On this day in 1919 a group of radicals, including perpetual sourpuss Emma Goldman, were deported.
Emma Goldman's deportation photograph. If it seems that she's frowning in the photo due to deportation, Goldman was always frowning.
Goldman is a celebrated figure today, but at the time plenty of people were glad to see her and her fellow travelers go. Frankly, she was a perpetual malcontent. In the US she advocated for extremist positions. Upon returning to Russia (she'd grown into her teen years there, and was born in a town in what is now Lithuania), she grew rapidly discontent with the Soviets and then relocated to Germany, where she wrote two books about her "disillusionment" with Russia. While living in Germany, she irritated the German left who rapidly grew discontent with her, and then went on to the UK, which seemingly occupied the status of host country for the perpetual malcontent at the time. During the Spanish Civil War she was at first enthusiastic about the anarchist Republicans but worried they were giving too much over to the Reds, which probably failed to grasp that there was no way that the organized Spanish extremist left wasn't going to dominate over the disorganized Spanish left. Eventually she ended up in Toronto, which ironically was an extremely conservative town at the time.
Emma looking discontent in 1911.
She probably came by her perpetual discontentment honestly and presents what ought to be a case study in the combination of high intelligence with a really messed up early life. In other words, while she's widely admired today in spite of advocating for really loony ideas, she herself was pretty much a loony. As we've dealt her story before we won't go into detail here, but she was born into an unhappy family which was her mother's second marriage. Her mother had two children by her prior husband, to whom she'd been married very young, and the second marriage was basically arranged and never happy. Goldman's father was strict and potentially abusive. Goldman herself was raped by a suitor while in her early teens. Her constant discontent with everything thereafter may well have been due simply being a highly discontented person, which given the nature of her life, a person can't blame her for.
Emma Goldman in 1886, in about the only photograph of her smiling.
She lived a genuinely crappy life in a lot of ways and was in the Eastern European demographic that was attracted to radicalism due to the conditions she was living in. Smart, difficult and working in manual labor, she was attracted naturally to radical political ideas, even though they were not grounded in any sort of reality. It says something about the spirit of the times that they gained traction in their own day.
They'd obviously gained enough that the US determined to deport foreign born radicals and on this day in 1919, it did it.
This has been looked back on as a betrayal of American values, but a person, even now, has to pause a bit and wonder if it was. Goldman was truly a radical and her ideas antithetical to any sort of government at all. Soviet Russia, while definitely having a government, was nearly the poster child for radicals at the time and she was a Russian. Some seeing the product of radicalism in their own land might reconsider their own cause but she never did, just finding other left wing movements lacking.
Without going too far it it, it's also notable that a lot of the figures of the radical left were of this era were, quite frankly, messed up, and then adopted lifestyles that guaranteed they'd be even more messed up. For the 1910s, this is sort of book ended by the perpetually crabby Goldman on one end and the perpetually befuddled looking Rosa Luxemburg on the other, both now heroes with no achievements which keeps their heroism going on, as their adherents can always imagine that the ideas they advocated for were never tested, even if they were.
She died in Toronto in 1940 and her body was brought into the United States for burial. She's one of the poster children of a certain brand of radicalism from that era even though, in retrospect, she is to be more pitied than celebrated if some degree of rationalism is applied.
One paper that wasn't questioning the deportation was the Cheyenne State Leader, which even suggested that if their ship sank they'd welcome it. The Leader was never subtle in its views.
The leader also reported the unlikely story that two sixteen year old Texas twins were required to marry six feet tall Wyoming cowboys or forego an inheritance. The Leader often had odd stories like that, and a person has to wonder if the story was accurate. It reportedly originated by way of a letter to Leader from the aforementioned twins, which sounds fairly dubious. Hopefully it was.
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