CaptHowdy: "I had no idea who she even was. I googled.  She sounds like a nut to me. Anarchy is a bullsh!t fantasy. Usually of bored rich people."

Maureen Stapleton played Emma Goldman to Warren Beatty's John Reed and Diane Keaton's Louise Bryant, and won the 1981 Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her work.

What Rosa Luxemburg was to Germany, Emma Goldman was to this country, as both were unflinching voices of the damned and downtrodden. Goldman was the daughter of Russian Jews, and emigrated to this country as a teenager with her half-sister Helena in the 1880s after her father's failed attempt to arrange a marriage for her at age 15.

She was politically radicalized by the injustice of Chicago's notorious "Haymarket Affair," in which eight well-known anarchists were arrested, tried and convicted for the murder of seven policemen and four civilians at a labor rally bombing. It was a crime which none of them likely committed, yet four of them were hanged for it.

Goldman first came to the attention of authorities during the Panic of 1893, when she advocated that the poor and unemployed take the fight to the rich and powerful. She was arrested and imprisoned for inciting a riot.

Eight years later, she was initially arrested in 1901 and charged with having planned the assassination of President William McKinley, a crime for which she had no involvement whatsoever. The attempts by authorities to shut her up and frame her only further radicalized her.

Emma Goldman was one of the Gilded Age's more colorful, passionate and fascinating characters. She was an uncompromising revolutionary who's worth getting to know better, if you have time.