All About Emma : Letters: 'Red Emma' Goldman espoused the eight-hour workday, contraceptives and 'free love,' but the woman behind the public image was tormented by jealousy and doubt.

By JOHN BOUDREAU

July 31, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

BERKELEY — “I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown in jail,” anarchist Emma Goldman declared in 1916 after being locked up for lecturing on birth control, “but I never will be silent.”

More than half a century after she died in exile, “Red Emma”--an audacious orator once branded the most dangerous woman in the United States by J. Edgar Hoover--speaks today to a nation grown suspicious of government.

In high schools and universities across the country, Goldman’s words on equality and on freedom of expression and choice are stirring new interest. UC Berkeley has released a 69-reel microfilm collection of 30,000 of her letters and other documents and is working on a two-volume book of her best material.

“This was somebody who looked straight into the fire of the contradictions around her, who endured a lifetime of harassment for her political beliefs and still came out triumphant,” says Candace Falk, director of the Emma Goldman Papers at UC Berkeley. “Many of the rights of freedom of expression people enjoy today were won because of the willingness of people like Goldman to speak up for their beliefs.”

Goldman, Falk believes, “was the Madonna of the turn of the century. She wanted to push people’s buttons.”

Adds Joan Jensen, professor of women’s history at New Mexico State University: “She was greatly feared by people who opposed change.”

Goldman battled censorship, rallied the masses around women’s reproductive rights and called for acceptance of gays and lesbians, in the process becoming one of America’s first female media celebrities. Among her famous correspondents were Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Lincoln Steffens, Sinclair Lewis, Helen Keller, V. I. Lenin and Albert Einstein.

“This is a time when people hunger for historical figures who resonate more with the world they live in,” Falk says. “I think her basic message is this: Any freedom that one wins has to constantly be fought for.”

“The issues of her times are similar to those of our times,” agrees Neil Anstead, academic director of the Los Angeles’ Unified School District’s Humanitas Program, which started a Goldman curriculum earlier this year. “She’s fighting against the system. She’s a very romantic figure in that regard.”

But despite her reputation as a firebrand, the real Goldman also was a woman tormented by jealousy and doubt, the collection shows. Through her prolific letters, readers come to see the feisty revolutionary who espoused the eight-hour workday, contraceptives and “free love” but who was haunted by depression and anguish over her blatantly promiscuous longtime lover, Dr. Ben Reitman.

Falk, 45, is a longtime feminist admirer of Goldman whose office in the headquarters of the UC Berkeley researchers, an off-campus cottage, is filled with copies of virtually every letter the anarchist wrote. The walls are plastered with photos: police mug shots, a picture of Goldman addressing a sea of men in New York’s Union Square, a portrait of Reitman. Strewn about are Emma Goldman coffee mugs and a poster announcing a series of her lectures.

In 1975, while visiting a friend in Chicago, she stumbled onto a box that had been owned by Reitman and stuffed with Goldman’s steamy, sorrowful love letters. At first, Falk couldn’t believe the tone and topics of the letters from “Mommy” to “Hobo”--Goldman’s nickname for Reitman.

“When I first started to read the letters,” Falk recalls, “I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t Emma Goldman.’ I expected the letters to be very victorious, like the woman on the platform speaking of total freedom and openness.” In fact, “the letters were very jealous. She said his letters to her were like a narcotic: They made her heart beat faster, but they put her brain to sleep. And she had these terrible moments of feeling her life was not meaningful.”

Falk adds: “A lot of people think they know her, or else they’ve never heard of her. It’s fascinating for people to see she was just like anyone else.”

Meanwhile, Goldman’s tortured scribblings fill page after page. “Dearest,” she wrote Reitman in 1909, “do you know that creepy, slimy, treacherous thing doubt? Have you ever been seized by it? Has your soul ever suffered its sting, your brain ever experienced its horror-beating force?”

Some letters contain passionate desire, others the pain of betrayal.

“I believe she sometimes wrote to calm herself down,” says Falk. “After her lectures late at night, she’d be all hyped up from dealing with enormous audiences. She would often write to Reitman, even if he was in the same town, because she felt she could write out her heart to him.”

For his part, Reitman did little to hide his promiscuousness.

“She would be giving a lecture on misconceptions of free love in a huge auditorium--free love for her was more like serial monogamy--and Reitman would stand in a corner and watch to see if he could find a woman to pick up,” Falk says.

“He would find someone, they would leave and she would know they were having an affair while she was speaking. He would come back a little later in the evening and she would have hundreds of people surrounding her, but all along she would feel so humiliated.”

The 10-year relationship finally ended in 1917 when Reitman, who had also been jailed for disseminating birth-control information, impregnated another woman.

Initially, Falk says, she was reluctant to expose Goldman’s private life. In one letter, Goldman wrote: “If anyone ever saw these letters, I’d feel naked before the world.” Then Falk discovered another, in which Goldman indicated a desire that her life be an example for others.

Indeed, Goldman was always searching for a harmonious, hopeful life. In 1885, at 16, she set sail from Russia for the United States looking for the promised land. She quickly became dismayed, though, with the dismal conditions of life in New York City joined the anarchist movement.

From that point on, life was anything but harmonious. She began her public agitation on a number of social issues in 1890 and, a few years later, was accused along with Alexander Berkman, a fellow anarchist who also was her lover, of the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick of the Carnegie Steel Co.

Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison for shooting and wounding Frick, who in 1892 had provoked a bloody feud with workers. Goldman, who was arrested but later released, added a speech against violence to her repertoire.

For nearly three decades she traveled across the nation, filling auditoriums and city squares with her fiery rhetoric, until she was deported to Russia in 1919 after inveighing against World War I and the draft.

Goldman, who viewed the 1917 Russian Revolution as the dawn of a just society, became disillusioned after Lenin told her that free speech was merely “a bourgeois notion.”

After only two years, she left Russia again for several countries, including Germany, England and Canada, while warning the world about the Bolshevik regime--to the chagrin of many on the left.

“Goldman was never politically correct,” Falk says. “She always thought independently and risked being an outcast.”

In 1934, the Roosevelt Administration allowed Goldman to return to the United States for a 90-day visit, and she returned to the lecture circuit. Once again, crowds by the thousands turned out to hear her.

“It was very unsatisfying for her in the sense that she could taste what it felt like to be back in America, but she couldn’t stay,” Falk observes. “America was the place that was the most fertile ground for her and most open. She recognized it was her real home.”

After the tour, she returned to Canada, where she was then living, and anxiously awaited word on a request to end her exile. The request was denied. Goldman died in Canada in 1940, shortly before her 70th birthday. Only then did she return to U.S. soil; she was buried in Chicago.

Throughout her life, U.S. agents kept close tabs on her. “There’s a very, very thick file of surveillance on her from this country,” Falk says. “They always had people watching her. They surveyed her all those years, up until her last day alive. Then the file said, ‘Case closed.’ ”

But for many, the case of Emma Goldman remains very much open.

“Emma Goldman compelled people to re-examine their assumptions and to see and feel and act in ways that may be genuinely disturbing,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon F. Litwack, a UC Berkeley professor. “That’s what makes her so important to our social and cultural history.”