Yet at its height in 1879, the Chicago SLP could claim only 870 members, and the English-speaking section a mere 150. And these small numbers produced not a tightknit band of fearsome stalwarts, but a querulous group rent by personality conflicts and disagreements over ideology and strategy. Weekly meetings devolved into rancor as the English-speakers clashed with the Germans. Albert objected to Morgan’s support for fusion with the Greenback Labor Party and to Morgan’s argument that the eight-hour movement was a piecemeal, largely meaningless reform. Philip Van Patten had by this time moved to Detroit, the national headquarters of the SLP, but from afar he took to denouncing the increased visibility of Chicago’s Lehr und Wehr, which he considered unnecessarily provocative. Van Patten also persisted in supporting electoral action in direct opposition to Parsons. The SLP English section was dissolving even as an infusion of energetic young refugees from Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law of 1878 galvanized the Germans. Feuds took on a bitter, highly personal tone. Van Patten wrote darkly of coming expulsions of party apostates, telling George Schilling, in August 1880, “Experience has taught me that if you do not crush a sworn enemy he will assassinate you. I have had too many lessons in these difficulties to underestimate an enemy’s power.” Other socialists, not capitalists, were the “enemy.”33
Points of contention among SLP members seemed infinite in their permutations, as disagreements over various issues metastasized and ultimately tore the group apart—members argued about the viability of the Knights of Labor (which some said moved too slowly to support striking workers), the distinction between economic organization and political action (trade unionism versus partisan political activity), and the divergent goals of state socialism and a cooperative commonwealth. In November 1880, Albert decided to venture once more into the political arena and run for state representative from the 6th District, despite the fact that Schilling and Morgan and others were backing a different socialist candidate named Christian Meier. Both Meier and Parsons lost, garnering 3,418 and 495 votes, respectively. In a letter to Van Patten, Elizabeth Morgan excoriated Albert Parsons for his betrayal: “We all feel like doing anything to beat that D[evil]. of Parsons. We are all death on that man and he knows it.” If Albert was having second thoughts about his role in Chicago politics, this election put those doubts to rest. As a means to a workers’ revolution, the ballot box was a sham.34
During these years the media thirsted for evidence of violence-prone schemers, finding threats to the social order in German parades and picnics, and making it nearly impossible for socialists to convey their ideas to a wider audience beyond their immediate ethnic neighborhoods. Although Albert remained a much-sought-after interviewee among reporters and their editors, he was at the same time dismissed as “The Communist Parsons,” his ideas reflexively labeled “foreign”—associated with the city’s Germans, Bohemians, Poles, and Scandinavians, and outside the bounds of American tradition and culture. Socialists hailed their red flag as a symbol of equality—“the blood flowing in the veins of every human body, rich or poor, white or black”—while the media pointed to the same banner and conjured the blood of innocents flowing in the streets after a radical takeover. In March 1879, immigrant workers gathered in large numbers to raise money for the Arbeiter Zeitung and celebrate the Paris Commune of 1871; the event garnered the headline “The Reds.” Held at the cavernous Exposition Building, the event drew, according to the Tribune, thousands of thieves from the dives and slums of the immigrant wards and “the worst specimens of female depravity.” A speech delivered by Parsons, “but a small man,” received short shrift. Featured in the lengthy descriptions of the event were pointed references to various ethnic military companies composed of men who “strutted about in their uniforms with belts, cartridge boxes, bayonet scabbards and breech-loading Remingtons.”35
The press and the police expressed trepidation over the designs of immigrant rifle companies—the Lehr und Wehr, in particular. Founded in Chicago in 1875, the group of volunteers grew out of the conviction of recent immigrants that defense of the republic—the new fatherland, the United States—necessitated an armed citizenry. Chicago had spawned a host of ethnic military companies during the Civil War, so this development was not entirely alien. The Lehr und Wehr carried new Springfield and Remington rifles, and its members drilled every week in parades followed by music and drinking—more merry-making than menacing. In 1878, however, the cautious Van Patten was worried about a growing public perception that the group was drilling for revolution and not for pure enjoyment; he urged its members “to avoid any military display and instead ridicule the authorities by appearing in a manner as innocent as that of a religious procession,” advice the members rejected. Some of these militias dispensed with weapons altogether and drilled exclusively in the spirit of camaraderie. John F. Waldo, a printer who belonged to a group of native-born radicals called the International Rifles, described it as “the International Rifles without the rifles.” In 1879, the state legislature moved to outlaw such militias altogether.36
