Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  Employers, too, began to modify their strategies for dealing with restless workers, further confounding the anarchists. More and more companies were concluding that the violent strife that flowed from wage reductions could only be avoided by introducing labor-saving machinery. And in Illinois and throughout the Midwest, employers were recruiting local or southern African American men as strikebreakers, replacing one group of exploited workers with an even more destitute one. Mine owners in Ohio’s Hocking Valley, and quarry owners in Lemont, Illinois, were among those introducing blacks as scabs in 1885. Although Albert appeared and spoke at rallies among white strikers in both places, he never mentioned these black workers in his speeches or in his reports published in The Alarm.15

  The most dramatic development, and no doubt to the IWPA the most aggravating one, was the meteoric rise of the Knights of Labor, especially after the summer of 1885, when it conducted a series of successful strikes against railroads owned by the financier Jay Gould. The workers won a remarkable victory: they managed to get Gould to back down and not only reverse wage reductions but also refrain from firing workers who belonged to the Knights, thereby demonstrating an astonishing collective power equal to that of one of the country’s largest railroad barons. By the late spring of 1886, Chicago boasted twenty-six local Knights assemblies and 10,000 members. Albert still belonged to Assembly 1307, a “mixed” group that included both skilled and unskilled workers, but within the American Group and the IWPA at large he was in a distinct minority as a Knight.16

  Although Chicago justly claimed to be the center of labor militancy in the country, the city’s record for 1885 and early 1886 was far from triumphant. The McCormick Reaper strike of April 1885 and the streetcar strike in July of that year both ended in defeat for the workers. In the spring of 1886, the eight-hour campaign competed for the attention of the estimated two-thirds of Chicagoans who were churchgoers with a series of massive religious revivals led by Baptists and Catholics; the well-known preacher Dwight Moody made headlines, but the spate of revivals also featured lesser-known figures such as Sam Jones and Sam Small, who presented themselves as “Two Soul-Saving Sams.” Evangelists denounced the anarchists not only for their godless anti-Americanism but also for patronizing the Biergarten on Sundays. To a degree, the religious revivals and the eight-hour rallies competed for workers’ time, energy, and loyalties.17

  In 1885, labor politics remade partisan and police-department politics. Although generally able to maintain the support of mainstream trade unions and the city’s elites simultaneously, Mayor Carter Harrison angered the former group in the summer of 1885 when he appointed John Bonfield as inspector and secretary of the police department. Bonfield, who shared with businessmen and Pinkerton security forces a deep and abiding fear of labor radicals, used the police to crush the streetcar workers in July (and he was not averse to roughing up strikers himself). Of his penchant for breaking up peaceful meetings, he said, famously, “The club today saves the bullet tomorrow.” The near-ubiquitous presence of Albert Parsons and August Spies at outdoor rallies, where they lectured crowds about the need for force, prompted the police department to install more efficient means of communication among officers, beef up their surveillance of routine weekly meetings as well as “monster” demonstrations, and call for more and better arms. Detective Michael Schaak spoke for law enforcement officials when he claimed that radicals deserved no free-speech rights because “socialism places itself beyond the pale of moral forces.”18

  In this tense atmosphere came signs that Lucy was eager to start her own agitation tour. The March 6, 1886, issue of The Alarm carried the announcement that “Mrs. Lucy Parsons, of Chicago,” was to speak on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune in St. Louis, Missouri, on the 13th of that month. A few weeks later, the paper reported that she had canceled the trip due to illness, but now that she had recovered, she “contemplates making a tour of Socialistic propaganda in that section soon.” Lucy’s itinerary was to have included the cities where Albert was well known—not only St. Louis, but also Kansas City, Leavenworth, and Saint Joseph. She planned to leave as soon as he returned from a series of extended trips that stretched over a three-month period, beginning in January. Perhaps she, like Albert, was becoming bored of a routine that consisted mostly of talking to a small knot of American Group members on Wednesday nights, and much larger, but less engaged, crowds on Sundays. Or she realized that her oratorical abilities matched those of her celebrated husband, and hoped to make her mark on the IWPA. The couple had begun to assemble a collection of newspaper clippings from the many places where Albert had spoken; before long, radicals in these places would soon welcome the remarkable Mrs. Parsons as well.19

