by GREG GUMA
Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
To say that you believe in a society dedicated to individual liberty rather than top-down authority or force sounds as American as apple pie. At least it should. But when the person saying it calls him or herself an anarchist, those same views are often decried as un-American or treasonous.
Anarchists have been tarred for a century as subversives, bomb-throwers, terrorists; deluded utopians at best. But no “ism” is more misunderstood, purposely distorted or entwined with America’s traditions of self-government and free speech.
Even in Vermont — a place much associated with socialism since the first election of Bernie Sanders as Burlington mayor back in 1981 — anarchists of the past have found it hard to win a hearing. In fact, Emma Goldman, a charismatic spokeswoman for this libertarian socialist ideal, once tried to explain her beliefs to Burlingtonians only to find the doors barred to her entry.
Why such hostility? In a sense, the real confusion began in 1886, just days after America’s first May Day mobilization. The five-year-old American Federation of Labor called for strikes on May 1 wherever companies were refusing the eight-hour workday. More than 350,000 people across the country responded. But in Chicago the powers-that-be decided to make an example of the strike leaders if anything went wrong. Something did. And some of the organizers were anarchists.
On May 4, the night after a fight between strikers and strikebreakers during which police shot several people and killed one, a protest rally was held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. As the rally was breaking up a bomb exploded. Several policemen were killed, and the event was called an “anarchist plot.” A campaign of repression was immediately launched against anarchists everywhere.
The true culprits were never identified, yet eight anarchists were convicted of the crime and four of them were hung. For decades the word anarchist remained etched in the public mind as a synonym for political violence. Its actual meaning was seldom discussed.
Anarchists, Marxists, Socialists. Most people don’t realize there’s a difference. A common perception is that anarchists, like Marxists and some Communists, want the state to control the “means of production” and feel individual rights must sometimes be sacrificed to create a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Nothing could be further from the fiercely libertarian values at the heart of anarchism.
Free speech, for example, has always been a central tenet for these believers in diversity, decentralization and self-management. Ironically, they have regularly been denied this basic right — even in Burlington.
“Is there free speech and fair play in Burlington?” So went the headline of a flyer distributed in the Queen City on Sept. 3, 1909, the date when Emma Goldman was scheduled to speak at City Hall on “anti-militarism.” The answer to the question turned out to be an official “no.” Mayor James Burke, in many ways a champion of progressive ideas, would not let Goldman “preach any of her un-American doctrines.”
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