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Article Excerpt
Emma Goldman visited and lectured in Winnipeg on five separate occasions: first in 1907, twice in 1908, again in 1927, and finally in late-1939, just five months before her death on 14 May 1940. (2) The Lithuanian-born Jewish revolutionary and pioneer feminist was not yet forty years old when she first came to Winnipeg, but she was already the most famous, or more precisely, infamous anarchist in North America. The newspapers of the day invariably labelled her "Red Emma," or bestowed upon her grandiose, half-mocking titles such as "High Priestess of Anarchy" or "Anarchist Queen." At first glance, Winnipeg might seem an unlikely destination for the person who J. Edgar Hoover called "the most dangerous woman in America." But Emma Goldman was a tireless activist, writer, and public speaker, one who lectured from coast-to-coast for much of her life, and it is not difficult to see what first drew her to the city.
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Winnipeg was a colonial boomtown in the early twentieth-century. According to one estimate, it had about 90,000 people in 1906, and probably over 100,000 the following year--making it one of the largest population centres in Canada at that time, and the fourth most important manufacturing centre in the Dominion. (3) Winnipeg was the "gateway" to the "northwest" for arriving immigrants, and every other day the local newspapers featured front-page stories announcing the arrival of ships to eastern ports, as well as trainloads of new arrivals bound for points west. (4) Who these immigrants were was a matter of deep anxiety for the largely WASP elite, as exemplified even by relatively progressive voices like J. S. Woodsworth, (5) not to mention debates within the pages of the local labour weekly The Voice. (6) Anglo elites in Winnipeg, and prominent "national" figures, such as Minister of Interior Clifford Sifton and railway magnate William Van Home, sought to replicate "British-style" institutions in the northwest, and fill the Prairies with "the right class" of "settlers"--meaning, those of "Nordic" or "Anglo-Saxon" stock, followed by a descending hierarchy of "less desirable" types based on assumed racial, cultural, and religious criteria. (7)
Most of the new arrivals were, not coincidentally, British, or English-speakers from elsewhere in Canada or the United States--and in terms of the prevailing imperial perspective of the day, such people were often characterized as the true "natives" of the land. (8) But Canadian expansionists were also torn between their ideal (and typically racist) imperial visions, and their pragmatism when it came to the logistics of continental expansion, or when it came to the "needs" of industry for cheap labour. Significant numbers of Scandinavians, Italians, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, and European Jews were also arriving, and other cultural groups in smaller numbers--seeking land or wage-work, or both, in what was often viewed as a "free" or "vacant" land of "opportunity." Before and after the completion of the continental railway, dozens of colonies of Jews, Icelanders, Mennonites, Doukhobors, and other ethnic, cultural or religious groups were founded in Manitoba and the Prairies, and this process continued into the twentieth-century. For example, as Roz Usiskin notes, after the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia, and renewed Tsarist pogroms, a new wave of Jewish immigration to Canada occurred. (9) The ruling class was more than happy to utilize such immigrants, many of whom were unskilled or semi-skilled, as a weapon against skilled labour and established labour organizations. (10)
A significant minority of these new immigrants (Jewish and otherwise) had been dissidents and revolutionaries in their home countries, and brought with them, if not openly socialist or anarchist views, then often radical notions of labour organizing, and experience with strikes and unions. While English-speaking elites were trying to maintain their self-appointed privileges, and make enormous profits through control of colonization, local government, investments, access to patronage positions and resource-extraction leases, as well as early land acquisition and speculation, more marginalized immigrants brought with them their own visions of rights and justice. They formed trade and farmers' unions to protect their interests, engaged in strikes, formed cooperatives and mutual aid societies, and even established their own schools and newspapers-partly along cultural and religious lines, but also on the bases of class and ideology. It was in 1907, for example, that Jewish radicals formed their own Arbeiter Ring ("Workers' Circle") local in Winnipeg, a mutual aid society that had as its ultimate goal the abolition of capitalism, and its replacement by some kind of "socialist" society. (11) It was precisely this sector of Winnipeg's radical community that invited Emma Goldman--the most famous anarchist in North America--to speak that very same year.
