Official SLP policy discouraged women from taking “men’s” jobs (that is, any job in which men predominated) on the theory that the work would harm mothers and their capacity to rear children, and also that the women’s low wages would undercut those of men. Plank number 7 of the SLP platform called for the “prohibition of the employment of female labor in occupations detrimental to health or morality.” The Socialist engaged in decidedly un-revolutionary rhetoric when it called for women to withdraw voluntarily from wage-earning drudgery so they could assume “their rightful position as the sovereign queen of a good man’s household and at the same time ensure that ‘good man’ has a chance to work and the right to the fruits of his labor.” Presumably, then, women could continue to labor in their own homes as seamstresses, though not in shops as tailors or machine operatives; or in other women’s homes, as domestic servants and cooks, though not in hotels as waiters or chefs.16
Lucy knew firsthand the tribulations of those who engaged in women’s work, paid or unpaid, and she was a prominent member of the WWU, at times presiding over meetings. Yet competing claims on her energies suggest that her devotion to the organization was not wholehearted, and in fact, she lacked the patience to go into individual small workplaces and convince the women there that their best interests lay with the WWU, as other members did. She was also busy helping Albert with his political campaigns each spring and fall. In all likelihood, it was she and Lizzie Swank who sewed the colorful slogan-banners that adorned every large socialist event—“Our Civilization: The Bullet and the Policeman’s Club” and “No Masters, No Slaves.”17
Lucy was also active in planning and publicizing the “monster picnics” that had become a significant part of her family life. These large gatherings struck her as more satisfying and more useful to the cause than the tedium of small-bore outreach to workers, one person at a time, often in the presence of a hostile boss and panicked coworkers. A celebration of Whitsunday (Pentecost) on June 16, 1878, showed how socialists tried, with mixed success, to harness large pleasure outings to their own purposes. At the “great demonstration,” Albert interrupted the afternoon entertainment to lecture the crowd and defend socialism as a genuinely American movement. Still, his listeners consisted of only a small knot of the sympathetic, or the curious. Most young people barely paused from dancing and flirting, while others visited with friends or enjoyed the merry-go-round. He competed with popcorn vendors for the attention of the crowd.18
Late 1878 marked the beginning of Lucy’s lifelong career as essayist, editorialist, and investigative journalist when The Socialist published a series of her letters to the editor. These pieces obliquely evoked her own ordeal in bondage. They also suggested her eclectic taste in reading, including poetry, fiction, and current news, and revealed a rhetorical style and substantive focus all her own, yielding florid indictments of capital and melodramatic descriptions of suffering women. In one letter, she dismissed the notion of “harmony of employer and employed (master and slave),” arguing that it was as unlikely as harmony between the “robber and the robbed.” She asked, “Oh, when will ignorance be dethroned, and reason and justice reign supreme? When will the masses learn that property is his and his only who has produced it—earned it?” She also denounced the unjust treatment of impoverished Union veterans, out of work and out of luck, condemned to the poorhouse and scorned by a new “slavocracy”—city officials and employers: “But alas! What must be their heartfelt humiliation and burning indignation when they are denied by a bloated aristocracy, a cruel money-ocracy, the commonest right that should be accorded the yellow cur that runs the streets—the right to live!—and [instead] find themselves alluded to in the columns of a hireling, venal press as ‘mendicants,’ ‘relics from the late carnage,’ ‘unfortunates,’ etc. But then, what else can they expect from A speculating, thievish clan, / who rob alike on sea and strand.” The heroic liberators of the slaves were now either enslaved themselves, bound by the wage system, or cast out on the street to scrounge for scraps like animals.19