At the end of 1880, the Parsonses faced a troubling reality. Since arriving in Chicago, Albert had joined Typographical Union No. 16, lectured huge crowds of restless strikers, and helped cobble together the Trade and Labor Assembly. Yet he had received no support from his No. 16 comrades during that fateful week in July 1877. He was a much-sought-after speaker at rallies and picnics, and had received endorsements from the powerful Arbeiter Zeitung, such as: “A. R. Parsons has suffered hunger and want for his convictions and is an independent character, who will not be taken in tow by other persons to be guided to other goals.” Yet he consistently lost his election campaigns in the 15th Ward, presumably a hotbed of socialist fellow-feeling. Chicago’s laboring classes remained fragmented, with employers and even union leaders pitting native-born against foreign-born, skilled against unskilled, women and children against men, wage-earners against “tramps.” For her part, Lucy had helped to launch the Working Women’s Union, with high ideals, only to see it languish, thwarted by the indifference of the women who could most benefit from its message.37
Even the socialists’ modest reformist platform seemed utopian. At an August 30, 1880, meeting (dubbed the “Chicago Commune” by the Daily Inter-Ocean), the delegates nominated Albert as their candidate for Congress (he declined to run) and also put forth a platform that must have struck newspaper readers as so much wishful thinking—maximum-hour labor legislation, “the inspection of food, to the end that all impurities therein might be detected,” the creation of a national bureau of labor statistics, the abolition of child labor in factories, compulsory schooling for all children under the age of fourteen, and redistricting of political wards on the basis of population growth. These demands, which within a generation would gain a favorable hearing from Progressive reformers and politicians, remained associated in Gilded Age Chicago with communists, the “tumultuous mob.”38
Still, at the end of the decade, the depression had begun to lift, and for a few years, at least, workers saw reason to hope that the upturn would bring a more generous hourly wage, or the chance for them to open their own small shops. Albert continued to preach to the socialist choir via the Arbeiter Zeitung, using an urgent tone: “Who would not employ force, if all peaceable ways have failed to get one’s right? It is only power, which sustains the throne of the despot. Only power can maintain the existing systems and forms of Government…. Everybody should join the glorified red flag of liberty and equality as a lifelong fighter and make a determined stand for the rights of humanity.” Taking stock of their frustrated ambitions, their electoral and organizing disappointments, fueled by what they believed were stolen elections, and the dismal outlook for socialist reform, the Parsonses now shifted course to address more directly what they considered the grand hoax of the American voting system.39
EVEN AS THE PARSONSES BEGAN TO CULTIVATE A MORE RADICAL outlook, they were settling into their immigrant neighborhood. Striding through her Larrabee Street
neighborhood on the way to her workshop, Lucy Parsons cut a striking figure—tall, with an erect carriage, and with brown skin and black hair, she seemed out of place in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly German, with a few Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Hungarian, and Irish families. Almost all of the native-born residents of the North Side were children, the offspring of immigrant machinists, house painters, carpenters, tinsmiths, white washers, tailors, bookkeepers, firemen, and wagon makers. By the early 1880s, Lucy and Albert had probably achieved a high level of fluency in the German language, not only to communicate with core socialist activists, but also to survive in a largely self-contained community where most of the storekeepers hailed from German-speaking states. They no doubt gathered regularly with their comrades in one of the nearby Biergarten, family-friendly eating and meeting places.40
