Have you heard about Emma Goldman’s ice cream shop?

How Did We Get Here #2

Happy May Day, everyone. There’s probably no better Worcester way to celebrate than to reflect on the life of our own Emma Goldman, a woman Joe Petty would certainly call “divisive” and whose time in America ended during our country’s first puff of the magic deportation dragon, the high it’s chased ever since. Please consider supporting this, the only outlet in Worcester to run a May Day Emma Goldman story—a fact I feel comfortable asserting without checking. The more people sign up to sustain this outlet, the more we can do good work like what you’re about to read. —Bill

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How Did We Get Here #2: Have you heard about Emma Goldman’s ice cream shop?

“At the International Socialist Congress held in Paris in 1889 the decision had been made to turn the first of May into a world-wide holiday of labour. The idea caught the imagination of the progressive workers in every land. The birth of spring was to mark the reawakening of the masses.” —Emma Goldman, Living My Life

Did you know that famous anarchist Emma Goldman ran an ice cream shop in Worcester? I hear it mentioned all the time, so for this May Day edition of How Did We Get Here, I thought I might write a piece in her honor.

In 1897, a young Emma Goldman immigrated from Russia to New York City. At just 20 years old, already an awakened anarchist, she worked as a seamstress while organizing for worldwide revolution with others in her primarily Russian Jewish community. Living in New York City was tough at the end of the 19th century, and it began to wear her down. She toiled grueling, 18-hour days alongside her romantic partner, Alexander Berkman. When their friend Modest Stein (also Goldman’s lover) found stable photography work in Springfield she gladly took the chance to join him in Massachusetts. In time, they decided to strike out on their own and found a place in Worcester. Berkman soon left New York to meet them there.

Independence was rough going. Their dreams of opening a photography studio seemed impossible; in the city no one came into their shop. When they ventured out to the surrounding towns, they found the farmers of New England very different from the peasant farmers they knew in Eastern Europe.

“The [Russian peasant] seldom had enough for himself to eat, yet he would never fail to offer the stranger bread and kvass (cider). The German peasants also, as I remembered from my schooldays, would invite us to their “best room,” put milk and butter on the table, and urge us to partake. But here, in free America, where the farmers owned acres of land and much cattle, we were lucky to be admitted at all or be given a glass of water” (Goldman, Living my Life).

In Europe, with the exception of Great Britain, the birthplace of evil¹, the land existed more like a public resource; peasants subsisted on it in exchange for the extraction of tithes and a portion of their product by the monarchy. They did not own the land they tilled, and they paid dearly to use it. Here, they realized, the farmer was (is) the private owner of their property. Anyone with the money to purchase land was really a capitalist, and held little in common with the proletariat farmers that Goldman and her cohort knew from back home. That, at least, is what they chalked it up to at the time.

As their business floundered, and the farmers remained incorrigible, Goldman and company grew desperate to find a new source of income, if only to pay rent. For months, their landlord had been urging them to open a cafe or an ice cream parlor; at last they relented. They began operations that spring in a little shop in the Canal District, where Bocado now lives, and within months started turning a profit.

Almost as soon as it began, their business venture came to an abrupt end. Just one year later, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Andrew Carnegie’s goon Henry Clay Frick promised striking steel workers that he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands. The nation was in uproar, and it seemed like violence could only follow. Emma Goldman read the headlines over a customer’s shoulder, reacting so dramatically to the news that the man was worried for her health. She, Berkman, and Stein packed up shop that night to join the struggle, believing fervently that this was “the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection.”

They planned to distribute anarchist propaganda to the strikers, working feverishly to develop and print it in New York before taking the train up to Homestead. Before they could properly begin, a new headline swept the nation: Pinkerton agents had gunned down steel workers on the shores of the Monongahela River. Frick had followed through on his threat. A month after leaving Worcester, once Goldman, Stein, and he had sufficiently planned the deed, Alexander Berkman snuck his way into Henry Clay Frick’s office. With a cheap pistol, hurriedly purchased en route, he shot Frick three times and stabbed him with a poison dagger to avenge the workers. He was unsuccessful in his assassination attempt, but the act set the stage for the rest of the trio’s lives.

