Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  When they arrived in Chicago, the couple rented units 25 and 26 at 157 Fifth Avenue (now Wells Street), rooms that possibly included not only a residence but also a workspace for Lucy, and sometime before 1875 she opened her own seamstress business. Albert’s substantial savings, his steady work as a printer, and Lucy’s sewing gave them a modicum of financial security for their first three and a half years in the city. Still, they lived in at least four different places during that time, eventually settling in the 15th Ward, an area on the North Side still in the process of rebuilding after the fire. The site of a former German farming colony, the neighborhood had streets named Schubert, Mozart, Frankfort, and Rhine.7

  By 1873, Chicago had expended enormous amounts of labor, capital, natural resources, and political will and imagination to rebuild itself after the conflagration that began on the late Sunday night of October 8, 1871. The fire killed 300 people, consumed 18,000 buildings, including much of the downtown business district, and leveled 2,100 acres. Yet remarkably, within a year, a public-private partnership had succeeded in scouring the visible effects of the disaster from the cityscape. When the Parsonses arrived, they saw temporary shanties built to house the homeless still in use, but they also saw neat rows of new wooden cottages for workers and impressive new downtown office buildings. The great department stores were selling an abundance of tastefully displayed ready-made goods. Prairie Avenue and Lake Shore Drive were sites of a post-fire building boom among the city’s great magnates—Marshall Field (retail sales), George M. Pullman (railroad cars), Potter Palmer (hotelier), Cyrus McCormick (farm machinery), and Philip D. Armour (meatpacking).8

  The magnificent residences of such men contrasted mightily with the city’s vast neighborhoods of low-lying tenements. Mary “Mother” Jones, a labor organizer who began her career as a seamstress in Chicago around this time, took note of “the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front” in winter, and the overworked mothers from the West Side bringing their babies to the lakefront for a breath of cool air in summer. The elites’ conspicuous wealth provided the gilt for the age, testifying to the city’s role as a thriving rail and water entrepôt trading in lumber, meat products, beer, and farm machinery. Here was the Central Texas crossroads of Waco written on a gigantic scale.9

  Yet recovery from the fire exposed deep social fissures within the city. Many thousands of native-born migrants, together with many thousands of foreign immigrants, had come to Chicago to partake of the so-called Great Rebuilding. The newcomers came full of hope only to seek in vain for adequate shelter, however, now that hastily erected factories and sprawling warehouses had devoured whole residential neighborhoods. They squeezed into high-priced, poorly ventilated barracks, basements, and hovels surrounded by open sewers that were clogged with kitchen slop, human excrement, and animal carcasses. The high death rate, a product of poor sanitation and smallpox and cholera epidemics, exceeded that of London, Paris, and Liverpool. In their first summer, Albert and Lucy encountered the unbearable stench emanating from the polluted Chicago River—although it may have seemed little more than a meandering cesspool, it nevertheless served as a vital commercial artery for lumber and ore, with boats and barges headed toward Lake Michigan—as well as from the fetid stockyards and slaughterhouses overtaking the South Side.10

  To some extent, the plight of the poor reflected the drop in demand for manufactured goods due to the depression. At the same time, widespread homelessness resulted from larger processes of mechanization and other forms of labor displacement that threatened to shrink the ranks of the employed even when times improved. The construction derrick was the symbol of the city’s rebirth but also of builders’ rush to replace workers with labor-saving devices. Other groups lost their jobs to new technologies. Machines now did the tasks of sausage-casing workers. The appearance of the refrigerator car in 1874 threw many butchers out of work. The widespread use of the typewriter replaced male bookkeepers with female stenographers, who, for less pay, could record four or five times as many words per minute. Sewing machines forced speedups among factory seamstresses. Cheap labor in general further depressed wages and increased unemployment. Convicts even took the place of some boot and shoe workers, and young boys began to do the jobs of many adult male wood-carvers. Meanwhile, the vast majority of meatpackers, machine factory operatives, and sweatshop workers endured fourteen-hour days in dirty, dangerous conditions. Nevertheless, despite the fact that more and more people were living under Chicago’s bridges and sleeping in police stations, the city fathers counseled the poor to practice “self-dependence.”11