Larrabee Street consisted mostly of two-story frame tenements, two or three families in each dwelling, interspersed with saloons, grocers, and workshops. The Parsonses’ neighborhood was one of solid, working-class, two-parent families, with almost all of the wives keeping house and a few taking in laundry or sewing. Residents could hardly keep from whispering about the peculiar couple—a slight, well-dressed white man and his attractive wife of indeterminate origin—who had settled among them. Later, according to an 1887 article in Knights of Labor, a weekly publication put out by the organization, a neighbor recalled them as “a very queer-looking couple.” They lived on the second floor of a dwelling with a sign that read “Mrs. A. R. Parsons, fashionable dressmaking,” though it was clear that more than sewing transpired there. After 9 in the evening men and women would arrive and take their places on the wooden benches at the back of the neat, well-furnished apartment; Lucy told her curious neighbors that Albert was teaching English to immigrants. Still, the article said, “the demeanor of the lady was so well-bred and dignified that she commanded the respect of all with whom she came into contact, so that gradually even the horrified gossips became used to the queerly matched pair and ceased to pay any particular attention to their actions.”41
The neighbor remembered Lucy as “a thorough lady in her manners and… much respected despite her dark complexion,” and the couple “seemed devotedly attached to each other.” In the process of moving from Texas to Chicago, Albert and Lucy had forged a relationship of mutual dependence and affection. Lizzie Swank, who saw them frequently and knew them both as well as anyone did, described it as “a long period of uninterrupted and happy companionship.”42
The family expanded on April 20, 1881, with the birth of Lulu Eda, perhaps named for a daughter of Albert’s brother William H. Parsons and his wife, Louisa, a child who died in 1868 at the age of six. Lulu Parsons was identified as “Niger” on her birth certificate, which gave her father’s occupation as “clothier.” Lucy listed Virginia as her place of birth, but reported her full maiden name as Lucy Ella Hull (partly echoing the name on her marriage license, Ella Hall). By this time, she was the mother of two children under the age of two, and questions remain about how she and Albert divided household tasks and child rearing. Did they leave their son and daughter in the care of one of their employees during the frequent nights they stayed out late at political meetings, or did they take the children with them? Did Lucy have to adapt her southern-style cooking to ingredients found in German-owned grocers? Could she count on any help lugging water from a nearby well or scrubbing floors and clothes? Did she, with her love of fine clothes, ever peruse the collection of French kid gloves at Marshall Field’s downtown department store? Did she miss her mother or mourn the infant Champ whom she had buried in Waco? Certainly, her persistent habit of reporting different maiden names and middle names for herself suggests that she wanted to obliterate any traces that would allow Chicagoans of any stripe to trace her back to Dr. T. J. Taliaferro and his other slaves.43
In 1881, Lucy’s intensified duties as mother and breadwinner did not prevent her from joining Knights of Labor Local Assembly 1789. Founded in September, the local was in fact a reconfigured Working Women’s Union, all female and “mixed”—that is, composed of workers in a variety of occupations as well as middle-class activists and intellectuals. However, she objected to Local 1789’s “mixed” nature and its emphasis on political action; she thought it a poor vehicle to further working-class solidarity. Before long, 1789 would founder on the same issues that had hindered the WWU—the predominance of middle-class reformers and the difficulty of organizing young sewing women.44
Around this time, Albert and Lucy worked to bring more members into the TLA. They planned periodic outings, each of which would begin with a procession wending its way through the city. The “grand demonstration” of Sunday, August 21, 1881, culminated in a picnic at Ogden’s Grove on the North Side. It drew an estimated 10,000 workingmen and their families and featured twenty unions affiliated with the TLA, including typographers, blacksmiths, seamen, tin and iron sheet workers, cigar makers, bricklayers and stone masons, plasterers, iron molders, and silver gilders. At the same time, the size of these events masked the organizational weaknesses of socialist unions. The Parsonses would remain disappointed by the large socialist-sponsored outdoor gatherings that yielded so few new converts to the cause.45
