Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  Chapter 6

  Haymarket

  BY THE MID-1880S, SEGMENTS OF THE LABORING CLASSES HAD demonstrated in a most convincing fashion their ability to upend whole sectors of the economy and wrench concessions from mighty captains of industry. Working together, railroad workers, in particular, could disrupt interstate trade, mail delivery, and passenger travel, and in the process threaten a range of businesses, from banks and large manufacturers to farmers and other small producers. In Chicago, trade groups protesting longer hours and lower wages were constantly walking off the job and “slugging” (physically assaulting those who refused to join them). Such protests, combined with routine, highly politicized parades and picnics and a robust anarchist press, created a charged atmosphere in Chicago. Many city elites were convinced that workers in their collective capacity possessed the power to destroy the very fundamentals of the American economy: the cherished institutions of state, church, and representative democracy. Radical labor leaders seemed ever poised to light the fuse and throw the bomb that would ignite a tinderbox of working-class resentment and anger, with the subsequent explosion leaving the city in a smoldering shambles, surpassing the horrors of the fire of 1871.1

  To a great extent, the fears of the Chicago business community were overblown, for workers remained badly divided among themselves along the lines of competing craft, ethnic, religious, and racial loyalties. Lucy and Albert Parsons exacerbated the bitter internecine feuds among Chicago’s laboring classes in the mid-1880s, heaping contempt on more conservative elements with a kind of disdain they usually reserved for the bloated plutocracy. An 1885 Labor Day celebration sponsored by the Chicago Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions banned all banners except for the American flag, essentially excluding all anarchists and thereby eliciting scorn from The Alarm. Unwilling to furl their red or black flags, members of the IWPA decided to march on their own, and later sneered at the competing 8,000-person-strong “meaningless affair.” The federation had passed a number of resolutions objectionable to the IWPA, including “praising the ballot and denouncing the bullet,” as well as insulting foreigners and hailing America as “a free republic.” The Alarm described the rival march this way: “The Voluntary Slaves Exhibit Themselves Before Their Delighted Masters.”2

  Yet the anarchists’ rhetorical provocations were out of all proportion to their actual strength. The IWPA remained a small group—with perhaps 12,000 members throughout the United States, and no more than 3,000 of those in Chicago by early 1886. Of the fifteen IWPA groups within the city, only one, the American Group, was composed of English-speakers, probably no more than a few dozen people at most. During the 1880s, Chicago’s population doubled, from about 500,000 to 1 million, and labor organizations of all kinds, including trade unions and local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, grew in membership and strength. However, by mid-1886, of the city’s total population of 800,000, no more than 52,000 to 85,000 belonged to a union of any kind. No single trade could boast that all of its members were organized.3

  Albert and Lucy Parsons remained convinced that the IWPA was composed of avant couriers, and that absolute numbers of anarchists, socialists, or trade unionists counted for little. This was just as well, for despite their exhausting round of weekly activities, American Group members had won few converts. In fact, the IWPA held virtually no appeal for native-born American workers, who recoiled at the constant paeans to dynamite and bloodshed in general. Many radical immigrant agitators, anarchists and socialists alike, persisted in distancing themselves from incremental efforts to make the workday shorter and the workplace safer, claiming, for instance, that the fight for an eight-hour day was a waste of time and a distraction from the impending revolution. In this respect, Albert Parsons, who served as the head of Chicago’s Eight-Hour League, was the exception who proved the rule. Even he, however, vastly overestimated the revolutionary potential of the Chicago laboring classes.

  The Parsonses and their comrades possessed a keen sense of the inexorable historical transformations of the day, including the great industrialists’ insatiable quest for higher profits and reduced production costs via technological innovation. IWPA members understood that machines were replacing humans, supply was outstripping demand, and businesses were consolidating, swelling the ranks of the poor, who were now forced to fend for themselves. At the same time, the anarchists did not possess any real insight into the values of diverse groups of white male American-born workers, many thousands of whom were afflicted with deep prejudices against women, African American, and Chinese immigrant workers. Machine operatives and manual laborers in Chicago shared certain hardships—the grueling conditions of everyday life, including long hours for little pay, dependence on their wives and children for the family’s income, and crowded and expensive housing, but much divided them as well. And for all their prescience regarding mechanization’s ills, the anarchists could not foresee the dramatic growth in the number of jobs, and also in different kinds of jobs—in other words, the capacity of the American economy to expand and to absorb (albeit imperfectly), the many millions of immigrants arriving in the country from the 1880s onward.

