Come back Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman Occupies Wall Street
Vivian Gornick – December 7, 2011 – The Nation.

If ever there was a life that embodied the spirit that is driving the Occupy Wall Street movement it is that of Emma Goldman, who went to jail in 1893 for having stood on a soap box in Union Square in the midst of one of America’s worst depressions and, pointing at the mansions on Fifth Avenue, implored 3,000 unemployed men and women to ask the ruling class for work. “If they don’t give you work,” she cried, “ask them for bread. If they deny you bread, take it!” These words made those listening to Emma erupt in thunderous cheers; they also made J. Edgar Hoover describe her in 1919 (when he was urging the government to deport her) as The Most Dangerous Woman in America.

One afternoon in mid-October a young woman—dressed in a white Victorian shirtwaist, long black
skirt and rimless glasses shorn of earpieces—stood up in
Zuccotti Park to announce that she was Emma Goldman and that she had traveled through time to tell those gathered in the park that she loved what they were doing. Nothing in the way of OWS street theater could have better invoked the spirit of the protest than the appearance of a principled anarchist, born nearly a century and a half ago, who never considered herself more American than when she was denouncing the brutish contempt in which capitalism held the feeling life of the individual.

“Feeling” was a key word for Emma Goldman. She always said that the ideas of anarchism were of secondary use if grasped only with one’s reasoning intelligence; it was necessary to “feel them in every fiber like a flame, a consuming fever, an elemental passion.” This, in essence, was the core of Goldman’s radicalism: a lifelong faith, lodged in the nervous system, that feelings were everything. Radical politics, in fact, was the history of one’s own hurt, thwarted, humiliated feelings at the hands of institutionalized authority.

It was the intensity with which she declared herself—in lecture halls, on open-air platforms, in school auditoriums and private homes, from theater stages and prison cells, the back of a truck or a courtroom stand—that made her world famous. That intensity—her signature trait—was midwife to a remarkable gift she had for making those who heard her absorb the pain inherent in whatever social inequity she was exposing. As the women and men in her audience listened to her, a scenario of almost mythic proportion seemed to unfold before their eyes. The homeliness of their own small lives became invested with a sense of drama that acted as a catalyst for the wild, vagrant hope—especially vulnerable to meanspirited times—that things need not be as they were. ..more