Emma Goldman was a leader in the American anarchist movement and
cofounder with Alexander Berkman of the anarchist monthly Mother Earth.
After she and Berkman distributed a manifesto urging young men to resist the
military draft during World War I (1914-1918), the two were charged with
conspiracy to violate U.S. conscription laws. In June 1917 Goldman addressed
her jury, calling for free speech and the right to resist tyranny. The two were
convicted, sentenced to two years in prison, and fined $10,000.
'Progress Is Never Within the Law”
By Emma Goldman
Gentlemen, when we asked whether you would be prejudiced against
us if it were proven that we propagated ideas and opinions contrary to those
held by the majority, you were instructed by the Court to say, 'If they are
within the law.' But what the court did not tell you is, that no new faith—not
even the most humane and peaceable—has ever been considered 'within the law' by
those who were in power. The history of human growth is at the same time the
history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the
brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.
Gentlemen of the jury, most of you, I take it, are believers
in the teachings of Jesus. Bear in mind that he was put to death by those who
considered his views as being against the law. I also take it that you are
proud of your Americanism. Remember that those who fought and bled for your
liberties were in their time considered as being against the law, as dangerous
disturbers and trouble-makers. They not only preached violence, but they
carried out their ideas by throwing tea into the Boston harbor. They said that
'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.' They wrote a dangerous document
called the Declaration of Independence. A document which continues to be
dangerous to this day, and for the circulation of which a young man was
sentenced to ninety days prison in a New York Court, only the other day. They
were the Anarchists of their time—they were never within the law.
Your Government is allied with the French Republic. Need I
call your attention to the historic fact that the great upheaval in France was
brought about by extra-legal means? The Dantes, the Robespierres, the Marats,
the Herberts, aye even the man who is responsible for the most stirring
revolutionary music, the Marseillaise (which unfortunately has deteriorated
into a war tune), even Camille Desmoulins, were never within the law. But for
those great pioneers and rebels, France would have continued under the yoke of
the idle Louis XVI, to whom the sport of shooting jack rabbits was more
important than the destiny of the people of France …
Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not
whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other
domain of human thought and expression—to science, literature, music; in fact,
everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within
the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a
chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and
condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever
going into the complexity of the human soul.
Progress knows nothing of fixity. It cannot be pressed into
a definite mold. It cannot bow to the dictum, 'I have ruled,' 'I am the
regulating finger of God.' Progress is ever renewing, ever becoming, ever
changing—never is it within the law.
If that be crime, we are criminals even like Jesus,
Socrates, Galileo, Bruno, John Brown and scores of others. We are in good
company, among those whom Havelock Ellis, the greatest living psychologist,
describes as the political criminals recognized by the whole civilized world,
except America, as men and women who out of deep love for humanity, out of a
passionate reverence for liberty and an all-absorbing devotion to an ideal are
ready to pay for their faith even with their blood. We cannot do otherwise if
we are to be true to ourselves—we know that the political criminal is the
precursor of human progress—the political criminal of today must needs be the
hero, the martyr and the saint of the new age.
But, says the Prosecuting Attorney, the press and the
unthinking rabble, in high and low station, 'that is a dangerous doctrine and
unpatriotic at this time'. No doubt it is. But are we to be held responsible
for something which is as unchangeable and unalienable as the very stars
hanging in the heavens unto time and all eternity?
Gentlemen of the jury, we respect your patriotism. We would
not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not
be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for
one cannot believe that love of one's country must needs consist in blindness
to its social faults, in deafness to its social discords, in inarticulation of
its social wrongs. Neither can I believe that the mere accident of birth in a
certain country or the mere scrap of a citizen's paper constitutes the love of
country.
I know many people—I am one of them—who were not born here,
nor have they applied for citizenship, and who yet love America with deeper passion
and greater intensity than many natives whose patriotism manifests itself by
pulling, kicking, and insulting those who do not rise when the national anthem
is played. Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes.
He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. So we, too, who know
America, love her beauty, her richness, her great possibilities; we love her
mountains, her canyons, her forests, her Niagara, and her deserts—above all do
we love the people that have produced her wealth, her artists who have created
beauty, her great apostles who dream and work for liberty—but with the same
passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her cant, her corruption, her
mad, unscrupulous worship at the altar of the Golden Calf.