  The anarchists also underestimated the power that the promise of upward mobility held for many workers—not spectacular mobility, Carnegie-style, but incremental mobility, especially among native English speakers. More significant perhaps was the promise of intergenerational progress—the bricklayer’s hope that his son might someday become a building contractor, the waiter’s hope that his son might someday own a small restaurant. In fact, anarchists worried that workers who escaped into the middle classes would doom their movement, dependent as it was on the long-term loyalty of suffering toilers. Albert and Lucy never grasped the power of symbols such as American or red flags either to animate or disgust the native-born laboring classes—a group the Parsonses conceived of narrowly, as urban white wage earners exclusively, with all others dismissed as a cheap-labor threat to working-class solidarity.4

  Lucy Parsons was among the chief architects of the anarchists’ escalating attacks on industrialists and conservative union leaders. She did not suffer fools gladly, and the fools, in her view, included not only Democratic and Republican trade unionists but also socialists and fellow anarchists who disagreed with her. For someone who pressed for working-class solidarity in the face of overweening capitalist power, over her long career she consistently ridiculed and dismissed other radicals to a surprising degree. As one Chicago anarchist noted, “if you started talking with her chances are you would get a beautiful slap in the face with her words. She could just brush you off, insult you, bulldoze you—that was Lucy.”5

  If the white laboring classes had little use for the anarchists, one influential group in the city did take this fierce little band seriously, hanging on their every word, written and spoken, and believing completely in their almost otherworldly power. This group, of course, consisted of wealthy businessmen and the law enforcement establishment. Police detectives read each new issue of The Alarm, and plainclothes officers attended every Wednesday-night and lakefront meeting and mass rally and picnic. If and when class warfare actually did break out in Chicago, the authorities would have no trouble locating the source of the bloodshed, and they would ensure that justice would be swift toward the offenders—or their proxies in crime. And in that way the city’s small coterie of anarchists would finally secure their place in history.

  ALBERT’S EVENTUAL BREAK FROM HIS OWN LOCAL CHAPTER OF THE National Typographical Union reveals his estrangement from aspirational, English-speaking trade unionists in general. In his first years in Chicago, Parsons had been the proud owner of a union card, but by mid-1885 he was using the pages of The Alarm to excoriate NTU members and their acquiescence in the wage system. The union identified with the so-called respectable skilled laboring classes; these workers infused their identity with a commitment to temperance in alcohol consumption and to other forms of self-improvement, unapologetic antiforeign and antiradic
al tendencies, and a belief in the possibility of upward mobility. In their own words: “Now printing can boldly throw down the glove and challenge comparison with any and every trade or profession for sobriety, respectability, the calling to high places of trust and honor, as it has ever been able to do for education, intelligence, genius, and the rare dowry of brains.” Parsons opined that Local No. 16 was not a true labor union at all, but rather “a mere make-shift, a place where cliques, rings, and selfish schemes are fostered, and it becomes an instrument for the hopeless enslavement of the worker to his capitalistic task-master.” Here his animus toward the local seemed to stem not only from broad ideological differences with its members but also from his bitter memories of those members who had abandoned him when he was blacklisted after the Great Strike of 1877.6

  The American Group readily adopted immigrant-ethnic iconography, art, history, and ideology. Of necessity, and with apparent genuine enthusiasm, Lucy and Albert partook of the rich pageantry that drew on European radical traditions. At the same time, the American Group also looked to American history for inspiration and for a guide to the future. Albert (more often than Lucy) invoked the words of American historical figures such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in an attempt to portray radicalism as a homegrown impulse; after all, blood flowed freely during the American Revolution, that seminal revolt against tyranny. English-speaking anarchists also presented themselves as the new abolitionists, working in the tradition of Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown, on the cusp of another momentous conflict. Philip D. Armour, the meatpacking industrialist, and George Pullman, the manufacturer of the Pullman sleeping car, were the new slaveholders, and they wielded the lash of hunger that lacerated the back of the wage-slave. Yet most native-born workers found this analogy highly offensive. IWPA speakers and writers charged that Chicago men and women were “slaves” if they worked for wages, voted in elections, obeyed the law, and professed allegiance to the United States. Among immigrants, the epithet “slave” might have served as a bold rallying cry, but among white, American-born men, to be compared to enslaved blacks, or to Chinese “coolies”—or cowardly “dogs,” for that matter—registered more as an insult and less as a call to arms. This attempted fusion of European and American radical traditions won few converts.7

  The anarchists’ ideal of a transnational, universal struggle among workers went well beyond the waving of red and black flags to make pointed attacks on organized religion, the ballot, secular and religious holidays, and the system of government generally. Promoting a European anticlericalism manifested in “free thinking,” IWPA speakers and writers, including both of the Parsonses, went out of their way to denigrate religious faith of any kind. They objected to the idea that “God has a grudge against all humanity, in consequence of a little difficulty he had with our ancient parents,” as The Alarm once put it. The clergy were hucksters peddling superstition, Christian charity a hoax and a distraction. Yet denominational affiliation (or lack thereof) represented a profound signifier among the major labor organizations in Chicago, with the Central Labor Union dominated by atheists, the Trade and Labor Assembly by native-born Protestants, and the Knights of Labor by Irish immigrants and other Catholics. The Parsonses had little understanding of the fact that although some clergy were arguing that a shorter workday would provide more opportunities for dissipation, others were claiming that such a day was part of a benevolent God’s plan to improve the lot of man on earth. To Albert and Lucy, religion came in the form of either the Salvation Army preacher competing for souls on the lakefront, or the priest urging his congregants’ forbearance in this worldly vale of tears.8

