Emma Goldman, a young shopkeeper in 1892, was serving a customer
in her ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass., when she got the
latest news about a labor strike in Pittsburgh.
As she explains in her autobiography, Living My
Life:
One afternoon a customer came in for an ice cream while
I was alone in the store. As I set the dish down before him, I
caught the large headlines of his paper: “LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN
HOMESTEAD — FAMILIES OF STRIKERS EVICTED FROM THE COMPANY HOUSES
— WOMAN IN CONFINEMENT CARRIED OUT INTO STREET BY SHERIFFS.” I
read over the man’s shoulder Frick’s dictum to the workers: He
would rather see them dead than concede to their demands, and he
threatened to import Pinkerton detectives. The brutal bluntness of
the account, the inhumanity of Frick toward the evicted mother,
inflamed my mind. Indignation swept my whole being. I heard the man
at the table ask: “Are you sick, young lady? Can I do anything for
you?” “Yes, you can let me have your paper,” I blurted out. “You
won’t have to pay me for the ice cream. But I must ask you to
leave. I must close the store.” The man looked at me as if I had
gone crazy.
Goldman closed her store that day, permanently. Standing in
revolutionary solidarity with the working class against Henry Clay
Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, was more important
than making sundaes.
“It was Homestead, not Russia; I knew it now,” wrote Goldman, a
Lithuanian-born anarchist, seeing the battle in Pittsburgh as the
spark that could ignite a worldwide firestorm of revolt against
hierarchy and subjugation.
The first task was to arouse America’s insufficiently radical
masses by printing a manifesto and taking it to Pittsburgh, she
explained, “a flaming call to the men of Homestead to throw off the
yoke of capitalism, to use their present struggle as a
steppingstone to the destruction of the wage system, and to
continue toward social revolution and anarchism.”
Rather than negotiate a union contract, Frick ordered the
construction of a solid board fence topped with barbed wire around
the Homestead mill. Striking workers dubbed the fortified property
“Fort Frick.”
“Not a strike, but a lockout,” Frick announced. “It was,” wrote
Goldman, “an open declaration of war.”
On July 6, 1892, a 13-hour battle between strikers and 300
Pinkerton detectives, hired by Frick to protect the nonunion
workers he planned to employ, left 10 dead and 65 wounded.
“I will kill Frick,” proclaimed Alexander Berkman, Goldman’s
lover and close political associate, and, like Goldman, a
Lithuanian-born anarchist. Gaining entry to Frick’s office, Berkman
shot Frick twice in the neck and stabbed him four times in the leg.
Frick survived and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
“A blow aimed at Frick,” theorized Goldman, would “strike terror
in the enemy’s ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of
America had its avengers.”
Nearly three decades after the assassination attempt on Frick
(and after being imprisoned three times — for inciting a riot,
distributing birth-control information, and conspiring to obstruct
the military draft), Goldman was deported to the Soviet Union,
along with Berkman, in 1919.
Greeted as heroes, Goldman and Berkman met all the leading
figures of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — Vladimir Lenin,
Gregory Zinoviev, Alexandra Kollontai and Leon Trotsky. Lenin
readily accepted Goldman’s proposal that she and Berkman develop a
group called “Russian Friends of American Liberty” to advance the
rights of political prisoners in the United States.
Instead, what Goldman witnessed firsthand in Russia from 1920 to
1921 was worse than Homestead. “I saw before me the Bolshevik
State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary
effort, suppressing, debasing and disintegrating everything,” she
wrote in her book, My Disillusionment In Russia, published
in 1923.
From close range, Goldman observed the slaughter of workers who
went on strike in several Petrograd factories. “The ‘conquest’ of
the city was characterized by ruthless savagery,” a “bloodbath” of
those classified by the government as “counter-revolutionaries,”
she reported. “They had dared to raise their voice in protest
against the new rulers of Russia.”
Goldman’s conclusion, after witnessing the concentration camps,
the destruction of trade unions, the persecution of independent
thought, the rampant corruption raging throughout the Soviet
government, and the forced labor inflicted upon the masses (and the
wholesale arrest of Russia’s anarchists): “The centralized
political State was Lenin’s deity, to which everything else was to
be sacrificed.”
