Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  With the exception of Bonfield, who was observing the crowd, the police were nowhere in sight—nearly two hundred officers were waiting in the Desplaines police station, only half a block away, in case they were needed. Together with Bonfield, Mayor Harrison eyed the crowd and anticipated trouble. Still, Harrison found nothing particularly noteworthy in the speeches. As Parsons concluded his remarks, the mayor indicated to the inspector that all seemed to be in order, and the police would probably have no cause to intervene. Harrison left for home, and Bonfield walked the short distance back to the police station.

  Albert finished at about 10 p.m., when Fielden took to the speaker’s wagon and began to talk. Before long, however, rain clouds moved in from the north, causing many in the crowd to disperse. Albert and Lucy and Lizzie, as well as Adolph Fischer, the AZ typesetter, retreated to a tavern in nearby Zepf’s Hall, about half a block from the speaker’s stand. Fielden continued to speak to a dwindling number of people on the square, estimated at five hundred or so. At about 10:20, he began to denounce the legal system that undergirded the capitalists’ power, urging his listeners to “keep your eye upon it, throttle it, kill it, stab it, do everything you can to wound it—to impede its progress.” Though this was boilerplate anarchist rhetoric, his words prompted two undercover detectives to run to the station and alert Bonfield. Together with a captain, the inspector led his contingent of eighty men on a rapid clip down the street, scattering the crowd before them before stopping and confronting Fielden. Bonfield ordered him to stop speaking and climb down from the wagon, and Fielden protested, “But we are peaceable.”33

  Suddenly, someone in the nearby alleyway threw a round object with what one observer called a “slender tail of fire.” The metal casing filled with dynamite and lit by a fuse landed in front of the police column and exploded. A tremendous explosion ripped through the square, felling some police and causing others to draw their pistols and begin firing wildly into the crowd. One officer, Mathias Degan, died immediately; another six police and at least four civilians would later succumb to their wounds. The square now took on the appearance of a battlefield, with the dying groaning and writhing on the pavement. The injured numbered at least sixty-seven, probably more, as many of the workers sought aid in nearby storefronts and homes, never to be counted. Most of the wounds came from bullets, not bomb fragments, but whether from the guns of police or men in the crowd is unknown.34

  The Parsonses and Lizzie Swank Holmes saw none of this; they were in the nearby saloon. Albert later said that upon hearing a loud noise he thought that perhaps the Illinois regiments had trained their Gatling gun on the demonstrators, and so he quickly ushered the two women to the back of the building, where they waited in the darkness for about twenty minutes. Finally, when all was quiet, they emerged into the street and hastened to the Milwaukee Avenue viaduct. Lizzie gave this account of her words to Albert at this point in the events: “I do not know what has happened, or whether there is any further danger, but we may be sure some kind of a conflict has occurred. Everybody knows you and they all know your influence. If any of our boys are in danger you are. Whatever has happened, leave the city for a few days at least. We can’t spare you yet, and in the excited condition the people must be in[,] we do not know what might happen to you.” When he hesitated, she recalled, she used “many other arguments to induce the brave, home-loving man to depart before he at last consented.” Albert accepted a loan of $5 for his travels from Thomas Brown, a member of the American Group who had attended the meeting early in the evening and now stood close by. He was about to go, but, according to Lizzie, he spoke to his wife before leaving: “Before he turned away he said, ‘Kiss me Lucy. We do not know when we will meet again.’” Lizzie said “there seemed a sad, almost prophetic, tone in his voice; so hurriedly, and with what unexpressed feelings none can ever know, their parting, the end of a long period of uninterrupted and happy companionship, took place.” Lizzie offered to see him off at the train depot, and the two disappeared down the street. Lucy headed back home to the Parsonses’ apartment on West Indiana Avenue, where Lizzie would join her later that night.35

