Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  To their friends, the Parsonses appeared to be a devoted couple and loving parents living a wholly respectable life. Both took pride in their appearance—Lucy wore fashionable dresses, and Albert dyed his hair and kept his mustache nicely trimmed. He remained attentive to the particular outfits worn by members of his audiences, whether shiny silk and satin or grease-stained cotton. Lucy at times cited the love of fine clothes as a universal impulse thwarted by a cruel capitalist system. The couple’s attractive dress and prim demeanor now conveniently helped to dispel the popular stereotype of the bewhiskered, slovenly, foreign-born anarchist. How could this portrait of a couple basking in the love of family, and even in bourgeois domestic contentment, be reconciled with their public calls for murder and mayhem? In the end, both Albert and Lucy begged to be taken at their word—specifically, their conviction that a spectacular act of killing was necessary to ignite a revolution. And so they promoted that criminal message with impunity, and with breathtaking naïveté.26

  With the launch of The Alarm, Albert began to spend more time out of town, not only to make new converts to the cause, but also to solicit new subscriptions. As editor, he earned a paltry $8 a week, less than the average Chicago workingman, who made $2 a day. Intended as a weekly, after just a few months the paper became biweekly; printing it more often was too expensive. Non-English papers grabbed a greater share of the anarchist readership. Two German weeklies, one German daily, one Bohemian weekly, and one Scandinavian weekly made Chicago the center of the anarchist press in the country. By early 1886, the Arbeiter Zeitung, edited by the German immigrants Spies and Schwab, had a circulation of 3,600, while The Alarm reached perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 subscribers in Chicago and the Greater Midwest (a generous estimate, to be sure, but some of these readers no doubt passed their copies on to friends).27

  Every once in a while, The Alarm would carry a small ad for “Mrs. Parsons, Dressmaker”; the word kleidermacherin (lady dressmaker) appeared in German script. Located at 377 West Indiana Street, Parsons’s dressmaking business catered to the immigrant community, which in turn provided her with her social circle. When she wrote “Tramps,” she was thirty-three years old, the mother of a five-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. She was just beginning to assume the persona of what the press mockingly called “Citizeness Parsons,” an evocation of the murderous female French revolutionary of 1789, or the American Louise Michel, the defiant “Red Virgin” of the 1871 Paris Commune. Parsons accommodated reporters with pithy if frightful quotations, as she did on the occasion of a strike by Lemont, Illinois, quarry workers in the spring of 1885: “Let every dirty, lousy, tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palace of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination without pity.” Her peculiar talents—the ability to marry extreme rhetoric with a woman’s sensibilities, and a mother’s at that—served her well as orator, performer, and, eventually, national celebrity. Yet such boldness could be self-indulgent, as she seemed determined to say anything so long as it might turn up as the next day’s headline.28

  Drawing upon European revolutionary ideals and icons, the IWPA tended to relegate women to symbolic roles. The group sponsored tableaux vivants and parade floats that featured “lady liberty”—“a woman costumed as the Goddess of Liberty bearing aloft the red flag,” The Alarm said, “while a proletariat armed with a flaming sword and his cartridge box inscribed with ‘dynamite’ stood beneath.” Parsons, however, was a real woman, not a goddess, and she pushed the IWPA toward a greater acceptance of women in the public sphere. In August 1885, The Alarm published a piece titled “Brave Marching Women,” noting that a large IWPA procession on a Sunday the month before had featured a novel sight—seven women serving as honor guards and marching with a large silk banner. “It was a thing unique,” noted the writer, and it no doubt impressed upon the thousands of spectators “that if Communism can attract the gentler sex to such a degree they will take part in public demonstrations, and in obedience to their convictions dare to face public scorn and possibility of disorder and arrest by the organized powers of society, there surely must be some quality in Communism which challenges respect.” Most of the marchers were mothers, the same article noted, and their presence belied the popular image of anarchists as “creatures of the baser sort—rough, disorderly, animated by the impulse of destruction for plunder’s sake alone, and at war with the best interests of society.” In a story the day after the procession, the editors of the Tribune highlighted the participation of “Mrs. Parsons, the female agitator.” Yet the paper’s chief concern seemed not to be the presence of the women but the absence of the American flag: of the 2,000 or so participants, the paper said, there was “no other class of people who parade[d] without the national flag.”29

