Emma Goldman, Part II: The Trial

Emma Goldman, mid-1890s.

[For part I of this post, "Emma Goldman -- Speaking out for Free Bread, going to Jail," clich here.]

The police in Philadelphia held Emma Goldman for almost a week after her arrest in August 1893, before they could arrange extradition to New York City. “I was weighed, measured, and photographed,” she recalled.  On the train ride north, one detective tried to befriend Emma.  He offered to get the criminal charges against her dropped if she would spy on some of her radical friends.  She told him to go to hell.

Emma's trial began on October 4, 1893, before Judge James Fitzgerald of NY's Court of General Sessions.  It quickly became a great carnival, drawing packed crowds to the courtroom each day, a combination of radicals, friends, down-and-outs, newspaper writers, and curiosity seekers.  Gun-toting policy guarded every door.  Emma, wanting to make the best impression, wore a dress that one witness described as "neat and most un-anarchistic in its neatness," her yellow hair "carefully combed."

Emma had insisted at first on defending herself, but ultimately she accepted the court-appointed lawyer, resulting in one of the strangest combinations imaginable.  The lawyer was A. Oakey Hall, former mayor of New York City under the notoriously corrupt regime of Tammany Hall Boss William M. Tweed.  Tweed had been driven from power in 1872 after he and his Tweed Ring had stolen massive futures from the city treasury.  Oakey Hall, though acquitted of direct graft, had fingerprints on every major decision of Tweed and his Ring.

Emma Goldman – obviously ignorant of the scandal – found Oakey Hall charming, “tall distinguished-looking, vivacious.” She described him as “a great jurist. He had once been mayor of New York, but had proved to be too humane and democratic for the politicians [but] his affair with a young actress made him politically impossible.” [Tweed, dead by them, would have laughed out loud at the whitewash.]



Oakey Hall, Emma's lawyer, 
as Mayor of NYC in 1870.

In fairness, Oakey Hall, then 67 years old, gave his young client a first-rate defense.  The New York grand jury had indicted Emma Goldman on three counts of incitement to riot, based on her August speech to the unemployed workers at Union Square, her telling them to steal bread from the rich people on Fifth Avenue.  Hall built his defense on three key points: that police detectives had made mistakes in translating Emma's speech from German to English, that the Union Square meeting itself was perfectly legal, and that her words were protected under the US Constitution as Free Speech.


Emma on the Stand
But the trial’s highlight came on its third day when Emma Goldman herself took the stand to testify.  The chief prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney John F. McIntyre, decided to use his trump card.  He would show the 12-man jury that, no matter what she said in her speech,  this woman was a dangerous radical zealot.  Emma herself was exhausted by this point in the trial.  One reporter described her eyes as being “misty and restless, and there was a tremor in her hands” as she took the stand.  


"Do you believe in a Supreme Being, Miss Goldman," he said, causing gasps in the packed courtroom.


"No, Sir, I do not," she said.  What did God have to do with the criminal case?  No matter.  


The prosecutor went on. "Do you believe in the laws of the State?"


"I am an anarchist, and against all laws,” she answered.  “My theory is that the Legislature and the courts are of no use to the mass of the people. The laws passed help the rich and grind the poor."


"Didn’t you tell your hearers [in Union Square] to take bread by force if they couldn’t get it peaceably?”


"No.  But I think the time will come, judging by what has happened, when they will be compelled to do so. That is what I told them on the night I spoke."


Then he turned back to anarchy itself, that strange foreign-sounding word.  Anarchists in Europe back in the 1890s threw bombs and assassinated kings.  Even in the US, the Haymarket affair in Chicago -- just six years earlier -- still scared the socks off most Americans.  The prosecutor asked about one radical recently arrested with a bomb. “What do these anarchists want with dynamite bombs, anyhow!” he asked.


“Why, they want to use them in the great war if the social revolution ever comes,” said Emma Goldman.


“Would you use dynamite?”


“I do not know what I would do. The time may come when it may be necessary to use it.”


The testimony was devastating.  Emma had given the prosecutor all the ammunition he needed to paint her as a violent, godless, unpatriotic  malcontent who deserved prison whether she committed a crime or not.  Oakey Hall, in his final plea to the jury, did his best to put Emma's words in a positive light.  The anarchist, he explained, "believes in co-operation and the common ownership of property. Anarchy dislikes the rich and the monopolistic, but surely this is no crime."


