The Sovereign Citizen. Patrick Weil
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And on April 8, 1909, the U.S. District Court of the Western District of New York invalidated Kersner’s citizenship.33 The defendant did not appear at the hearing. However, Kersner’s father testified to his date of birth as 1865 or 1866 and to their date of arrival in the United States as 1882. Simon Goldstein, his former employer and his witness at the time of his naturalization, confirmed that Kersner and Goldman were husband and wife and were living together as a real couple.34
Goldman’s eventual deportation would not occur until a decade later. In a memorandum dated March 21, 1908, to Straus, Charles Earl, solicitor of the Department of Commerce and Labor, wrote that he had examined the legal prospects of deporting Goldman, and had concluded that if the government took away Kersner’s citizenship, Goldman’s long residence in the United States would protect her.35
“Before a person can be legally deported under the immigration act,” he explained, “it must first appear that such a person is ‘an alien’ within the meaning of that act. . . . It yet remains exceedingly doubtful whether she is ‘an alien’ within the meaning of the immigration act and as such liable to deportation. Goldman has permanently domiciled in the U.S. for over 32 years since she was 15.” In the most recent federal court decision on the issue, Rodgers v. United States ex rel. Buchsbaum, the court held that “we are clearly of the opinion that an alien who has acquired a domicile in the United States cannot thereafter while still retaining such domicile legally be treated as an immigrant on his return to this country after a temporary absence for a specific purpose not involving a change of domicile.”36 But in 1914, the Supreme Court would reverse this holding in Lapina v. Williams.37
After deciding not to pursue Goldman, the Department of Justice nevertheless hoped she would leave the country unaware that, in its view, she had lost her citizenship. Then the government could bar her from reentering the United States.38 Goldman in fact had heard about the denaturalization of her former husband. The secret service of the Anarchist Bureau of the Chicago Police Department had, at the beginning of 1909, intercepted a letter from Goldman to a fellow anarchist. In it Goldman wrote: “At first I took this case of the U.S. Authorities of taking my papers away as a joke but now it turns out serious; altogether too serious. The U.S. Authorities are planning to take us by surprise. We, a few of us, had a meeting and decided to be prepared. Now what I ask of you is very important and you should attend to it at once. Go to his brother and find out how long since Jac. K. left Rochester, how long since he last heard from him and if he is alive. If he is dead that alters my case. I am worried to death over it and hope that you will do your share [to] relieve me from it.”39
Later, after both she and her former husband were denaturalized, Goldman published a first version of “A Woman Without a Country” (see Appendix 1). In this short pamphlet written in a sarcastic tone, she narrates the government’s obsessive chase and concludes: “You have Emma Goldman’s citizenship. But she has the world, and her heritage is the kinship of brave spirits—not a bad bargain.”40
In subsequent years Goldman became involved in the opposition to World War I: “She could not understand how professed liberals could in one breath denounce Prussian militarism and in the next propose conscription.”41 In protest against the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required all males aged twenty-one to thirty to register for the draft, she and Berkman organized the No Conscription League of New York, which proclaimed: “We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, antimilitarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments.”
On June 15, 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested and charged with conspiracy to “induce persons not to register” under the newly enacted Espionage Act, and were held on $25,000 bail each.42 Defending herself and Berkman during their trial, Goldman invoked the First Amendment, asking how the government could claim to fight for democracy abroad while suppressing free speech at home.
The jury found them guilty and the judge imposed the maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment, a $10,000 fine each, and the possibility of deportation after their release from prison. Goldman served two years in the Missouri State Penitentiary.43 Just before the expiration of her sentence, on September 5, 1919, the Department of Labor ordered Goldman’s arrest in order to deport her on the basis of the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act.44 Harry Weinberger, her lawyer, tried to argue before the commissioner general of immigration that the denaturalization of her former husband did not affect the citizenship of Emma Goldman. “The citizenship of her husband made her a citizen,” he declared, “the same as if she had applied on her own account.”45 The final decision was submitted to Louis F. Post, assistant secretary of labor.46 He concluded that “the revocation of her husband’s citizenship, upon which hers depended, operated automatically to subject her to the disabilities of an alien.” “If I erred,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “my decision was jurisdictional and would have been reviewed by the courts in habeas corpus proceedings. But Miss Goldman didn’t take her case to the courts.”47
On December 8, 1919, Goldman and Berkman appeared in federal court before Judge Julius M. Mayer, who declared that as aliens, they had no constitutional rights. In court, Goldman argued: “The apparent cancellation of my citizenship by starting an action against Jacob A. Kersner without giving me an opportunity to defend or show the falsity of the government’s position, shows how any woman married to a naturalized citizen and feeling secure in her citizenship, may suddenly find herself an alien, and because of some opinion she may hold which may be unpopular, find herself an arrested alien and deported from the country she may come from more than 30 years ago, as is my case today.”48
Goldman and Berkman remained in detention at Ellis Island. On December 10, 1919, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declined to overrule the lower court’s decision in their case. On December 13, her lawyer obtained the guarantee that Goldman and Berkman would be deported to the country of their choice, Soviet Russia, instead of to Germany, the first option of the Bureau of Immigration. And at dawn on December 21, 1919, Goldman, Berkman, and 247 aliens set sail on the SS Buford, bound for Russia. Fifty-one were considered anarchists and 184 were members of the Union of Russian Workers who had been arrested during the first Palmer Raids, conducted in eighteen U.S. cities in November 1919.49 Already working for the Justice Department, a young J. Edgar Hoover had supervised the deportation proceedings and was present when the boat deporting Goldman set sail.50
Later, on December 9, 1921, Goldman would write from Riga to Harry Weinberger. She was just out of Russia and in despair over her experience in the Soviet Union:
My dear, dear Councelor:
It is a long time between letters. Is it not? I will make no idle apologies. Living in Dante’s Inferno is not conducive to communication with the outside world. It is not only the censorship which prevented my writing. It was much more my own disturbed and harassed spirit which could find no peace or comfort long enough to write serenely.
. . .The only difference between Russia and other countries is that in Russia the very elements who have helped to unfurl the Revolution have also helped to carry the Revolution to her grave—and that pain eats more into one’s vitals than the existence of reaction in other lands. One can survive the betrayal of an enemy but one you believe in and loved—one can never survive.51
She implored Weinberger:
I want you to write me with perfect frankness about my chance of returning to America. It is no use deceiving myself and others by saying I will feel at home and be able to take root anywhere out of America. If I had unlimited means and could reconcile myself to a life of leisure, Europe would be preferable. Even though the world is one black dungeon, one could travel comfortably and without annoyance, if one had means and would change one’s name. It might even be profitable to cruise the world and write one’s impression. But I have no means and I cannot continue being dependent much longer. Nor can I continue inactive much longer. I must really know how I stand in regard to the States, so it’s up to you to tell me.
First, any sense in pressing the “Kersner” claim? Secondly, any good in going through with the marriage farce. I mean any good