  In an effort to attract the attention of ordinary onlookers as well as the authorities, Parsons was developing a fine sense of the flamboyant. That Sunday was not the first time that she had marched in an IWPA parade; to mark Thanksgiving in 1884, she and Lizzie Swank had each carried a flag—the red, for universal solidarity among working people, and also the black, the symbol of hunger and starvation, apparently in the first time it was borne aloft on American soil. Their performance that day was notable because the procession wended its way through a wealthy neighborhood, where the two women halted before one mansion after another and then gleefully pulled doorbells, groaned, and shouted threats to the residents—a shocking breach of street-demonstration decorum, even for anarchists.30

  Not content to serve a decorative function at parades, Parsons also became a prominent speaker at the huge weekly Sunday-afternoon lakefront meetings held during the summer of 1885. These picnic-rallies drew thousands to enjoy the cool breezes off Lake Michigan and listen to a predictable lineup of anarchist English and German-language speakers, including the Parsonses, August Spies, and Samuel Fielden. The events confounded the police because the crowds consisted of families as well as political orators. (“Wives and children,” observed one reporter, “always diversify the Anarchistic assemblies.”) The mainstream papers ridiculed the lakeshore “sour-headed cranks” who railed “against the people and property of this city, as well as against the laws of the state and the country.” Still, the lakefront gatherings became predictable over time, and the audiences became inured to talk of the attentat; one reporter for the Daily Inter-Ocean opined that the speakers told their audiences over and over again “go arm yourselves”—and “away they would go, to arm themselves with beer, and the next Sunday the whole thing would be gone over again in substance and form.”31

  By that summer Lucy Parsons was determined to speak at virtually all IWPA-sponsored events, despite the fact that they were customarily masculine affairs; even male anarchists only grudgingly admitted women to indoor mass meetings because their presence demanded that the men refrain from smoking, an activity that might offend the “ladies.” At rallies of strikers, the few women present were likewise deemed a novelty. Such gender conventions made Parsons’s frequent public appearances and heated rhetoric all the more remarkable. During the bitter Chicago streetcar strike of July 1885, the organizers refrained from calling upon her to speak at a Sunday rally, though she was eager to address the crowd. At a regular American Group meeting the following Wednesday night, she excoriated the employees who remained indifferent to the plight of their fired coworkers, “like whipped curs kissing the hand that smote them.” She complained about the slight she had suffered a few days before, pronouncing the strikers’ gatherings “wishy-washy hog wash.” If workers were indeed denying they had pushed streetcars off the tracks, she exclaimed, “What rot! They’re either knaves or fools—knaves if they derailed the cars and failed to own up to it, and fools if they left any splinter of any car the company has got.”32

  To a large degree, Parsons declaimed freely; the opposition to her speaking at an outdoor meeting during the streetcar strike came from
the workers themselves, not from the police. In this respect she benefited from Victorian policing methods and faced neither official harassment nor arrest. Later, some critics would complain of the protective shield of womanhood that allowed her to continue to speak with impunity—in the words of one attorney, “By her talk and other means of instilling their devilish sentiments into the minds of the people, she could at all times escape arrest and do tenfold more harm than good. They could quell the men, but woman-like, she would have her say.”33

  CHICAGO’S GREAT UPHEAVAL SPURRED ALBERT AND LUCY TO exploit the rising resentment among white workers during the depression months of late 1884 and all of 1885 and at the same time devote themselves to seemingly never-ending fundraising efforts for The Alarm. Each week brought a round of regular events—the lakefront meetings on Sunday afternoons, Monday-night drills among members of the armed American Group, and sporadic strategy sessions of The Alarm’s subscription committee (led by Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Swank). Lucy frequently presided over the three-hour-long Wednesday-night debates, reports, and book discussions (“How the Working People Are Robbed”) held at the American Group offices at 54 Lake Street. The IWPA sponsored orations, theater events, concerts, dances, and day-long outings to places such as Sheffield, Indiana. Lucy helped to choreograph the “monster” rallies that marked American holidays such as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, now appropriated by the anarchists as occasions to denounce the United States. She continued to sew banners that proclaimed “Workingmen, Arm Yourselves!” and “Down with the Throne, Altar, and Moneybags.”34

