Emma Goldman: “The Psychology of Political Violence”

About the Author

Emma Goldman was born June 27, 1869, in Kovno, Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. The Goldman family moved to St. Petersburg, where Emma's father experienced a series of business failures. Goldman often quarreled with her father, who failed to support his daughter's educational endeavors. In 1885 Goldman and her older sister Helena left Russia for the United States and settled with other family members in Rochester, New York, where Goldman began factory work as a seamstress. In February 1887 she married her fellow worker Jacob Kersner, but the marriage dissolved after a year, with Goldman moving to New York City in 1889.

Upon her arrival in the more cosmopolitan environment of New York City, Goldman met the anarchist Alexander Berkman, with whom she began a political and romantic relationship. Berkman introduced Goldman to another anarchist, Johann Most, an advocate for what anarchists called the propaganda of the deed, concluding that their direct action would motivate the masses to revolution. Most encouraged Goldman's involvement in the anarchist movement, although she would later split with her mentor. In 1892 Pennsylvania authorities violently suppressed a labor uprising in the steel plants of Andrew Carnegie in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Following the violent suppression of the steel strike, Berkman was imprisoned for his attempted assassination of the plant manager, Henry Clay Frick. Although no evidence was established linking Goldman to the act, she later acknowledged her involvement. Goldman was imprisoned for allegedly urging unemployed workers to revolt during the national financial crisis referred to as the Panic of 1893. After serving a ten-month sentence, she continued her political agitation, supporting herself by working as a midwife and nurse following study at the Vienna General Hospital in 1895 and 1896.

On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Goldman was arrested for her alleged association with the assassin but freed for lack of evidence. In 1906 Berkman was released from prison, and the couple began publication of the anarchist journal Mother Earth. In the pages of Mother Earth and in her public speeches over the next decade, Goldman addressed issues of anarchism, women's rights, patriotism, and labor organization. It was in Mother Earth that she first published the essays “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” “The Psychology of Political Violence,” and “Marriage and Love.”

In 1917 Berkman and Goldman were arrested for their opposition to conscription and American participation in World War I. Charged under the newly enacted Espionage Act, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison. Released during the zenith of America's “red scare”—a period of anti-Communism that followed World War I, in reaction to the Russian Revolution—Berkman and Goldman were deported to Russia.

Although she initially supported the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, Goldman expressed disillusionment with the centralized state evolving there. In 1921 she left Russia, living briefly in Germany before settling in London. Although many on the political left censured Goldman for her opposition to the Soviet state, the anarchist defended her views and assailed coercive states of both the political left and right in her autobiography, Living My Life (1931). Suffering from a stroke, Goldman died in Toronto on May 14, 1940.