Before discussing some of the details of Goldman's first visit, it is important to emphasize that colonial society--despite its internal divisions, and despite the bitter class war that is often rendered invisible by narratives of "peaceful settlement" and "nation-building" in Canadian historiography--was in fact, fairly united in one critical domain: its willingness to instigate, ignore or profit from, the ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples. Bryan Palmer was no doubt correct to suggest that the working-class--despite its transformation from a largely skilled and "overwhelmingly Anglo-American" labour force, to a much more diverse (culturally and linguistically) and less-skilled labour force--"remained a distinct entity, with a culture marked off from that of its rulers." (12) However, it was also true that poor and marginalized immigrants, regardless of whether or not they were fleeing tyranny elsewhere, and regardless of the degree of their "revolutionary" ideals, as well as their level of hostility to the rise of monopoly capitalism, were nevertheless colonizers, seeking land and prosperity of their own. As such, rich or poor, they were also a "distinct entity, with a culture marked off" from that of indigenous peoples. As colonizers, they were generally disinclined to worry about the dispossession of the original owners of the land, except insofar as this might generate violent resistance. (13) In many ways, Emma Goldman's visits to Winnipeg in 1907-1908 highlight this point, and speak to some of the contradictions within "classical" Anarchism (and to be fair, within every current of revolutionary thought) in relation to settler-colonialism and indigenous peoples. (14)
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Before Emma Goldman ever got to Winnipeg, news of her pending visit and planned lectures made the mainstream media--perhaps understandably, in her case, due to the attempt to link her to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (15) A full week before her arrival, The Manitoba Free Press published a lengthy story that read more like a press release from supporters than the typical corporate media denunciations: "Citizens of Winnipeg are to have opportunities next week of hearing Emma Goldman of New York, the great Jewish lady orator, who is now making a tour of the United States and Canada." The article outlined the titles of her five planned subjects, the location of the talks (at the James Avenue Trades Hall), the languages that each would be given in, and ended with a brief biographical description and a quote from one of her talks in Toronto, to the effect that "All natural wealth is due to the production of the working classes. If God has given the world for all, no man has a right to exclude any from it to ... his own self-aggrandisement." (16)
On 6 April, four days before her arrival, the Manitoba Free Press, published another article entitled "Preaching Anarchy" and sub-titled "Emma Goldman's Doctrine as Promulgated in Toronto." The piece quoted Goldman as saying, in part:
Government is always on the side of the rich against the poor, of the strong against the weak, of the robbers against the robbed. Therefore, anarchy intends to destroy government, and allow each man to be a law unto himself, unrestrained by any form of coercion. Every human being will then be able to enjoy the fullest extent of self-expression and gratify his own desires, unrestricted except by his own respect for the rights of others.
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This time, however, the Free Press chose to end with a note of sarcasm, saying: "Curiously enough, the subject of Miss Goldman's address was 'Misconceptions about Anarchism,' and yet her description of anarchy and the view entertained of it by the public are wonderfully alike." (17)
The morning of Goldman's arrival on Wednesday, 10 April, both the Winnipeg Tribune and Manitoba Free Press had lengthy exposes on Goldman's life, views, and local lectures. The Free Press piece, sub-titled "Well Known Woman Anarchist to Deliver Addresses Here This Week," reiterated the basic facts of her lecture itinerary, but also stated that Goldman "is being brought to the city by the Radical Club of Winnipeg, which is made up largely of Hebrew people. There are, however, a number of English members in the organization, and also a number of Galicians." (18) The article also quoted an unnamed "officer" of this "Radical Club" stating that "everywhere" Goldman speaks she
is heard by large audiences of people, especially of the working classes. All that she stands for is freedom and justice, and when the ideas which she advocates triumph, the world will be very much happier and better than it is at the present time. (19)
The Winnipeg Tribune article of that same day was given prominent placement on the front page. A large sub-title read: "Emma Goldman, Apostle of Anarchy Tells What the Philosophy of Anarchism is and What Would Happen if Anarchy Was in Place of Artificial Laws...." This article was actually based on an interview by a beat journalist with the Tribune, who went to meet Goldman after the paper received a formal invitation. The article began with the obligatory joke about bomb-throwing, and the journalist's trepidation at meeting such a notorious woman, who must surely have been "a swarthy Amazon, six feet or more tall, and with a voice like sounding brass." He was surprised, however, to find Goldman to be "a small woman, with a soft voice and ready smile, but withal, of seriousness quite fitting to one who preaches a gospel so new that it has not yet advanced beyond the stage of persecution and unbelief...." The interviewer then felt the need to inject his own gendered assessment of Goldman's character. He wrote that Goldman "has the true womanly presence and charm of her sex ... [and that] freedom of speech and the unburdened expression of thought increases, in the fair sex, in inverse proportion to the size of the individual." (20)
The transcript of the interview was wide ranging, beginning with the details of her lectures in Winnipeg. Goldman herself was quoted as saying:
I shall deliver five lectures while I am here, all at the Trades Hall, and they will be open to all who choose to come. These lectures have been arranged by the Society of Anarchists of this city, and the subjects of two of these talks have been announced. The other three will be given in the German language and will be upon the following subjects: "Crimes of Parents and Educators," "Direct Action versus Legislation" and "The Position of the Jews in Russia." (21)
The first two talks that Goldman alluded to were two of her staple lectures: "Misconceptions About Anarchism" and "The Spirit of Revolt in the Modern Drama." The interview also touched on items as diverse as the cold Winnipeg weather, and Goldman's life in New York, to past tours of Europe, to Kropotkin, opposition and support for her...
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