  Around this time Lucy wrote a piece for The Alarm responding to a March 17 massacre in Carrollton, Mississippi, a small town one hundred miles north of Jackson. Two black brothers, Ed and Charles Brown, sought to have a white man arrested for attempting to murder them. When the Browns and their supporters appeared in the county courthouse for a hearing, several dozen white men stormed in and opened fire, killing ten blacks on the spot and fatally wounding thirteen more. The white assailants were never prosecuted. One of only a handful of Alarm pieces devoted to southern blacks, this one, titled “The Negro,” begins with a lament: “Who has stood upon the sea-shore and watched the weird dash of the ceaseless waves and has not become tired of the monotonous sameness?” Parsons then turned to her own fatigue born of a never-ending struggle: “Who but a devoted soul in this labor movement does not at times become tired—a weary tiredness, verging on a disgust at the apparent sameness and monotony of the wage system as depicted by those engaged in the noble work of exposing the hideous inequalities of the present economic system?”20

  After this introduction, Parsons considered the plight of black men and women in Carrollton and throughout the South—“defenceless, poverty-stricken, hemmed about by their deadly enemies… these our fellow-beings are murdered, without quarter.” She rejected the argument that racial prejudice was the cause of injustice: make no mistake, she wrote, the black man was terrorized because he was poor and dependent, not because of the color of his skin. In this, one of her only direct statements on racial ideologies, she suggested that southern white terrorism sprang from the lack of legal protection accorded to blacks, not from any inherent characteristics of their “race.” Here she was partly right: blacks were uniquely vulnerable in the late nineteenth-century South because of their historical liabilities in the eyes of the law, first as enslaved workers, and then as disenfranchised, landless laborers. Parsons, however, adopted a Marxist analysis, saying that black people constituted a subset of the poor generally, and that the pernicious idea of “race” should have no place in anarchist thought or action.21

  This view allowed her to hold blacks responsible for their own liberation: “And to the negro himself we would say your deliverance lies mainly in your own hands.” Tilling the same soil as their enslaved forebears, blacks must foreswear both politics and prayer, and instead wreak revenge on white landowners. If their profound humiliation was not incentive enough, then they should “look in the tear-stained eye of your sorrowing wife and hungry children, or think of your son, who has been sent to the chain-gang or perhaps murdered upon your door-steps.” Grasp what weapons are available, she urged black men—“the torch of the incendiary,” the only argument that tyrants and capitalists understood. In this case, though, Parsons was wrong in her suggestion that the Carrollton blacks were passive; the Browns and others had tried to defend themselves on the streets of the town and in the courtroom, where, according to one report, they came armed with “every conceivable kind of firearms, double barrel breech-loading shot guns, Winchester rifles, pistols of all calibers, including the long horse pistols, with their immense balls.” Still, whites overwhelmed them with their numbers, brooking no defiance.22

  It is unclear why Lucy Parsons decided to forgo a regional speaking tour in the spring of
1886. It is possible that the eight-hour-day movement was gaining momentum, and that she and Albert saw in it the bright promise of revolution right there in their hometown. What is clear is that as soon as the opportunity to agitate widely presented itself, she would be ready and eager to avail herself of it.

  AS EARLY AS THE WINTER OF 1885–1886, CHICAGO AUTHORITIES HAD gone on high alert in anticipation of the upcoming May 1 demonstration on behalf of the eight-hour day. In late December, parties unknown deposited a tin can filled with explosive material on the doorstep of a local judge; later detonated at a nearby police station, “the infernal machine… caused consternation among the force,” according to a report in Labor Enquirer. The wealthy members of the Commercial Club ordered a $2,000 machine gun for the 1st Infantry Regiment and formed a Committee of Safety, which employed its own security force. Detective Schaak stepped up surveillance of “anarchists and hot-headed strikers.”23

