Title: 1Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Feminism 2 From the Lyrical Left to the Old Left
11)Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Feminism2) From
the Lyrical Left to the Old Left
- History 351
- Oct. 20, 2009
2Discussion After Class Today?
- We can stay on for about 20-30 minutes after
class today for informal discussion about Emma
Goldman. Its optional and I have no set agenda
for the discussion.
3Announcements
- This is the due date for the Emma Goldman video
review. Late papers will be accepted but
penalized in the grading through next Tuesday
class time. No papers will be accepted after
that. - Study questions on the readings on radicalism in
the Great Depression are now on line at
http//www.uoregon.edu/dapope/351steinbeckkelley.
htm - Paper topic options for the paper due the Tuesday
before Thanksgiving (Nov. 24) are now online at
http//www.uoregon.edu/dapope/351papertopics--fal
l09.htm. - The midterm for Hist 351 is scheduled for Tues.,
Nov. 3. Instructions and possible essay questions
will be posted by the end of this week. -
4Accessing Robin Kelleys article online
- For the readings on the Great Depression, Ive
assigned an article by Robin Kelley, We Are Not
What We Seem. If youre on campus, you should be
able to get to it here. - If youre off campus (or have trouble with the
on-campus link), use this link. Youll need to
log in, using your duckID and password as if you
were logging in to Blackboard. Then youll be
taken to the article.
5Some Websites of Interest
- Images of the 1919-20 Red Scare
- An on-line history of Greenwich Village, New
Yorks artistic and intellectual neighborhood
with a radical reputation. - www.infoshop.org, an enormous website on
anarchism today, has an advice column, Dear Emma! - Sacco and Vanzetti memorial website
- Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman wrote a brief
article about the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti
case of the 1920s. - Heres the Communist Party USAs website today
- The Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose
State University
6Goldman on Political Violence
- Goldman Compared with the wholesale violence of
capital and government, political acts of
violence are but a drop in the ocean. - Goldman says attentaters have a rare love of
animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary
relations of life, exceptional sobriety of
demeanor, frugality and regularity, austerityand
courage beyond compare. - The man who flings his whole life into the
attempt, at the cost of his own life, to protest
against the wrongs of his fellow men, is a saint
compared to the active and passive upholders of
cruelty and injustice, even if his protest
destroy other lives besides his own.
7Goldman as Feminist?
- Womens Nature
- Women worship religion, war and the home, all of
which exploit her. - Women are busybodies, have narrow and purist
attitude, stemming from life-long economic
parasitism. - Women's Suffrage
- Voting as a Right?Universal suffrage as a
fetish Woman, even more than man, is a fetish
worshiper, and though her idols ay change, she is
ever on her knees, ever holding up her hands,
ever blind to the fact that her god has feet of
clay.
8Goldman on Love, Marriage and Sex
- Marriage and love have nothing in common they
are as far apart as the poles are, in fact,
antagonistic to each other. - The prospective wife and mother is kept in
complete ignorance of her only asset in the
competitive field---sex. Thus she enters into
life-long relations with a man only to find
herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond
measure by the most natural and healthy instinct,
sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of
the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical
suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal
ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled
as a great virtue.
9Love, Marriage and Sex (continued)
- The institution of marriage makes a parasite
of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates
her for life's struggle, annihilates her social
consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and
then imposes its gracious protection, which is in
reality a snare, a travesty on human character. - Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man
has bought brains, but all the millions in the
world have failed to buy love. - Some day, some day men and women will rise,
they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet
big and strong and free, ready to receive, to
partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love
If the world is ever to give birth to true
companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love
will be the parent.
10Goldman and Cultural Change An End of American
Innocence
11Emma Goldman and Anarchism Today
- Two Images of Emma Goldman
- As Uncompromising Revolutionary
- As Earth Mother
12The Great War, the Red Scare and American
Radicalism
- Nationalism or socialism? American Socialists
Oppose US Entry into the War, 1917 - Repressive Legislation
- Vigilante Violence
13The Great War, the Red Scare and American
Radicalism
- Eugene Debs Canton, Ohio Speech 1918
- Socialist Party Repression and Division
- Following the Soviet Model?
