Emma Goldman, "Mother Earth," and the Anarchist Awakening

Rachel Hsu

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780268200282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Anarchisme

This book unveils the history and impact of an unprecedented anarchist awakening in early twentieth-century America. Mother Earth, an anarchist monthly published by Emma Goldman, played a key role in sparking and spreading the movement around the world.

One of the most important figures in revolutionary politics in the early twentieth century, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was essential to the rise of political anarchism in the United States and Europe. But as Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu makes clear in this book, the work of Goldman and her colleagues at the flagship magazine Mother Earth (1906–1917) resonated globally, even into the present day. As a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States in the late nineteenth century, Goldman developed a keen voice and ideology based on labor strife and turbulent politics of the era. She ultimately was deported to Russia due to agitating against World War I. Hsu takes a comprehensive look at Goldman's impact and legacy, tracing her work against capitalism, advocacy for feminism, and support of homosexuality and atheism.

Hsu argues that Mother Earth stirred an unprecedented anarchist awakening, inspiring an antiauthoritarian spirit across social, ethnic, and cultural divides and transforming U.S. radicalism. The magazine's broad readership—immigrant workers, native-born cultural elite, and professionals in various lines of work—was forced to reflect on society and their lives. Mother Earth spread the gospel of anarchism while opening it to diversified interpretations and practices. This anarchist awakening was more effective on personal and intellectual levels than on the collective, socioeconomic level.

Hsu explores the fascinating history of Mother Earth, headquartered in New York City, and captures a clearer picture of the magazine's influence by examining the dynamic teamwork that occurred beyond Goldman. The active support of foreign revolutionaries fostered a borderless radical network that resisted all state and corporate powers. Emma Goldman, "Mother Earth, " and the Anarchist Awakening will attract readers interested in early twentieth-century history, transnational radicalism, and cosmopolitan print culture, as well as those interested in anarchism, anti-militarism, labor activism, feminism, and Emma Goldman.

Part 1

PRACTICES

CHAPTER 1

Headquarters Stance

A Proposition.—Would it not be wiser to explain theories out of life and not life out of theories?

—Mother Earth, March 1906

In 1906, Emma Goldman reoriented herself and anarchism in the field of radical culture by publishing Mother Earth, from which evolved a communal lifestyle, an inclusive approach to propaganda, and a transformed understanding of anarchism. As Mother Earth’s sole proprietor, publisher, and main editor, Goldman rightly claimed it as her “baby” and located the magazine’s office in her lodging place, which had moved across Manhattan over the years.¹ Out of either financial concern or editorial convenience, she housed an increasing number of people toiling for the magazine in her flat. Their cohabitation bonded them in an unconventional, counternormative “Mother Earth family,” an alternative kin group that fused their living, social, textual, and activist spaces for their anarchist cause. Goldman courted native middle-class intellectuals with various activities in order to facilitate an overall social reconstruction. Interactions between Mother Earth’s members and the new intellectual audience expanded the anarcho-communist radius beyond its original immigrant, labor, and ghetto circles. With this subtle but significant move, Goldman strove to gain better ground for anarchist propaganda, which had been stifled in American society.

The working and networking of the Mother Earth family in its headquarters featured an unusually permeable spatiality for anarchist communism. Tom Goyens has stressed the importance of examining the “spatial practices” of such oppositional groups as anarchists. His study of German immigrant anarchists in New York from 1880 to 1914 discusses the “spatial countercommunity” that they formed while engaging in their public campaign for anarchism.² Goyens details the lifeworld of these anarchists, “[who] existed physically in a space replete with its own signifiers, symbols, and rituals,” which could be understood as demonstrations of the anarchist habitus.³ Habitus, to quote Bourdieu, implies a “sense of one’s place.”⁴ More than habit or socialization, habitus inherits the personal/collective past (family, ethnic, and class history, for example) of individuals or groups to inform their present thoughts, decisions, and actions. For such anarcho-communists as those portrayed in Goyens’s book, or Goldman and her comrades, their habitus carried the trace of their anarchist genealogy, as well as the stigmatized image of anarchists, to shape their self-identity and movements in American society. Goyens’s study of the German immigrants’ anarchist habitus brings to light a “culture of defiance” sustained by an active but rather closed social network in distinction from nonanarchist German immigrants and other groups.⁵ Mother Earth’s anarchist habitus, as I explain, structured its headquarters and propaganda in a different way.

