Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz

Posted by Sappho on May 23rd, 2005 filed in Anarchism

Emma Goldman did not believe in assassinating government officials in the US. Assassination, she thought, was a reasonable tool against a Tsar, but not against a President. Her reasoning, though, was a bit different from the reasoning her adopted country might have liked her to give. The difference between presidents and Tsars is supposed to be that we elect the President. We have a voice in choosing him and his policies, and therefore, living in a democracy, with rule of law, and not in a tyranny, we have no reason to use violence against our own government. Emma Goldman, anarchist cynic that she was, believed none of this. Rather, she believed that, in the US, the President was the mere tool of Wall Street, and that it was better to spend your time and energy countering more direct representatives of economic oppression. As she said on one occasion, before the assassination of McKinley, when challenged on her views:

As to killing rulers, it depends entirely on the position of the ruler. If it is the Russian Tsar, I most certainly believe in dispatching him to where he belongs. If the ruler is as ineffectual as an American president, it is hardly worth the effort.

Though Emma Goldman had never seen the use of assassinating an American president, she found herself trying to organize a defense for a man she barely knew, who had done just that.

Goldman didn’t even know Czolgosz by name when she saw the first newspaper headline accusing her of inciting him to assassinate McKinley. She soon learned, though, that she had, in fact, met the man briefly, and knew him as a young man going by the name of Nieman who was eager to get in touch with anarchists. Goldman had linked him with her anarchist friends, who found him suspicious “because he constantly talked about acts of violence.”

Now this young man stood in danger of execution, and Goldman couldn’t help seeing in him the younger face of her dear Sasha, who had undertaken a similar desperate act against a different man. She had no wish for McKinley (at this time still alive but near death) to die, but nor did she want the solitary young man who “did it for the working people” to be altogether without defense – even though she herself was put under arrest for an involvement she didn’t have in the case.

Goldman wrote later of her response at the time:

[A reporter] was quite amazed when I assured him that in my professional capacity I would take care of McKinley if I were called upon to nurse him, though my sympathies were with Czolgosz. “You’re a puzzle, Emma Goldman,” he said, “I can’t understand you. You sympathize with Czolgosz, yet you would nurse the man he tried to kill. “As a reported you aren’t expected to understand human complexities,” I informed him. “Now listen and see if you can get it. The boy in Buffalo is a creature at bay. Millions of people are ready to spring on him and tear him limb from limb. He committed the act for no personal reasons or gain. He did it for what is his ideal: the good of the people. That is why my sympathies are with him. On the other hand,” I continued, “William McKinley, suffering and probably near death, is merely a human being to me now. That is why I would nurse him.”

Next and final post in the series on the evolution of Emma Goldman’s views on violence: Emma Goldman in the Soviet Union.