Unlike Albert, who wrote in grand terms about socialist theory and the shifting structure of the labor force, Lucy engaged with popular magazines. In one Socialist piece she responded indignantly to a recent Scribner’s article, “Hints to Young Housekeepers,” with its condescending proscriptions for the duties, clothing, and even food allowance appropriate for cooks and servants. Her days as a domestic in a slaveholder’s household, and later for employers in Waco, surely informed her critique of cruel mistresses who would keep young women in “the bondage of aristocracy.” In another piece, she took the same magazine to task for fawning over British lords and ladies, admonishing its readers: “Hear, ye who love republican institutions, with what a gush of sophistry the aristocracy greets the ‘royalty’ of old monarchy-ridden Europe, whose history has floated down to the present generation in the blood of the work-people—and the end is not yet!” No doubt she was the only contributor to The Socialist who had been born a slave, and one among the few who possessed only the bare bones of a formal education.20
On September 29, 1879, Lucy gained the attention of Chicagoans outside radical labor circles when a Tribune reporter offered an account of a speech she had given the day before at the socialists’ weekly meeting in Uhlich’s Hall. It is possible that this short notice, “The Regular Weekly Meeting of the Socialists,” marked the first time any newspaper had quoted her: “Mrs. A. R. Parsons spoke at some length, and held the attention of her auditors closely to the end.” She called for legislation “which should wipe out the private and exclusive ownership of the land.” Impressed by her confident demeanor, the reporter noted, “She avowed herself as being very ultra in her views, and expressed the belief that, should she give expression to her extreme views, she would be annihilated,” a characteristic bit of hyperbole on her part.21
The fact that Lucy was speaking at all indicated she was a woman possessed of considerable determination and physical strength, for just two weeks earlier, on September 14, she had given birth (at home, under the care of a neighborhood midwife) to a baby, Albert Parsons Jr. The birth certificate, which gives the child’s race as “Negro,” is notable because it is possibly the only public document for which Lucy provided accurate information about her background: she listed her maiden name as Carter, and her place of birth as Virginia. Perhaps she felt she could not risk falsifying an official state form. She also gave her full married name as Lucy E. Parsons, with the “E” in subsequent years standing for either Ella or Eldine.22
Clearly, the birth of the baby added to Lucy’s responsibilities. Meanwhile, Albert traveled, solicited subscriptions to The Socialist, and campaigned for a new group, the Eight-Hour League. He appeared before a congressional hearing held in Chicago by a select committee of the House of Representatives in late 1879. The committee was looking into the “cause of the general depression on labor and business.” It was perhaps there that he first met forty-year-old Dyer Lum, a bookbinder by trade and a Union veteran as well as secretary to the committee that sponsored the hearing. Lum, a descendant of the illustrious abolitionist Tappan family, was given to an idiosyncratic brand of individualistic socialism that could veer toward spiritualism. Beginning in 1880, he and Albert worked together to promote the eight-hour day.23
When the WWU collapsed in late 1880, the local press gleefully chronicled its internal contradictions and unfulfilled promise. Like other SLP-sponsored gatherings, WWU meetings attracted curious reporters bent on describing for their readers the pronouncements of those with “communistic proclivities,” as well as any trouble within the group (for example, attempts to recover the modest funds from a treasurer who had allegedly embezzled them). Exposed as interlopers and asked to leave, reporters would then denounce the proceedings as “secret,” implying a conspiracy afoot.24
At its demise, the group had little to show for its efforts. A special meeting called in November 1879 on behalf of sewing women, “who are invited to attend,” and presided o
