the British detained the entire passenger list. On April 15 a mass
meeting of anarchists, socialists, and Industrial Workers of the World
was held at Manhattan Lyceum to make a formal protest to the British
government against their detention. Kerensky asked for their release,
and they were allowed to go on. By this time a second consignment had
left, but by a different route. On April 3 George Brewer, H. Gurin,
Mr. and Mrs. David Rohlis, one Kotz, one Schmidt, one Nemiroff and 27
others left the Pennsylvania Station for Chicago, Vancouver, Japan
and Siberia. On April 23 Comrades Bogdanovitch, Bendetsky, Albert
Greenfield, John (or Ivan) Stepanoff, Michael Smirnoff, Henry Shklar
and 89 more left on the Erie Railroad for Seattle, Japan and Siberia.
On the 12th day of May, “Dynamite Louise” Berg, sister of the anarchist
who was killed July 4, 1914, by the accidental explosion of a bomb,
boarded the steamship _United States_ of the Scandinavian-American Line
in Hoboken for Christiania and Russia. On that ship sailed nearly a
hundred others of the anarchist and revolutionary element. Ninety more,
including Sokoloff, a prominent I. W. W., left for San Francisco
and Japan two days later. On May 26 Mrs. Bill Shatoff, with Alexander
Broide, J. Wishniefsky, and 18 more members of the Coöperative
Anarchist Organization sailed from Hoboken on the _Oskar II_. Two days
passed and Meyer Bell, an anarchist who had seen the inside of many an
American jail for revolutionary agitation, and Mrs. Meyer Bell, with
110 others took their departure for San Francisco and the Orient. The
last consignment but one, a group of 90 more potential Bolsheviki,
followed them on June 24.
[Illustration: Captain John B. Trevor, Military Intelligence]
Shatoff and Wolin waited until their flock had been herded out of
the country, and then vanished themselves. No one knew their route,
but they were heard from in Seattle. Altogether some 600 anarchists
made the pilgrimage. Some never reached Russia. Others who did get
back found that conditions offered slim picking, and the Chinese and
Manchurian ports are sprinkled with them to-day--men without a country,
who cannot live in Russia, and who may not return to the United States.
Those who did get through to the capital of Russia straightway joined
the organization. Trotzky had found Lenine there with plans already
well advanced. The Provisional Government superficially was adequate
to handle the situation, and during June it gave some slight promise
of being able to prosecute its share of the war, but a breach was
coming. A Council of Workmen and Soldiers had sprung up to oppose the
Duma and the government when the Duma voted for an immediate offensive
in Galicia, the Council voted for a separate peace. Kerensky swung
himself back into balance for a month, and led a military offensive. It
turned into a retreat, the retreat into a rout. Korniloff took command
of the army on August 2, and the following day the military governor
of Petrograd was assassinated. The deposed Czar was taken to Siberia.
On September 2 Kerensky tried the expedient of arrest against his
rising enemies in Moscow. On September 16 he proclaimed a new republic,
but political structures could not keep out the terrifying German
military advance that already was threatening Petrograd nor the German
propaganda which was already there. Mid-October saw the government in
flight to Moscow. On the 21st of October Leon Trotzky, at the head of
the Bolsheviki in the Council, declared his party for an immediate
democratic peace, and left the hall at their head, cheering. Municipal
elections on November 1 rejected the Bolsheviki, but they would not be
rejected, and on November 7 the Maximalists deposed Kerensky and took
possession of the Government. Lenine became premier, Trotzky minister
of foreign affairs.
The New York delegation won influential positions under the new
régime. A United States senator has described the current Russian
government as nothing but “Lenine and a gang of anarchists from New
York, Philadelphia and Chicago.” Wolin took charge of a branch of the
press--a sort of commissioner of public misinformation. Shatoff, in
America a humble syndicalist and I. W. W., rose to the eminence of
chairman of the “Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against
Speculators and the Counter Revolution” in Petrograd, a commission
whose activities are perhaps better described by its common title
in the capital. It is called the “Blood and Murder” or the “To the
Wall” committee. He has filled in his spare time as Commissioner of
Railroads, and has been commonly credited in Petrograd with the murder
of the Czar and his family. Ouritzky, Shatoff’s predecessor at the
head of the Committee, had amassed a fortune of some four million
roubles during his tenure of office. He died a violent death. Shatoff,
in October of 1918, had not followed suit. The same John Reed who
contributed to the support of the _Blast_ appeared in Petrograd as a
sympathetic correspondent, and was made consul to New York--a portfolio
which he was unable to use when he returned to New York because of
his indictment, along with Max Eastman and several other editors of
a paper known as _The Masses_, for attempting to obstruct the draft.
The balance of the New York anarchists who made up the expeditionary
force of 1917 found their way, such of them as escaped the rigors of
Petrograd life, into positions of influence in the government of one
hundred or more millions of Russian people. To be sure, their hold is
not too secure, but they are enjoying for the moment a sense of power
which is intoxicating. Nothing seems to please a Bolshevik of the New
York City group more than power--the same thing he tried to overthrow.