- Birth of the Communist Party
14Excerpts from Espionage and Sedition Acts
- Espionage Act, 1917 A crime "to convey false
reports or false statements with intent to
interfere with the operation or success of the
military or naval forces of the United
States...or attempt to cause insubordination,
disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of
duty...or...willfully obstruct recruiting or
enlistment...."Sedition Act, 1918 A crime to
"utter, print, write or publish any disloyal,
profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the
form of government of the United States, or the
Constitution..., or the uniform of the Army or
Navy,... or any language intended to...encourage
resistance to the United States...."(Another
1918 act provided for banning any immigrant who
was an anarchist or believed in the violent
overthrow of the American government and for
arresting and deporting any alien who fit those
categories.)
15The bomb-thrower is labeled European Anarchist
16A nationwide steel strike in 1919, led by
radicals, led this cartoonist to equate labor
militance with Communism.
17IWW Headquarters after Raid, 1919
18Centralia, Wash. 1919
- On Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1919, veterans from
the American Legion in Centralia attacked the
local IWW union hall. Wobblies met them with
gunfire. Four legionnaires were killed. That
night, IWW member Wesley Everest was taken from
his jail cell and lynched. On left Everest
buried with National Guardsmen standing by. On
right wanted poster.
19Goldman and Berkman Deported
- Deportation to Russia, 1919
- My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further
Disillusionment in Russia - Living My Life
- Goldman and the Spanish Civil War
20The 1920s A New Era of Normalcy
- Prosperity despite inequality
- Conservative political dominance
- Republican Party control
- Democratic Party provincialism
- Decline of organized labor
- An emerging consumer culture
- Culture Wars of the 1920s
-
21Exile, an Avant-Garde and Cultural Discontent in
the 1920s
- For many intellectuals and artists, Paris was the
destination of choice in the 1920s. - Cultural conflict in the 1920s and
disillusionment with the idealistic rhetoric of
the Great War led to cynicism about the
possibilities of American politics. Political
radicalism and cultural radicalism diverged in
the twenties. - Below Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Beach,
American proprietor of the famous Shakespeare
and Company bookstore in Paris
22The 1920s Radicalism in Conservative Times
- Socialist Party Division, 1919
- Debs death, 1925
- Norman Thomas as SP leader
- Thomas ran for President as the Socialist Party
candidate six times. He once said, I always get
more applause than votes.
23Communists in the 1920s
- Origins of the Communist Party
- Immigrant Base
- Underground strategy and revolutionary dreams
- American Communists and the Soviet Uniona
Bolshevized party - Joseph Stalin and the Third Period analysis of
capitalism
24The Great Depression
- Depth and Duration
- Failure of Recovery Measures
- Hoover
- Roosevelt and the New Deal Bold persistent
experimentation but continuing slump - Recession of 1937
- World War II and the end of the Depression
- From Roast Beef and Apple Pie to a third of a
nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
(FDR, 2d inaugural address, 1937)
25The Depression and the Contradictions of
Capitalism
- Was Depression America on the brink of
revolution? - Immiseration
- So, in a declining state of society, we have the
increasing misery of the worker in an advancing
state, complicated misery and in the terminal
state, static misery.Karl Marx, Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844 - Concentration of Capital
- As capitalism develops, Centralization of the
means of production and socialization of labor at
last reach a point where they become incompatible
with their capitalist integument. Thus integument
is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private
property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated.Capital, Volume I, chapter 32 - Falling Rate of Profit
- This law, and it is the most important law of
political economy, is that the rate of profit has
a tendency to fall with the progress of
capitalist production. Marx, Economic
Manuscripts of 1861-63
26An Americanized Working Class?
- Impact of 1924 immigration restriction
- Workers, mass culture and ethnic communities
- Working class benefits and working class rights
27A 1938 advertisement. What does this suggest
about the fate of consumer culture even during
the Great Depression?
28FDRs New Deal Reform to Save the System?
- FDR as radical? FDR as conservative?
- A Christian and a democrat
- Saving the rich man, losing his top hat
- When a reporter asked Norman Thomas if the
Roosevelts New Deal had carried out the
Socialist Party program, he replied that, yes,
the New Deal had carried it out on a stretcher.