kind, and his is
the deeper degree of criminality than any other." When William Buwalda,
a soldier in the United States Army and the recipient of a medal for
bravery, shook hands with Emma Goldman at one of her lectures in 1908,
he was courtmartialed and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. It was
only as a consequence of numerous public protests that Buwalda was
pardoned after he had served ten months. The Red Hysteria of 1917-21
merely climaxed decades of ill-treatment of a militant minority in a
nation founded on the principles of human rights and individual
liberty.

If this ugly chapter in recent American history was the work of men of
property and of public officers, there were numerous other Americans,
less powerful but of greater probity, who cherished the fundamental
freedoms of our Founding Fathers. These liberals spoke out forcefully
against the violation of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. They
gladly gave of their time and money to the defense of the harassed
radicals. Because Emma Goldman suffered most from police brutality and
because her dynamic personality attracted those who came in contact with
her, she was befriended by scores of Americans in every part of the
country. These Jeffersonian liberals admired her courage and sincerity
and helped her to organize her lecture tours and to finance her
propagandistic and literary ventures.

Emma reached the nadir of her career during the aftermath of President
McKinley's assassination. With the memory of Alexander Berkman's fate
still festering in her heart, she said: "Leon Czolgosz and other men of
his type ... are drawn to some violent expression, even at the sacrifice
of their own lives, because they cannot supinely witness the misery and
suffering of their fellows." Even before her attitude was known, she was
arrested as an accomplice of Czolgosz and treated with extreme savagery
before being released for lack of evidence.

Even more painful to her was the obtuseness of those anarchists who
condemned Czolgosz's act as wanton murder. Ironically enough, even
Berkman wrote from prison to disapprove of the shooting and to
differentiate it from his own attack upon Frick; in his opinion the
killing of McKinley was individual terrorism and not a deed motivated by
social necessity. Emma was shocked by this argument, since to her both
acts were inspired by the same high idealism and spirit of
self-sacrifice. Unlike Berkman, who had come to see the futili