About the Work
This book is a combined legal and political document, presented as the record of the case of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman against the United States, centered on their deportation proceedings. The work is structured as a pamphlet, containing an introduction by Robert Minor, the main text of a polemical essay on deportation, and a substantial appendix of quotations from American and foreign authors. The core of the text was written by Alexander Berkman, who hastily composed its final lines in December 1919 while detained at the Ellis Island Deportation Station, using pencil and scraps of paper concealed from the authorities. The book was composed against the immediate backdrop of the “Red Ark” departure, the ship that carried Goldman and Berkman into exile, which sailed in early morning darkness, leaving wives and children destitute and denied any knowledge of the sailing or the right to bid farewell. The work serves as both a protest against the specific act of their deportation and a broader indictment of the post-war political repression in the United States, which they saw as an imitation of Czarist Russian tactics. It is a document of its time, capturing the fear and defiance of the radical left during the First Red Scare.
Context
The book is situated in the immediate aftermath of World War I, a period the authors describe as one where the war was over but peace was not. They note that slaughter continued on many fronts, hundreds of thousands were dying from the blockade of Russia, and small nations like Ireland, India, Egypt, Persia, and Korea remained oppressed, with “self-determination” having become a crime under the grip of world imperialism. The text argues that the war was sold to the American people as a holy crusade against tyranny, despite the fact that they had voted overwhelmingly not to participate and had elected a President who “kept them out of the war.” The authors claim that Wall Street then sounded the bugle, and war publicity transformed the German into the “Vicious Hun,” poisoning even the obscurest hamlet with propaganda. Radicals—Anarchists, Socialists, I.W.Ws., pacifists, and conscientious objectors—who protested that America had no interest in the European War were jailed and subjected to lynch law. The book is particularly critical of the “radical intellectuals” who betrayed the cause, becoming “the bloodiest canines of Mars” by citing history, philosophy, science, and even Christ to justify the killing. The Government resorted to white terror to enforce the war effort, and the radicals warned that wartime legislation would remain operative after the war, stifling free speech permanently. The context is one of profound disillusionment, where the promise of a war for democracy has given way to a peace dominated by repression, with the radical and the Bolshevik becoming the new prey for the “plutocratic imperialist and the jingo-profiteer.”
Structure of the Book
The book is composed of several distinct parts. It opens with an introduction by Robert Minor, which sets the scene of the deportation and provides a biographical sketch of Berkman and Goldman. This is followed by the main body of the pamphlet text, which is a sustained political essay. The essay is organized into several sections, beginning with a broad analysis of post-war conditions and labor unrest, then moving to a critique of anti-Bolshevik propaganda and the resulting “American pogroms,” and then to a detailed condemnation of the administrative process of deportation as transplanted from Czarist Russia. The main text concludes with a call to action and a series of historical examples. The final and substantial portion of the book is an appendix titled “Quotations from American and Foreign Authors Which Would Fall Under the Criminal Anarchy Law, Espionage Law, Etc.” This section is an anthology of libertarian and anti-government sentiments from thinkers such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Henry George, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, compiled to demonstrate the repressive nature of the laws under which radicals were being prosecuted.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
The book begins with Robert Minor’s introduction, which describes the desperate conditions under which Alexander Berkman wrote the pamphlet’s final lines at the Ellis Island Deportation Station in December 1919. Minor details the departure of the “Red Ark,” the ship carrying the deportees, which left in early morning darkness, leaving wives and children destitute and denied farewell rights. When the women and children arrived with working-class comforts for the Russian winter, they were told the ship was gone, and they stormed the ferry-house in grief and rage before being driven away by soldiers. Minor frames this as the first picturesque incident of the War Millionaires’ effort to crush America’s soul. He defends Berkman and Goldman as Americans in the best sense, despite being deported as “Russians,” noting their thirty years of enlightenment work in America and their influence on nearly every liberal in the country. He highlights Berkman’s years in American prisons for the welfare of men and recalls a scene in Moscow where a young immigrant girl declared that a hundred Alexander Berkmans would change European history. Minor notes that most intellectuals did not bid them goodbye, but working-class youth did, which he sees as fitting, as their work will grow in the working class, which is why plutocracy deported them.