  The couple found time to take weekly rambles with Swank, when Albert would entertain the two women. He was “an excellent mimic [who] would, sometimes, where he thought no one would be hurt, ‘take off’ the eccentricities of people in a very laughable manner,” Swank later remembered, calling the walks “memorable incidents.” In November 1885, Swank married her comrade, the thirty-four-year-old, British-born William Holmes, the American Group recording secretary and a prolific writer for the Labor Enquirer. She moved to his home in Geneva, west of Chicago, where he taught school, and continued to write for The Alarm and other radical publications.35

  Lulu and Albert Junior at times accompanied their parents to meetings, and they must have become accustomed to falling asleep at home as American Group meetings stretched late into the night around them. By this time Junior was attending the Kosciusko public elementary school nearby; his mother lamented that patriotic songs such as “Hail Columbia, Happy Land,” and “Yankee Doodle” were part of the curriculum. The children went to the regular IWPA picnics at Ogden’s Grove, the Sunday lakefront meetings, and other social gatherings. Yet it is possible that, as their mother became more visible as a speaker (at times sharing the podium, or salt barrel, or wagon, with her husband), the children found themselves placed in the care of a neighbor or a friend. Both parents were spending more time outside the home.36

  Between October 1884 and May 1886, Albert embarked on a series of “agitation trips” that took him as far east as New York and Maryland, as far south as Kentucky, and as far west as Nebraska. He spoke in large cities such as Kansas City, Cleveland, and Cincinnati and stopped for a day or two in small company mining towns. It would later become apparent that Lucy’s reaction to Albert’s out-of-town trips was not resentment that he was gone from home so much, but dismay that she was not sharing in the excitement, in his travails as well as his triumphs. Indeed, his detailed accounts of his exploits while spreading the gospel of anarchy only seemed to whet her own appetite for adoration from the crowds. One day, his tours of the mid-1880s would become road maps for her own.

  Parsons had always relished his role as outside agitator. By the mid-1880s, he was so familiar to the laboring classes of Chicago that he could no longer count on reaching a pool of new listeners. Moreover, with The Alarm’s Chicago subscription base static (and small), he needed to attract a stream of new readers if the paper were to survive. It is possible, too, that the predictability of his weekly routine of IWPA obligations, combined with the inevitable commotion of a household with two children under the age of six, propelled him out of Chicago and into towns and cities where he could look forward to greeting old comrades and meeting new ones. Once again he would feel the exhilaration of speaking to a crowd of rapt listeners. Leaving the editorship of the paper to Lizzie Swank Holmes (presumably Lucy had her hands full with her sewing business and the care of the children), he was gone for weeks at a time.37

  Parsons’s out-of-town trips proceeded most smoothly when he could rely on the hospitality of local labor leaders. Drawing on IWPA connections, he often stayed in the homes of German immigrants, and spoke in Turner halls throughout the Midwest. He also sought to leverage his membership in the Knights of Labor, the Typographical Union, and the American Group sections of the IWPA into invitations to speak. (These ties could be unpredictable, however; for example, the “conservative workingmen” of Saint Joseph, Missouri, loudly objected to the Knights sponsoring this well-known “communist.”) An enthusiastic host could provide a suitable venue for his speech, quickly print and distribute announcements—surreptitiously, if necessary—and find him a back-alley escape if he was confronted by persons less than enthusiastic about his visit. After a long day speaking and dodging police, Parsons would unwind with his hosts, and (as he apparently did in Topeka) tell them how to make dynamite bombs, reminding them to keep the room well ventilated while assembling the pieces.38

