Emma Goldman and the United States: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship

Abstract

Emma Goldman had a love-hate relationship with the United States. While she was radicalized there after her arrival as an immigrant who had left Czarist Russia in her teens, the female anarchist spent years fighting the state and its government for more freedom and equality. The First World War witnessed the climax of this struggle, and Goldman’s support for the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution turned her into a prominent target of new laws that would be used to expel her from the US. Afterward, she experienced the “Soviet utopia” and lived in many European countries. Goldman lectured there about the American anarchist movement, US capitalism, and the failure of the workers to challenge capitalism. The present article follows the history and the development of this special love-hate relationship and thereby not only provides a detailed evaluation of Goldman’s genesis as a radical anarchist in its American context, but also highlights the overlap between biographical history, the history of anarchism in the United States, and global migration experiences in the first third of the 20th century, as they were brought together and influenced by transnational events, i.e. the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and its consequences.