The pamphlet text proper opens with an analysis of post-war conditions, declaring that the war is over but peace is not. It details the broken promises of the war, which was supposed to be the last war and a holy crusade against tyranny. The authors recount how the American people, who had voted not to participate, were dragged into the conflict by Wall Street and a propaganda campaign that demonized the Germans. Radicals who protested were jailed, and the “radical intellectuals” betrayed them by justifying the war. The Government resorted to white terror, and the radicals’ warning that wartime legislation would outlast the war has come true: liberty is dead, and white terror dominates. Berkman and Goldman themselves cannot secure a hall to lecture on prison life or amnesty after thirty years in New York. Radical papers are suppressed, and raids on Anarchist, Socialist, I.W.W., and Union of Russian Workers headquarters occur daily, with books, libraries, pianos, and victrolas destroyed. The text then addresses the question of whether the radicals were misled, arguing that individuals cannot control mankind’s fate—the Kaiser did not create the war, and Wilson was made by it, not the other way around. Deep socio-political causes inherent in wage-slave civilization control the world, and the spirit of idealism struggles against the institutionalized, producing war and revolution.
The next section focuses on post-war conditions and labor unrest. The authors note the end of anti-“Hun” hatred, as commerce now demands feeding Germany “at a good profit,” quoting the German phrase “der Moor hat seine Schuldigkeit gethan” (the Moor has done his duty) to illustrate the brevity of national antagonisms when not stoked by business and religion. The “Frankenstein” of intolerance cultivated by the war remains alive and seeks a new outlet, finding it in the radical and the Bolshevik. The Government and class-conscious capitalists are filled with trepidation as revolution stalks Europe and threatens America. The war satisfied no one except financial interests and war profiteers; the American people feel victimized, having made sacrifices in hope of a bettered world. Their faith in the established order is shaken, and the authors declare that America is “on the threshold of the Social Revolution.” The masters are most terrified by labor’s new attitude: open rebellion against “Things as They Are,” shameless demands, and defiance of authority. Workers no longer accept a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, nor even doubled or trebled wages; they challenge private ownership, demand participation in industry, and even suggest labor taking over all industry. Disobedience is rampant, and labor rebels against State, Capital, and even their own leaders. The masters fear “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “Soviets of workers, soldiers and sailors,” citing the Boston police as having made common cause with labor. Soviet Russia’s unpardonable crimes are listed: abolishing profits, giving peasants the masters’ lands, proclaiming wealth common property, and subjecting aristocrats and capitalists to work. The rich find it intolerable to be leveled with common laborers. The response, the authors say, must be diplomatic: “strong as a lion, subtle as the snake.”
The following section addresses anti-Bolshevik propaganda and American pogroms. The war-time anti-Hun propaganda is redirected against the “Bolshevik,” the “radical,” and particularly the Slav, with Russians as the especial target. The press and pulpit paint Soviet Russia in blood and infamy, using falsehood and forgery where guns failed. The result is “American pogroms” against Russians, Bolsheviki, communists, radicals, and progressives. The authors claim the United States was historically free of race hatred, excepting the native negro, and that Americans, mostly of foreign descent, only engaged in light banter. Russians and Slavs were previously welcomed as docile, patient slaves and appreciated for their labor; Russian culture, literature, music, dancing, and the revolutionary intelligentzia were honored. Now it is a crime to have been born in Russia. The cause is the Russian Revolution—not the Miliukov-Kerensky revolution, but the real revolution that birthed Soviet Russia. The authors contrast helping revolutionists overthrow the Czar (acceptable) with the Prometheus of labor rising to emancipate the masses (unacceptable). Soviet Russia is called a “pioneer social experiment” and a “guiding star” to the oppressed. The American social order, maintained by club, gun, jail, lynch law, water-cure, dungeon, and straitjacket, is doomed and bears the virus of disintegration. American men have chosen imprisonment and death over participating in an “unholy war,” and workers are outgrowing craft-unionism, learning international solidarity, and rebelling against government by injunction. The section ends with the chorus: “Death to the Bolsheviki, the aliens, the I. W. Ws., the Communists, the Anarchists!”
The next part of the text condemns the imitation of European tactics by the American plutocracy and Government, which lack originality. Washington borrowed tricks from London even before the war, and American militarism aped the Old World’s bankrupt imperialism. The hue and cry against the “alien” is a “faithful replica” of Czarist persecution of Jews, and American pogroms against radicals are an “exaggerated picture” of Russian Jew-baiting. The passage then focuses on the importation of Czarist Russia’s “most infamous and most inhuman method”—the administrative process—onto American soil. This is described as the systematic sacrifice of “hundreds of thousands of the finest and bravest men and women of Russia” and the robbery of “the very flower of its youth.” The author invokes “O shades of Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry” as witnesses to this betrayal. The administrative process is defined as “the suppression and elimination of the political protestant and social rebel.” It involves picking men up on the street on mere suspicion of “political untrustworthiness,” arresting them in club rooms or homes, tearing them from families, locking them in jails or detention pens, holding them incommunicado for weeks and months, depriving them of open court hearings, denying trial by jury, and finally deporting or banishing them to unknown shores. This occurs not for any crime committed but “merely on the denunciation of an enemy or the irresponsible accusation by a Secret Service man” that the suspect holds unpopular or “forbidden” opinions.
