “The average striker will tell you that this is not a strike for his bread and butter alone, but for his home. He claims the town of Homestead as his own. He denies that Mr. Carnegie built it. ‘We, the workingmen of Homestead built it…We are interested in it more than Mr. Carnegie for we made the place and we don’t want to be driven out of it for a new set of workmen who have done nothing to make it what it is.’ ”
Sasha, Emma, and Modska (Sasha ‘s cousin) began planning their response to the homestead situation. It turned out to be Sasha’s attempt to murder Frick at his office at Homestead. Forcing his way into Frick’s office, Sasha shot him a couple of times, knifed him and was then subdued and taken to jail. Frick recovered rapidly from his wounds.
Sasha’s trial was quick, though many did not think it judicially fair. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Instead of welcoming the attempt at murdering Frick, most of the Homestead workers rejected it. Anarchists were mixed about this deed. Some thought Sasha a hero while others vilified him.
The police assumed that Sasha did not act alone. They arrested and jailed many local anarchists and other radicals but had to release most of them for lack of evidence. Emma and Modska were never seized.
While in prison, Sasha was not idle. He started an underground newspaper that exposed the barbarity and horrors of the Pennsylvania prison system. Sasha was well-liked by the inmates, but often hated by the administration. His independent spirit often earned him solitary confinement, beatings and little food to eat.
After serving fourteen years in prison he was given his freedom. Welcomed back by his Emma and other anarchist friends, he produced a book from the material gathered while he was imprisoned. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist exposed the amount of homosexuality that occurred in prison. At the time of the publication, homosexuality was a taboo topic in society, never talked about openly, and most especially by the guardians of the prison system. Sasha was frustrated by society and the reflection mirrored in the prison system.
“Prisons defeat the ends for which they are created,” he wrote. “The promiscuous mingling of prisoners in the same institution, without regard to the relative criminality of the inmates, converts prisons into veritable schools of crime and immorality. There is not a single prison or reformatory in America where either flogging and clubbing, or the straitjacket, solitary confinement, and reduced diet (semi-starvation) are not practiced upon the unfortunate inmates, so that when they emerge from behind bars they are condemned to repeat their transgressions. Prisons neither improve the prisoner nor prevent crime. They achieve none of the ends for which they were designed.”
Sasha’s freedom and his resurrection came in 1906, the same year that Emma launched the anarchist journal Mother Earth. It was conceived as a monthly “based on libertarian principles” that would incorporate Emma’s interest in social issues, progressive ideas, and the arts. Emma edited Mother Earth and at times Sasha did, too.
Emma encouraged Sasha to open a weekly paper. Emma’s was well established and a significant journal in cultural and activist affairs. It suited Emma’s personality by printing “theoretical, literary and educational” materials and not just purely radical writings. Sasha’s paper was “a practical weekly, a fighting champion of revolutionary labor.” He called his weekly The Blast. The Blast would “propagate no isms.”
Anarchists opposed the United States’ entry into World War I. Emma and Sasha were no exceptions. They staunchly opposed American intervention in this imperialist/capitalist war. They wrote and spoke across the nation about the ills of war. Sasha wrote in Mother Earth, “Almost the whole of Europe is involved in a murderous struggle that would be impossible if the workers were class-conscious or enlightened in an anti-militant sense.”
With World War I ended and the Soviet Revolution having just taken place, the country was in the midst of hysteria. Hounding and jailing foreigners was commonplace. Forcing immigrants who were non-citizens and radicals to flee their homes in the United States, the government deported many of them to their country of origin. This meant for Emma and Sasha the new Communist Soviet Union.
Warmly received by the Soviet government and others, Sasha and Emma saw that all was not well with this revolution. They quickly observed that despite the revolution’s promises, it was not of the people or even for the people. It seemed to be dictatorship of the people and not a dictatorship for the people as was being sold to the world. Emma was aghast at the treatment of the citizens. “People raided, imprisoned, and shot for their ideas!” The reality was that “The old and the young held as hostages, every protest gagged, iniquity and favoritism rampant, the best human values betrayed, the very spirit of revolution daily crucified…. I felt chilled to the marrow of my bones.” The situation was horrible.
Emma and Sasha went to see Peter Kropotkin, a leading world anarchist. Kropotkin left London where he was living in 1917 to return to his homeland Russia. Sasha and Emma visited him in May 1920. Kropotkin told them about how he was disturbed that the Bolsheviks had seized power. “This buries the revolution” he remarked. “They have shown how the Revolution is not to be made.” Emma and Sasha agreed.
Emma and Sasha escaped from the Soviet Union and its oppressive world. They realized they had “no place in Russia, that they must ‘escape from the horrible revolutionary sham and pretense.” They understood clearly that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the revolution. Once out of Russia, they spoke openly and wrote honestly about the failed revolution. For these actions, narrow thinking leftists in Europe and elsewhere despised them. Sasha and Emma were some of the earliest leftists to witness the betrayal of the revolution and to inform the revolutionary world.
Not many countries in Europe wanted to allow Sasha and Emma to immigrate into their country. Eventually they settled in France. Emma loved the United States and wanted to live there but she couldn’t return due to her deportation. Sasha did not care where he lived. He was not as attached to the United States as Emma. He could hang his hat anywhere.
In 1925 at the age of fifty-eight, Emma married a British citizen, which conveniently, made her a British subject. Her new citizenship allowed her to travel to Canada or other English colonies. When Emma visited Canada she was able to have her many American relatives come and visit her. She was family- oriented and loved by many of her siblings and their children.
With the rise of Fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain, Sasha and Emma continued their struggle to make our world a better place for the less fortunate. Emma and Sasha judged “fascism and Communism to be mirror images—ideologically contrary yet identical in result: despotism, a police state, corrupt bureaucracy, and mass murder.” After learning of the murder of an anarchist comrade in Germany, Emma sadly wrote: “The fact is that the Communists are the forerunners of fascism. Neither Mussolini nor Hitler have made a single original step. All they had to do is follow and copy faithfully the steps taken by Lenin and Stalin.”
Weakened and mortally ill from possibly cancer, Sasha committed suicide in 1936. Emma mourned the death of her lifelong companion. “Sasha’s end had been the most devastating blow life has dealt me,” Emma said. Just a few months, later the Spanish Civil War broke out. “The one thing which has kept me from utter despair is the marvelous courage and heroism of our comrades in Spain.” The fascists fought this battle to take over the democratically elected government of Spain and won. Nazi Germany’s air power and financial support outweighed the western democracies’ embargo. The west lost a chance to possibly stop the march of fascism.
Emma Goldman died on May 14, 1940 after suffering two strokes that left her unable to speak or write. The Times called her “a writer of distinction and an able critic of the drama.” It noted “her passion for America, evident during her tour in 1934.” Anarchism did not die with her death. Emma once said, “Everyone is an anarchist who loves liberty and hates oppression. But not everyone wants it for the other fellow. That is my task; I want to extend it to the other fellow.”
In our very recent American history anarchism has demonstrated some of its potential power in the Occupy Wall Street movement that swept the nation a couple of years ago. A central focus of the OWS movement was to protest how the one percent of our nation’s population controls most of the wealth of the nation/world and the other ninety-nine percent own the rest. The future belongs to those who love liberty, freedom and economic equality for all.
Sasha and Emma is an enlightening work. It has a wealth of detail and offers the reader a deeper understanding of the history of this century that has led us to where we are today. Those who read it will not regret it.
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David Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at david.strom@sdjewishworld.com