  THE FOLLOWING DAY—WEDNESDAY, MAY 5—LUCY HAD TO CONTEND with the harsh glare of the media, but she seemed prepared. That morning, police began a hasty, indiscriminate roundup of men suspected of the bombing, a crackdown that would eventually net two hundred individuals. A Chicago vigilante committee warned, “Spies, Parsons, and Schwab [Spies’s AZ colleague] and others of their kind, beware! The rope does its work quick. The massacres of our brave policemen must be avenged.” The Tribune added Fielden, the speaker at the time of the bombing, to the list of prime suspects, berating municipal authorities for allowing these men “to pursue their frenzied course without the slightest interference.” Like a deadly snake, the monster of anarchy had struck with stunning ferocity.36

  The police ransacked the Parsonses’ apartment, and Lucy later claimed that the officers had cruelly taunted their son, demanding he tell them where his father was hiding. She might have chosen to shrink from the intrusion—the menace of it all—but instead, when the men left, she and Lizzie Swank Holmes hurried to Fifth Avenue and the offices of the Arbeiter Zeitung. There they found another raid in progress. Michael Schwab and August Spies had been working on that afternoon’s edition of the paper, but now, they, together with the entire twenty-three-person staff of the AZ, were placed under arrest. Oscar Neebe, who was also present at the time, later recounted what he called “another lot of ruffians” who ran up the steps and saw the two women writing at a desk. One of these officers demanded of Lizzie, “What are you doing there?” before grabbing her. Then “she protested as an American woman, and as she protested he said: ‘Shut up, you bitch, or I will knock you down.’” Apparently, Lucy “was called the same name by the officers. They called her a black bitch, and wanted to knock her down; and they said they would not let us publish any paper; they would take the types and material and throw them out of the window.” Subsequent newspaper reports indicated that a search of the AZ office had yielded dynamite sticks, fuses, blasting caps, and a kind of lead type that matched fragments of the bomb, and that Albert’s desk upstairs contained gunpowder and a fuse in addition to a six-foot-long “brass cartridge that is used in heavy bombing.”37

  Officers arrested the two women and took them down to the central police station. Lizzie was held until Saturday. Lucy spent only a brief time behind bars, since the officers were planning “to shadow her, hoping she would make some appointment with her husband, so that the latter could be captured.” The search for Albert had commenced, with officers looking up and down Lake Street (the site of the American Group headquarters) and its vicinity and going from door to door, from basements to attics. Soon there were reported sightings of him in Chicago, wounded; in Dallas, disguised; in Pittsburgh, hiding out with immigrant sympathizers; and in Cleveland and St. Louis.38

  Over the next few days, Lucy found time to write an account of the bombing for Labor Enquirer. Although she had not witnessed the moments before the bombing herself, she offered her own recollections of that night at Haymarket, when the “minions of the oppressing class were marching up to one of the most peaceably assembled meetings ever held in this country by any class of people to discuss questions concerning their own interests.” Had the anarchists wished to destroy their enemies completely then, she wrote, they could have done so easily, so “thoroughly disorganized and demoralized” were the police. She reported on the last few days’ “reign of terror… which would put to shame the most zealous Russian bloodhound.” The authorities had quickly suspended the anarchist papers and were now conducting home invasions of everyone “who has ever been known to have raised a voice or sympathized with those who have had aught to say against the present system of robbery and oppression.” She added: “This organized banditti have arrested me four times; they have subjected me to indignities that should bring the tinge of shame to the calloused cheek of a hardened barbarian.” Th
ough they might try to intimidate her, “they simply challenge my contempt.” By this time she was well aware that, as a reporter put it, she was “under the strictest surveillance, and wherever she goes or turns an officer is on her track.”39

  Newspaper editors quickly responded to the public’s eager demand for news about the fugitive Parsons and his enigmatic wife. As early as May 6, two days after the bombing, stories began to surface about Albert, Lucy, and their courtship in Texas. The Dallas Morning News ran an article about Albert’s Radical Republican days, when he “levanted with a colored woman, who is the present Mrs. Parsons, and who occasionally helps him out by making street speeches.” That same day the Waco Day featured a piece on Albert titled “His Early Career in Waco—Learning the Rudiments of Agitation,” which portrayed him as “argumentative, as cranky, as discontented and as little disposed to hard work as ever” and recounted his run-ins with the local Democrats who now controlled the city’s politics. The Waco reporter also went into detail about his “liaison with a colored woman (rather bright color) known as Lucy Gathings” and described her “husband” (formerly Oliver Gathings, now Oliver Benton) who was still living in Waco. Taken by the sudden infamy of a native daughter, the reporter noted that she was “quite intelligent for her opportunities” and that her socialistic speeches “are intelligently worded.” Apparently, at least someone in Waco had been following the careers of both Lucy and Albert in Chicago.40