The text then details the conditions at Ellis Island, stating that at that very moment there are one hundred “political suspects” held there, with several hundred more in Immigration Detention jails. None are charged with specific crimes; all are accused of entertaining “illegal” views. Nearly all were seized on the street or arrested in homes or reading-rooms “while engaged in the dangerous pursuit of studying the English language, mathematics, or American history.” Others were arrested in factories or in raids on homes and peaceful meetings. Many were beaten and clubbed, some requiring hospital treatment. In police stations they faced the third degree, threats, and torture, then were thrust into “bull pens” at Ellis Island. There they are treated as dangerous felons, kept under lock and key, allowed to see families only once a week with a screen between them and guards present. Their mail is censored. Some who protested isolation and “putrid food” were placed in the insane asylum. This drove the politicals to a hunger strike—”the paradoxical self-defense of despair.” The Government keeps their destination secret.
The text then recounts the case of Emma Goldman as a precedent for the arbitrary use of the administrative process. More than eight years ago, Secret Service men were ordered to gather “material” in Rochester, N. Y. to disfranchise a certain citizen. This man was “of no concern whatever to Washington,” an ordinary quiet working man with no interest in social or political questions. He had long been considered dead, having disappeared years previously with no trace found “till this day.” The Government disfranchised him anyway, without apprising even his wife. The pretext was that he was not fully of legal age at naturalization—about 20 years before. Ten years passed. Then the Government announced it intended to deport Emma Goldman, who had acquired citizenship by marriage 30 years before. The Government suddenly announced she was a citizen no more “because her husband had been disfranchised ten years ago.” The author argues that the principle of deportation is broadening: not only alien social rebels but naturalized Americans and native-born citizens are threatened. “One hundred per cent Americanism” aims to root out traditional American freedom. The author mentions denaturalization, banishment, exile to “the Island of Guam or to Alaska, the future Siberia of the United States.” Congress is preparing laws for disenfranchisement of naturalized Americans. The ultimate blow is aimed at Labor, at “the increasing discontent of the masses, their growing class-consciousness.”
The main text concludes with a call to action and historical examples. The author asks where are the judges who doomed Socrates, the persecutors of the Gracchi, the banishers of Aristides, the excommunicators of Spinoza and Tolstoy—their memory obliterated by Progress. The author declares “the dawn has begun. In Russia.” The passage urges artists, educators, writers, and workers to resist. Workers are told their emancipation is their own work, that “an injury to one is the concern of all,” and that solidarity is essential. The author warns that suppression comes home to labor.
The final and largest portion of the book is the “Quotations” section, an anthology of libertarian and anti-government sentiment. It opens with unattributed statements asserting that all men should be free, and that if any must be slaves, it should be those who desire slavery for themselves or for others. A second unattributed line declares that the preservation of liberties is a duty the whole people must never entrust to any hands but their own. Thomas Jefferson is quoted on the opening of eyes to the rights of man, with science revealing that mankind was not born with saddles on their backs nor a favored few booted and spurred to ride them. Jefferson then describes three forms of society: without government, as among “our Indians”; under governments where every will has just influence, as in England slightly and in the American States greatly; and under governments of force, as in monarchies and most republics—a “government of wolves over sheep.” He doubts whether the first condition is not best, though it is inconsistent with great population. He holds that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing,” as necessary as storms in the physical world. Honest republican governors should punish rebellions mildly so as not to discourage them. Jefferson also complains of suffering under “the base prostitution of law to party passions in one judge, and the imbecility of another,” and states that error alone needs government’s support, while truth stands by itself. William Lloyd Garrison is quoted on liberty for each, for all, forever; on ruling no one and being ruled by no one with consent; on the peril to all liberties when one is enslaved; and on cursing the Constitution of the United States, seeing crowds trample consciences at the bidding of a piece of parchment. He rejects moderation in his cause, comparing it to telling a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm. He declares he will not equivocate, excuse, or retreat an inch, and will be heard, citing the apathy of the people. This is from the first issue of the Liberator, January 1, 1831. Wendell Phillips states that anything that cannot bear