"Red Emma" and Free Speech at Berkeley

Emma Goldman, socialist, anarchist and feminist, died in exile from the United States in 1940, as the swastika was about to fly over Europe. Twenty years earlier, she and her longtime lover, Alexander Berkman, were deported to what was then called Soviet Russia at the peak of the Red Scare. J. Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department attorney who had organized the raids (named the "Palmer raids" after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) was on the docks watching as Goldman, Berkman and over 500 others were deported on the Buford, which the yellow press dubbed the "Soviet Ark."

Emma's anarchism soon led her out of the Soviet Union--she was to publish two books, My Disillusionment in Soviet Russia, and My Further Disillusionment in Soviet Russia. This may along with her activities in pre World War I Greenwich Village, birthplace of American cultural Bohemia, explain why she was one of the very few American partisans of socialism who were mentioned positively, albeit as something of quotable comedy relief character, in American history lectures when I first went to the City College of New York in the early 1960s.

As the 21st century dawns, much has changed and much remains the same for left critics of the American establishment. To the chagrin of rightists, streets and buildings are named after Malcolm X and Paul Robeson. Robeson, persecuted by the FBI in the 1950s and 1960s, now is an object of respect at Rutgers University, where he was once class valedictorian and an All-American football player. Finally, Martin Luther King, whom J. Edgar Hoover had "categorized" as a Communist in 1962 so that the FBI could harass and hound him for the rest of his life, has a national holiday named after him.

But how much of this is merely tokenism or even what philosopher Herbert Marcuse called in the 1960s "repressive tolerance"? We don't put our dissidents in jail, but we deny them access to mass media, make sure no one will listen to them, and then use the fact that they are not in jail and can speak on street corners as evidence that we are the epitome of freedom and democracy.

We even let some dissidents who become famous be honored, but not necessarily for what they were. So American students read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written as an explicit Socialist agitational novel, and are taught to remember Sinclair for the passage of the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts. Martin Luther King is remembered as a good man who preached non-violence toward whites and, either Christ-like or Uncle Tom-like, depending on your ethnic background and point of view, died for the sins of the larger society. His concept of "positive peace," peace with social justice, opposition to the Vietnam War and U.S. military interventionism in his last years, and his campaign to unite all people living in poverty in a national Poor Peoples Movement at the time of his assassination are totally unknown to most of the people who honor him in school rituals and learn about him from the media.

Today the Emma Goldman papers are located at the University of California at Berkeley, scene of the Free Speech movement of 1964-65, which preceded and encouraged many of the youth and student protests of the late 1960s. Clark Kerr was the great villain of the Free Speech movement, but the present Cal administration did something that I am not sure Kerr would have done--censor a fund-raising appeal from the Goldman papers on the grounds that its anti-WWI and pro-free speech quotes were "political" and the university does not take political positions in its fund-raising appeals.

While Clark Kerr in 1964 had attempted to bar students from using campus space to engage in contemporary political activities for civil rights and other issues, the Cal administration today has sought to censor the statements of an historical figure whose whole life was based on politics on the grounds that this interfered with university neutrality in raising money.

First of all, this is very bad business, since no one would contribute a penny to the Emma Goldman papers, except for political reasons. That the anti-war statements may prove useful to opponents of the Bush foreign policy is another issue cited by Cal administration sophists. Of course, the Free Speech movement itself, which today is "honored" at Berkeley, was about making study relevant to contemporary affairs, confronting the ivory tower which overlay the "knowledge factory," as the students called American higher education then.

At the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman was blamed by a section of the yellow press and assorted yahoos for the assassination of President McKinley, because the assassin had attended one of her meetings. In subsequent years she faced assault, numerous arrests, and eventual deportation, although no one in the United States or "Soviet Russia" for that matter was able to shut up Emma, who always understood that free speech didn't mean anything unless you used it. Cal's administration doesn't seem to understand that at all--or understand that the academic freedom of students and scholars is about continuing debate, making the past relevant to the present.

The huge flap their actions produced in the press is evidence that they haven't succeeded in shutting up Emma today. Indeed, I marched with tens of thousands of mostly young people in Washington this past weekend opposing the Bush Iraq policy, echoing Emma in both their statements and their bopping and dancing along to hip drum music. But their actions deserve to be roundly condemned for what they are--an insult to both academic freedom and free speech and a Catch-22 contention that the manuscript collection of one of the most remarkable political women in U.S. history should refrain from making political statements in advertising itself.