This week in Michigan and Indiana

Visiting Indiana

As I’ve said, we went to Indiana to see the eclipse and we were lucky with the weather, not so lucky with the traffic after the eclipse was over. Driving towards Fort Wayne, on the way to Lafayette last Sunday, we stopped at a relatively new state rest stop on the freeway near the Michigan border. I photographed this interesting bit of local history:

Enjoying Our Garden In Spring

Reading About an Unusual Woman: Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life by Vivian Gornick 
(published in 2011)

This book is a biography of a famous woman, Emma Goldman (1869-1940). Emma Goldman was an anarchist by conviction. She was also a gifted and powerful speaker and influencer of large numbers of people during the late 19th and early 20th century in the US. She famously encouraged workers to believe in their rights. For example, this famous quotation: “Demonstrate before the palaces of the rich. Demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right.” (p. 37)

Gornick’s biography effectively describes both Emma Goldman’s life and her ideas. I particularly was interested in the explanations of the political philosophy of anarchy along with its intellectual history. (Anarchy does not just mean chaos!) I enjoyed reading the author’s summary of the 19th century development of a variety of radical ideas and how they were expressed by Emma Goldman and her contemporaries. Emma Goldman’s ideas about women’s rights and her work with Margaret Sanger in support of “birth control” (a term invented by Sanger) are still tragically relevant today.

I liked the comparison of politics in the era before World War I to a similar flourishing of idealistic politics in the 1960s and 1970s — an era when author Vivian Gornick herself was active in the Woman’s Movement and other political dramas. In this later burst of radicalism, Emma Goldman’s life and thought again became admired and somewhat influential.

 Emma Goldman’s success up until around 1916 was impressive, but ultimately her political ideas became so threatening that she was arrested, convicted, jailed, and then deported from the US to Russia. During World War I she served a jail term for violating the Espionage Act, a law that prohibited speech about military conscription and other war-invoked issues. The remainder of her life was much less successful — her long exile from her adopted country, the USA, was a sad aftermath to her popularity before the war. 

The journal Mother Earth was Emma Goldman’s creation, and she published and edited it from 1906-1917 when the US government shut it down as many American freedoms came under threat, including freedom of speech and of the press. The June, 1917 issue shown here was among the last before her arrest. The image of a tombstone stating “In Memoriam American Democracy” reflects her conviction that laws like the Espionage act were destroying American ideals— one of many ways that her time can be compared to the 1970s as well as to our time. (The modern Mother Earth News, founded in 1979, borrowed the name from this original.)

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life is about Emma Goldman and the era when she was influential, but it’s also about the author, Vivian Gornick (b. 1935) and her time. In fact, a recent New Yorker article says: “Gornick was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of passionate socialists. It was only natural, when she closed her eyes at night, that she imagined herself not in the arms of a tall, handsome stranger but on a soapbox, as the second coming of Emma Goldman.” (source)

I also read a few of Emma Goldman’s essays. I was especially intrigued by these words from her essay “Woman Suffrage” —

“I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes. Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena? The most ardent suffragists would hardly maintain such a folly.”

Walking Along the Huron River

In urban gardens like our own, we’ve been seeing early spring flowers and spring green and blossoms on trees. Outside of town, at Dexter Metropark, it’s still pretty wintery, as the city has a warming effect from all the heated buildings. We took a walk in a park along the Huron River through a wooded area where the trees are still quite bare. I made one striking observation: the graffiti under the bridges have remained nearly unchanged in three years.

 

This week: April, 2024

In July, 2021– the graffiti haven’t changed since then.

This week: April, 2024

In July, 2021: not much change here either.

Photo taken during our walk this week.

I wonder why these bridges have never been re-graffitied!

Blog post and all photos © 2021, 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and Sami’s Monday Murals