  The Parsonses’ emerging new politics reflected the German radical tradition as it unfolded in teeming Chicago. Socialists decried the quest for profits that they believed despoiled the life-chances of the masses. The symbols of a future reckoning were everywhere—not only in the mechanical innovations featured at the 1873 Industrial Exposition, but also in the swelling ranks of the jobless and homeless—the “tramps” composing a mighty, footsore “army.” Through no fault of their own, these men and women were now superfluous, victims of businesses that were moving, inexorably, toward labor-saving machinery and “efficiency.” According to socialists, this process would eventually displace a substantial proportion of the laboring and middle classes together. However, such a transformation was not to be resisted, for it was the spark that in time would ignite a far-reaching popular revolt. The downtrodden laboring classes would finally fight to receive a full share of the fruits of their own labor as their miserable condition became untenable at last.12

  Lucy and Albert Parsons would come to view the city as a perfect example of evolutionary capitalism—the historical process by which businesses grew into trusts, monopolies, and syndicates, shedding workers along the way. In fact, this view of the grand sweep of the past, present, and future found support not only among German theorists, such as Karl Marx, but also among a diverse group of American thinkers and businessmen at the time. The home-grown American writer Edward Bellamy, and captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (steel and oil magnates, respectively), heralded the seemingly relentless march to corporate bigness. Carnegie and Rockefeller saw gigantic companies as more efficient than their smaller counterparts, the means by which capital could be channeled into philanthropic enterprises for the good of all. For their part, socialists disagreed among themselves about the inevitable and ideal future—whether it would be organized around a strong central government that would absorb and control the largest monopolies, or around a cooperative commonwealth of small voluntary associations.

  If socialists and robber barons could agree on the inevitable processes of workplace innovation and business consolidation, they could not agree on the scope and meaning of the personal suffering wrought by these processes. Laboring men and women in Chicago felt the immediate effects of the crash of ’73. Railroads moved to cut their labor forces and reduce wages, and businessmen and their allies in the press suggested that the most effective way to help the unemployed was to close the taverns and billiard halls, saving workers as a group $28,000 a week in “squandered” wages. In fact, the pro-business Tribune saw the disaster as a blessing if only the irresponsible laboring classes would cut back on frivolous spending: “There is a silver lining to every cloud; adversity is a good school; its lessons are abiding, and, while the entire people are alike temporarily prostrated, all must endeavor to take the brightest view of the situation, and conform their habits to the change in circumstances.” Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican Party leaders, preoccupied with cultural issues such as the morality of Sunday-afternoon Biergarten outings, and with municipal patronage jobs, the spoils of electoral victory, showed little concern for those who were becoming “prostrated,” temporarily or otherwise.13

  In Chicago, European immigrants took the lead in offering an alternative to the two major political parties and organizing the demonstrations of late December 1873; the Workingmen�
��s Union put forth speakers who addressed the crowds in English and German, with a smattering of Swedish, Polish, and French. Indeed, in the early 1870s, 45 percent of Chicago was foreign-born, and among the voting-age population, immigrants predominated. A vast divide separated the well-to-do—mostly native-born Protestants who believed that, with a bit of effort, every person could control his or her own destiny—from the laboring classes, especially the immigrants, who tended to favor collective action to address perceived wrongs. The Germans (Catholic, Lutheran, and atheist) in particular assumed a lively, visible presence in Chicago—even their parades and picnics gave expression to the labor radicalism favored by many.14

  In August 1874, Chicago businessmen organized the Citizens’ Association (CA). Its members believed that government existed solely to protect private property, and not to cater to the interests of what the CA called the “baser elements of the people.” City Hall employed and represented too many people who had no property to protect, these businessmen argued, and in fact, “this city is governed, for the most part, by unfit and unworthy men, in an undignified, uncultivated, and demoralizing manner.” Elites disapproved of workers who took to the streets in protest—a time-honored tradition, especially among trade unions. The laboring classes saw mass rallies as a vital expression of the people’s will, while the Citizens’ Association saw them as a mockery of the democratic process, which they believed mandated that individuals cast their ballots privately in the service of property interests. The mass marches in late 1873 undermined the ideal of the storybook Victorian Christmas, when families should be gathering together in their snug little cottages, and not shamelessly parading through the streets, proclaiming their own poverty and desperation.15

