In March 1883, the Parsonses met Johann Most himself when he visited Chicago for the first time. (The conversation was probably in German; Most was uncomfortable with English in its written or spoken form.) By now the thirty-seven-year-old writer and newspaper editor had achieved international notoriety; he had been in and out of jail in the course of his exile from Germany, at first living in France, and then moving from France to England and, in 1882, from England to the United States. He was lucky to have escaped with his life after calling for workers to massacre capitalists and assassinate heads of state throughout Europe. A medical procedure in his youth had left him with a misshapen jaw, and some saw in his physical disfigurement a reflection of his own disregard for human life.51
Most expressed contempt for all kinds of labor reform and all kinds of labor unions. Substantive differences separated him from the Parsonses, who, together with Spies, believed that unions and Knights assemblies were “the embryonic groups” of an ideal cooperative society. George Schilling wrote that he considered Most “so exceedingly authoritarian that I have never regarded him as a consistent opponent of the state.” The Parsonses appropriated Most’s heightened rhetoric, which was shocking in the extreme even to socialists, but neither Albert nor Lucy showed much concern for the finer points of the German theorist’s ideology.52
The IWPA’s defining manifesto, approved at a convention in Pittsburgh in October 1883, contained boilerplate SLP rhetoric and a call for “equal rights for all, without distinction to sex or race.” Written by Parsons and Most, among others, the document began with wording from the Declaration of Independence but went on to quote Thomas Jefferson’s justification for armed resistance to tyranny. And the rhetoric was raw: The dispossessed masses owed their fate to “a system that is unjust, insane, and murderous.” The IWPA called for a new American revolution: “By force our ancestors liberated themselves from political oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves from economic bondage. ‘It is therefore your right, it is your duty,’ says Jefferson, ‘to arm!’” Albert began writing for a radical San Francisco paper, Truth, which was running articles with headlines such as “Dynamite: Plain Directions for Making It,” and “Dynamite Will Be Used in America.”53
The Parsonses were convinced that anarchy emerged from conglomerates that strived for efficiency—anarchy was, then, the “inevitable end of the present drift and tendency of things,” Albert wrote. Ultimately, by eliminating workers, these businesses slowly destroyed themselves, for the jobless could no longer buy goods. The couple saw anarchy as a “science” because current trends could predict outcomes, and those trends could be proven by marshaling statistics related to output, unemployment, and company profits. (Albert titled a major 1887 essay Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis). The solution to the “labor question,” flowing from easily verifiable facts, was nothing more or less than “a scientific subject.”54
Nevertheless, the dearth of radical literature in English would continue to frustrate members of the American group. The IWPA sponsored a library, but its holdings were almost exclusively in German. Not surprisingly, then, the Parsonses, Lizzie Swank, and William Holmes took advantage of a new English-language paper published in Denver, The Labor Enquirer, which provided a suitable outlet for their essays, letters, and dispatches from Chicago. Joseph R. Buchanan, its socialist editor, supported the Knights of Labor, but remained critical of its leader, Terence V. Powderly, whom Buchanan considered too accommodationist. The Enquirer included Lucy’s denunciations of venal employers and retrograde two-party politics. Swank wrote exposés detailing the plight of starving needlewomen. Holmes defended the poor from charges that their “extravagance was the only thing preventing them from climbing out of the desperate straits they found themselves in.” Albert Parsons wrote a summary of the proceedings of the first Illinois State Labor Convention and criticized the delegates’ faith in useless reforms and the political system (the two parties, he said, were each only faintly veiled “agents of private capital”).55
Meanwhile, Lucy felt pressed to make money. In 1884, the Parsons family was living on the thin edge of distress, with Albert contributing only sporadically to the household income. The demand for clothing in Chicago was increasing exponentially, but so, too, were the numbers of garment workers—25,000 women and 5,000 men were now employed in the industry, which included wholesale clothing houses, some 500 small shops and factories, and custom dressmakers and tailors. A family of four needed $60 a month just to make ends meet, leaving nothing for small pleasures or modest savings accounts. And with two children to care for, Lucy had her hands full.56