The Verdict

Emma Goldman at time of her
depotation from America, in 1919.

The 12-man jury took two full hours -- a long time back then - to find her guilty.  "You are a woman of above the ordinary intelligence, yet you have testified that you have no respect for our laws," Judge Fitzgerald told her on passing sentence.  "There is no room for you in this community.”

Emma Goldman refused to appeal either the verdict and or her sentence of one year's confinement at the penitentiary on Blackwell's Island in New York’s East River, a spot now called Roosevelt Island.  Wild rumors circulated that radical anarchists might bomb police stations or try to manage her escape, but nothing happened.  Once behind bars, Emma found relief from the prison gloom by working in the hospital, starting a life-long interest in hygiene and medicine. She read books and delighted when radical friends came to visit.


On her release, Emma Goldman would speak loudly as ever, start her magazine Mother Earth, write essays and books by the dozens on topics from politics to labor to feminine hygiene to marriage to war and peace.  She would be jailed many times, including after the assassination of President William McKinley when the shooter, a self-described anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, mentioned he had been inspired hearing her speak.  On American entry into World War I, Emma Goldman spoke out against military conscription and was jailed under the wartime Espionage Act. After the war, she, along with Alexander Berkman, was deported to Russia – one of many abuses from the 1919 Red Scare.  Still, she always considered America her home, and on her death insisted on being buried in Chicago, near the tomb of the Haymarket Anarchists.


Every American political activist today of any stripe -- liberal, radical, conservative, tea party, whatever - owes a deep “thanks you” to Emma Goldman for practicing the most basic truth about our rights under the Constitution.  Simply put, it's this-   Free Speech: Use it, or Lose it.  


If you've never heard of Emma Goldman because, like Victoria Woodhull, nobody bothered to mention her in your high school or college history classes, don't let them get away with it!! Before Women's History Month is over, check out one of these good books:


             

Yes, Thomas Nast invented Santa Claus

For Christmas Eve, I give you Santa Claus, as created in America by Thomas Nast, the brilliant, edgy cartoonist for Harper's Weekly who almost single-handedly created the art of modern visual satire.

Nast's cartoons of New York City's untouchable corrupt Boss Tweed made Nast a unique national media star and political terror after they helped force Tweed's arrest in 1872.   Among other things, Nast created the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, and pioneered personal attack politics.   But he had a soft side.

Born in 1840 in Alsace, son of an army trombone player, Nast came to New York as an 8 year-old, learned English from scratch, and soon exploded on the scene as an artistic prodigy just as the newest media technology -- graphic magazines -- was coming of age.  Barely in his 20s, he drew national fame for his sketches of Garibaldi's march through Italy, American Civil War battlefields, and dazzling sports events like prize fights and horse races.

Nast created the drawing on the right below for Harper's Weekly in 1863, at the height of the Civil War when thousands of families were split apart and husbands-fathers-brothers were being butchered on faraway battlefields.  It's simple sentiment made it a sensation and helped boost regular sales of Harper's into the stratosphere.   People posted copies of Nast sketches in saloons, kitchens, and storefronts.

Around this same time, Nast began making the old German fold legend Saint Nicholas a regular in his Christmas-time fare, gave him a fat belly, beard, sled, and mission to give presents.  Nast drew Santa visiting Civil War soldiers at the front, then on the home front climbing down chimneys, hugging children, stuffing stockings with presents, and the rest.  He made him a household name as well, as in the 1874 Harper's cover above.

Nast himself would make a fortune as the most famous illustrator in America, but then lose it in 1885 after investing his money in a Wall Street firm run by former President Ulysses Grant (Grant and Ward) that went belly up after being victimized by an embezzler.

Economic Stimulus? Bring back Boss Tweed

Don't misunderstand. Stealing is wrong. Graft is bad.

Still, watching today's politicians in Washington tripping over themselves trying to figure out ways to stimulate the economy, I get nostalgic for the master. Bring back Boss Tweed.

William Magear Tweed, Boss of New York's Tammany Hall machine in the 1860s and 70s, controlled mayors, governors, newspapers, and companies. He kept his power by stealing elections. He used his power to steal from the city and county -- for an astounding estimated $100 million (billions of dollars in modern money) during his relatively brief time at the pinnacle.