ver by Lucy, had attracted twenty people, fifteen women and five men. Of those, only one or two were needlewomen. Lucy dispensed with the planned program and suggested the group instead address the well-worn adage “Union is strength.” Several months later, the group was still discussing “the feasibility of organizing a sewing girls’ union,” and leaders were still reading aloud essays designed to rally “the slaves of Chicago.” One member delivered a paper “in which [she] recited some of the cruelties practiced upon the working women at the present day, whose condition, she claimed, to be no better than negro slavery.” Invited to stand and tell their own stories, the handful of working women in attendance chose instead to remain in their seats. Mid-Sunday afternoon meetings held no appeal for the WWU’s target audience. Exhausted after toiling six days a week for pennies, most young women were not inclined to listen to well-meaning ladies engaging in political debate. Later, Lizzie Swank described the challenges of organizing young women, who typically hoped to marry and quit the workforce as soon as possible, and native-born workers, who often shied away from collective action. Pride played a role in their hesitancy: “They preferred to bear their privation alone, and allow others to think they were comfortably situated, quite well off, and needed no one’s sympathy,” Swank wrote. She encouraged the founders of a similar group in Denver but also offered advice: “A great deal of tact and genuine sympathy is necessary to deal with all the cases you meet. ‘Patronage’ will not do—I have seen too much of that tried in this city.”25
By 1880 Albert Parsons had won the deep admiration of his socialist comrades, both German- and English-speaking. In 1879, they had sent him to an SLP convention in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, where the delegates nominated him as their candidate for president of the United States. Parsons declined the honor, pointing out that he was too young to serve (though throughout his life he would shave three years off his age, claiming a birthdate of 1848). The Illinois state legislature had created a bureau of labor statistics, a key demand of the socialists, and its research would bolster his argument about the effects of a transformed industrial economy on the state’s most vulnerable workers. In January 1880, he represented Chicago at a Greenback Labor Party (GLP) conference in Washington, DC, and that June he and Lucy served as delegates to the national GLP convention held in Chicago. (The Parsonses eventually broke with the party because it refrained from condemning “those lordly pirates called capitalists.”) In May, the Knights of Labor and socialist unions founded the Trade and Labor Assembly (TLA), with Albert taking the helm. The TLA was dominated by German immigrants; the SLP still lacked meaningful support among English-speaking workers.26
Furthermore, the SLP’s principled stance against cheap labor often spilled over into a deep animus for the most exploited workers. A Socialist piece, probably written by Albert, detailed the plight of black sharecroppers, who were forced to subsist on “stinking lard, mouldy flour, spoiled meat, and other refuse,” but it also denounced the exodus of blacks out of the South and into the north as an implicit threat to wage-earning white Chicagoans. The writer argued that blacks should remain where they were and “secure to themselves the whole fruit of their toil by utilizing their political liberty in the right direction.” Of course, by this time, among southern blacks “political liberty” was in short supply, as Albert well knew. Even more striking was a strident rallying cry among Chicago socialists, “The Chinese must go!” At a “monster meeting” in May 1879, members of the TLA resolved, in support of their West Coast counterparts, “that in answer to the California war-cry of ‘The Chinese must go,’ we echo the universal watchword of American workingmen: ‘Not only the Chinese, but Chinese institutions [i.e., indentured servitude] must go.’”27
Despite pandering to the prejudices and fears of Chicago’s white workers, the socialists saw their organizing efforts sputter and stall. The depression that began in 1873 and lasted for six years took a tremendous toll on organized labor nationwide. Membership in trade unions throughout the country declined from 300,000 to 50,000 in the course of the downturn. In Chicago, recent strikes by coopers, cigar makers, and shoemakers had failed, with the last group intimidated by employers who threatened to import Chinese workers from the western states. In August 1879, The Socialist ceased publication after just eleven months, depriving Albert of his modest weekly income and both him and Lucy of a platform for their ideas and observations.