  By 1874, it was apparent that the city’s Republicans and Democrats had become unequal to the task of resolving a volatile mix of ethnic, class, and ideological conflicts. Elites, most of whom favored the Republican Party, remained firm in their conviction that individuals must rely on their own resources—a curious view for men who themselves formed fraternal-based businesses and gigantic combinations, as well as the Relief and Aid Society and the Citizens’ Association, in pursuit of “good government.” Abetting this larger effort to protect private-property interests were newspaper publishers, who rationalized and promoted a pro-business view of the world, and law enforcement officials, who apprehended and brought miscreants to justice, whether lone burglars or mobs of immigrant “communists.” For their part, the Democrats attracted a mix of ethnic and working-class groups but remained focused on capturing patronage jobs rather than upending the capitalist order.

  As Albert Parsons knew full well from his Texas days, the Republican Party promoted robust partnerships with business that included state-sponsored subsidies to railroads in the form of land grants and tax rebates. At the same time, throughout the country, small voluntary associations were emerging as a countervailing force to these potent alliances between politicians and capitalists. Many of these groups stressed harmony rather than competition among like-minded people; they included the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, usually referred to simply as the Grange, established in 1867 and intent on freeing farmers from their dependence on middlemen, such as grain storehouses; the Knights of Labor, organized in 1869, which was devoted to small producers and the laboring classes; and the Greenback Labor Party, which had been determined since its formation in 1873 to expand the currency and thus lessen the burden of debtors who had been victimized by predatory lenders. Lucy and Albert Parsons arrived in Chicago at a time when the Anti-Monopoly Party was organizing farmers and miners in the Illinois countryside, and when the newly formed Workingmen’s Party of Illinois appealed to city dwellers. In the summer of 1874, the British-born Elizabeth Morgan helped start a Chicago branch of the Sovereigns of Industry, an urban variation on the rural Grange. The Sovereigns’ call to arms amounted to a rallying cry for the age: “You have but to combine, workingmen and women! And a great and immediate benefit is yours.”16

  These proto-political associations shared a basic set of impulses and ideas with the small utopian experiments that had emerged in the antebellum period, communes representing a wide range of beliefs about gender roles, religion, the division of labor, and leadership structures. In general, prewar homegrown anti-capitalist communities embraced the peaceful tactics characteristic of voluntary associations prone toward moral suasion rather than legislation or force as a means of attracting support. Nevertheless, by the postbellum period many native-born Chicagoans were beginning to develop an aversion to anything that smacked of communism and socialism, political ideologies that were now conflated with revolution and domestic terrorism. Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy was published in 1867. Four years later thousands of French workers took to the streets in Paris in demonstrations on behalf of justice and equality in a sixty-four-day uprising called the Paris Commune; authorities suppressed the rebels only by massacring many hundreds of them. For Chicagoans, “communist” became an epithet signifying foreigners’ contempt for American values as well as any instance of collective action on the part of the poor. Native-born Americans especially expressed a visceral hatred for and fear of “communists” of any kind.17

  IN CHICAGO, NEITHER ALBERT NOR LUCY WAS IN FACT A MEMBER OF the toiling masses, a group consisting of factory workers and unskilled laborers, 70 percent of whom were foreign-born. Most of the men in this group worked in manufacturing, meat processing, and the building trades, whereas a majority of wage-earning women found jobs as domestic servants. Printers—such as Albert—represented only 1,826 of all 96,000 male workers, and seamstresses—a group that now included Lucy—only 1,686 of all 16,000 female workers. Although both of the Parsonses were employed in jobs that were vulnerable to mechanization, neither had to contend with long hours inside a sweatshop firetrap or a foul-smelling slaughterhouse, or outside in the elements. Lucy in fact ran a small shop, probably consisting of herself and a helper or two. In the coming years their close comrades would all come from the ranks of either skilled tradespeople or small, independent entrepreneurs, men and women who possessed pride of craft and realized that a traditional way of life was rapidly disappearing in the wake of piecework and mass production.18

