An Extraordinary Woman and an Unlikely Anarchist: Emma Goldman, Leon Czolgosz and Anarchism in America

by Rabbi Jonathan Brown

    The word "anarchism" evokes strong reactions among those who hear it.  Its connotations include resistance to arbitrary rulers and unjust laws, labor unrest leading to mob violence, assassinations, and chaos. The movement has ancient antecedents, Julius Caesar being arguably a prominent early victim. After a long hiatus, the movement re-emerged in 19th century Europe, wreaking havoc and evoking fear in palaces and in the carriages conveying the kings, queens, and dukes through the streets of Europe's capitals.

   In its modern guise, anarchism called for a social revolution that would abolish all political and economic authority, thereby—at least in theory—ushering in a society based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals. Since the United States of America to a certain extent is a society based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals who have the right to select and to unselect their leaders, one might not have expected that it would have much to fear from anarchists. In America, there were no kings or dukes or czars or Kaisers who, in the mind of an anarchist, deserved to be eliminated; our rulers were elected.

    Following the Civil War, however, two factors provided the conditions in which the philosophy of anarchism could flourish even in the United States. First, the Industrial Revolution transformed villages into towns and towns into cities. Second, a continually increasing flow of immigrants from Europe fled oppressive conditions in their own countries to seek freedom in America, but was ill-prepared to find work here. This 'perfect storm' of human beings, some on the move from their lives on the farm into the towns and cities, and millions more coming over to America in search of a new start, had two devastating effects. First, the agrarian way of life that had prevailed in much of our country up to that time was severely diminished. Second, the combined influx from the farm and from overseas overwhelmed the infrastructure of the places where people hoped to create a new life for themselves and their families. Providing even basic necessities like decent housing, health care facilities, and sanitation became an overwhelming task, and millions lived in squalor.

    Meanwhile, commerce and industry were expanding so rapidly that men with the right connections and business acumen could become hugely successful, with almost unlimited power.  In the prevailing free market economy, there was neither oversight nor accountability; owners of factories, mines and businesses could do what they wanted with their money and their workers. Corporations could combine to destroy the competition. Among the most glaring of the injustices all this change provoked was the chasm that daily grew larger between the life-style of the titans of commerce and industry, like Philip Armour, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, George Pullman, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt (Gilmour 26-31; Miller 18-20 and passim), and the working conditions and grinding poverty of the workers who provided the titans with their fortunes and power:

For every tycoon smoking cigars wrapped in hundred dollar bills, for every society woman who strapped a diamond–encrusted collar to her dog, for every playboy who spent the summer sailing Daddy's yacht, there were tens of thousands of seamstresses, coal miners, and assembly line workers for whom life was simply a battle for existence. Armies of exhausted men, women and children—entire families—trudge through factory gates six and seven days a week for up to 16 hours a day. Daily salaries were counted in quarters, nickels and dimes. (Miller 34-35)

    This dramatic contrast in fortunes was the ground on which American anarchism found firm footing. And it was the backdrop for the entrance of a remarkable woman who would galvanize the resistance of the workers and energize tens of thousands of other Americans who saw what was happening and were disgusted by it.


    Her name was Emma Goldman. Her family had immigrated to America 1885 and settled in Rochester, New York; Emma, sixteen, adapted quickly to her new environment.

     A year after she arrived, a bomb was thrown at a workers' meeting in the Haymarket Square in Chicago, killing one policeman and injuring several others. The bomb thrower was never identified, but eight anarchists were apprehended, tried, and convicted despite the lack of evidence against them. In November 1887, four of those charged were executed, and a fifth took his own life in his prison cell. The trial and verdicts added many new adherents to the anarchist cause. "The Haymarket trial," said Goldman, "was the decisive influence in my life" (Avrich 46) (1)

    Her concern for the suffering of workers and their families in her newly adopted land soon brought her to the attention of the socialists and anarchists who were already deeply engaged. In the words of historian Paul Avrich:

Goldman was a born propagandist and organizer. She would become the champion of a slew of unorthodox causes including women's equality, sexual liberation, birth control, libertarian education, and artistic freedom. But she is best known for her role in organizing and encouraging workers to stand up for their rights, for better working conditions, a living wage, and job security. (45)

An exceptional orator, Goldman spoke in hundreds of lecture halls and union meetings around the country.  On May 5th, 1901, she addressed an audience of several hundred people at Cleveland's Memorial Hall, beginning by reminding them that Anarchism, alone among radical ideologies, promised to liberate downtrodden workers:

We do not favor the socialist idea of converting men and women into mere units of production under the eyes of a paternal government. We go to the opposite extreme and demand the fullest and most complete liberty for each and every person to work out his own salvation upon any lines that he pleases, so long as he does not interfere with the happiness of others. (Miller 274)

Anarchists were opposed to shedding blood to achieve their ends, she told the crowd.

