Originally published in ‘Free Vistas: Volume 1’ by Joseph Ishill‘s ‘Oriole Press’ in 1933, republished in a pamphlet format by Stuart Christie‘s ‘Cienfuegos Press’ in 1979
The title is perhaps misleading because, in a technical sense. I am not without a country. Legally I am a “subject of His Britannic Majesty.” But in a deeper, spiritual sense, I am indeed a woman without a country, as I shall try to make plain in the course of this article.
To have a country implies, first of all, the possession of a certain guarantee of security, the assurance of having some spot you can call your own and that no one can alienate from you. That is the essential significance of the idea of country, of citizenship. Divested of that, it becomes sheer mockery.
Up to the World War citizenship actually did stand for such a guarantee. Save for an occasional exception in the more backward European countries, the native or naturalised citizen had the certainty that somewhere on this globe he was at home, in his own country, and that no reversals of personal fortune could deprive him of his inherent right to have his being there. Moreover, he was at liberty to visit other lands and wherever he might be he knew that he enjoyed the protection of his citizenship.
But the War has entirely changed the situation. Together with countless lives it also destroyed the fundamental right to be, to exist in a given place with any degree of security. This peculiar and disquieting condition of affairs has been brought about by a usurpation of authority that is quite incredible, nothing short of divine. Every government now arrogates to itself the power to determine what person may or may not continue to live within its boundaries, with the result that thousands, even hundreds of thousands, are literally expatriated. Compelled to leave the country in which they happen to live at the time, they are set adrift in the world, their fate at the mercy of some bureaucrat vested with authority to decide whether they may enter “his” land. Vast numbers of men and women, even of children, have been forced by the War into this terrible predicament. Hunted from place to place, driven hither and thither in their search for a spot where they might be permitted to breathe, they are never certain whether they may not be ordered at any moment to leave for other parts — where the same fate is awaiting them. Veritable Wandering Jews, these unfortunates, victims of a strange perversion of human reason that dares question any person’s right to exist.
From every “civilised’’ country men and women may now be expelled any time it suits the police or the government. It is not only foreigners who are thus virtually driven off the face of the earth. Since the World War citizens are also subject to the same treatment. Citizenship has become bankrupt: it has lost its essential meaning, its one-time guarantee. Today the native is no more safe in “his own” country than the citizen by adoption. Deprivation of citizenship, exile and deportation are practiced by every government; they have become established and accepted methods. So common are these proceedings that no one is any more shocked by them or made sufficiently indignant to voice an effective protest. Yet, for all their “legality,” denaturalization and expatriation are of the most primitive and cruel inhumanity.
The War has exacted a terrific price in the stupendous number of human lives lost, men maimed and crippled, countless hearts broken and homes destroyed. But even more fearful is the effect of that holocaust upon the living. It has dehumanised and brutalised mankind, has injected the poison of hatred into our hearts, has roused man’s worst instincts, made life cheap, and human safety and liberty of the smallest consideration. Intolerance and reaction are rampant, and their destructive spirit is nowhere so evident as in the growing despotism of official authority and in its autocratic attitude toward all criticism and opposition. A wave of political dictatorship is sweeping Europe, with its inevitable evils of irresponsible arbitrariness and oppression. Fundamental rights are being abolished, vital ethical conceptions scorned and flouted. Our most precious possession, the cultural values which it has taken centuries to create and develop, are being destroyed. Brute force has become the sole arbiter, and its verdict is accepted with the servile assent of silence, often even with approval.
Till 1917 the United States had fortunately not become affected by the internecine madness which was devastating the Old World. The idea of war was very unpopular, and American sentiment was virtually unanimous against mixing up in the European imbroglio. Then, suddenly, the entire situation changed: a peace-insisting nation was transformed, almost over night, into a martial maniac run amuck. A study of that strange phenomenon would no doubt be an interesting contribution to our understanding of collective psychology, but the subject is outside the present discussion. Here it must suffice to recollect that, after having elected Woodrow Wilson president because he “had kept them out of war,” the American people were somehow persuaded to join the European war. The President’s decision, very unwillingly concurred in by a no-war Congress, had the effect of changing the entire psychology of the United States. The tranquil country became a land of flaming jingoism, and a deluge of intolerance and persecuting bigotry overwhelmed the people. The vials of mutual suspicion, of hatred and compulsion were poured out from North to South and from East to West, setting man against man, and brother against brother. In the halls of legislation the spirit of the new militarism manifested itself in draconic laws passed against every critic and protestant.