  It should also be noted that the Parsonses did not live, work, or organize among black people, who at the time of their arrival in Chicago numbered 4,000 or so—barely 1 percent of the city’s population. Before 1874, blacks had remained clustered block by block in the wards along the lake, interspersed among various ethnic communities; however, a fire that summer forced them to disperse to other parts of the city. The black men of Illinois won the right to vote in 1870 after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (three years after their Texas counterparts were enfranchised), but made up only 800 voters in the city’s total voting population of 50,000. The party of Lincoln largely ignored them, and the Democrats completely shunned them. White labor leaders looked down on workers who were paid by the task, which most black workers were; for their part, the 1,500 black cooks, laundresses, and underemployed manual laborers found the call for an eight-hour day irrelevant to their work lives. Yet neither Lucy nor Albert could have been completely oblivious to the presence of black people, since the local papers were filled with lurid stories about blacks’ alleged proclivities for rape and murder (“The Rochester Horror”) and their supposedly bizarre customs and superstitions (witchcraft and “Voudouism”).19

  Had the Parsonses taken an interest in the city’s small community of former slaves, they would have heard thrilling tales of fugitives finding their way north and banding together to foil the designs of slave catchers before the Civil War, and of hardworking families making heroic efforts to piece together a living for themselves. Yet both husband and wife and their socialist comrades remained preoccupied with white craftsmen and factory workers, the urban proletariat. Living in a self-sufficient, cloistered, virtually all-immigrant neighborhood, they drew upon Europ
ean traditions of class struggle that had no room for African Americans. And most white workers, regardless of ethnicity, saw the black man primarily as a potential strikebreaker, a menace to their own livelihood. Albert’s steadfast indifference to Chicago’s black population suggests that his earlier efforts on behalf of black Texans for civil rights had been purely opportunistic, a way for him to advance within the Republican Party, rather than the result of strongly held principle.20

  Lucy probably kept her distance from Chicago’s blacks for more personal reasons. From the time she arrived in the city, she would go to great lengths to deny her own African heritage. As a newcomer to Chicago, where no one knew her mother, she achieved at least partial success in this effort, as many observers could not determine her precise origins from the color of her skin or the texture of her hair. Taking up the cause of long-suffering black domestics would have resulted in calling attention to herself and risking derision or worse. Nevertheless, ignoring workers who shared her African ancestry only brought so much protection. Throughout her life, those who were openly hostile to her politics would point to her copper-colored complexion and quickly label her a “nigger.”

  Albert and Lucy cast their lot with the mainly foreign-born radicals. Given the shortage of native-born socialists, German immigrant leaders were grateful to discover in the gifted orator from Texas a devoted comrade who could reach English speakers. When Albert joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in March 1876, both he and Lucy forged bonds with several men who would shape Chicago’s labor politics in the coming years. George A. Schilling, a twenty-six-year-old German-born cooper, wrote for the Chicago-based Arbeiter Zeitung (Workers’ Paper). Level-headed and compassionate, he would prove a steadfast advocate of the city’s laboring classes for the next sixty years, and together with Albert he helped to found the English section of the SDP. Thomas J. (“Tommy”) Morgan, twenty-nine, an English-born machinist, had arrived in Chicago with his wife, Elizabeth, in 1868. A long stint of unemployment after 1873, when he lost his job with the railroad, had radicalized him. The bilingual August Spies, a twenty-one-year-old German-born upholsterer who had come to the United States in 1872, loved the theater and had a flair for the dramatic; with his light brown hair and blue eyes, he played the gregarious “ladies’ man” and enjoyed dancing and lunching at fashionable restaurants.21