It was in this context that, after three years of mounting regular campaigns for elective office, Albert began to reconsider the ballot box as a means of socialist revolution. He had come to believe that workers’ long hours and pitiably low wages effectively disfranchised them; they had no time to devote to the political process, or even to cast their votes on election day. His string of failed campaigns meant that the electoral process was inherently corrupt, he thought, depriving him and other socialists of the support they clearly deserved: “My experience in the Labor party had also taught me that bribery, intimidation, duplicity, corruption, and bulldozing grew out of the conditions which made the working people poor and the idlers rich, and that consequently the ballot box could not be made an index to record the popular will until the existing debasing, impoverishing, and enslaving industrial conditions were first altered.” The spring 1880 municipal and state elections further convinced him that officials had “counted him out,” not even bothering to record the votes cast for him. He and Lucy began to argue that all forms of government, propped up by the façade of a democratic process, were illegitimate and inherently coercive—“that every law and every Government in the last analysis was force, and that force was despotism, an invasion of man’s natural right to liberty.”28
Stuffed ballot boxes were not the only source of frustration for the Parsonses. Many workingmen seemed resigned to hardship, caring nothing about politics. And yet certain vital constituencies, such as Irish immigrants and native-born whites, had become convinced that the voting booth was a more effective vehicle for change than the weak and fragmented unions were. They favored throwing their support behind one of the two major parties’ political machines. Some socialists, seduced by partisan patronage, endorsed mainstream candidates; too many, according to Albert, “doggedly, the most of them, hugged their idols of Democracy or Republicanism, and fired their ballots against each other on election days.”29
In the spring of 1879, Carter Harrison, a Democrat, had won the mayoralty in an upset vote that reflected his aggressive appeal to German socialists, including at least a portion of those living in the Parsonses’ 15th Ward. In the prior fall’s state elections, the SLP had elected a state senator and three state representatives, with their supporters casting 12,000 votes out of a total of 57,000, suggesting a substantial bloc of votes that no serious candidate could afford to ignore. Once in office, Harrison instructed the police to temper their approach to strikers and to tolerate public appearances by militia groups, such as the Lehr und Wehr and the Bohemian Sharpshooters. His successful appeal to white workers, even radicals, ushered in a period of Democratic dominance in Chicago politics that lasted until the end of the century. Predictably, however, the mayor’s concessions to labor failed to impress Albert Parsons, whose own political fortunes had suffered proportionately.30
Parsons would run for office one last time, in November 1880; after that, the Parsonses’ decision to renounce the party system altogether meant that for the rest of their lives both would refrain from voting—not only in local, state, or national elections, but, as a matter of principle, even in meetings of comrades. They remained wary of yielding decision-making to a majority and believed instead that the ideal way for any group to resolve any question was to talk its way to consensus. As editors and orators, Albert and Lucy shared the conviction that well-read, well-informed leaders must prod the masses, and not wait for at least half of them to act.
In the December 7, 1878, issue of The Socialist, Lucy expressed the generalized disgust for electoral politics that both of them felt with a poem tit
led “A Parody,” modeled after Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (1816). In his poem Byron had described an apocalyptic landscape, scorched and smoking: “The world was void / The populous and the powerful was a lump / Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—/ A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.” Lucy began her poem with Byron’s words—“I had a dream, which was not all a dream”—and told of men wandering “aimless, homeless, hopeless,” weeping, lying prostrate on the ground while the “the cries of their hungry children / And the prayers of their despairing wives fell like curses upon them.” In this dystopia, a dream and not at all a dream, each man suffered alone, “And each sat sullenly apart, gorging himself in gloom.” People were starving on this “cheerless earth,” watered by the blood of tramps and the tears of children.31
As they calculated their support among the masses, Albert, Lucy, and other SLP members played a numbers game that alternately buoyed and deflated them. Socialists could organize picnics that attracted many thousands of men, women, and children. Trade unionists could summon 7,000 workmen to march in their parades. In 1879, a three-day July 4 celebration sponsored by the Eight-Hour League brought an estimated 50,000 men, women, and children into the streets to watch a grand procession, with onlookers appearing in every window and door along the way. The Socialist noted that “a new and striking feature” of the event was the presence “of a large body of ladies—the wives and daughters of workingmen,” who also marched through the streets. A WWU float was festooned with white and pink fabric and ribbons and banners that read, “No rights without duties, and no duties without rights,” and, “When woman is admitted into the council of nations war will come to an end, for woman more than man, knows the value of life.” At the head of the mile-long procession flew the Star-Spangled Banner alongside the “gory-red banner of the Socialists,” according to the Daily Inter-Ocean. Lively spectacles such as this one over and over again renewed the Parsonses’ faith that the revolution was at hand, while convincing the authorities that a general strike was just a parade away from shutting down the entire city.32
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