The sanguine European struggle for territory and markets was proclaimed a holy crusade in behalf of freedom and democracy, and forcible conscription was hailed as “the best expression of a free citizenry.” The war orgy evidenced a psychosis on a nation-wide scale never before witnessed in the United States. Compared with it the temporary American aberration that followed the violent death of President McKinley, in 1901, was a mere flurry. On that occasion, as will be remembered, the Federal Government rushed through special legislation outlawing everything that indicated the least symptom of non-conformism or dissent. I am referring to the notorious anti-anarchist law, which for the first time in the history of the United States introduced the principle of government by deportation. Persons suspected of anarchist tendencies, disbelievers in organised government, were not to be allowed entry to the United States, the land of the free; or, if already there could be sent out of the country within a period of three years. According to that law men like Tolstoy and Kropotkin would have been refused permission to visit the United States, or deported if found within its boundaries.
That law, however, product of a short-lived panic, virtually remained a dead letter. But the war-time psychosis revived the forgotten anti-anarchist statutes and broadened them to include everyone who was persona non grata to the powers that be, without the benefit of time limitation. There began a national hunt for “undesirables.” Men and women were gathered in by the hundred, arrested on the street or taken from their work-benches, to be administratively deported, without hearing or trial, frequently because of their foreign appearance or on account of wearing a red shawl or necktie.
The war cyclone, having swept Europe, gained increased momentum in America. The movement to make the world safe for democracy and liberty, solidly supported by the “liberal” intelligentsia of press and pulpit, made the United States the most dangerous place for democrat and libertarian. An official reign of terror ruled the country, and thousands of young men were literally driven into the army and navy for fear of their neighbours and of the stigma of “slacker” cast upon everyone in civilian dress — cast mostly by idle ladies of fashion who paraded the streets to aid the cause of “humanity.” Everyone who dared raise his voice to stem the tide of the war-mania was shouted down and maltreated as an enemy, an anarchist and public menace. Jails and prisons were filled with men and women ordered deported. Most of them were persons that had lived many years in their adopted country, peacefully following their vocations; some of the others had spent almost their entire lives in America. But length of sojourn and useful occupation made no difference. The great Government of the United States stooped even to the subterfuge of secretly depriving naturalised citizens of their citizenship, so as to be able to deport them as “undesirable foreigners.”
Future historians will wonder at the peculiar phenomenon of American war psychology: while Europe experienced its worst reaction as a result of the war, the United States — in keeping with its spirit of “get there first” — reached its greatest reactionary zenith before entering the war. Without warning, as it were, it forswore all its revolutionary traditions and customs, openly and without shame, and introduced the worst practices of the Old World. With no more hesitation than necessary it transplanted to America methods of autocracy which had required centuries to develop in Europe, and it initiated expatriation, exile and deportation on a whole scale, irrespective of any considerations of equity and humanity.
To be sure, the pacifist intellectuals who prepared America for war solemnly insisted that the summary abrogation of constitutional rights and liberties was a temporary measure necessitated by the exigencies of the situation, and that all war-legislation was to be abolished as soon as the world would be made safe for democracy. But more than a decade has passed since, and in vain I have been scanning American newspapers, journals and magazines for the least indication of the promised return to normalcy. It is easier to make laws than abolish them, and oppressive laws are particularly notorious for their longevity.
With its habitual recklessness it has outdone the effete Old World in “preparedness.” The former great democracy of Thomas Jefferson, the land of Paine and Emerson, the one-time rebel against State and Church, has turned persecutor of every social protestant. The historic champion of the revolutionary principle, “No taxation without representation,” compelled its people to fight in a war waged without their consent! The refuge of the Garibaldis, the Kossuths and Schurzes practices deportation of heretics. America, whose official functions always begin with a prayer to the Nazarene who had commanded “Thou shalt not kill” has imprisoned and tortured men who scrupled to take human life, and has hounded those who proclaimed “peace and good will on earth.” Once a haven for the persecuted and oppressed of other lands, the United States has since shut its doors in the face of those seeking refuge from the tyrant. A new twentieth-century Golgotha for its “foreign” Saccos and Vanzettis, it silences its native “undesirables,” its Mooneys and Billingses, by burying them alive in prison. It glorifies its flying Lindberghs, but damns their thinking fathers. It crucifies manhood and expatriates opinion.
