(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[I]f Emma Goldman was looking for a receptive audience, she found one when she visited Vermont in 1899. As perhaps the nation’s leading proponent of anarchism, Goldman could hardly have hoped for a more supportive community than Barre.
At the turn of the last century, sections of the city were consumed with anarchism. Barre was hardly alone. Anarchism, the political theory that governments are repressive and should be replaced by a society that relies on voluntary cooperation, was at its high tide both nationally and internationally. In Barre, support came primarily from members of the Italian community, who had emigrated to work in the city’s granite industry.
Goldman’s visit started promisingly. The Barre Evening Telegram announced her arrival on Jan. 23. “Workingmen of Barre Attention!” the paper declared. “EMMA GOLDMAN IN TOWN!” The Telegram reported that Goldman, “the well-known lecturer and friend of the people,” would deliver four speeches “on Social Problems.” The city’s Italian-language newspapers published similar announcements.
Goldman wrote years later in her autobiography that upon arriving, “(v)ery little time was left me for introspection into my personal life; there were numerous meetings, debates, private gatherings, and discussions.”
She was to be in Barre for a couple of weeks as the first stop of a nine-month, 11-state speaking tour. Goldman would stay with local activist Salvatore Palavicini, whom she knew from their work together during a strike by textile workers. She would also visit Luigi Galleani, an internationally known figure who would publish his Italian-language newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), from Barre for 16 years.
Some elements of Barre society, however, were less than thrilled about her arrival, as would soon become clear.
Her early talks went well. The Telegram reported that she spoke to a packed house at Tomasi Hall on Jan. 26. Her subject was “The New Woman,” the paper reported, and between 40 and 50 women joined the crowd of laborers that night.
Her ideas were radical for the time. “(Goldman) spoke strongly in favor of woman’s rights, claiming that woman is man’s equal in everything but brute strength, and not his inferior as has been the popular cry of the past,” the paper wrote. “Give woman the same advantages and she will compare favorably with man in every undertaking. Woman’s first duty is to the home, but she should not be obliged to stay at home for months at a time while her husband is mingling with the social world.”
The reporter ended the brief article by noting that Goldman “gave a very interesting discourse, speaking eloquently in the defense of her sister woman.”
Goldman offered strong words and strong convictions for her era, but that night there were none of the threats or violence of which she and other anarchists would later be accused. All in all, it seems to have been a calm affair.
Her talk two days later, titled “The Corrupting Influences of Politics on Man,” proved more controversial. No transcript of that speech exists. The Telegram, which apparently did not send a reporter to the event, commented on it in a three-sentence note on Page 4. “(I)f she said all the things attributed to her she went a little too far,” the paper wrote.
What exactly she supposedly said is unclear. Goldman later wrote that some in Barre accused her of saying, “God bless the hand that blew up the Maine” – a reference to the U.S. Navy battleship that had exploded in Havana’s harbor the year before, killing 260 sailors. “It is of course obviously ridiculous to credit me with such an utterance,” she added.
After her third speech in town, a group of citizens approached the mayor to make sure Goldman never delivered her fourth. The group was sufficiently large or influential to persuade the mayor to act. He called out the police.
The Montpelier Argus and Patriot said the move was necessary to maintain public safety. “(H)er lectures have been so violent that there has been danger of a riot,” the paper wrote. The Argus and Patriot reported that a large crowd had assembled outside Tomasi Hall. “Some came out of curiosity intending to hear what she had to say. Others wanted to see the row. Still more came with rotten eggs and decayed vegetables and some men had arranged to cut the electric light wires leading to the building and leave the hall in darkness if she commenced to speak.”
The sheriff and his deputies surrounded the hall. The paper reported that they were all “armed to the teeth, and some of the anarchists of Barre were ready to make their presence felt.”
The police managed to block Goldman from speaking that night, so she left town on a train bound for Chicago, the next stop on her tour.
“(I)f the woman keeps away from Barre or stops talking,” the Montpelier paper reported, “no one is likely to make any trouble for her.”
Ironically, the stymied speech is the only one of Goldman’s talks in Barre that we have a copy of. When they learned her talk would be stopped, Goldman’s supporters printed and distributed 5,000 copies of the speech throughout the community. In a second irony, Goldman had planned to speak about how authority restricts freedom.
In the pamphlet, Goldman made clear she was not attacking society as a whole, but rather government and its laws. “No intelligent man or woman wants to destroy society,” she wrote, “for society and State are not identical.”
She found government and its laws oppressive and hypocritical. “Thou shalt not kill, steal, rob and cheat, says the law,” she wrote, “at the same time under (government’s) wing wars are carried on, whole nations are destroyed, prisons are crowded, armies enlarged, battleships built, thousands beheaded, garrotted, hung and sent to the electric chair, while a few are getting richer and richer, monopolizing half the earth, and the great mass of producers (workers) hunger, the army of the unemployed is on the increase and countless thousands of children die for lack of food and want of air.”
Goldman didn’t buy the story that the mayor had been responding to public concerns in banning her speech. She wrote in her autobiography that an Italian friend from Barre had written to explain her rough treatment. While touring Barre, the friend informed Goldman, “(y)ou caught the Mayor and the Chief of Police in Mrs. Colletti’s kitchen, dead drunk … and you have looked into their stakes in the brothels. No wonder they consider you dangerous now and want to get you out.”
Whatever the reason for Goldman’s expulsion, she and Vermont weren’t done with each other.
Tensions between police and local anarchists continued. In December 1899, they reached a peak when Police Chief Patrick Brown was ambushed. Brown was shot but survived. A local anarchist was convicted in the shooting. The Washington County state’s attorney thought the man had a famous accomplice. The state’s attorney tried to charge Goldman as an accessory, claiming she had yelled threats against the police as her train left the station. A grand jury, finding the connection tenuous at best, refused to indict her.
Two years later, after an anarchist shot and killed President William McKinley, some again suspected Goldman of complicity. After all, she had once met the gunman. The Barre Evening Telegram called for the assassin to be hanged, adding that “perhaps it would seem a little barbarous to lynch a woman, but Emma Goldman certainly deserves something severe in the way of punishment.”
In light of the president’s death, Barre police would keep anarchists in line, the paper promised: “The authorities are determined to prevent any jollification over the sad event and a close watch is being kept on the local as well as the visiting anarchists and at the least sign of jollification the meeting will be broken up.”
However Barre police felt about anarchists, they did nothing to break up a meeting held six years later, in 1907, when Goldman ignored threats and returned to Vermont.
The Barre Daily Times wrote that 500 people attended the talk, at which Goldman shared the stage with Galleani.
“The meeting was a comparatively mild affair as far as anything incendiary was concerned,” reported the paper, which informed readers she “made no bones of saying that she is an anarchist.”
Despite her struggles, Goldman was apparently an optimistic anarchist. As the Daily Times reported, “while disclaiming any power of prophesy, nevertheless she prophesied that we shall be emancipated, economically, politically and morally.”
