Steve Fraser writes:

Subsequent volumes will doubtless document these journeys, but Falk’s first two end in 1909, at the height of Goldman’s fame in the US, when she was being heard by perhaps 75,000 people a year and read, or read about, by many more. Her reception in mainstream America was strikingly ambivalent. Police affidavits at the time of her first arrest describe ‘one Emma Goldman being an evil disposed and pernicious person and of turbulent disposition’. Newspapers portrayed her as the ‘Priestess of Anarchism’, presiding over ‘savage reds’, ‘hard-faced, half-clad men’ gathered in an ‘anarchist drinking den’. More than twenty years after the Paris Commune, she was still described as a pétroleuse when she addressed a demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square. Because Czolgosz had attended an anarchist rally at which Goldman spoke not long before he shot McKinley, the media called for her head, the Chicago Tribune describing her as a ‘wrinkled, ugly Russian woman, who owns no god, has no religion, would kill all rulers, overthrow all laws, and who inspired McKinley’s assassination’. As an immigrant, a woman, an anarchist and a Jew, Goldman’s very person seemed to signal the end of civilisation as the bourgeoisie understood it.

(LRB 26 February 2009)

Illinois | hardback 641 pp. |ISBN: 9780252075438