The year 1884 was notable for a series of failed strikes nationwide, and another recession had followed the four-year economic recovery beginning in 1879. In April, Albert took the podium at Uhlich’s Hall and denounced the suppression of a recent strike in Cincinnati. Last on the program was “Mrs. A. R. Parsons,” who, according to the Tribune, “spoke in the same spirit as those who had preceded her,” but also maintained that the lesson from Cincinnati was “that the women should take an interest in the wage-workers’ cause.” The following month, Albert and Johann Most shared the stage at Turner Hall, where in “blood and thunder harangues” they applauded the collapse of several Wall Street firms.57
In June 1884, Albert withdrew from the TLA, taking twelve unions with him, because he felt the parent group lacked revolutionary fervor. He formed a new federation—the Chicago Central Labor Union (CLU), which consisted of an estimated 12,000 members, rivaling the TLA—and began to embark on lengthy “agitation trips” throughout the Midwest to proselytize for the IWPA. His oratorical abilities had only increased over the years; he could speak for two to three hours and for at least a portion of that time hold the attention of the uninitiated as well as true believers. Drawing from history, poetry, political theory, and the day’s headlines, he impressed listeners as erudite yet genial, down-to-earth and approachable. On the afternoon of July 4, 1884, he was standing before a crowd (of 3,000, he later claimed) in Ottawa, Kansas, declaring that “to be forewarned was to be forearmed,” and that the workers “must be prepared to meet force with force.”58
Within a few months he would begin to edit his own newspaper, a venture launched with contributions from respectful listeners like those in Ottawa. The only English-language IWPA periodical in Chicago, The Alarm would give both Albert and Lucy a broad forum for their ideas as they rejected traditional politics and followed a new, more radical path compared to that of even the socialists. Already widely appreciated for his fiery speeches, Albert would take his place among anarchist leaders admired for their journalistic flair; and Lucy, his writing partner and an increasingly public presence in her own right, would share equal responsibility for this new publication and the catastrophic whirlwind it wrought.
Chapter 5
A False Alarm?
BY THE MID-1880S, ALBERT AND LUCY PARSONS HAD DEVELOPED mutually advantageous relationships, not only with several reporters for major Chicago newspapers, but also, remarkably, with the plainclothes policemen and private security agents who had become a ubiquitous presence at International Working People’s Association gatherings. Reporters covered the Parsonses assiduously, providing detailed accounts of their speeches as well as exclusive interviews with them. An old newspaper hand himself, Albert understood that editors had a voracious appetite for sensational copy. For her part, Lucy proved herself a rhetorical provocateur of the first order, a distinction that would garner her a rapt audience of friends and foes alike. Together they hoped to use the mainstream press as the medium through which they spread a startling new message about the power of dynamite far beyond the tiny subscriber base of The Alarm. In this effort, they succeeded spectacularly—and disastrously.1
Albert went out of his way to cultivate the police department’s undercover detectives, who routinely posed as ordinary workers, hoping to learn more about the presumed anarchist threat. Members of the sm
all IWPA American Group had no trouble identifying poseurs in their midst. The interlopers, believing they had actually insinuated themselves into anarchist circles, would leave a meeting and return to their precinct captains with breathless tales of conspiracies and dynamite plots. At one gathering, a man hired by what the anarchists called the “Pinkerton army” listened raptly as Albert proclaimed (presumably for the agent’s benefit), “I say to you, rise one and all and let us exterminate them all; woe to the police or militia who they send against us.” Albert pretended to take these poorly disguised spies into his confidence, using them as message-bearers to the city’s establishment, all in an effort to make the IWPA seem more powerful and menacing than it was, or ever could be.2
