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| Mexican Anarchists in Los Angeles |
I’m nearly finished with the second volume
of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, including the first volume
close to 1000 pages. Not only a dynamic speaker, Goldman was a superb writer,
making her life’s story read like a novel, but allow me to digress.
I’d been at my ex-brother-in-law’s home as
he was preparing to move to a senior citizen’s memory care facility. His wife had died earlier in the year, and he
was no longer able to care for himself. His doctor told him it was dangerous living
alone, especially as his mind slipped a little more each year.
I had my eye on a wall filled with books,
all hard covers, and old. Jerry told me to take whatever I wanted. He’d
inherited the books from a woman who had taken him in when he was a teenager, after her
husband’s death. Flora Mae was one of the first women to graduate from Stanford
with a degree in political science. She and her husband had no children, so she
pretty much left everything she owned to Jerry.
The first time I pulled Goldman’s
autobiography from the bookcase, newspaper clippings poured out. Flora Mae had
kept many of the book’s original reviews. The autobiography was printed in
1931, first edition, a classic, and in good shape. I had studied Goldman’s
work, along with other anarchists, like her good friend, Russian-American Alexander "Sasha"
Berkman, who spent 20 years in prison for attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel who tried to stop striking workers using violence.
I’d also read the writings and life
stories of the Flores Magon brothers, Ricardo and Enrique, Mexican anarchists,
the brains behind the Mexican Revolution, who coined Zapata's words "It's better to die on one'feet than to live on one's knees." The brothers had fled Mexico to El Paso, St. Louis, then on to L.A., where they continued exposing corruption and
crime in Mexican politics. They believed American justice would protect them
from Mexico’s autocratic rulers. It didn’t.
Ironically, the U.S. government feared the
Magon brothers’ speeches and newspaper, Regeneracion, would incite workers in
the U.S. to defy their employers. Woodrow Wilson’s administration arrested the
brothers, and, in something of a kangaroo court, found them guilty of sedition.
What the court used to convict them was one line from a newspaper article
they’d written, an inspiring, symbolic line telling workers to “…drop the tools
and take up the rifle that is waiting for the hero’s caress.”
For those words, Ricardo received 21-years
in Leavenworth federal prison where he died under suspicious circumstances. Enrique
received 15-years at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Unfortunately for the brothers, at the
time, the U.S. had just entered WWI, and Woodrow Wilson had passed the sedition
Trading with Enemies Act, a way to jail or deport immigrants they thought
dangerous to U.S. national security. Wilson had also passed the country’s first
Selective Service Act, and anyone who refused to register or submit to the
draft could receive 30 years in prison.
For me, all of this was material for my
third book Death and the American Dream, an historical novel about Los Angeles
politics and the media in the 1920s. As often happens when a writer gets lost
in research, I might have gotten carried away by the politics of the time,
mainly immigrant and workers’ rights, as well as the relationship between
Mexico and the U.S. during WWI.
In Rochester, New York, Emma Goldman, a
Russian-Jewish migrant, had worked in sweatshops as a teenager. She absorbed
the conditions and began to speak out against the injustices she witnessed and
experienced. She became an anarchist, like the Flores Magon brothers. In fact,
Goldman and her political partner, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman had helped raise
funds for Ricardo and Enriquez’s defense.
As far back as the late 1800s, U.S.
industry, mostly agriculture and the railroads, flooded Mexican villages with
flyers announcing employment opportunities in the American Southwest. The companies also
sent U.S. contractors to Mexico who traveled through villages contracting
workers to travel north. The companies promised a good pay, decent living and
working conditions.
When Mexicans attempted to cross the
border, many were arrested and jailed for participating in unfair labor
practices. The company contractors arrived and paid their fines. Once freed,
Mexican workers were forced to labor without pay, until their debt to the
company had been paid. It was a form of indentured servitude. If they purchased
anything on credit at the company’s story, it was added to their debt. If they
tried to escape, they were pursued by federal marshals or private detective
agencies. It was in this environment that men and woman like Emma Goldman,
Sasha Berkman, and Magon and his followers tried to educate the workers.
Anarchism isn’t an easy concept to
understand. When most of us think of anarchists, we think chaos, as in, “It’s
complete anarchy.” Political anarchists do not support one government over
another, neither capitalist nor socialist, democracy, fascism, or communism. In
a sense, they don’t believe in governments at all. Here is where it gets
confusing. Can a society exist without a structured government? Anarchists
think they can.
Francisco “Pancho” Villa was something of
an anarchist, though he didn’t know it. After Villa attacked a town in
Chihuahua and routed the federal soldiers, the corrupt mayor, and his cronies,
one of Villa's men asked, “What do we do now? The people want action.” Myth has it
that Villa asked the people what they needed. They told him they were starving.
The government and army had forced them to work and taken everything they
produced.
Supposedly, Villa told the town’s bakers
to start baking bread to feed the people, not unlike Jesus feeding the
multitudes. It worked. Common sense. After that, Villa took one problem at a
time and began figuring a way to solve them, using common sense and fairness,
reminding me of a scene from Don Quixote, where the people of a town voted for Sancho
Panza to be their mayor. From what I recall, Sancho, too, began solving
problems by using common sense. So, why is governing so hard? Politics and
greed, which any good anarchist abhors.
In volume II of Goldman's book, the Wilson Administration
deports both Emma and Sasha to Russia, where the communists have recently been
victorious over the Tsar. Emma does not like what she sees of communism's early rise and
begins to observe and report. As Americans, she and Sasha hold privileged
positions over other foreigners in Russia at the time. The two land a job
working with a museum traveling the country to collect historical documents to
record the events of the revolution.
Goldman does not hold back in her
criticism of the communist system, sometimes barely making her way out of
dangerous situations, especially during a time when everybody was under
suspicion of being an anti-revolutionist. She traveled to the Ukraine, Kiev,
where Russia set up its capital and where she learned of Jewish atrocities
committed in the hundreds-of-thousands. She described the hatred between the
communist proletariats who would love nothing more than to see communist
intellectuals placed up against a wall and shot. The Cheka, something of a
Soviet Gestapo, executed anybody accused of stealing food or even a pair of shoes to survive. The communists refer to them as speculators.
After barely surviving the journey through Ukraine and
the Crimea, both considered a part of Russia, at the time, she was allowed to travel to the north of Russia, where people in
towns cooperated, shared food and other necessities and survived in relative peace, where there were no firing squads or people stealing from each other.
Goldman’s autobiography is a marvel. She has a keen eye for detail and doesn’t hesitate
to call out injustices wherever she sees them, whether in a capitalist or commuist state. She not naive and also understands Russia's difficulties as bands of anti-revolutionists continue to battle the communists, to return Russia to
the Tsar. She is able to explain a complicated system, its early struggles and,
possibly, downfall, like the idiological struggle between Lenin and Trotsky, so relevant to
today’s crisis in Russia and the Ukraine.