I suppose it makes a difference whose power it happens to be.
Neither Goldman nor Berkman returned to Russia. Their publishing and
bookselling business kept them here, and both were always in demand as
lecturers. Both had pictured themselves for many years as the champions
of anarchy in the United States, and it is conceivable that they
did not wish to pass over their sceptres to any less well qualified
successors. Unlike the ringleaders of the I. W. W., these anarchists
did not dodge real work. Both had active minds, and were happiest when
they were busy. Berkman’s writing at times shows a certain cheerful
tenderness underneath its bombast, and Emma Goldman had a rather
good-natured sarcasm at times as a speaker.
The two cast their lot in with the pacifists, the
anti-conscriptionists, and the factions whose chief aim was to
interfere with America’s going to war. Emma began to lecture on the
subject. On the night of May 18 she spoke to a meeting in the Harlem
River Casino. After a preamble advising the audience that government
agents were present and that violence would be out of order, she drew
what she probably considered a logical conclusion from this advice and
shouted:
“And so, friends, we don’t care what people will say about us. We
only care for one thing, and that is to demonstrate to-night, and to
demonstrate as long as we can be able to speak, that when America went
to war ostensibly to fight for democracy, it was a dastardly lie.
It never went to war for democracy!... It is not a war of economic
independence, it is a war for conquest. It is a war for military
power. It is a war for money. It is a war for the purpose of trampling
underfoot every vestige of liberty that you people have worked for,
for the last forty or thirty or twenty-five years, and therefore we
refuse to support such a war....
“We believe in violence and we will use violence.... How many people
are going to refuse to conscript? I say there are enough. I could count
fifty thousand, and there will be more.... They will not register! What
are you going to do if there are 500,000? It will not be such an easy
job, and it will compel the government to sit up and take notice, and
therefore we are going to support, with all the money and publicity at
our hands, all the men who will refuse to register and who will refuse
to fight.
“I hope this meeting is not going to be the last. As a matter of fact
we are planning something else.... We will have a demonstration of all
the people who will not be conscripted, and who will not register. We
are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen,
and no power on earth will stop us.... If there is any man in this hall
that despairs, let him look across at Russia ... and see the wonderful
thing that revolution has done....
“What is your answer? Your answer to war must be a general strike, and
then the governing class will have something on its hands....”
She wound up her speech with an appeal for funds, and said that her
paper, _Mother Earth_, was going to support the rebellion against
the draft law which had been signed by the president that very day.
_Mother Earth_ spoke, in her next issue, which appeared shortly before
registration day, June 5, and spoke in fairly disapproving terms toward
conscription. But the sun went down into New Jersey on registration day
without having witnessed the greatest demonstration New York City ever
saw, or any demonstration whatever save the quiet, cheerful enrollment
of what later became a heroic national army.
On June 15 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in the
office of _Mother Earth_ at 20 East 125th Street. On June 27 they were
arraigned for trial. On July 9 the jury pronounced them guilty of
having attempted to obstruct the draft. Judge Mayer thereupon sentenced
Berkman to two years in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Goldman
to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri for two years,
and fined each of them $10,000. It was a stiff blow to organized
anarchy--the maximum sentence possible, and the judge followed it by
directing the District Attorney, Harold A. Content, to notify the
Commissioner of Labor of the conviction, in order that when the two
emerged from prison, they might be deported as aliens convicted of two
or more crimes to the country from which they came, bringing uplift to
down-trodden America.
Their work has since been carried on in a more or less desultory way.
They, too, have become official martyrs to the cause, whose names will
be inscribed along with those of Brescia, the Haymarket murderers, and
a score of others, on the anarchist service flag. The undercurrent
of opposition appeared spasmodically during the war and it became
necessary for an Alabama Judge, sitting in the District Court of New
York, on October 25, 1918, to impose maximum sentences under the
espionage act upon three more advocates of unrest, Jacob Abrams, Samuel
Lipman and Hyman Lachnowsky, the ringleaders of a group who circulated
leaflets denouncing armed intervention in Russia and advocating a
general strike. They were sentenced to twenty years apiece; a fourth
member got three years and a $1,000 fine. A woman in the group, Mollie
Steiner, was sentenced to fifteen years.
The efforts at “demonstration” which the imported anarchists in America
have employed are neither as picturesque nor as popularly received as
those of their comrades in the old world. Anarchy is out of tune in
America. Prussianism has already had its answer from the United States.
Bolshevism is not for a well-educated, deep-breathing nation like ours.
And anarchy, the poorest wretch of the three, must make terrifying
faces through some other window than that of a country full of people
who are going to continue to make this democracy safe for itself.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
changed. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
Transcribers improved readability of some numbers in some
illustrations, and switched the transcribed sequence of the text of one
pair of “random pages” (following page 26) to make it easier to follow.
Transcriber corrected the Title page misspelling of “SMALLL, MAYNARD &
COMPANY” to “SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY”, which is how it appears on the
Copyright page.
Transcriber removed redundant book title just above the title of the
first chapter.