  Still, even his glowing reports chronicling his own remarkable successes contain hints of the difficulties he faced. In some cases, the largest local venue charged an exorbitant afternoon or evening rental fee, devouring any money he might have made. Often he labored under conditions that were less than ideal—there was the day he spoke in Springfield, Ohio, in February on a skating rink that was “cold as a dead man’s feet,” or the day in July when he spoke in a stifling lecture hall in Topeka. In some outdoor spaces Parsons had to compete with the fire-and-brimstone sermons of nearby itinerant evangelists, or the fulminations of temperance activists. And he at times had to work to counter his own unprepossessing appearance as a slight, earnest, well-spoken man; he was the first to admit that he did not look “very dangerous.” At a speech in Canton, Ohio, he inquired of his listeners whether they were prepared to use navy revolvers, long knives, Winchester rifles, or dynamite; he swore that “before I would see my child standing barefoot in the snow and crying for bread, I would sink everything down into the deepest abyss of hell and damnation.” The sheer force and number of his words must somehow compensate for his kindly, nonthreatening demeanor.39

  On the road, Parsons delivered his standard speech with the same rhetorical strategies he used at “monster” rallies in Chicago, but in the space of just two hours or so, it was difficult for him to convey the full logic of the idea that “the existing social order has outgrown its usefulness, if it ever had any.” And not all audience members warmed to his grim conviction that “wage bondage” admitted of only three options for workers—to suffer as slaves, as objects of charity, or as prisoners in jail. Parsons seemed intent on dashing the modest hopes of workers who might want a better paycheck, or a better life for their children: “Here in Cleveland, in America, not Ireland, Russia, Italy or despotic Europe, but right here in Ohio, beneath the ‘Stars and Stripes,’ over twenty thousand American sovereigns in one small city were perishing of hunger and cold,” he said to an Ohio crowd.40

  Soliciting the attention of the press, both sympathetic and hostile, he no doubt reveled in reports that labeled him and other IWPA interlopers as “Dynamiters”; at the same time, his long-winded speeches might be distilled to the headline “He Counsels Murder” (as was the case in Cleveland). Both inside and outside of Chicago, newspapers followed his perambulations through the Midwest, assuming that their readers would take an interest in—or be outraged by—what he had to say when addressing workers in a faraway state or town. In March 1885, the New York Ti
mes featured Parsons’s trip to Cincinnati, highlighting his prediction that “the final outbreak against law and order” was nigh and identifying him as the “husband of a negress,” presumably a sure way to discredit him. The Chicago Tribune, too, was keeping close track of Parsons as he traveled around the country waving the red banner of revolution.41

  Parsons fully deserved his reputation as a rousing public speaker, full of energy and moral righteousness, and his friends admired him as a sparkling conversationalist with a deft sense of humor. Yet his railings against law and order in mid-1880s Chicago seem at odds with his former role as a Texas political operative. He had transformed himself from a Republican loyalist to a self-proclaimed anarchist, but he remained a proud outsider, embracing a cause that was couched in different terms at different times—but that was ultimately consistent—to bring enlightenment to his benighted listeners, to bolster their sense of manhood, and to instill in them the courage to destroy their oppressors. He was a knight-errant, traveling from the Reconstruction era to the Gilded Age, spreading “freedom.”

  During one of his trips to Pennsylvania coal country in Pennsylvania, Albert wrote a letter to Lucy describing her as one “whose whole being is wrapped up in the progress of the social revolution.” More broadly, the thread running throughout her life was her fierce determination to rise above the circumstances of her birth. An avid reader with eclectic tastes, within ten years of first stepping into a schoolroom she had become a writer and orator of some distinction. Wife, mother, seamstress, essayist, reporter, and agitator, Lucy Parsons eschewed the identity of a black person or a freedwoman. Notably, she lacked her husband’s warmth and his sense of ease in the world. She had worked too hard becoming “Citizeness Parsons” to tolerate people who struck her as patronizing or superficial. She and Albert always retained the courage of their convictions, but questions remained: Could they blast the laboring classes out of their sluggishness by spreading the gospel of dynamite? Were they themselves even true believers of that gospel? Or, more likely, were their threats merely rhetorical, idle, and the alarms they raised simply false?42