But Tweed also used his power to build. Talk about infrastructure? Tweed and his Tammany crowd did more to modernize New York and bring immigrants and the working poor into the social mainstream than anyone else in his generation. Tweed didn't need a "Stimulus Package" to grease the economy. He used the direct way -- graft. He spent the city into a $100 million deficit, mostly borrowed from investors in Europe who had no idea they were being bilked. Most of the cash went to pay politicians and hire legions of laborers. But along the way, it helped spark an economic boom.

Boss Tweed knew how to spread the wealth around. The rich, the poor, all prospered. Stock prices and property values both soared. Taxes stayed low. His system collapsed only when the New York Times got its hands on a purloined copy of the Tweed Ring's secret account books and exposed them on its front pages -- the journalistic Scoup of the Nineteenth Century. By then, Tweed had been humiliated by the cartoon satires of Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly (see cartoon above), making him an easy mark for a politically ambitious prosecutor like Samuel Tilden.

A year after Tweed's fall from power, in 1873, a financial panic threw New York and the country into the worst economic depression ever expeirienced till that time.

Graft aside, Tweed's regime left the city and country wonderfully enriched: Their fingerprints are on every major NY creation of the Gilded Age: Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Tweed Courthouse, new widened streets and sidewalks, the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mount Sinai Hospital, and dozens of charities. The list is almost endless. And they left a tradition of political inclusion, a "wide tent" approach as similiar to Barack Obama and John McCain as the stories of foul play.

But for the stealing -- which, to be clear, was wrong -- he was a great man.

Tweed would know how to get the country moving again in today's financial mess. Just don't watch too closely. "Transparency" certainly was never part of his approach. Tweed's methods were not for the squeamish.

For more, see my own book: Boss Tweed, the Corrupt who Conveived the Soul of Modorn New York.

Racist Cartoons

This week's now-notorious New York Post "monkey" cartoon -- the one showing two policemen standing over a dead monkey they've just shot and saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill" -- has raised storms of protest. Whether the artist intended the monkey as Obama or not, the implication is hard to miss.


The controvercy raises a deeper fact. Political cartoons in America have a long history of treading into racism, zenophobia, and bigotry. And some of the worst have come from our most celebrated, main stream journals.



Thomas Nast (above right), for instance, is celebrated as the brilliant young 1870s artist for Harper's Weekly whose ridicule destroyed the regime of New York City's Boss William M. Tweed -- easily the era's most corrupt pol. Nast became the most famous, widely-read, and politically influential graphic artist of the Nineteenth Century, able to sway elections and make or break Senators. But his cartoons seethed with bigotry, against Catholics, against Irish, against immigrants, against Democrats.



Before closing the book on the current controversy, here are a few samples. The point is not to make excuses for the New York Post. Rather, to me, it's the opposite. These examples show how dangerously easy it is for artists and journalists to let passions over today's hot spot issues get in the way of good sense. Editors have a duty to to work hard, not to censor talented artists, but to make sure they express themselves clearly -- and not to allow what might have started as a simple satire against the Stimulus Bill (obvious fair game) cross the line into ugliness.


As for Thomas Nast:
He enjoyeed portraying Catholic clergy is vile creatures, in this case as crocodiles.




















He consistently drew Irishmen as semi-human gorillas, never far from a whiskey bottle and shackled to political mahcines. (The fellow with the whip is Peter B. Sweeny, famed chieftain of New York's Tamman Hall from the Boss Tweed era.)



























And for political enemies like Tweed, he considered capitol punushment just fine:

Rating George W. Bush

Before leaving C-SPAN's poll of presidents, I need to get two more items off my chest. One is about Abraham Lincoln, the winner at #1. Can we please take off the rose-colored glasses and treat him like a real person? I will get to this in my next post.

The other is about George W. Bush. Let's talk about him right now.

When I first was the final C-SPAN list two days ago, I quickly noticed the difference between me and the group over GWB, and I wrote this:

Finally, there is George W. Bush. The C-SPAN group places him in the bottom ten at #36. I rated him even lower, as third worst at #41. This rating obviously is the most speculative of the bunch. We still don't know the outcome of the wars Bush started and the economic cataclysms begun under his watch. But, to my mind, the potential long-term damage Bush has done to this country far out-paces the likes of a Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore, or Frankling Pierce. Unlike these other disappointments, George W. Bush was both bad AND consequential.