We say that if America has entered the war to make the world
safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is
the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being
outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing
and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every
independent opinion gagged. Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we
give of it to the world? We further say that a democracy conceived in the military
servitude of the masses, in their economic enslavement, and nurtured in their
tears and blood, is not democracy at all. It is despotism—the cumulative result
of a chain of abuses which, according to that dangerous document, the
Declaration of Independence, the people have the right to overthrow.
The District Attorney has dragged in our Manifesto, and he
has emphasized the passage, 'Resist conscription.' Gentlemen of the jury,
please remember that that is not the charge against us. But admitting that the
Manifesto contains the expression, 'Resist conscription', may I ask you, is
there only one kind of resistance? Is there only the resistance which means the
gun, the bayonet, the bomb or flying machine? Is there not another kind of
resistance? May not the people simply fold their hands and declare, 'We will
not fight when we do not believe in the necessity of war'? May not the people
who believe in the repeal of the Conscription Law, because it is
unconstitutional, express their opposition in word and by pen, in meetings and
in other ways? What right has the District Attorney to interpret that
particular passage to suit himself? Moreover, gentlemen of the jury, I insist
that the indictment against us does not refer to conscription. We are charged
with a conspiracy against registration. And in no way or manner has the
prosecution proven that we are guilty of conspiracy or that we have committed
an overt act.
Gentlemen of the jury, you are not called upon to accept our
views, to approve of them or to justify them. You are not even called upon to
decide whether our views are within or against the law. You are called upon to
decide whether the prosecution has proven that the defendants Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman have conspired to urge people not to register. And whether
their speeches and writings represent overt acts.
Whatever your verdict, gentlemen, it cannot possibly affect
the rising tide of discontent in this country against war which, despite all
boasts, is a war for conquest and military power. Neither can it affect the
ever increasing opposition to conscription which is a military and industrial
yoke placed upon the necks of the American people. Least of all will your
verdict affect those to whom human life is sacred, and who will not become a party
to the world slaughter. Your verdict can only add to the opinion of the world
as to whether or not justice and liberty are a living force in this country or
a mere shadow of the past.
Your verdict may, of course, affect us temporarily, in a
physical sense—it can have no effect whatever upon our spirit. For even if we
were convicted and found guilty and the penalty were that we be placed against
a wall and shot dead, I should nevertheless cry out with the great Luther:
'Here I am and here I stand and I cannot do otherwise.'
And gentlemen, in conclusion let me tell you that my
co-defendant, Mr Berkman, was right when he said the eyes of America are upon
you. They are upon you not because of sympathy for us or agreement with
Anarchism. They are upon you because it must be decided sooner or later whether
we are justified in telling people that we will give them democracy in Europe,
when we have no democracy here? Shall free speech and free assemblage, shall
criticism and opinion—which even the espionage bill did not include—be
destroyed? Shall it be a shadow of the past, the great historic American past?
Shall it be trampled underfoot by any detective, or policeman, anyone who
decides upon it? Or shall free speech and free press and free assemblage
continue to be the heritage of the American people?
Gentlemen of the jury, whatever your verdict will be, as far
as we are concerned, nothing will be changed. I have held ideas all my life. I
have publicly held my ideas for twenty-seven years. Nothing on earth would ever
make me change my ideas except one thing; and that is, if you will prove to me
that our position is wrong, untenable, or lacking in historic fact. But never
would I change my ideas because I am found guilty. I may remind you of two
great Americans, undoubtedly not unknown to you, gentlemen of the jury; Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. When Thoreau was placed in prison for
refusing to pay taxes, he was visited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson said:
'David, what are you doing in jail?' and Thoreau replied: 'Ralph, what are you
doing outside, when honest people are in jail for their ideals?' Gentlemen of
the jury, I do not wish to influence you. I do not wish to appeal to your
passions. I do not wish to influence you by the fact that I am a woman. I have
no such desires and no such designs. I take it that you are sincere enough and
honest enough and brave enough to render a verdict according to your
convictions, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt.
Please forget that we are Anarchists. Forget that it is
claimed that we propagated violence. Forget that something appeared in Mother
Earth when I was thousands of miles away, three years ago. Forget all that,
and merely consider the evidence. Have we been engaged in a conspiracy? has
that conspiracy been proven? have we committed overt acts? have those overt
acts been proven? We for the defense say they have not been proven. And
therefore your verdict must be not guilty.
But whatever your decision, the struggle must go on. We are
but the atoms in the incessant human struggle towards the light that shines in
the darkness—the Ideal of economic, political and spiritual liberation of
mankind!
Source: The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches.
MacArthur, Brian, ed. Penguin Books, 1996.
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