  The Waco paper’s story was picked up by a number of papers in Illinois, Texas, and beyond, and before long reporters were referring to the absconded anarchist’s wife as a “mongrel,” or as one who looked like “an ordinary plantation ‘nigger.’” Perhaps, opined the Dallas paper, the anarchists were aiming to produce “a single family through the intermarriage of the races,” and “with the mule thus produced and an equal division of the fruits of industry the anarchist expects to bring order out of chaos.”41

  Intrigued by the reports from Texas, the Chicago Daily News sent a reporter to interview Lucy on the evening of May 7; he found her at home, “reticent and defiant.” Denying any knowledge of her husband’s movements, she seemed rather inclined to talk about herself. Based on what she told him and what she looked like, the reporter wrote that she was thirty-three years old (taking two years off her true age), a native of Texas, and “of Mexican and Indian descent with a possible trace of Ethiopian blood in her veins.” Describing her appearance and manner to his readers, he noted: “She is of a swarthy complexion, darker than an ordinary mulatto, but without the olive tint of the half-bred Ethiop. Her hair is abundant and rebellious, waved but not kinky. She has the high cheek bones of the Indian strongly marked and a long, pointed chin. Her eyes are as black as ebony. She is tall and angular. She is a self-possessed speaker and a fluent one.” The interviewer informed his readers that her “socialistic harangues” revealed her to be “the most violent and vindictive of all the orators of that persuasion.” Asked if she still maintained that “the ambition of her life is to fire the engine that shall run the guillotine to cut off the heads of capitalists,” she replied coolly, “That is my religion.” The reporter concluded, “She is a remarkably strong willed and determined woman of a fair education and no ordinary ability.”42

  With her husband in hiding, Lucy immediately set out to fashion a new life-story for herself, one that would introduce her to a nationwide audience as the daughter of Mexican and Indian parents. She now claimed, “My ancestors were here before any Europeans. They went forth to meet Cortes when he landed on the Pacific slope.” With this one deft stroke, she sought to deflect attention from her blackness and also repudiate the idea that all anarchists were suspect because of their foreignness. She became a new person, the captivating orator, the Mexican Indian wife of the famous Haymarket conspirator. And only a few knew better for certain—those Wacoites who remembered when Albert the Confederate veteran met Lucy the former slave.43

  Chapter 7

  Bitter Fruit of Braggadocio

  SOON AFTER HE LEFT ZEPF’S HALL THAT TUESDAY, MAY 4, ALBERT Parsons took a late-night train to Geneva, Illinois, the hometown of Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband, William Holmes. Geneva, located about thirty-five miles west of Chicago, resembled a New England village; there, according to Lizzie, all the residents knew each other, and “poetry, music, painting, and classical literature dwell peacefully in every household.” The couple found Geneva at once serene and infuriating, for despite its laudable egalitarianism—with few poor and none rich—the residents knew little and cared nothing about the great struggle raging not far away in Chicago. Lizzie was indignant that Geneva authorities refused to allow homeless men to tarry within the town’s borders. In an homage to Lucy’s famous propaganda piece, she suggested that tramps could either slink away in shame, “or stay—have you a match about you?” William predicted the downfall of the smug denizens of Geneva—“there will be eternal war; war to the Knife—to extermination,” he wrote. “Let the day come quickly that shall see the beginning of the end.”1

  Geneva was too small not to notice a newcomer who was now being hunted as a notorious fugitive, so Parsons quickly set about disguising himself. He shaved his mustache, stopped dyeing his prematurely gray hair, grew a beard, and donned ill-fitting clothes, effecting a complete transformation from dapper city gent to rough-hewn rural workman. By May 10 he had moved on to Waukesha, Wisconsin, a town of 5,000 just west of Milwaukee, where he found lodging with Daniel Hoan, a subscriber to The Alarm. Under the name of Amos Jackson, Parsons worked in Hoan’s well-pump factory and picked up odd jobs as a painter and carpenter. He regaled the neighborhood children with stories of his boyhood on the Texas frontier and took daily hikes over the rolling hills, stopping every once in a while to drink from a spring and admire the lovely vista of lake and meadow. After months on the road speechifying, he now enveloped himself in the idyll that was Waukesha.2

