Exile
Emma Goldman, 1869 - 1940
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After intermittent visits across Europe and Canada, Goldman settled in St. Tropez, France, in 1928. For several years, she lived and wrote in a cottage called "Bon Esprit," purchased for her with the help of Peggy Guggenheim.
After intermittent visits across Europe and Canada, Goldman settled in St. Tropez, France, in 1928. For several years, she lived and wrote in a cottage called "Bon Esprit," purchased for her with the help of Peggy Guggenheim.
With the exception of a brief ninety-day lecture tour in 1934, Goldman spent the remaining years of her life in exile from the United States, wandering through Sweden, Germany, France, England, Spain and Canada in a futile search for a new political "home." In order to obtain the security of British citizenship, she married an elderly Welsh coal miner in 1925, but the marriage was only a formality.
In the 1920s and 1930s, while struggling economically and frustrated by the restrictions her status as an exile imposed on her political activities, Goldman engaged in a variety of literary projects. The most notable of these endeavors was her thousand-page autobiography, published in 1931 as Living My Life. In the early 1930s, Goldman also became increasingly concerned about the rising tide of fascism and Nazism. For the next several years, she lectured frequently on the imminent dangers posted by Hitler and his fellow fascists.
When the Spanish Civil War erupted in July 1936, Goldman hurled herself into the Loyalist cause with an enthusiasm reminiscent of her early activist years in America. Anarchists had succeeded in winning broad popular support in parts of Spain, and when Goldman visited collectivized towns and farms in Aragon and the Levante, she was electrified by what seemed to her to be the beginnings of a true anarchist revolution.
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C.N.T. - A.I.T. - F.A.I.
SERVICE INTERNATIONAL D'INFORMATION DE PRESSE
INTERNATIONAL PRESS SERVICE
INTERNATIONALER NACHRICHTENDIENST
Casa C.N.T. -- F.A.I. -- Via Layetana, 32 y 34 -- BARCELONA
September 25th, 1936
Emma Goldman's first address to the Spanish comrades at a mass-meeting attended by ten thousand people.
Dear Comrades!
I greet you in the name of our comrades in England, the United States and Canada. We outside of Spain have already been given a new impetus by your great courage in the battle you are making against fascism and for our ideas. All of us are determined to aid you with all our energies and to the last drop of our blood until you have triumphed in your grand and wonderful aim.
I realize as do all the comrades in Europe and the States do that you must first concentrate your efforts to drive out of Spain the black and sinister forces that are threatening your liberty, and that are holding the people in many countries by the throat. In freeing Spain from this devastating [sic] scourge you will also break the backbone from fascism in the rest of the world. Your splendid battle is, therefore of universal scope and magnitude. I know only too well the fortitude needed, the concecration [sic], and the tremendous power of endurance to bring such a task as yours to victory. But also I know that you have all these qualifications and that you will succeed.
I am in your midst only a few days. But thanks to the solidarity and cooperation of the CNT and FAI, I have already been placed in a position to learn that over and above your struggle to crush fascism you are laying great stress on the constructive side of your battle. The factories, I visited and the houses you have requisioned [sic] for your great task are in perfect condition and order as if there had been no pitched battles with our enemies in Barcelona. Work and life has continued under your supervision perhaps better than under the old owners. You have thereby proven that our grand teacher Michael Bakunin was right when he said that the spirit of destruction is also the spirit of construction. And you have done more. You have branded as villainous misrepresentations the charges in many papers that Anarchism is a chaotic theory -- that it has no program -- that it is only bent on wreck and ruin. In the face of danger and death you have already demonstrated that Anarchism is the most constructive social philosophy, worth living, fighting and if need be dying for.
You comrades of Barcelona and Cataluna in general are giving a shining example to the workers of the rest of the world, that you fully understand the meaning of revolution. For, you have learned through past mistakes that unless the revolutionary forces succeed in feeding, clothing and sheltering xx the people during the revolutionary period the revolution is doomed to ruin. For, its strength and its security lie not in the state, or in the political power of parties but in the constructive efforts during the fighting period. Your marvellous [sic] experiment will and must succeed. But whether it does or xxxx fails, you are planting new roots deeply in the soil of Spain, in the hearts and minds of your people, and in the hearts and minds of the oppressed all over the world.
I have come to you as to my own. For your ideal has been my ideal for forty five years and it will remain to my last breath. My one desire is to be a part, great or small, in the grandious [sic] battle you are making. Long live the CNT! Long live the FAI! Long live your fight for the liberation of humanity!
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Emma Goldman speaking about the Spanish anarchists at a May Day rally in Hyde Park, London, May 1, 1937.
Emma Goldman speaking about the Spanish anarchists at a May Day rally in Hyde Park, London, May 1, 1937.
Goldman soon became the London representative of the National Confederation of Labor and the Anarchist Federation of Iberia (CNT-FAI), directing the English-language press service and propaganda bureau for the Spanish anarchists. She worked tirelessly, writing hundreds of letters to supporters and editors. Dismayed but not vanquished by Franco's triumph in early 1939, she moved to Canada, where she worked to gain asylum for Spanish refugees and helped foreign-born radicals threatened with deportation to fascist countries.
Notes:
- Information from "Emma Goldman in Exile," "Emma Goldman and the Spanish Civil War," and "Biographical Essay on Emma Goldman" on the website of the Emma Goldman Papers, accessed March 18, 2002, available at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Exhibition/exile.html, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Exhibition/spanishcivilwar.html, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Curricula/bioessay.html.
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