Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace.
Emma Goldman’s Last Publication As A U.S. Resident
Goldman, Emma and Alexander Berkman. Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace. Last Message to the People of America. Ellis Island, New York: December, 1919.
8vo.; a disbound but fully intact copy, the inner pages detached from spine staples; printed wrappers; covers occasionally darkened, especially near spine. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First and only edition of a fascinating and quite scarce pamphlet, containing an extraordinary 24-page statement by Goldman and Berkman about their deportations. The Ellis Island imprint reflects Goldman’s last legal “residence” in this country—she was held there just prior to being shipped out of the US. According to Alice Wexler:
As of noon on December 5 [1919], Goldman and Berkman were prisoners at Ellis Island. Emma was placed in a room with Dora Lipkin and Ethel Bernstin—the only other women on the island, who had been arrested during the first of the Palmer raids in New York...(Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 264-75).
On December 12 the Supreme Court upheld the legal premises for Berkman’s deportation; rather than continue her appeal, Goldman chose to flee with him to Russia:
Her decision once made, Emma worked frantically to get supplies, money, food and clothing for herself and Berkman...In the midst of hurried preparations, a trip to the dentist, and farewell visits, Emma also composed manifestos protesting the deportation and sent letters to her friends, bidding them a sad goodbye and urging them to continue the work of agitation...[She] urged Ben [Reitman, her lover and colleague] to ‘push my essays and prison pamphlets’ and ‘keep my memory alive’...Early in the morning of Sunday, December 21, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the two hundred and forty-seven other immigrant radicals locked up on Ellis Island were suddenly awakened from sleep and hurried out in the freezing darkness onto barges that carried them to the S.S. Buford, a battered old army transport ship that had carried troops during the Spanish-American War. Accompanied by two hundred and fifty guards carrying revolvers, they sailed at dawn, on a ship with sealed orders, into the wintry Atlantic toward an unknown destination...For Goldman, the scene grotesquely reversed the traditional images of America and Russia: ‘Czarist’ America was now sending her back to ‘free’ revolutionary Russia...As she sailed out of New York Harbor on that icy December morning, Emma Goldman left behind the only place in the world where she had felt almost at home. Except for one three-month visit, she would never return. (ibid.)
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