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May 18, 2003
Review: A woman in revolt
REBELLION and revolt have been an endemic feature of human nature from its genesis. If the revealed scriptures of all faiths are deferred to, the evolution of human presence on planet Earth started with an act of rebellion by Adam and Eve in heaven. What followed is the common history of human species. We continue to pay the price of our progenitors’ urge to be their own masters.
Emma Goldman was one Eve who pursued her innate hankering for freedom — every individual’s birth right — with uncommon zeal and conviction. She made history in the process.
Born in 1869 to poor Jewish parents in Lithuania — then under imperial Russian control — Emma emigrated to the US as a child with her family and lived in Rochester, New York. She was married very young, at 16, to a Jewish youth who was unable to consummate the union. She found in voracious reading a handsome recompense for her tortuous marriage.
Emma was 17 when she learned of the labour struggle in Chicago by the workers of the International Harvester Company for a regulated eight-hour working day. American history books recall that defining moment as the Hay Market Affair which saw workers offering their blood for securing their dignity of labour and rights. The May Day observed all over the world every year pays tribute to that trail- blazer event in world labour movements.
However, it was not destined to remain a peaceful affair. There was a clash between the protesters and police. In the midst of the melee someone lobbed a bomb which killed several people, including policemen. Eight known anarchists were arrested by police on suspicion and an erring Illinois Supreme Court awarded death penalty to all eight of them. Which prompted the great playwright George Bernard Shaw, from across the Atlantic, to tersely comment: “ If the world must lose eight of its people, it can better afford to lose the eight members of the Illinois Supreme Court.” Emma was so moved by the Hay Market Affair that it changed her life forever. She decided that she belonged to the likes of those who had raised the standard of revolt in Chicago. So she ran away from her home in Rochester and settled down amongst anarchists in New York City. Her journey as a born protester struggling to wrest back her birth rights began in right earnest in Manhattan.
Emma and her lover, Alexander Berkman — like her a Russian immigrant popularly known as Sasha — became the leaders of the anarchist movement in US. They sought to change the lot of the downtrodden and the oppressed by force, if the denizens of power would not give them their legitimate share under the law by peaceful means.
The climax of Emma’s struggle for ordinary people’s emancipation was reached in 1917 when the US government began conscription of young Americans to become fuel for its war machine in Europe during the first world war. Emma and Sasha led the agitation against conscription, were arrested and promptly exiled to Russia, their native land. The right-wing fanatic who put them on board a steamer bound for Russia was J. Edgar Hoover whose notoriety, later, as Director of FBI spanned not only decades but continents.
Emma and Sasha welcomed the opportunity of living in the so-called ‘workers’ paradise’ in Russia. They even befriended Lenin but soon became disillusioned with the reign of terror that became a norm in Russia in the guise of the supremacy of the proletariat. They forsook Russia, and then wandered in Europe, living mostly in France. Berkman took his own life in 1936 to put an end to the agony of ill-health. Emma died, at age 71, in Canada during a lecture tour.
Howard Zinn, a leftist intellectual, activist and academic of sterling repute, whose exploits in these fields are second only to those of Noam Chomsky, has captured the essence of Emma’s extraordinary and mercurial life in a riveting two-act play. It is a work of painstaking research into the macabre life of a woman who lived by her own rules of a totally free spirit, changed lovers frequently, and even had a lesbian relationship with a woman inmate during one of her several incarcerations.
Zinn, a professor at Boston University, is an extraordinarily talented and versatile man himself who has been honoured in various parts of the world for his passionate defence of the rights of the oppressed people. A Marxist by conviction, Zinn was hailed in the finest intellectual circles for his masterly Marx in Soho. Critics called it a superb expose of the injustices, iniquities and hypocrisies of contemporary societies, especially the affluent ones. But Zinn is best known for his classic, A People’s History of the United States, which defies conventional wisdom of US history.
Zinn thinks that Emma’s philosophy of unencumbered right of agitation against oppression even influenced the anti-Vietnam movement of the 1960s. Emma believed in decentralized resistance which became a hallmark in the 60s. It was an inadvertent tribute to a revolutionary who had been sent into oblivion by her right-wing tormentors.
Zinn has, appropriately, closed the book on Emma in his play with the law closing in on her after her robust denunciation of conscription, which was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on May 18, 1917. The last words uttered by Emma from the podium sound so fresh and contemporary in the backdrop of the right-wing, neo-conservative, agenda propelling the military juggernaut for an unjust, immoral and illegal war. Emma poignantly reminds her audience:
“I, too, am willing to die for this country...Yes, for this country. For the mountains and rivers, the land, the people, yes, for the country. But not for the President, nor for the generals and admirals, not for the industrialists and bankers who want this war. They are not our country. They do not care a damn whether you, young man, live or die...”
These words of Emma, prophetic as they sound, could well have been spoken by any one of the millions of men and women who vociferously protested against, and denounced, the war thrust on Iraq by the ruling right-wing cabal in Washington. History in the US, true to Marxian dictum, is repeating itself as both a tragedy and a farce.
Emma (A play in two acts about Emma Goldman, American anarchist)
By Howard Zinn
South End Press, 7 Brookline Street, #1, Cambridge, MA 02139-4146, US
Website: www.southendpress.org
ISBN: 0-89608-664-X. 138pp. $9
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