Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich (review)

This engaging book is both a love story and a narrative of revolutionary communist anarchism. It covers the period from the late 1880s, when Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, two Russian émigrés, first met in a New York City café, to 1940. These years, arguably, mark out a particular kind of anarchism’s most robust accomplishments and notoriety. They are bookended by the trial and execution of Albert Parsons, August Spies, and other victims of the repression following the May 1886 bombing at Haymarket Square and the denouement of the promise of anarchism evident in the struggles associated with the Spanish Civil War. By this latter point in time, Goldman had died in Toronto after being incapacitated by two strokes. Berkman predeceased Goldman, committing suicide at his apartment in Nice, France, despondent during his last days in 1937 at the prospects of ongoing ill health and financial dependency. Too poor to be buried according to his wishes, “Sasha” Berkman’s final resting place was what is referred to in France as a communal grave. Goldman fared better, but not without bitter irony. Deported with Berkman from the United States in 1919, ostensibly for the threat she posed to order and good government, and barred from re-entry except for a brief period in 1934, Goldman was interred in Waldheim Cemetery, the burial plot of the Chicago Haymarket martyrs whose example so galvanized Berkman, Goldman, and an entire generation of revolutionary anarchists.

For five decades Berkman and Goldman were loved and revered figures within an international movement fractured by strategic differences but united in its utopian idealism. They were, at the same time, reviled and demonized by anarchism’s foes, their principles a body blow to bourgeois power and propriety. Berkman’s and Goldman’s commitments, which included the rights of men and women to freely constitute their relationships of love and the rights of labour to oppose exploitation and oppression, rested securely on cherished freedoms in which speech, conscience, association, and thought always loomed large. The defining feature of their anarchism was their accent on individual independence, refusal of all constraints on liberty, and resistance to authority, especially that of the established state. This aligned them with the Autonomist wing of early American anarchism.

The leitmotif of their lives together was Berkman’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Andrew Carnegie-owned Homestead steel works. This act is commonly understood to be one of the first instances of unambiguous anarchist terrorism perpetrated on American soil. It was a conscious effort to kill a symbol of capitalist exploitation, conducted by a revolutionary who denied that murder was his intent, proclaiming instead that he was an idealist and his purpose was to unleash the pent-up resistance of the constrained masses. Goldman knew of Berkman’s plan, approved of it, enabled his actions, and agreed with his decision to forego a legal defence and instead use the courtroom to mount a political challenge. She was forever cognizant of her responsibility, writing in Living My Life: “I had planned the Attentat with him; I had let him go alone.” (84)

It was not Frick’s humanity that Goldman and Berkman imagined themselves lethally attacking, then, but rather his class purpose. Frick, engaged in an epic labour-capital confrontation in 1892, was determined to break the spirit and organizational stranglehold of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers over Carnegie’s plant, located on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He refused demands for an increase of hourly rates on the part of the union men, imposed a wage cut, locked the workforce out, brought in scabs from employment agencies in Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, and turned the steel works into an armed camp, protected by an imposingly tall fence topped with barbed wire and patrolled by Winchester rifle bearing Pinkerton detectives. Dubbed “Fort Frick,” Homestead soon became a war...