Some believe that we should first obtain the force and let the intelligence and education come afterwards. Nothing could be more fallacious. If we get the education and intelligence first among the people, the power will come to us without a struggle.

But it was understandable, she then said, that some anarchists carried out violent attacks. "Some men," she noted, "were so consumed with passion that they could not simply stand idly by and watch wrongs being committed" (Miller 274).

    In attendance that evening was a young man who, in a few short months, would find himself consumed by such passion. His name was Leon Czolgosz.

    The Czolgosz family had arrived in America from Poland in 1872 and had settled in Detroit, where Leon's father's uncle had already found a good job (Miller 38). They stayed there for a decade in a relatively comfortable setting. It was an overwhelmingly Catholic neighborhood, and the church played an important role in Leon's childhood.

    As Leon grew older, he took an interest in current events; after leaving school at sixteen to help augment the family income, he started paying attention to the condition of workers in the communities in which he lived. During his teens and early twenties, his family lived in Cleveland, and Czolgosz obtained work with the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company. After a prolonged strike in 1893, he and the other strikers had been blacklisted (the owner could replace them with new immigrants who would work for less); unable to return to work under his own name, he chose another one: Fred Nieman. Rehired because he was a skilled worker, he was promoted several times until he made a decent living.

    But he was a 'peculiar duck.' Czolgosz had always lived a quiet, strangely solitary life. Even as child, while he did well at school, Leon did not seem to have a single close friend (Miller 41). As Scott Miller describes him:

During lunch he would often find a place apart, remove a sandwich from his lunch pail and quietly observe the conversations and friendly banter of the other men as he munched his food. After work, when colleagues made plans to meet up for beer or a game of cards, he slipped out of the factory gates alone, heading to his usual place in the saloon at the corner of Third and Tod, or straight home to read…Normal social interaction seemed beyond his capabilities. (76)

But he did hold strong opinions about politics. Like Goldman, he had only contempt for the capitalist system and the way it treated the working class.

    Within the anarchist movement, a distinction was made between those who wished to protest working conditions by "the word"—publishing newsletters, writing books, putting up flyers and holding meetings decrying the treatment of workers—and those who thought that the situation required action,  "the deed." Czolgosz had been introduced to the notion of "the propaganda of the deed" some years before he met Emma Goldman, but the logical consequences of that approach had never been presented to him as clearly and effectively as it was in Goldman's speech.  And so it was that the "deed" he chose was to assassinate President McKinley, who represented for Czolgosz all that was wrong in capitalism.

    During the previous summer, on July 29, 1900, an Italian immigrant named Gaetano Bresci had assassinated King Umberto I of Italy. (2)  The event made an evident impression on Czolgosz; he decided to use the same gun to kill McKinley that Bresci had used to kill King Umberto I, the easily concealed .32 caliber Iver Johnson "Safety Automatic" revolver. If he knew of Emma Goldman's response to the murder of the Italian king—she had been quoted as saying, "King Humbert [sic] was justly put to death by a brave man, who cared to act for the good" (qtd. in Miller 276)—that would only have confirmed McKinley as his target. (3)

    After hearing Goldman speak, nothing would deter Czolgosz/Nieman from carrying out his intended 'deed'. He later explained, "her doctrine that all rulers should be exterminated was what set me to thinking so that my head nearly split with the pain. Miss Goldman's words went right through me, and when I left the lecture I had made up my mind that I would have to do something heroic for the cause I loved" (qtd. in Miller 274).


    President McKinley's decision to attend the Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901 had been well publicized. Czolgosz decided this would be the perfect occasion for his 'deed,' but came to the Exposition without a clear idea as to how he was going to carry out his plan. On Sept. 5, he joined a large procession that included McKinley entering the Fairgrounds, but could not get close enough to McKinley to shoot him without endangering other people. So, the next day, he came to be standing in line along with thousands of other well-wishers as the president greeted his adoring public, shaking each person's hand and offering a brief greeting as they came by.  No one paid attention to the slight little man who kept his hand in his pocket the entire time.