free thought should crack; that society left to itself tends toward freedom, justice, and truth; that the right to think, know, and utter is the dearest liberty, without which no people can be free and with which no slavery can exist. He argues that convincing thinking men of what is right and humane men of what is just gains the cause permanently, while violence loses half of what is gained. Liberty’s manna must be gathered daily or it rots; only unintermitted agitation keeps people awake to principle against being smothered by material prosperity. He urges allowing every man, right or wrong, to utter his conscience freely, protecting even the humblest and most hated member, for a community that dares not do so is “only a gang of slaves.” Stephen Pearl Andrews argues that governments have justified themselves by maintaining order, but order has never been maintained because attempts to reduce men to order constrict their natures. The less effort to reduce men to order, the more orderly they become, comparing Austria and the United States. He suggests that an army of one hundred thousand soldiers in New York, as at Paris, would cause a bloody revolution in a week; the remedy for turbulence is more liberty, and with no external restrictions there will be no disturbance, provided regulating principles of justice are accepted in the public mind as substitutes for repressive laws. Henry George warns of insidious forces producing inequality and destroying liberty. It is not enough that men vote or are theoretically equal before the law; they must have liberty to avail themselves of opportunities and stand on equal terms with nature’s bounty. Otherwise Liberty withdraws her light, darkness comes, and progress’s forces turn destructive. Unless foundations are laid in justice, the social structure cannot stand. Henry David Thoreau asserts that law never made men more just, and respect for it makes even the well-disposed agents of injustice. He describes soldiers marching to war against their wills and consciences, serving as “small movable forts and magazines” for some unscrupulous man in power. The mass of men serve the State as machines, with bodies—standing army, militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus—without free exercise of judgment or moral sense, on a level with wood, earth, and stones. Others—legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, office-holders—serve with their heads, rarely making moral distinctions, as likely to serve the devil as God. He cannot recognize as his government a political organization that is the slave’s government also. All men recognize the right of revolution: to refuse allegiance and resist government when its tyranny or inefficiency are great and unendurable. Ralph Waldo Emerson states that laws make no difference to a hero; that foolish legislation is a rope of sand perishing in the twisting; that money spent on courts and prisons is ill laid out; that every actual State is corrupt and good men must not obey laws too well; that politics has for ages signified cunning, intimating the State is a trick. No law is sacred but that of his nature; good and bad are transferable names; the only right is what is after his constitution. He is ashamed how easily we are all caught by the semblance of absolute truth in the deliverance of the majority, and he declares that the less government we have, the better.
Main Arguments
The book’s central argument is that the deportation of radicals like Goldman and Berkman is not an isolated act of justice but a systematic campaign of political repression that imitates the worst methods of Czarist Russia. The authors argue that the administrative process—the suppression and elimination of the political protestant and social rebel without trial by jury—has been transplanted onto American soil, betraying the nation’s revolutionary heritage. They contend that the war-time propaganda machine, which demonized the “Hun,” has been redirected against the “Bolshevik” and the “radical,” creating a climate of intolerance that leads to “American pogroms” against Russians and other Slavs. The book argues that the real cause of this persecution is the Russian Revolution, which is not the acceptable revolution that overthrew the Czar, but the real revolution that birthed Soviet Russia, a “pioneer social experiment” that threatens the capitalist order. The authors further argue that the war itself was a product of deep socio-political causes inherent in wage-slave civilization, not the actions of individuals like the Kaiser or Wilson. They maintain that the post-war labor unrest is a direct result of the war-time promises of democracy, which gave workers a sense of power and led them to challenge private ownership and demand participation in industry. The book’s final argument is that the suppression of free speech and the persecution of radicals will ultimately harm labor itself, and that the only remedy is solidarity and resistance. The inclusion of the quotations section serves to demonstrate that the ideas for which the radicals are being persecuted are part of a venerable American and Western tradition of libertarian thought, from Jefferson and Thoreau to Garrison and Emerson, and that the laws under which they are being prosecuted would criminalize the very founders of American democracy.
