Politics: UC Berkeley Fumbles & Recovers Free Speech

During the last four months of 1964, a historical battle was fought on the Berkeley campus of the University of California over the issue of political speech. The Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" had its beginning on September 14th of that year, when Katherine Towle, the Dean of Students, wrote to the heads of all off-campus organizations to inform them that the sidewalk at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue, always considered to be city property, was actually the property of the university and that tables, fund-raising, membership recruitment, or speeches would no longer be permitted there.

Since the Great Depression, when on-campus political activities had been barred to dissuade communists and socialists, this had been the campus' free-zone, where everyone from right wing groups to radical politicos could disseminate information about their causes. Putting this area off limits for political activities brought both the right and the left together in a "United Front," which eventually lead to a student strike, the arrest of more than eight hundred students for occupying Sproul Hall, and forced the resignation of Chancellor Edward W. Strong. By January 3, the students had prevailed and free political expression became an enduring mainstay at UC Berkeley..

Until now, that is. After thirty-eight years, the notion of free political speech on the Berkeley campus is back in the news. This time the issue isn't political activities by radical students, but the words of a single Russian born anarchist named Emma Goldman. This is curious, given the fact that Goldman died in 1940, more than two decades after being deported from the United States to Russia for her opposition to World War I.

To be sure, Goldman was extremely controversial in her time, and her words evoked the wrath of political and military leaders of the era. "Emma Goldman is a woman of great ability and personal magnetism," wrote the United States attorney in New York, Francis Caffey, in 1917, "and her persuasive powers are such to make her an exceedingly dangerous woman." She was so loathed by the US military that in the first decade of the twentieth century they sentenced a fifteen year veteran, William Buwalda, to three years imprisonment for attending a meeting in San Francisco where she spoke.

Now, nearly a full century after her heyday, officials at UC Berkeley are afraid that her words will be offensive to those who support President Bush's war plans against Iraq.

The current brouhaha began when Dr. Candace Falk, the director of the university sponsored Emma Goldman Papers Project, chose to include three of Goldman's quotations to use in a fund-raising appeal. University officials demanded that two of the quotes be struck, implying that they were chosen to purposefully make a statement on the current situation between the US and Iraq.

The first quotation in question, from a 1915 paper, calls on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." The other comes from 1902, when Goldman warned free-speech advocates that they "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door-neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open.".

The two quotes were edited-out by Dr. Robert M. Price, UC Berkeley's associate vice chancellor for research, who said, "It wasn't from nowhere that these quotes randomly happened to fall on the page." He added that Dr. Falk "...was making a political point, and that is inappropriate in an official university solicitation."

Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the university sponsored Mark Twain Project, expressed a sentiment echoed by many Berkeley oldtimers when he heard of the incident. "We just got through creating the Free Speech Cafe on campus," he said, "and we have a free speech archive. How many times does this have to happen at Berkeley before they learn?"

For her part, Falk reacted with a proper "free speech movement" spirit. She withheld the edited mailing from most people on the project's mailing list, and had an alternative solicitation printed at her own expense. "You can't work on the Emma Goldman Papers Project and fold on something like this," she said. "We just had to find a way to get this out."

The administration at UC Berkeley evidently learned something back in 1964, for this time it didn't cost them a student strike, numerous demonstrations and a chancellor to get them to decide to uphold the First Amendment in proper academic fashion. On January 17th, the New York "Times" reported that university officials had reversed their original decision and would allow the Emma Goldman Papers Project to send the original fund-raising letter.

We can only imagine that Ms. Goldman is gleefully chuckling from her grave at the controversy she's caused more than sixty years after her death.

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