When he reached the president, as McKinley extended his hand, Czolgosz/Nieman pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot McKinley twice before being wrestled to the ground. The president lingered with his wounds for a week, and died on the morning of September 14th. (4)

    Czolgosz, like Bresci in Italy, had made no plans to escape. He was placed in police custody, and the interrogation began the very next day. It is the statements he made during his interrogation that remove all doubts about whether or not he was an anarchist. He had written no tracts on anarchism, nor did he make public statements about his feelings. When he held conversations with fellow anarchists, he was so ill informed they thought he was a spy for the government! In answering his interrogators, though, he was unmistakably plain. He did not believe in the republican form of government, he stated, and continued: "I don't believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill them. I don't believe in voting. It is against my principles. I am an Anarchist. I also don't believe in marriage; I believe in free love." He made it clear that he understood what he was doing when he shot the president, and that he was willing to accept the consequences of his action. "I know what will happen to me. If the president dies, I will be hung. I want to say, I want it to be published that I killed President McKinley because I done my duty" (Miller 304).

    The police, acutely aware of Czolgosz's connections with Goldman, located her in the apartment in Chicago where she was staying, arrested her, and kept in her custody for two weeks. She spoke highly of Czolgosz, calling him "a hero who had made the ultimate sacrifice for his beliefs." Writing about him in an anarchist publication called Free Society, she said, "His was a soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world, a soul impractical, inexpedient, lacking in caution. But daring just the same" (Miller 343).   

    At his trial, Czolgosz said very little. There was no diatribe against the government or President McKinley or the plight of the workingman, only an insistence that he had acted alone. The sentence was death, to occur during the week of October 28th, at Auburn Prison, which contained New York State's only electric chair at the time. Several hundred people were waiting for him when the train arrived at the prison at 3 a.m. on the morning of September 26th. They would have been delighted to hang him right there. It took a phalanx of police to get him safely into the prison. He was executed on October 29th, mourned by very few outside of his family.


    That a republic like the United States, whose elected president shares power with a Congress elected by the people, and whose legislation was frequently subject to review by the Supreme Court, would need to worry about the president being assassinated seemed highly unlikely at the beginning of 1901. Even after Lincoln was assassinated, it was assumed that the circumstances that led to his death were unique, just as the Civil War was unique. James A. Garfield's assassination by a rejected office seeker seemed bizarre, and not ipso facto a reason to be afraid of more killings. But the death of McKinley made it clear that any president needed stringent security at all times, most especially in public settings like the Music Hall at the Pan- American Exposition.

    McKinley, a very friendly person and a highly popular president (who kept saying, "who would want to hurt me?"), did not appreciate the depth of the discontent, frustration, anxiety, and anger created when those made astonishingly rich by industrialization used their very powerful influence with him to keep the workers powerless, mired in poverty, and miserable at work and at home.
 
    In that fertile ground for dissent, the movement known as anarchism flourished and gained thousands of sympathizers. Emma Goldman became a spokesperson for the movement and Leon Czolgosz responded to her eloquence, which fed his frustration as a fired worker. Having been convinced by Goldman that McKinley should be assassinated, that newsletters and rallies would never change the situation, he 'did his duty' and killed the president. Americans could never again say that anarchism—or ideologically motivated assassination—was a problem only in Europe.

(1) For more information about the Haymarket riot, see Miller 138-143.

(2) Bresci had immigrated to America in 1884, but still had family and strong ties to Italy and was distressed by how workers were treated there. He was selected by a lottery to kill the Italian king who had specialized in brutal repression of riots over the rising cost of bread (Miller 263f.)

(3) In the same speech, which she had given at a meeting on East Fourth Street in New York, she said she would hate to be in the shoes of a monarch, or of President McKinley, due to the "fickleness of the masses."

(4) Vice-president Theodore Roosevelt had been hiking in the Adirondacks. Shortly after lunch on Sept. 13th, a forest ranger had given him telegram announcing serious deterioration of the president's condition. Roosevelt immediately set out for Buffalo, through a rainy night. McKinley died about 2:15 am, and Roosevelt arrived a few hours later, wet and exhausted. That afternoon he was sworn in as America's 29th president.


Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Bechtel, Stefan. Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife that Changed the World.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Gilmour, Kim. "The Men who Built America." History Channel Club Magazine 10:5 (September-October 2012), 26-31.

Millard, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. New York: Anchor Books, 2012.

Mlller, Scott. The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century. New York: Random House, 2011.