In early 1881, Philip Van Patten anticipated the impending breakup of the Socialistic Labor Party. He knew that an impatient group of SLP members, whom he labeled “anarchists” (they called themselves the “Socialist Revolutionary Club”), had decided to dispense with the idea that politics was the surest course of action to achieve a class revolution. Van Patten defended state socialism, maintaining that workers must invest the state with the protection of rights and the distribution of property. He charged that anarchists, in denying all governmental authority, also denied the authority of the people. Anarchists provided no mechanism, no structure, for social change, insisting on chaos as a matter of principle: “A single discontented, ignorant, spiteful or dyspeptic member could block all business!” Lobbing the harshest charge of all, he argued that the anarchist, in his extreme individualism, resembled no one so much as “the grasping capitalist” who defended “the barbarous plundering of one another that makes men all claws and stomach, like the crab or the devil fish.”46
In a significant departure from their previous brand of activism, Albert and Lucy Parsons eagerly accepted the label “anarchist”; it possessed a shock value that they craved. Yet they were hardly doctrinaire, and anarchism, like other political philosophies, encompassed a wide range of views. Later, Albert would write, “We are called by some Communists, or Socialists, or Anarchists. We accept all three of the terms.” For the time being, at least, the distinctions among these three ideologies mattered little to them (though soon enough those distinctions would incite self-destructive internecine warfare among radicals). Albert defined anarchism as “the elimination of all authority in social affairs; it is the denial of the right of domination of one man over another. It is the diffusion of rights, of power, of duties, equally and freely among all the people.” He and Lucy could simultaneously champion trade unions as the seeds of a new order and the Knights of Labor, the Eight-Hour League, the WWU, and anarchism. Others argued that these various associations all operated from wildly divergent assumptions, and offered contradictory strategies for economic transformation. To the Parsonses, though, anarchism primarily represented a renunciation of mainstream political parties; in their view, no true anarchist would ever cast a ballot for any kind of candidate.47
Founded in London in 1881, the anarchist International Working People’s Association (IWPA)—at times called the “Black International”—inspired Albert Parsons and the upholsterer August Spies to form a Chicago chapter of the group two years later. The association took as its guiding principle an idea developed by the German anarchist Johann Most—“propaganda by deed” (attentat), a burst of violence that would awaken the masses from their slumber and impel them to overthrow their masters. Most proposed that that jolt might conveniently come in the
form of dynamite; the powder was easy enough to make, to carry, and to conceal, and it leveled the field of battle between employers and employees, police and street demonstrators. He said the mere mention of it should be enough to instill fear in the cold hearts of capitalists.48
By late 1883 the IWPA claimed 2,000 members in the United States, with a few hundred in Chicago divided into English, German, and French sections. Albert and Lucy Parsons joined the English (or American) group, consisting at first of just five other people (a number that would grow to ninety-five in early 1885). For the time being, at least, they cared little about the small numbers, believing that a handful of devoted members could serve as avant couriers, advance messengers, for the cause. Nationwide, Easterners dominated the IWPA, and in Chicago, German immigrant craftsmen predominated. Together the couple attended Sunday “mass meetings” of the IWPA, and they hosted discussions each Wednesday night in their apartment.49
For the Parsonses, the turn toward anarchism came at the expense of some old friendships (with Morgan and Schilling, for example) as they embraced a new circle of activists. Lizzie Swank remained a loyal friend, as did her soon-to-be husband William Holmes, an English-born teacher who lived in Geneva, Illinois, west of Chicago. August Spies became the editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung in 1884 and turned it into an anarchist publication. Spies and Albert Parsons would soon control, respectively, the city’s German and English-language anarchist press. Active in the English-speaking section of the IWPA was Samuel Fielden, a self-employed stonecutter and teamster. Born in England, he had started work as an eight-year-old in the cotton mills, which he termed the dwelling place of the devil, “his satanic majesty”; he arrived in Chicago in 1869 and became an itinerant Methodist minister and a lifelong champion of the working poor.50
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