This chapter explicates what I term the headquarters stance of Mother Earth as the basis for understanding core members’ lifestyle and performance in the urban space of New York City. Stances—namely, “position-takings”—were “practices and expressions of agents,” according to Bourdieu, as opposed (and also in relation) to their positions in society.⁶ “Stance” indicates the subjective roles one adopts, while “position” refers to the objective probabilities of one’s social space generated by the volumes and forms of capital that one could possess.⁷ “Stance” reflects the options that are open to individuals or groups to modify or maintain their social position. For scholars like Hanna-Mari Husu, who applies Bourdieu’s theory to the study of social movements, organizations “differentiate themselves on the basis of the stances they assume in respect to strategy, goals, and identity.”⁸ Drawing on this conceptual framework, I characterize the headquarters stance as the choices that core members made for their strategy, goals, and identity as they practiced and preached anarchism in New York. These choices involved the behaviors, attitudes, and agendas of Goldman and her cohabiting comrades as they operated Mother Earth’s production to spread anarchist messages. A systematic study of Mother Earth’s headquarters stance reveals core members’ anarchist practices and expressions in a complex interplay of their dispositions, resources, and social environment. While core members freely adopted their roles as individuals, together they helped present to the public a headquarters stance that was basically consistent with Goldman’s choices. Thus, I highlight Goldman’s stance as the embodiment of the strategy, goals, and identity that she intended her magazine to adopt with regard to the activities orbiting its headquarters.

Goldman’s stance during the Mother Earth years, I argue, exhibited an adaptable approach integrated into her habitus to take a better position for anarchist propaganda. Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, some scholars point out, is more of a durable nature that cannot fully elucidate individual/group agency and creativity in making (or responding to) personal or social change.⁹ The sociologist Chris Shilling deconstructs Bourdieu’s class-based notion of habitus into three “contingent and relational” modalities of action to highlight “the social shaping of our embodiment” as well as “the individual mediation of these experiences.”¹⁰ These modalities—habitual action, embodied crisis, and creative revelation—allow us to better grasp an individual’s or group’s structured, reflective, and innovative actions in continuity and change. Shilling’s revision of Bourdieu’s concept is instrumental to grasping how Goldman’s stance was informed not only by her anarchist disposition but also by her personal reflection under crisis and move to improve her anarchist social status. Goldman’s experience cooperating with middle-class intellectuals in 1903 and 1904 revealed to her a new prospect for propagating anarchism.¹¹ While her mind-set, values, and lifestyle—including her ethnocultural choice of Mother Earth’s office locations—remained deeply rooted in her anarchist habitus, she tried to turn the antianarchist crisis into an opportunity to expand the influence of anarchism. Goldman consciously adjusted the conventional mode of anarchist thought and action to better position anarchist propaganda in a competitive milieu. She did so by acquiring symbolic capital and social capital with Mother Earth’s multiform production.¹² By winning the support of respectable or cultured people for anarchism, Goldman sought legitimacy or recognition (symbolic capital) and a broadened social network (social capital) for her propaganda work in the field of radical culture.

Goldman’s creative adaptation oriented the headquarters stance of Mother Earth toward a multiethnic and cross-class public, which attested to a broader propaganda effect of anarchism. In contrast to the self-sufficiency, closeness, and homogeneity of the German anarchist community depicted by Goyens, the Mother Earth family exhibited openness, inclusion, and ethnic diversity. The ideological and spatial receptivity of the Mother Earth family to various othernesses set itself apart from other monoethnic, anarchist-exclusive, or rural communities.¹³ Beyond its office, core members located a range of venues to organize “family” events such as annual reunions, balls, and a variety of anniversaries. They developed the headquarters stance toward a common cause, diverse agendas, and versatile strategies to jointly create alternative spaces in the capitalist-dominant urban setting as they forged an anarchist identity and expanded support for anarchism. Core members’ efforts to produce texts and set up contexts revolving around the headquarters, as we shall see, gave rise to a new situation for repositioning anarchism in Progressive America.