  For years Parsons had presented himself to the world as a “revolutionist,” but he slipped easily into his new Waukesha persona. Boarding with the churchgoing Hoan family, he even addressed their congregation on a couple of occasions, preaching a bland socialism of “liberty, fraternity, equality, for our oppressed and down-trodden fellow man.” Later he would tell the Hoans that he fondly recalled their happy “Sabbath” outings. He also quoted from the Bible the family had given him—passages from the New Testament condemning “the pulpits of mammon” and the hypocrites who would embrace Jesus on the one hand and pursue their own greedy ends on the other. To the Hoans’ neighbors he was the funny little “Mr. Jackson,” who, reverting to Parsons the Wacoite, loved “the perfume of wild roses, clover, cherry, apple and many beautiful flowers in fragrant bloom.”3

  Soon Parsons would shift again, now presenting himself to a curious public as the descendant of rock-ribbed Yankee preachers and Revolutionary war heroes, a patriot devoted to traditional American values of freedom of assembly and speech. He would deny that he had ever advocated the use of force generally or dynamite particularly, and he would disavow articles in The Alarm, whether he had written them or not. In this sort of backtracking he was not alone; Lizzie Swank Holmes, too, disowned her own writings, proclaiming, “The theory of anarchy is opposed to all idea of force.” In contrast to her husband and her friend, Lucy Parsons felt no need to prevaricate about her political beliefs in the wake of the Haymarket bombing—although she certainly did dissemble about her origins.4

  A few days after Albert’s disappearance from Chicago, Lizzie informed Lucy that he was in Waukesha. In the meantime, Inspector John Bonfield and Detective Michael Schaak had enlisted the aid of the private security chief William Pinkerton (his father, Allan, had died the year before) in making hundreds of arrests, conducting warrantless searches, and shutting down radical labor presses. Mayor Carter Harrison expressed reservations about these tactics, but his concerns went unheeded. Businessmen such as Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Cyrus McCormick Jr. charged that the mayor and his administration had
tolerated the anarchists for far too long. The Chicago Tribune and other papers initiated their readers into a cult of the dead policemen, now martyrs to the cause of law and order. The wave of repression made national news, with the New York Times approving the crackdown on what it called “Anarchy’s Red Hand” and reporting “a preconcerted plan on the part of Spies, Parsons, and Fielden” to lure the police into a Haymarket trap and murder them all.5

  In Chicago, a grand jury convened to consider the evidence and proceeded to indict thirty-one men as accessories after the fact for the murder of police officer Mathias Degan, who died on the spot that night. Eight of the suspects were slated to stand trial—Arbeiter Zeitung editor August Spies; coeditor Michael Schwab; office manager Oscar Neebe; the printer Adolph Fischer; a recent newcomer to Chicago and suspected bomb-maker, the carpenter Louis Lingg, who was active in the Central Labor Union; a known militant, George Engel; and the American Group members Samuel Fielden and Albert Parsons. (Of the eight defendants, only Parsons and Fielden were neither German-born nor of German descent.) The prosecution believed that the person who threw the bomb was Rudolph Schnaubelt, the husband of Schwab’s sister, who had disappeared and was never apprehended. State’s Attorney Julius S. Grinnell constructed a case that posited a meeting in the basement of the Arbeiter Zeitung offices on the evening of May 3, the day before the bombing. Supposedly, Fischer, Engel, and others met there to plan an attack on any police who appeared in the course of a rally they had called for the following night at Haymarket Square. The exploded bomb was, according to the prosecution, the culmination of groundwork laid over many years by IWPA speechmakers and AZ and Alarm writers. The defendants—who, except for Lingg, were all orators, editors, or both—stood accused of murder and conspiracy.