Emma Goldman: “A New Declaration of Independence”

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Emma Goldman:“A New Declaration of Independence”
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Abstract

Emma Goldman was a leftist political agitator, an anarchist, and an intellectual. Born in Russia in 1869, she came to the United States in 1885 and soon became involved in the growing movement to organize laborers. Unlike many of the labor leaders in the United States, though, Goldman advocated violence as an answer to the industrialists’ domination and degradation of their workers. When President William McKinley was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, Goldman was immediately implicated by the press even though she had nothing to do with the event. She founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth in the early twentieth century as a mouthpiece for her ideas, but Goldman did not need much of a platform; she was considered the most dangerous political radical of her day in the United States, perhaps in the Western world. She attacked American government, the exploitation of workers by industrialists, and warmongering; she supported the rights of workers, women’s emancipation and suffrage, birth control, and free speech.

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