Key Concepts
A central concept is the “administrative process,” defined as the suppression and elimination of the political protestant and social rebel through arrest on mere suspicion, incommunicado detention, denial of trial by jury, and deportation to unknown shores. The book also develops the idea of “American pogroms,” the violent persecution of Russians, Bolsheviki, communists, radicals, and progressives, which it sees as an “exaggerated picture” of Russian Jew-baiting. The “Red Ark” is a key symbol, representing the deportation of radicals and the cruelty of the state in separating families. The text introduces the concept of the “Frankenstein” of intolerance, the monster of suppression cultivated by the war campaign that now turns on the country itself. The book also explores the idea of the “Social Revolution,” which it claims America is on the threshold of, driven by labor’s new attitude of open rebellion against “Things as They Are.” The concept of “one hundred per cent Americanism” is critiqued as a movement to root out traditional American freedom and to disenfranchise naturalized citizens. The book also presents the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “Soviets of workers, soldiers and sailors” as the masters’ greatest fear. Finally, the concept of “eternal vigilance” is invoked as the price of liberty, warning that wartime legislation would remain operative after the war to stifle free speech permanently.
Themes
A dominant theme is the betrayal of American ideals. The book argues that the United States, once the “freest democracy on earth,” has betrayed the legacy of Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry by importing the Czarist administrative process. This is framed as a profound spiritual and political crisis, where the nation’s revolutionary heritage is being crushed by the forces of plutocracy and imperialism. Another major theme is the nature of power and its corruption. The authors portray the “War Millionaires” and the “plutocratic imperialist” as the driving forces behind the war and the subsequent repression, protecting their dollars “looted over European graves.” The book explores how great financial interests, aided by international Junkers, thrust humanity into war through unprecedented propaganda, and how the “tiger in man,” once awakened, now turns on the country itself. The theme of labor’s awakening is also central. The book describes how the war-time promises of democracy gave workers a sense of power, leading them to challenge private ownership and demand participation in industry. This new attitude of open rebellion is what terrifies the masters most, and it is the ultimate target of the deportation campaign. The theme of exile and dispossession is powerfully present, from the description of the “Red Ark” leaving wives and children destitute to the case of Emma Goldman, whose citizenship was retroactively revoked. The book also explores the theme of intellectual cowardice versus working-class solidarity. Minor’s introduction contrasts the absence of intellectuals at the farewell with the presence of working-class youth, suggesting that the radicals’ work will grow in the working class. Finally, the theme of historical memory is present in the call to action, which asks where are the persecutors of Socrates, the Gracchi, Aristides, Spinoza, and Tolstoy, noting that their memory is obliterated by Progress, while the dawn of a new era has begun in Russia.
The Author’s Conclusions
The authors conclude that the United States has entered a period of profound reaction, where the promise of democracy has been replaced by the reality of white terror. They conclude that the war was not a crusade for freedom but a product of capitalist competition and monarchical rivalries, and that the peace has been betrayed. They conclude that the deportation of radicals is a deliberate strategy by the plutocracy to crush the growing class-consciousness of labor and to eliminate all opposition to the established order. The authors conclude that the administrative process, with its denial of trial by jury and its arbitrary arrests, is a fundamental betrayal of American principles and a direct imitation of Czarist tyranny. They conclude that the persecution of radicals will not succeed, because the spirit of idealism will continue to struggle against the institutionalized, and because the dawn of a new era has begun in Russia. The authors conclude that workers must rely on their own efforts for their emancipation, that “an injury to one is the concern of all,” and that solidarity is essential. They conclude that suppression will ultimately come home to labor, and that the only defense is eternal vigilance and resistance. The final conclusion, drawn from the anthology of quotations, is that the ideas for which the radicals are being persecuted are the very ideas upon which American democracy was founded, and that the laws used against them would criminalize the nation’s own revolutionary heroes.
Significance
The book is significant as a primary document of the First Red Scare, capturing the desperation and defiance of the radical left at the moment of its greatest persecution. It is a powerful indictment of the deportation of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, framing it not as a legal technicality but as a political act of repression that betrayed American ideals. The work is also significant for its compilation of libertarian quotations, which serves as a powerful argument that the radical ideas being suppressed were part of a long and honorable tradition of American and Western thought. The book’s significance lies in its articulation of the “administrative process” as a distinct and dangerous form of political control, a concept that resonates beyond its immediate historical context. It is a testament to the courage of two individuals who, facing exile, chose to speak out against the injustice they saw, and it serves as a warning about the fragility of civil liberties in times of fear. The book’s final message, that the dawn has begun in Russia, reflects the hope that many radicals placed in the Soviet experiment, a hope that would later be tragically betrayed, but which at this moment represented a genuine alternative to the capitalist order they saw as corrupt and oppressive. The work stands as a record of a moment when the promise of American freedom was tested and found wanting by those who had dedicated their lives to its realization.