The practice of deportation places America, in a cultural sense, far below the European level. Indeed, there is less freedom of thought in the United States than in the Old World. Few countries are as unsafe for the man or woman of independence and idealism. No offence more heinous there than an unconventional attitude; every crime may be forgiven but that of unapproved opinion. The heretic is anathema, the iconoclast the worst culprit. For such there is no room in the great United States. In a singular manner that country combines industrial initiative and economic self-help with an almost absolute taboo against ethical freedom and cultural expression. Morals and behavior are prescribed by draconic censorship, and woe to him who dares step out of the beaten path. By substituting rule by deportation for its fundamental law, America has recorded itself thoroughly reactionary. It has erected formidable barriers against its cultural development and progress. In the last analysis such policies are a means of depriving the people of the finer values and higher aspirations. The great body of labor is, of course, the most direct victim of this menace. It is designed to stifle industrial discontent, to eliminate the spokesmen of popular unrest, and subjugate the inarticulate masses to the will of the masters of life.
Unfortunately it is the workers themselves who are the main bulwark of reaction. No body of any toilers in any country is as mentally undeveloped and as lacking in economic consciousness as the American Federation of Labor. The horizon of their leaders is sadly limited, their social short-sightedness positively infantile. Their role in the World War days was most pitiful and subservient in their vieing to outdo each other as trade drummers for the Moloch of slaughter. They championed the most reactionary measures, too fatuous to understand that the same will remain a post-war weapon in the hands of the employers of labor. They learned nothing from past experience and have forgotten the lesson of the Sherman Law, passed by the efforts of the workers to check the industrial trusts but since applied by the American courts to weaken and emasculate the organizations of labor. As was to be foreseen, the “temporary” war legislation, sponsored by the American Federation of Labor is now being used in the industrial struggles against the toilers.
It was Fridjof Nansen, the famous explorer, who was one of the first to realise the far-reaching effects of the war psychosis in relation to these expatriated. He introduced the special passport that bears his name and which is designed to insure at least a modicum of safety to the increasing number of refugees. Because of Nansen’s great services in organizing the millions of homeless and parentless children during the war, the League of Nations was induced to approve his project and established the so-called Nansen passport. Few countries, however, recognise its validity, and that half-heartedly, and in no case does it guarantee its holder against exile and deportation. But the very fact of its existence goes to prove the havoc wrought by post-war developments in the matter of citizenship and the utterly wretched situation of the thousands of expatriated and countryless.
It should not be assumed that the latter consists mostly of political refugees. In that huge army of exile there are great numbers of entirely a-political people, of men and women whom territorial rapacity and the Versailles “peace” have deprived of their country. Most of them do not even get the benefit of the Nansen passport, since the latter is intended only for the political refugees of certain nationalities. Thus thousands find themselves without legal papers of any kind, and in consequence may not be permitted to stay anywhere. A young woman of my acquaintance, for instance, a person who has never been interested in any social or political activities, is at this very moment adrift in this Christian world of ours, without the right of making any country her home, without fatherland or abode, and constantly at the mercy of the passport police. Though a native of Germany, she is refused citizenship in that country because her father (now dead) was an Austrian. Austria, on the other hand, does not recognise her a citizen because her father’s birthplace, formerly belonging to Austria, has by the terms of the Versailles treaty become part of Rumania. Rumania, finally, declines to consider the young woman as a citizen on the ground that she is not a native, and never lived in the country, does not speak its language and has no relatives there. The unfortunate woman is literally without a country, with no legal right to live anywhere on earth, save by the temporary toleration of some passport officials.
Still more hazardous is the existence of the vast army of political refugees and expatriated. They live in ever-present fear of being deported, and such a doom is equivalent to a sentence of death when these men are returned, as is only too often the case, to countries ruled by dictatorships. Quite recently a man I know was arrested in the place of his sojourn and ordered deported to his native land, which happened to be Italy. Had the order been carried out, it would have meant torture and execution. I am familiar with a number of cases of political refugees not permitted to remain in the countries where they had sought refuge and deported to Spain, Hungary, Rumania or Bulgaria, where their lives are in jeopardy. For the arm of reaction is long. Thus Poland has on several occasions lately decreed the deportation of Russian political refugees to their native country, where the Tcheka executioner was ready to receive them. It was only through the timely intercession of influential friends abroad that the men and their families were saved from certain death. European despotism reaches even across the seas, to the United States and South America; repeatedly politicals of Spanish and Italian descent have been deported to their native lands as an act of “courtesy” to a friendly power.
These are not exceptional instances. Large numbers of refugees are in a similar position. Not to speak of the thousands of non-political, denaturalized and expatriated and despoiled of abode. In Turkey and France, to mention two countries only, there are at present over half a million of them, victims of the World War, of Fascism, of Bolshevism, of Post-war territorial changes and of the mania for exiling and deporting. Most of them are being merely tolerated, for the time being, and are always subject to an order to “move on” somewhere else. Lesser but still very considerable numbers are scattered throughout the world, particularly in Belgium, Holland, Germany and in the various countries of Southern Europe.