  In March, the IWPA called a mass meeting to denounce a lockout of McCormick Reaper strikers and to celebrate the spreading labor actions against Jay Gould’s Missouri Pacific and Texas and Pacific Railroads. Both Lucy and Albert addressed the crowd. In uncompromising terms, Lucy criticized the Knights’ support for arbitration, issuing the ultimate indictment of the group—that it “stood for law and order.” Albert, too, faulted the Knights for their timidity, but at the same time he offered at least half-hearted praise for their ability to organize all kinds of workers in such large numbers; the Knights were socialists, whether they knew it or not, he suggested. The ideological differences between husband and wife might have been subtle, but Lucy was staking out her own more radical critique of the Knights and their program.24

  The May 1 issue of the daily mainstream paper the Chicago Mail greeted the long-anticipated (or dreaded) day with the pronouncement that Albert Parsons and August Spies should be held “personally responsible for any trouble that does occur.” On that day, a Saturday, an estimated 300,000 workers went on strike at 13,000 workplaces nationwide. Chicago marked the day with a march of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, with Albert and Lucy, together with their children, at the head of the march—whether they claimed their place at the head by acclamation of their followers or simply by assuming that position on their own is unknown. Hopes ran high: as many as 45,000 employees, including 35,000 meatpackers, had recently won a shorter workday without going on strike. Still, the outpouring of laboring humanity could not mask raw conflicts within the crowd: that morning the Arbeiter Zeitung had attacked the Trade and Labor Assembly, calling its members “miserable creatures… more despicable then we can find words to express.”25

  Albert left Chicago that evening, taking an overnight train to Cincinnati, where on Sunday he spoke to a huge rally in favor of the eight-hour day. He did not return until 7 or 8 the morning of May 4, and so the fateful events of Monday, May 3, transpired without him.26

  That afternoon, employees of the McCormick Reaper works clashed with police on Blue Island Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, not far from the plant. Earlier that year, the company’s owner, Cyrus McCormick Jr., had locked them all out; he decided to install more machinery and hire strikebreakers, and thereby rid himself of union labor altogether. Some of the workers had been reinstated, but others—the molders, for example—remained locked out of the plant. The 1,300 men now on strike were divided, with more than half belonging to the Knights, 250 to the Metal Workers Union (affiliated with the Central Labor Union), and 300 to no union at all. August Spies was speaking to the lumber-shovers when the shift changed, and pickets began to attack scabs streaming from the factory. The police, who had been standing by, beat the pickets with their clubs and then opened fire, killing two and wounding many others. Enraged, Spies hurried to the AZ office and printed a handbill in German and English calling for a mass meeting the following evening (Tuesday) at Haymarket Square on Randolph Street, between Desplaines and Halsted Streets: “Good speakers will be present to denounce the latest atrocious act of the police, the shooting of our fellow workmen yesterday afternoon.” The AZ printer Adolph Fischer added a line—“Workingmen, arm yourselves and appear in full force,” but Spies hastened to cut it for the majority of the handbill’s print run.27

  Meanwhile, that Monday, groups of workers throughout the city were moving from one shop to another and pulling people out of work. Women joined the walkout, prompting the Chicago Tribune to report that hundreds of “shouting Amazons” had quit work early that day and, led by “two tall Bohemians,” were canvassing garment shops along the way and urging others to join them. Laughing, singing, and accompanied by a brass band, the garment workers called for better pay (the fourteen-year-olds earned 75 cents to $1 a week for 55 hours of work) and shorter days (their current stint was eleven hours). A Knights organizer paused long enough to tell a reporter, “We are not red-flag or Socialistic people, and we have no use for Spies or the Arbeiter Zeitung.”28

  On Tuesday, May 4, the strike that had begun on Saturday entered its fourth day, with groups as diverse as laundresses, lumberyard and glue-factory workers, Jewish male cloak makers, and high school students joining in the protests. Men armed with pick handles and clubs, who continued “slugging” scabs, ran up against troops from the 1st Infantry with bayonets leveled.

