Arrest and Incarceration
On June 15, 1917, the morning after a meeting of the No-Conscription League at New York's Forward Hall, government officials took decisive action against Goldman. Acting without an official warrant, the New York branch of the Justice Department ransacked the Mother Earth headquarters. With the help of local police, they seized letters, mailing lists, checkbooks, and manuscripts. (These documents would later become part of a file that J. Edgar Hoover studied to educate himself on the radical American left.) U.S. Marshall Thomas McCarthy arrested both Goldman and Berkman at this time, although he made no formal charges. He simply presented Goldman with a copy of Mother Earth's June 5 edition, claiming that it had enough treasonable material in it to incarcerate her for years.
In reality, Goldman's actions were well within her first amendment rights.
However, the urgency of Wilson's need to maintain pro-war sentiment superceded
these constitutional guarantees. By today's standards, Goldman would be viewed as an activist, not a criminal; and the raid against her Mother Earth offices
would be condemned as unconstitutional. However, in the draconian atmosphere of
1917, the anarchist was seen as a dangerous seditionist who must be stopped at
any cost. Verily, Goldman was a condemned woman long before she faced a judge
and jury.
(New York Times headline, June 16, 1917, from "The Emma Goldman Papers" (click here to view the full text of the article) http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Accounts/NYT61617.html)
Goldman's trial for Conspiracy against the Draft was really nothing more than
a formality. The prosecution did its best to convince the jury that Goldman was
a German agent who received her funding form German spies and even the Kaiser
himself. This strategy represented the government's best efforts to reinforce
growing paranoia about foreign spies and negate the influence of Goldman's anti-war teachings. The defendant knew that she had little hope for acquittal - there was no
dispute that she had violated the Espionage Act - so she used her trial as an
opportunity to promote her crusade against conscription. Claiming that the
draft violated the most basic American principles, Goldman actually read from
the Declaration of Independence. Overall, both the prosecution and the defense
used the trial as an exhibition of political opinions, rather than a pursuit of
justice. The fact that Goldman had no chance of receiving a fair trial -
indeed that she herself did not expect one - illustrates the lack of civil
liberties that marked the time. Goldman received two years' imprisonment and a
$10,000 fine, the maximum penalty for her supposed crime. Although the verdict
hardly surprised Goldman, she could hardly have anticipated the injustices
which were yet to be unleashed upon her.
(Emma Goldman and cohort Alexander Berkman at their trial in 1917, from "The Emma Goldman Papers" http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Images/ )
Once the authorities had managed to incarcerate Goldman in 1917, they had no intention of freeing her into American society ever again. She simply posed too great a threat to the war effort, as well as the nation's general stability. Consequently, the authorities took advantage of Goldman's two-year incarceration to conduct a quiet and methodical search for an excuse to deport her. This process inevitably meant that Goldman's most basic rights would be revoked. While in prison, all of her mail was intercepted and transcribed to War Department files. This included all confidential correspondences between Goldman and her attorney. Such activity showed that the U.S. Government no longer regarded Goldman as one of its citizens, but rather as a dangerous enemy of the state. Any publication that praised Goldman or her activism was banned from the mails. By 1918, the War Department maintained files on Goldman's friends and family as well as all 8,000 subscribers to Mother Earth.
In 1917 and 1918, Emma Goldman was a frail old woman, safely tucked away in an obscure Mississippi prison. Nevertheless, the United States War Department felt justified in evoking every available resource to contain the influence of her activism. The extreme nature of this action illustrates that the government considered the domestic battle against Goldman and the foreign battle in Europe to be one and the same. Unfortunately for Goldman and her political allies, this officially sanctioned persecution would fail to end even with the Armistice of 1918.