It was the shot that killed the Strike. Till then most people in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania (and maybe in the US as a whole) supported the strikers in the strike. This was even AFTER the "Second Battle Monongahela" where the strikers refused to permit Pinkerton agents to land at Homestead. so they could re-open the Homestead works with scab labor.
That support all but evaporated once her boyfriend had shot Frick (a shooting Goldman supported and wanted to participate in).
In many ways she was an idealist that could NOT understand why her ideal situation could not occur and when it did not occur was unwilling to change. Now, she did show more maturity then the many Fascists who had started out as Socialists but then embraced fascism (Mussolini, Goebbels and others. this is unlike Hitler who had participated in a Socialist Coup in Bavaria in 1919 but that appears to be more his going along with his fellow soldiers then any embrace of socialist himself. Hitler was captured, found out to be a good speaker and made an agent of the German Government where he spied on the Nazis and then joined the Nazi party, thus he was never a Socialist unlike Mussolini and Goebbels who both started out as Socialists).
By mature, Goldman stayed with her core beliefs, never really rejecting them but at the same time unwilling to modify them based on experience (This is the classic dispute between the Communists and the Anarchists that can be traced to the French Commune. The Communist maintain the Commune failed due to the leaders of the Workers refusing to adopt some of the same tactics used by the capitalists against the workers in any war for the workers. The Anarchists reject that modification of worker's rights to obtain worker's rights. This remain a dispute between these two movement to this vary day, how best to obtain worker's control of society. The Anarchist want a complete and total overthrow, thus total freedom. The Communists say such a situation is impossible for the Capitalists will use their ability to use force to undo such equality unless the workers are willing to face force with force. Thus you have to be able to face force with force and that requires an Army and that requires some force to force people into the army to fight as an army not as individuals).
I lean to the Communists on this debate and mention the 1921 West Virginia Coal War as a good example. The Coal Miners of West Virginia rose up in Revolt in 1921, marching on Mingo County West Virginia to revenge wrongs done to the workers, including the murder of a Town Marshall on the court house steps, for the crime of enforcing the law that the Coal mine owners did not want enforced. It is the only time where bombs were dropped from planes on US Citizens in the US (both by civilian planes and planes flown by what would become the US Air Force, through at that time called the US Air Service). A US Army officer who later examined the lines said of the miners had one company (about 100 men) they could have broke through the Mine owner's line and taken Mingo County and hang the Sheriff of Ming County. The problem was you had 15,000 individuals not one 100 man company. The Communists would have foreseen such a situation, the Anarchists would refuse to accept it (one aspect of the Battle of Blair Mountain was many states BANNED training of troops other then by the state, to prevent that one company of infantry from ever showing up in any future union-management battle, these laws remain in the books in most states).
Sorry, some comments on Emma Goldman that her supporters may not like.
)
= new reply since forum marked as read