  Albert had arrived home from Cincinnati between 7 and 8 a.m. that day and promptly fallen asleep. The details of his day’s activities thereafter remain in dispute. However, he, Lucy, and Lizzie Swank Holmes would later tell a similar story: that Lucy roused him at 10 in the morning to tell him that she and Lizzie wanted him to call a meeting of the American Group for 7:30 that evening to discuss tapping into the long-dormant energy of young seamstresses. (Swank Holmes had come to Chicago that morning from Geneva, Illinois, where she lived with her husband.) Lucy had addressed a large meeting of sewing girls on Sunday night, and she said (as Albert later recounted), “I think we ought to help those sewing girls to organize and join the eight-hour movement, because they work harder than anybody; these great tailor machines are very hard to work.” Sometime that morning Albert wrote the announcement: “American Group meets to-night, Tuesday, 107 Fifth Avenue. Important Business. Every member should attend. 7:30 o’clock sharp. Agitation Committee.” Questioned later, he was vague about who actually hand-delivered the ad to the Chicago Daily News, which carried the notice in its afternoon edition.29

  The major participants also agreed on the details related to the Parsonses’ early evening hours. After eating dinner together at their apartment, Lucy, Albert, Albert Junior, and Lulu, together with Lizzie, headed to the offices of the AZ and The Alarm on Fifth Avenue. First, though, sometime between 7:30 and 8, they stopped at the corner of Halsted and Randolph Streets (about half a mile from their residence), the site of the planned Haymarket Square protest. There they ran into two reporters, Edgar E. Owen from the Chicago Times and Henry E. O. Heinemann from the Tribune, who had both heard about the rally, but now, in the early evening, could find no evidence of one. People were milling around, but no one seemed to be in charge. Albert engaged in genial banter with the two men, jokingly asking Owen if he was armed. Replying that he was not, the reporter inquired of Albert, “Have you any dynamite about you?”—a question the whole group seemed to find amusing. Lucy said, “He is a very dangerous-looking man, isn’t he?” The reporters asked Albert if he was going to speak at the Haymarket, but he told them he had made other plans. After this brief exchange, the Parsons party took a streetcar east to 107 Fifth Avenue, which housed the AZ and Alarm offices.30

  The Parsonses, with their children in tow, and accompanied by Lizzie Swank Holmes, arrived late to the meeting, at 8:30. About a dozen people were in attendance, including Samuel Fielden. The discussion had been in progress for only about twenty-five minutes when a messenger arrived to say that the Haymarket meeting lacked for speakers, and that August Spies wanted Albert to address the crowd. The rally had started about half an hour late, with an estimated 3,000 people on hand. Albert agreed to go, a
nd with Lucy, Lizzie, Fielden, and several others from the meeting, set out for Haymarket Square. The Parsonses may have arranged for someone else to take their children home from the offices, although later, both parents denied having made such arrangements, instead saying that they had taken the children with them to Haymarket Square. This detail about the whereabouts of the children that night turned out to be one of some import.31

  When the Parsonses and the other members of their group arrived at the square around 9:15, Spies quickly wrapped up his remarks, and Albert mounted a makeshift speaker’s stand, an empty wagon parked near the square, at the mouth of a passageway called Crane’s Alley. Lucy and Lizzie sat on a spring seat in a nearby wagon. Albert spoke for about forty-five minutes, giving his classic stem-winder. Later asked if he had heard Parsons that night “go over and over, going into a thousand facts and figures, in regard to laboring men,” the journalist Heinemann replied, “That is Parsons, yes.” G. P. English, a stenographic reporter for the Tribune, judged Parsons’s speech “pretty much the same thing” as “his ordinary talk.” English, who had covered Parsons’s speeches for years, had instructions from his editor “to write out the most incendiary parts of the speeches.” At the end of his talk Parsons exclaimed to his listeners that if they did not want to see their wives and children perish from starvation or murder, then “in the interest of your liberty and independence, arm, arm yourselves!” Still, English found the speeches that night “a little milder” than usual.32