Emma Goldman Reading Walt Whitman: Aesthetics, Agitation, and the Anarchist Ideal

In June of 1919, the Walt Whitman Fellowship International held a celebration commemorating the centennial of the birth of America's "good grey poet" weeks before his motherland signed the treaty that would end the first "great war" to connect the modern world. George Smith, a local school examiner and the evening's host, came under fire from the board of education for virtually sanctioning the protests by reading aloud a telegram sent by Emma Goldman from a federal prison in Jefferson City, MO. Goldman (1869-1940) was arguably the US' most distinguished antiwar voice. Goldman expended much time and energy discussing the importance of literary imagination to anarchism in her early art lectures, and she was condemned for it from all sides. In her pamphlet-essay for the movement, "Anarchism: What It Really Stands for," Goldman defined her politics as "the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law."