  Members of the IWPA took pride in appropriating American holidays for their own purposes and mocking venerated American heroes: Thanksgiving, for instance, was a day to reflect on this “Thankless Day.” In late November 1884, the IWPA circulated a handbill that included sarcastic suggestions for the upcoming holiday: “You are to give thanks because your masters refuse you employment; because you are hungry and without home or shelter, and your masters have taken away what you created, and arranged to shoot you by the police or militia if you refuse to die in your hovels, in due observation of Law and Order.” Lucy wrote a dramatic account of the proceedings that dreary, cold day for The Alarm, pronouncing the holiday generally as “a lie—a stupid, hollow mockery—a sop thrown out by the ruling classes to tickle the pates of their ignorant dupes and slaves that they may, with better security, continue to rob them.”9

  The anarchists, in keeping with the conviction of European radicals that the secular state was just as hierarchical, authoritarian, and corrupt as they believed the Vatican to be, charged that church and state represented “twin relics of barbarism” and “the fountain of all evil.” In dismissing voting as a pernicious charade, the Parsonses managed to alienate the workingmen who considered the suffrage a sacred, hard-won right and the ballot box the site of a broader equality. Anarchists ridiculed believers in the ballot, “that capitalistic humbug,” as dupes and fools. In April 1885, Lizzie Swank Holmes took to the pages of The Alarm to chide a black man who resented that “the dregs and scum of Europe and America” could vote, while he could not. The woman suffragist was equally misguided, according to Swank Holmes: “Her brother slaves have had the ballot for more than a hundred years and are worse off now than at the beginning [of the nation].”10

  Proposals to ameliorate the harsh life-circumstances of the poor found no favor with the IWPA. Until the momentum for the eight-hour day built in early 1886, The Alarm included regular denunciations of that movement and other forms of “rancid reform pap,” such as minimum-wage and maximum-hour legislation. At times, even Albert Parsons had to seek some middle ground between, on the one hand, his dogmatic anarchist comrades, and, on the other, the mass of workers who were focused on bread-and-butter measures. Pressed from the left, he couched the fight for the eight-hour day as a revolutionary project, the first step in a process that would eventually yield a six-hour day, and then a four-hour day, and so on, until wage slavery must of necessity disappear altogether. At the same time, many native-born skilled workers believed that incremental change could flow from personal transformation—through forgoing alcohol, moving to another place or another job, or acting collectively to boycott or strike against employers. The anarchists’ constant calls for street-fighting, assassinating, and dynamiting—all strategies they considered “brave and humane”—sounded alien and frightening, even when uttered by that mellifluous American Albert Parsons.11

  More generally, though, the anarchists’ message was one of unmitigated pessimism—the middle class would sink into poverty, they said, millions of tramps would freeze to death, machines would take over the workplace, and the United States would remain as despotic as the most backward European regime. In a growing city and country, this scenario of misery and decay failed to move many workers. Nevertheless, according to Albert, to quarrel with the inexorable march to anarchy was “silly and vain.” For their part, members of the Socialistic Labor Party referred to their anarchist rivals as “the dynamite assassins.” One cynic charged that the amount of beer consumed at an IWPA picnic could have been better used to pay for the funerals of a dozen children who had starved to death.12

  Mother Jones, herself possessed of impeccable radical credentials, objected to the anarchists’ harsh language and theatrical tactics, which she believed did more harm than good. All proponents of the shorter working day suffered from guilt by association: “The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement,” Jones wrote in her autobiography. “A person who believed in an eight-hour working day was, they said, an enemy to his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of government were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats.” Jones recalled that on Christmas Day in 1885, the IWPA organized a march among “poverty-stricken people in rags and tatters” out of their neighborhoods and into the Prairie Avenue mansion district, where they waved the black flag and
railed against their oppressors. She wrote, “I thought the parade an insane move on the part of the anarchists, as it only served to make feeling more bitter. As a matter of fact, it had no educational value whatever and only served to make the police more savage, and the public less sympathetic to the real distress of the workers.” Anarchist leaders, with their constant talk of murder and dynamite, were tainting a reasonable drive for the eight-hour day: “Such speakers cause every spark of sympathy to disappear and bring us into disrepute.”13

  THE FAST-MOVING EVENTS OF 1885 AND EARLY 1886 LEFT THE IWPA scrambling to keep up: after years of agitating, workers in Chicago and throughout the nation were organizing strikes and boycotts, and joining labor unions in record numbers. New statewide trade unions sprang up in the state of Illinois, and the anarchist Central Labor Union and the socialist Trade and Labor Assembly both grew in terms of constituent groups and overall numbers—increasing, by March 1886, to twenty-four groups with 28,000 members, and fifty groups with 20,000 members, respectively. IWPA members watched, delighted at the upwelling of collective action, but largely disapproved of the upstarts’ tactics. They felt the groups were neglecting to do the necessary work of educating and organizing workers before having them take part in spontaneous walkouts.14