Miss Goldman was taken to the office of Chief of Police O’Neill and served with a warrant charging her with having conspired with other Anarchists then under arrest, to kill the President.
She detailed her meeting with the assassin in Chicago.
“I was at the house of Abraham Isaak. Yes, the house at 515 Carroll street. I was preparing to take the Nickel Plate train for the East with Miss Isaak. A ring came at the door. I answered the bell and found a young man there. He asked for Mr. Isaak. The latter had left the house, promising to meet us at the station and say good-by. I so told the young man and I further told him that he might go to the station with us and meet Mr. Isaak there. So you see,” she asserted, “he would not even have been with me for thirty-five minutes had I not asked him to go to the train.
“The young man—yes, it was Czolgosz, who shot the President—said that he had met me before. He said he had heard me lecture in Cleveland. I had delivered a lecture there on May 6, but I can’t remember all the people who shake hands with me, can I? I had no remembrance of him. We went to the station on the elevated train and this man accompanied us. I asked him where he had heard of Mr. Isaak. He said he had read the latter’s paper, Free Society. He did not talk to me about a plot. I never heard of him from that time until McKinley was shot.”
Emma Goldman’s ideas on anarchy are contained in an interview had with her some months before President McKinley’s assassination. She said:
“If a man came to me and told me he was planning an assassination I would think him an utter fool and refuse to pay any attention to him. The man who has such a plan, if he is earnest and honest, knows no secret is safe when told. He does the deed himself, runs the risk himself, pays the penalty himself. I honor him for the spirit that prompts him. It is no small thing for a man to be willing to lay down his life for the cause of humanity. The act is noble, but it is mistaken. While I do not advocate violence, neither do I condemn the anarchist who resorts to it.
“I was an anarchist when I left Russia to come to America,” she continued, “but I had hardly formulated my belief. The final influence that crystallized my views was the hanging of the Chicago anarchists in 1887.