  Meeting
Report
October 19, 2003
Barry Pateman
The Emma Goldman Papers
Our October 19 speaker was Barry Pateman of the Emma
Goldman Papers project at the University of California at Berkeley. The
people on the project are working on a seven-volume edition of the papers
of Emma Goldman, an outspoken and famous Russian-born anarchist, feminist
and freethinker who gave lectures where she could in late 19th century and
early 20th century America. Often she was unable to find a place to speak
and sometimes she ran into legal problems when she did speak. One place
where she was usually allowed to speak was in Unitarian churches!
Barry Pateman started by expounding the importance of
having knowledge of the history of non-establishment figures of the past
and of the danger of consigning that past into a memory hole. Such figures
pushed the envelope of free speech and left us a legacy of thought,
actions and legal rights that we often take for granted. Emma Goldman was
such a person. She became an anarchist as a result of the executions
resulting from the 1887 Haymarket bomb explosion in Chicago, which killed
several policemen. (Nobody proved that any of the persons executed had
anything to do with planting the bomb.) She was a dynamic speaker who
traversed America supporting causes such as union organization, birth
control, women’s equality and opposition to imperialism and war. She also
published a magazine, Mother Earth. She had a profound distrust of
governments, even democratic ones. This would occasionally lead to clashes
not only with the establishment, but also with others on the “left,” such
as socialists and (later) communists. She was arrested after the
assassination of President William McKinley but was released after the
authorities concluded she had nothing to do with it. She was arrested
again, after America’s entry into the First World War, for speaking out
against the draft. She was deported to Soviet Russia at the end of 1919.
She quickly found that Soviet Russia was no "worker’s paradise" but a new
form of despotism. She left Russia in 1921, never to return. She spent
most of the remainder of her life in France, although she did actively
support the Spanish anarchist cause during the Spanish Civil War of
1936-1939. She died in 1940.
The Emma Goldman Papers project is determined that Emma
Goldman’s legacy not be forgotten. It is the single repository for the
collection and organization of all of her papers and the major source of
current books about her life. Barry Pateman held the interest of the
audience throughout his talk on Emma Goldman’s life and the question and
answer period. He was an able exponent of the work of the project and was
very well received by the audience.
Report
prepared by Wayne Luney, HAGSA Recorder
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