e
should be drawn into the American labor movement, which was then, with
the Knights of Labor, the eight-hour agitation, and the propaganda of
the Socialists and the Anarchists, at its height. She became acquainted
with various radicals, read pamphlets and books, and heard speeches. She
was especially influenced by the eloquent writings of Johann Most in his
journal Freiheit.

So little is known, and so much absurd nonsense is believed, about the
Anarchists, that it is necessary to state dogmatically a few facts. If
these facts seem odd, the reader is respectfully urged to verify them.
One fact is that secret organizations of Anarchists plotting a violent
overthrow of the government do not exist, and never have existed, save
in the writings of Johann Most and in the imagination of the police: the
whole spirit of Anarchism is opposed to such organizations. Another fact
is that Anarchists do not believe in violence of any kind, or in any
exercise of force; when they commit violence it is not as Anarchists,
but as outraged human beings. They believe that violent reprisals are
bound to be provoked among workingmen by the tyrannies to which they are
subjected; but they abjure alike the bomb and the policeman's club.

There was a brief period in which Anarchists, under the influence of
Johann Most, believed in (even if they did not practice) the use of
dynamite. But this period was ended, in America, by the hanging of
several innocent men in Chicago in 1887; which at least served the
useful purpose of showing radicals that it was a bad plan even to talk
of dynamite. And this hanging, which was the end of what may be called
the Anarchist "boom" in this country, was the beginning of Emma
Goldman's career as a publicist.

Since 1887 the Anarchists have lost influence among workingmen until
they are today negligible--unless one credits them with Syndicalism--as
a factor in the labor movement. The Anarchists have, in fact, left the
industrial field more and more and have entered into other kinds of
propaganda. They have especially "gone in for kissing games."

And Emma Goldman reflects, in her career, the change in Anarchism. She
has become simply an advocate of freedom--freedom of every sort. She
does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated
violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not
the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, or George Francis Train, that she is
to be considered.