Let's be clear. I enjoy revisionist history. In my book BOSS TWEED, I was happy to restore the reputation of America's most corrupt pol ever, showing that Tweed, while stealing the City blind, was also a big-hearrted man who helped immigrants, built New York, and was victimized by unscrupulous "reformers." But that didn't mean be wasn't corrupt.

It is no Liberal fad to say that George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents ever. Facts are stubborn things. Bush might be a sincere nice man who loves his family, but that doesn't change the bottom line. How could the C-SPAN group rank him at #36? This son of priviledge is once again being let off the hook with a Gentleman's C?

True, a rank of 36 is no compliment. It places Bush in the bottom 10, and nobody argues that the bottom two, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, don't thoroughly deserve those spots.

The difference between 3rd worst (my rank) and 7th worst (the C-SPAN group's rank) may seem small, but at stake is the historical truth. The higher grade elevates Bush above four other Presidents who certainly had failures and fell far short of being role models, but who simply did too little in office to earn the bottom spots. Specifically:

• Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), died in office from food poisoning, presided over the Teapot Dome scandal though not personally implicated. During his term, he stabilized the economy, pardoned Eugene V. Debs from prison, and started no wars.
• William Henry Harrison (1841), died in office after 32 days. At 71 years old he gave a two-hour inaugural speech in a freezing snowstorm without a coat, possibly causing the cold that killed him -- not too smart. But he wasn't in office long enough to do harm;
• Millard Fillmore (1850-1853), replaced President Zachary Taylor and filled the last 2 1/2 years of his term. He backed the Compromise of 1850 that delayed the Civil War by allowing enactment of the notorious Fugitive Slave Act;
• Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), certainly no gem with a bad personality. He signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowing slavery to spread west. But he, too, was smaller than events arouond him.

George W. Bush was not a small President. He mattered. He was not mediocre. He was bad. The most important national challenge of our lifetimes, the attack of September 11, 2001, came on his watch. He made decisions that had consequences. The result was a string of disasters that is depressingly well known: two unfinished wars, a debt explosion, a financial collapse, a list of demoralized, ineffective Federal agencies, a sleazy re-election, inflamed wedge politics, the use of torture, the loss of global standing, and so on goes the list.


The C-SPAN group gave Bush bottom marks for Economic Management and International Relations, but it saved him from the cellar with C-level grades for three catch-all categories: "Crisis Leadership," "Vision/ Agenda Setting," and "Pursued Equal Justice for All." I don't buy it.
Ranking President Bush is speculative because the trail is still fresh. He just left office a few weeks ago, his wars are unfinished, his policies are still unfolding. Giving him a mediocre score may allow historians to keep their options open, to hedge their bets in case something in his legacy goes unexpectedly right. I think the record is clear enough to start him off at the near-bottom. If things go his way in the future, so be it.
Thanks for listening. --KenA

Boss Tweed's Birthday.

By the way, in case you missed it, this past Wednesday (April 3) was the 185th birthday of my own favorite icon of American civic virtue, Wm. Magear Tweed, The Boss, who presided over New York's Tammany Hall as grafter in chief from the Civil War until late 1872. By then, Tweed and friends has stolen as estimated $45 to $200 million from the city and county treasuries -- a sum worth billions in modern money. Along the way, they also did more good, did more to build the City, help the poor and immigrants get a foothold in society, and give government a friendly human face than just about anyone else of their generation.

Here the link to an interview I did on the occasion for NPR's Bryant Street Project:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89333730

In honor of the occasion, I give you my two favorite pictures of The Boss. First, here is Thomas Nast's classic "Twas Him," from the Harper's Weekly of August 19, 1871. The caption reads "Who stole the peoples' money?" Tweed is the chubby man holding his hat:

Then, there is this cover drawing from the January 6, 1871 Evening Telegram showing Tweed leading the dancers at Tammany's New Year's celebration at the NY Academy of Music:

So Happy Birthday, Boss. They don't make politians like you any more and, frankly, we are all poorer as a result. --KenA