TRIAL OF A PREFIGURED LIFESTYLE:
MOTHER EARTH FAMILY AT ITS HEADQUARTERS

The core of the Mother Earth family in its headquarters formed a voluntary kinship and multiethnic commune committing to anarchist propaganda. By publishing Mother Earth from her flat while housing several members to live and work together, Goldman made its headquarters a justifiable household.¹⁴ As the feminist scholar Clare Hemmings remarks, by depicting these associates as “family” members caring for her “baby,” Goldman had in mind a nonconformist bond to “challenge limited understandings of kinship as a prop of capitalism and nationalism.” Long before Goldman envisioned what Hemmings calls “universal kinship” when she married James Colton (a Welsh anarchist miner) during her exile in Britain in 1925, she had tried communal life, first in the early 1890s and then with the Mother Earth core members.¹⁵ Bound not by blood or marriage but by choice to work toward a common goal, the members living in Mother Earth’s office related to Goldman as (ex-)lover, friend, comrade, auntie, and mentor.¹⁶ As Hemmings writes, Goldman “foreground[ed] empathy and loyalty as central to this understanding of universal kinship.” As Goldman opened her flat to conjure up a Mother Earth kin group with anarchist spirits, she both demonstrated and expected fraternity and solidarity from the members.¹⁷

The first trial of this new kinship took place at Goldman’s flat at 210 East 13th Street (referred to hereafter as 210), the birthplace of Mother Earth (fig. 4). Upon her arrival in New York alone in August 1889, Goldman settled on the Lower East Side, a Russian Jewish enclave.¹⁸ Her numerous, mostly involuntary moves from one residence to the next across Manhattan reflected her vulnerability as an anarchist agitator. The worst situation occurred in 1901, after Leon Czolgosz’s assassination of President McKinley implicated Goldman.¹⁹ Police soon arrested her but later released her for lack of evidence. The stigma that burdened Goldman, however, kept her from finding lodgings and from using her real name.²⁰ During this period, she started to associate with white middle-class liberal figures beyond radical and immigrant circles. The rental flat that Goldman moved into in 1903, 210, was no stranger to a social mixture of new nonanarchist friends and old comrades. In early 1906, Goldman and her comrades and friends met in 210 and gave birth to her magazine venture.²¹

In opening her living space at 210 to a diverse group of inhabitants, Emma was experimenting with a prefigured communal lifestyle that was structured by her anarchist habitus and strained financial circumstances.²² “Prefiguration,” a core concept of anarchism, refers to various practices of antiauthoritarian organization, tactics, epistemology, and ethics in the here and now, before the arrival of anarchy.²³ The unorthodox family of Mother Earth stood for an anarchist attempt to prefigure a new way of intimate cohabitation liberated from political, legal, or religious restraints. Emma constantly took in comrades, friends, strangers, and even vagabonds, turning the narrow space of 210 into a communal haven. Emma’s niece Stella Ballantine first came to 210 around 1905; her friend Max Baginski and his family soon followed. Max was a German émigré anarchist and seasoned journalist from Chicago. He became Mother Earth’s first editor and strongly supported Emma’s incorporation of art and drama into anarchist propaganda. From 1906 on, teenage radical Rebecca (Becky) Edelsohn, old comrade Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, and new lover, Ben Reitman, moved into 210 one after another. Harry Kelly and Hippolyte Havel, both good friends of Emma, came to 210 almost daily to work for the magazine. Becky and Sasha were Russian Jewish immigrants, like Emma. Ben, born in the United States to a poor Russian Jewish immigrant family, had been a hobo since his youth, yet managed to earn a medical degree; the native-born Harry came from a Christian family and later became a printer; Havel, of Czech (then Bohemian) origin, had been imprisoned for his anarchist activism before immigrating to the United States.²⁴ None of them were free from fin...