These carefully calibrated, symbiotic relationships among anarchists, reporters, and police officers were on full display during the dedication of Chicago’s magnificent new Board of Trade building on April 28, 1885. Built at a cost of $2 million, the LaSalle Street structure took the form of a pavilion backed by a ten-story building that housed 110 offices. To celebrate the opening, the building was “bathed in a sea of electric light,” welcoming 5,000 delegates representing city exchanges from all over the country. The glittering affair included speeches delivered by dignitaries and an elaborate repast that cost an extravagant $20 per person.3
The IWPA organized a protest demonstration that evening at nearby Market Square, one that revealed their strategy of creating a public spectacle while also manipulating journalists and undercover men. Standing on a salt barrel, Albert took the lead in exhorting the crowd (which, according to a reporter, included 1,000 men and 6 women), and declared, “A new board of thieves is to be opened to-night. It is time this thing is stopped. These robbers fatten off our toil.” He advised his listeners to “buy a Colt’s navy revolver, a Winchester rifle, and ten pounds of dynamite, and learn how to make and use dynamite.”4
After the speeches, the crowd formed a procession, twelve people abreast. At the front was Oscar Neebe, who was American-born but of German descent, the co-owner of a yeast company and office manager for the Arbeiter Zeitung. He was flanked by Lucy Parsons, who carried a red flag, and Lizzie Swank, carrying a black one. Heading toward the Board of Trade, the organizers led the marchers in singing “La Marseillaise” and shouting “Vive la Commune!” As the crowd neared the new building, they cried, “Blow it up with dynamite.” Meanwhile, 600 officers formed an impenetrable cordon around what the anarchists called “the robbers’ roost.” Diverted from their destination, the marchers returned to Market Square. News reports contrasted the elegance of the proceedings inside with the ruckus outside, complaining of how the motley crowd had been “permitted to make the night hideous by their cries on some of the downtown thoroughfares.” The Chicago Tribune fumed that laborers in the building trades had benefited from work on the construction of the building, and decried the ungrateful demonstrators of this “unreasoning, ignorant, inconsistent association.”5
However, the end to the procession was not the end of the story. The IWPA entourage, which included Albert and Lucy Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab (a mild-mannered, bespectacled, German-born bookbinder), Lizzie Swank, and William Holmes, retreated to the offices of The Alarm and Arbeiter Zeitung (AZ) in Greif’s Hall at 107 Fifth Avenue. The small group represented the core of the two papers: Schwab was business manager of the AZ, and Lucy Parsons, Swank, and Holmes were regular contributors to The Alarm, which Albert, of course, owned. Fielden was treasurer of the American Group of the IWPA. There, on the second floor in the AZ office, Albert leaned out a window and continued his speechifying, declaring that “it was only a matter of time before the working men would have to assert their rights by dynamite and pistol.” He urged the poor to raid stores such as Marshall Field’s for clothing and other necessities.6
Soon after Albert finished speaking, Marshall H. Williamson, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, appeared in the office and asked him about the evening’s events. According to Williamson, Parsons confided that he and his comrades had planned to blow up the trade building with dynamite, but were surprised by the size of the police presence, and so postponed their attack for another day. Parsons showed the reporter a dynamite cartridge containing some reddish powder, and also a fifteen- to twenty-foot-long coil that looked like a fuse. Parsons and Spies proceeded to explode a fulminating cap in Williamson’s presence—“to show me it would go off, I presume,” he said later—and claimed that they had stockpiled dynamite, rifles, and revolvers. The reporter added, “Their manner of warfare would be to throw their bombs from the house tops and tops of stores, and in that way they could annihilate any force of militia that could be brought against them without any harm to themselves whatsoever.”7
As Williamson was leaving the building, he ran into two men he recognized as undercover police officers, Thomas L. Treharn and Jeremiah Sullivan, mingling with the crowd. Williamson suggested the two go up to the second-floor office and talk to Parsons. Securing an audience with Spies and Parsons, Treharn and Sullivan presented themselves as comrades inspired by the night’s dramatic events. They, too, were shown the cartridge with what looked to be a fuse, and concluded it was a stick of dynamite. They quizzed Parsons about his failure to carry through with the scheme that night, but he shrugged off the question, saying, “Oh, the blood hounds were there to prevent as usual.” He then boasted that he was in possession of devices that “could knock a hundred of them [police] down like tenpins,” and that he had enough fuse that a man a block away could detonate a charge sufficient to destroy the targeted building. Sullivan later acknowledged that Fielden might have known that he was a policeman; and if Fielden knew, then the rest of the IWPA did as well. But the highly scripted performance that unfolded that night in the AZ offices satisfied all participants and illustrated a systemic dynamic of mutual back-scratching—Parsons and Spies got a ready audience of would-be infiltrators who served as a conduit to the city’s press and police, furthering the strategy of scaring and shocking these groups; and the reporter and undercover cops got a private showing of the anarchists’ incendiary devices and a helpful lecture about how such devices would someday be used.8
After the failed strikes of 1884, the Parsonses and their fellow anarchists escalated their rhetoric, threatening death to the capitalists by dynamite or other means, at the same time the Alarm and AZ editors were periodically taking pains to show off suspicious-looking objects they claimed were bombs. Together these efforts formed a well-orchestrated attempt by the IWPA to create a dark narrative of a small but bold band of anarchists who were poised to bring the establishment to its knees. Presumably, in the face of this imminent threat, businessmen, mainstream politicians, and newspaper editors would prove more responsive to the demands of workers, and the proponents of dynamite would not need to engage in violent deeds after all. This narrative of potential violence in fact produced just the opposite result: the determination among elites to extinguish the ideas—and if need be, the lives—of the would-be dynamiters.
ALBERT PARSONS PUBLISHED THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE ALARM ON October 4, 1884. It was one of seven anarchist periodicals in Chicago, but the only one in English. He chose the title from a quotation by the philosopher Edmund Burke: “I love clamor when there is an abuse. The alarm disturbs the slumber of the inmates, but it awakens them to the dangers that threaten.” In the pages of The Alarm, and on tours throughout the Midwest, Parsons preached an increasingly militant form of anarchism, promoting “force—physical force, the only argument that tyrants ever could or would listen to.” He predicted that “a storm is brewing which will break ere long and destroy forever the right of man to govern, exploit, and enslave his fellow-man.” Workers must “agitate, organize, revolt!” And also subscribe to The Alarm.9
The paper’s first year and a half of publication coincided with the depression-driven Great Upheaval, a nationwide ferment that swelled the ranks of organized labor. The Knights of Labor grew exponentially, addi
ng 1,000 members a week in 1885 and claiming an estimated 700,000 by mid-1886. In boomtown Chicago, both the Trade and Labor Assembly and the Central Labor Union welcomed new constituent unions. Anarchists interpreted these developments as a sign that the masses, now finally stirring from their slumber, more than ever required the guiding hand of activist-ideologues. Although Parsons eventually turned on his own union, Typographical Union No. 16, he remained deeply invested in the CLU as well as the Knights of Labor. In October 1885, a national umbrella group called the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions met in Chicago and announced the opening of a dramatic, months-long campaign for the eight-hour day, which would end with a massive demonstration the following May. The anarchist IWPA belatedly sought to take the lead in this effort, even though some of its members perceived it as a misguided sop to reformers.10
The Parsonses took stock of the Great Upheaval, and within their household, serving up clamor was hardly Albert’s exclusive province. On the first page of the first issue of The Alarm appeared “To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited, and Miserable,” an essay written by Lucy. Before long, the “Tramps” essay would become a staple of anarchist propaganda, distributed at “indignation meetings” near and far, along with other tracts, such as Victor Hugo’s “Message to the Rich and Poor.” Produced as a broadside for 12 cents per 100 copies, and resold at 5 cents apiece, “Tramps” spoke directly to the estimated 35,000 unemployed men in Chicago, casualties of a downturn that was overwhelming private charities and adding daily to the number of the homeless. The 1,000-word-long piece helped solidify Lucy’s notoriety, but more tellingly, its publication also set her and Albert on a path to a fatal reckoning. If “Tramps,” like The Alarm, was a call to arms among the workers, it was also a cause for deep alarm among the ranks of Chicago’s powerful.11
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