Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination. Everett Marshall

which prompted their perpetration. She continued: “Some believe we should first obtain by force and let the intelligence and education come afterwards.”

      Miss Goldman did not hesitate to put forward a number of sentiments far more radical and sensational than any ever publicly advanced here. During Miss Goldman’s lecture a strong detail of police was in the hall to keep her from uttering sentiments which were regarded as too radical. This accounts for the fact that the speaker did not give free rein to her thoughts on that occasion. Because of anarchistic uprisings elsewhere it was thought best by the city officials to curb the utterances of the woman.

      As soon as it was known that Czolgosz admitted being a disciple of Emma Goldman, the police of a score of cities began an active hunt for her, in the belief that the President’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy, of which she was the head. It was known that Miss Goldman had been in Chicago in July, and that she had visited Buffalo in July and August. But her whereabouts immediately following the crime, could not easily be traced. The arrest of a number of anarchists in Chicago, and the capture of a number of letters, gave the police a clue that Miss Goldman was in St. Louis, and the police of that city made active search for her. She was not found, however, though the fact that she was in that city after the attack of Czolgosz on the President, was established. It was then surmised that she had gone to Chicago, and the police of that city redoubled their vigilance. Through a telegram sent to a man living on Oakdale avenue, the Chicago police learned that Miss Goldman had made inquiries concerning the arrest of the Anarchists in that city, and announced her purpose of going to Chicago, and would arrive on Sunday night, Sept. 8. The police watched the house in Oakdale avenue all Sunday night, but no one entered it. The watch was continued, however, and Monday morning the vigilance of the officers was rewarded. A woman approached the house and rang the front door bell. There was no response, and she went around the house to the back door, where she knocked. No one opened the door, nor was there any response. The woman then walked to Sheffield avenue and rang the bell at No. 303, the third flat in which is the home of Charles G. Norris. Here she was admitted, and while one of the detectives watched the house, the other reported to his superior officers. Captain Herman Schuettler, who had considerable experience with the Chicago Anarchists in 1886, prior to and after the Haymarket riot, immediately went to the Sheffield avenue house. The officer on duty there reported that no one had entered or left the house since the woman had disappeared behind its doors. The police officers tried the usual mode of securing admittance, but no response came to their signals. Then Detective Charles K. Hertz climbed in through a window, and opening the door, admitted Captain Schuettler. Sitting in the parlor, dressed in a light wrapper, with two partly filled valises in front of her, was Emma Goldman. She turned pale when the policemen confronted her and denied her identity, which was established by a fountain pen box, on which her name was written. The woman had said that she was a servant.

      Miss Goldman was taken to the office of Chief of Police O’Neill and served with a warrant charging her with having conspired with other Anarchists then under arrest, to kill the President.

      She detailed her meeting with the assassin in Chicago.

      “I was at the house of Abraham Isaak. Yes, the house at 515 Carroll street. I was preparing to take the Nickel Plate train for the East with Miss Isaak. A ring came at the door. I answered the bell and found a young man there. He asked for Mr. Isaak. The latter had left the house, promising to meet us at the station and say good-by. I so told the young man and I further told him that he might go to the station with us and meet Mr. Isaak there. So you see,” she asserted, “he would not even have been with me for thirty-five minutes had I not asked him to go to the train.

      “The young man—yes, it was Czolgosz, who shot the President—said that he had met me before. He said he had heard me lecture in Cleveland. I had delivered a lecture there on May 6, but I can’t remember all the people who shake hands with me, can I? I had no remembrance of him. We went to the station on the elevated train and this man accompanied us. I asked him where he had heard of Mr. Isaak. He said he had read the latter’s paper, Free Society. He did not talk to me about a plot. I never heard of him from that time until McKinley was shot.”

      Emma Goldman’s ideas on anarchy are contained in an interview had with her some months before President McKinley’s assassination. She said:

      “If a man came to me and told me he was planning an assassination I would think him an utter fool and refuse to pay any attention to him. The man who has such a plan, if he is earnest and honest, knows no secret is safe when told. He does the deed himself, runs the risk himself, pays the penalty himself. I honor him for the spirit that prompts him. It is no small thing for a man to be willing to lay down his life for the cause of humanity. The act is noble, but it is mistaken. While I do not advocate violence, neither do I condemn the anarchist who resorts to it.

      “I was an anarchist when I left Russia to come to America,” she continued, “but I had hardly formulated my belief. The final influence that crystallized my views was the hanging of the Chicago anarchists in 1887.

      “I am an anarchist because I love individual freedom, and I will not surrender that freedom. A leader must sooner or later be the victim of the masses he thinks he controls. When I definitely entered the work I gave myself a solemn pledge that I would study, that I would make passion bow to reason, that I would not be carried away from the truth by sentiment. I soon saw that the safest and wisest way to keep myself free was not to be a leader. That is why I am connected with no party. I am a member of no group. Individual freedom and responsibility—there is the basis of true anarchy.

      “No, I have never advocated violence, nor do I know a single truly great anarchist leader who ever did advocate violence. Where violence comes with anarchy it is a result of the conditions, not of anarchy. The biggest fallacy going is the idea that anarchists as a body band together and order violence, assassinations of rulers and all that. I ought to know something about anarchy, and I tell you that is false—absolutely false.

      “There is ignorance, cruelty, starvation, poverty, suffering, and some victim grows tired of waiting. He believes a decisive blow will call public attention to the wrongs of his country, and may hasten the remedy. He and perhaps one or two intimate friends or relatives make a plan. They do not have orders. They do not consult other anarchists.

      “Perhaps under the same conditions I would do the same. If I had been starving in Milan, and had raised my starving baby in the air as an appeal for justice, and had that baby shot in my arms by a brutal soldiery, who knows what I might have done? I might have changed from a philosophical anarchist to a fighting anarchist. Do you suppose if Santo Caserio had had anarchist organization back of him he would have tramped all the weary way to Paris, without money, in order to kill Carnot? If Bresci had been sent out from us, would he have had to scrape together every cent he could, even forcing one of his anarchist friends to pawn some of his clothes in order to repay a loan Bresci had made him? The friend curses Bresci for a hardhearted creditor, but Bresci never told why he needed the money so desperately.

      “Anarchy’s best future lies in America. We in America haven’t yet reached conditions—economic conditions, I mean—that necessarily breed violence. I am thankful for that; but we are much nearer such conditions than the old-time American ever dreamed we would be, and unless something is done to stop it, the time will come.

      “It’s all too absolutely silly, this talk about my being dangerous. Half my fellow believers think me a fool because I am always talking against violence and advocating individual work. I believe that the next ten years will see a wonderful spreading of the true principles of anarchy in this country.”

      Emma Goldman, at the time of the assassination, was a woman thirty-two years old, with coarse features, thick lips, a square jaw and prominent nose. She wore glasses on account of nearsightedness, and her hair was light, almost red—the color of the doctrine she teaches.

      She was held without bail, but afterwards released.

      After Czolgosz, the first arrests for complicity in the attempt on President McKinley’s life were made in the city of Chicago. The metropolis of Illinois, with its cosmopolitan population, has always been a hotbed of anarchy, and it was there the police instantly