There is nothing more tragic than the fate of those men and women thrown upon the mercy of our Christian world. I know from personal experience what it means to be torn out of the environment of a lifetime, dug out by the very roots from the soil you have had your being in, compelled to leave the work to which all your energies have been devoted, and to part from those nearest and dearest to you. Most disastrous are the effects of such expatriation particularly on persons of mature age, as were the greater number of those deported by America. Youth may adapt itself more readily to a new environment and acclimatise itself in a strange world. But for those of more advanced age such transplantation is a veritable crucifixion. It requires years of application to master the language, custom and habits of a new land, and a very long time to take root, to form new ties and secure one’s material existence, not to speak of the mental anguish and agony a sensitive person suffers in the face of wrong and inhumanity.
As for myself, in the deeper significance of spiritual values, I feel the United States “my country.” Not to be sure, the United States of the Ku Kluxers, of moral censors in and out of office, of the suppressionists and reactionaries of every type. Not the America of Tammany or of Congress, of respectable inanity, of the highest skyscrapers and fattest moneybags. Not the United States of petty provincialism, narrow nationalism, vain materialism and naive exaggeration. There is, fortunately, another United States — the land of Walt Whitmans, the Lloyd Garrisons, the Thoreaus, the Wendell Phillipses. The country of Young America of life and thought, or of art and letters; the America of the new generation knocking at the door, of men and women with ideals, with aspirations for a better day; the America of social rebellion and spiritual promise, of the glorious “undesirables” against whom all the exile, expatriation and deportation laws are aimed.
It is to THAT America that I am proud to belong.
A Woman Without a Country – Emma Goldman (1909)
From ‘Mother Earth: Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature‘, May 1909, New York City, published by Emma Goldman
The United States government in a mad chase after Emma Goldman.
What a significant title for a funny story. What rich material for a cartoon!
By the decision of the Federal government, Emma Goldman, the terrible, may now be deported. Well, serves her right. What on earth made her select our dear country, anyway? It’s different with us Americans. We are here through no fault of ours. But for her to come voluntarily, to live here twenty-five years, and to go on as if she were at home — that is strong, indeed!
What didn’t our government do to get rid of her?! For seventeen years the police have camped on her trail; her meetings were broken up; her audiences clubbed innumerable times, but that didn’t seem to help. Then she was arrested again and again — not for what she said, but for what she was going to say.
Why, she was actually sentenced to Blackwell’s Island penitentiary once, for inciting to riot which didn’t take place, but which might have taken place. Well, what happened? When she came out, she was worse than ever.
In 1901 she was held under twenty thousand dollars bail, while our poor government spent thirty thousand dollars to connect her with McKinley’s death. In short, every conceivable method was used to relieve the anxiety of the United States government. But that woman simply sticks and sticks. However, if there is anything Uncle Sam cannot do, we should like to know it. Hasn’t he men in the secret service patriotic enough to do any kind of a dirty job for money? Well, we sent some of them to a city called Rochester, where, many years ago, a man had the misfortune to marry that there Emma Goldman. He was a good man, you know; for no American citizen can be a very bad man. But that marriage was a blotch on his citizenship. So, out of Christian kindness and American loyalty, his naturalization papers were annulled. Wasn’t that a clever idea?
Of course, it cost quite a lot. Some people in Rochester had to be cajoled, intimidated, threatened, frightened, and possibly bribed. But it was done all right, and the country might now breathe easy if — but there is Emma Goldman, still enjoying our air, looking at our sky, counting our stars, basking in our sun, and dreaming un-American dreams — can there be a greater indictment against any human being? Not enough of that, she actually disbelieves in our or any government, and insists that they are only here to divide human interests. She attacks the entire system; she will have it that it is a life-and-soul-destroying mechanism, and that it strips man of the finest and best in him.
Did anyone ever hear of such treason?
Were she an American citizen, we might some day hang or electrocute her. But an alien — what’s left for us to do but to deport her. The trouble is, where, oh where can we send her?
Poor, poor United States government! Yours is, indeed, a difficult task. True, your hard, persistent labors have been crowned with some success. You have Emma Goldman’s citizenship. But she has the world, and her heritage is the kinship of brave spirits — not a bad bargain
Emma Goldman
Also
What is Fascism (and what are borders)?
Some Early Anarchists on Zionism: From Bernard Lazare to Emma Goldman (1899-1939)
National Atavism, from Mother Earth (1906)
Between Jails, by Emma Goldman (1917)
The Tragedy of the Political Exiles, by Emma Goldman (1934)
Reg. Reynolds Answers Emma Goldman on Palestine (1938)