Berkman went to prison, Stein went into hiding, and Emma Goldman—now age 23—refused to sink into obscurity. She continued speaking, writing, and acting for the cause of revolutionary anarchism. After Berkman finished his prison term, serving 14 years of his 21-year sentence, they rejoined their partnership, though not romantically. She was arrested and imprisoned several times before her eventual deportation in 1919, during the first Red Scare, though never for the conspiracy to assassinate Henry Clay Frick—until her memoir, printed post-deportation, prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to convict her or Modest Stein.

Emma Goldman was Jewish, and spent much of her time in America living and working in the New York Russian Jewish community, where there already existed an anarchist stronghold. Her immigrant community introduced her to some of the most influential people in her life and shaped her understanding of anarchism. This foundation was something she shared with many of the anarchist thinkers of her day, and it’s impossible to fathom the extent to which her Judaism informed her life and her choices. However, Goldman differed from her notable contemporaries in one major way: she was a woman. She took anarchist thought leaps and bounds forward through this lens, spearheading many of what we now consider to be foundational feminist ideas.

Unlike the suffragists of her day, who sought equal participation in the existing system, Emma Goldman insisted on a radical politics of women’s liberation; some of her views remain boundary pushing. As early as 1911, she was writing and speaking about the plight of sex workers, the abolition of marriage, and naming the various mechanisms through which women are forced into physical bondage whether inside or outside of marriage. She advocated a scientific compassion for those suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and directly challenged narratives around sin and punishment that were prevalent around this time. Goldman openly discussed abortion as a dangerous, frequently deadly horror that was symptomatic of the larger bodily and sexual slavery of women as a class. Before Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman was loudly advocating for and smuggling contraception into the country. She was arrested several times for it. Beyond and encompassing her feminist ideas were her stances against Christianity, Zionism, militarism, prison, the state, and for sexual freedom, the radical potential of theater, and the liberation of children.

Women in history are stripped of their humanity when we turn them into fun facts. Emma Goldman ran an ice cream shop in Worcester, so we get to claim her. But if we are to do so we had better understand her.

Reading Emma Goldman’s work, listening to her speak (in the above video, at 00:22 and again at 02:18), she was precise, forthright, and direct. She disdained vagueness and refused to shroud her meaning in allusion. She saw this as cowardly—a tool for hypocrites. Those were the people she hated most of all. Once, she snuck into a speaking engagement of Johann Most, a former-comrade-turned-nemesis, whom she believed had betrayed the anarchist movement. She sprinted to the stage, and before anyone could stop her, pulled out a horse whip and beat him with it mid-lecture. Goldman broke the whip over her knee and threw the pieces in his face before narrowly escaping the angry crowd on the shoulders of Modest Stein.

She was a force that basically no man, nation, law, or prison could contain. She also was a midwife, a nurse, a confidante for sex workers, and a wonderful cook. She engaged in regular correspondence with too many influential figures to count—Upton Sinclair, Herbert Read, Alfred Knopf, Rev. John Hayes Holmes, Roger Baldwin, Vladimir Lenin, to name a few. An honest, dangerous, principled and compassionate woman with a golden pen and seemingly no fear.

There isn’t room in my little column to do her full story justice, so I would encourage anyone who is interested in her life and her ideas to read her, and hear her speak in her own words. However, if I had to sum up Emma Goldman, anarchist and iconoclast, in one, I would defer to one of the true divas of all time, Little Edie:

I’ll leave it here, with a clipping from one of her last essays, published in Harper’s Magazine, entitled “Was My Life Worth Living?”

“The belief in freedom assumes that human beings can co-operate. They do it even now to a surprising extent, or organized society would be impossible. If the devices by which men can harm one another, such as private property, are removed and if the worship of authority can be discarded, co-operation will be spontaneous and inevitable, and the individual will find it his highest calling to contribute to the enrichment of social well-being …

I think my life and my work have been successful. What is generally regarded as success—acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige—I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished—his development has stopped at that point. I have always striven to remain in a state of flux and continued growth, and not to petrify in a niche of self-satisfaction. If I had my life to live over again, like anyone else, I should wish to alter minor details. But in any of my more important actions and attitudes I would repeat my life as I have lived it. Certainly I should work for Anarchism with the same devotion and confidence in its ultimate triumph.”

¹ Capitalism