Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  By this time the Chicago papers were doing their best to whip their readers into a frenzy. In late May, the Chicago Times had already reached a verdict: “Public justice demands that the assassin A. R. Parsons, who is said to disgrace this country by being born in it, shall be seized, tried, and hanged for murder.” The paper also indicted someone who had not been charged: “Public justice demands that the negro woman who passes as the wife of the assassin Parsons, and has been his assistant in the work of organized assassination, shall be seized, tried, and hanged for murder.” Considering Lucy’s own straightforward calls for workers to use dynamite and thereby wreak havoc on the capitalist system, it is worth noting that she escaped the police dragnet and, ultimately, any charges related to the Haymarket bombing.6

  Unbowed and uncowed, Lucy Parsons had the freedom of movement as well as the nerve to play at least a supporting role in the great drama that was the Haymarket trial. By mid-June, with Albert still hiding in Waukesha, she had met at least twice with defense lawyers to devise a strategy for the trial. (If the defendants had been truly principled anarchists, they would have refused counsel, arguing that the state-run proceedings were inherently corrupt.) The legal team of four was headed by Captain William Black, a corporate lawyer and Union Army veteran. Together he and Lucy discussed the merits of having Albert return to Chicago to surrender to authorities. (Sigmund Zeisler, another member of the defense team, later described Lucy as “well-educated and ladylike, though somewhat temperamental.”) Black favored an unannounced, highly choreographed appearance by Albert: the fugitive would show up on the first day of the trial, astounding officials who would now realize that an innocent man stood before them, since presumably no killer would turn himself in voluntarily. Thus forced to reexamine their prejudices against one defendant, the general public would have to reexamine their prejudices against all of them, and the prosecution would come under immense pressure to drop all charges. Lucy agreed to this plan and sent word to Albert, who made preparations to return.7

  On the morning of June 21, the day after his forty-first birthday and the day the trial proceedings were to begin, Albert arrived in Chicago and, as planned, made his way to the home of American Group member Sarah Ames, where he showered, shaved off his beard, and cut his hair, using bootblack to restore it to its preternaturally dark color. Lucy met him there for a brief reunion before the two of them took a hansom cab (together with a reporter for the AZ) to the county’s criminal court building. There, according to the Tribune, they found Black nervously “stalking up and down the sidewalk in the sun.” As Albert Parsons and William Black ascended the steps of the building and walked into the courtroom, there was “considerable stir and craning of necks,” as people whispered and then shouted, “Parsons has come into court!” Asked where he had been hiding, he replied, “O, I’ve been out West to a watering place.” As he took his seat next to the other defendants, Lucy sat “smilingly watching the proceedings.” She told reporters, “He’s been more than 500 miles from Chicago, and so thoroughly disguised that his own mother wouldn’t know him.”8

  Clearly shocked at Parsons’s sudden appearance, State’s Attorney Grinnell nonetheless quickly recovered his composure and ordered that he be taken into custody so he could stand trial with the other defendants. Black had not anticipated this development; it was, he told Grinnell, “not only most ungracious and cruel, it is also gratuitous.” The whole scene confounded the defense. Instead of accepting accolades from all sides as a hero and effecting the release of his co-defendants, Parsons spent the night in the Cook County jail, in company with his old friend August Spies. Later, he would explain his return in patriotic terms: “I thought I could safely trust the sober, second thought of the community and the love of fair play, which I think is characteristic of the American people.”9

  LUCY—“JAUNTILY ATTIRED,” ACCORDING TO THE TRIBUNE—attended every day of the trial, including jury selection; from June 21 through July 15, nearly 1,000 men were examined during the voir dire, a preliminary part of the proceedings in which witnesses and jurors are evaluated for competency. Eventually the process seemed so time-consuming that both the defense and the prosecution agreed to authorize a special bailiff to complete it. Judge Joseph E. Gary proved decidedly welcoming of jurors who expressed an initial bias against the defendants, but then, under questioning by Grinnell, assured the court that they could evaluate the evidence in an impartial way. In the end the jury consisted primarily of native-born middle-class men, clerks and proprietors of small businesses. Factory hands and other wage earners were conspicuous for their absence, as were immigrants and union members.10

  Within a few days of Albert’s return, Lucy had abandoned her dressmaking business, at least temporarily, in order to capitalize upon what she believed would be Chicagoans’ newfound appreciation for anarchist ideology. Like Albert, she welcomed the opportunity to give interviews to all who asked. In the early evening of June 22, a reporter found her at home at 245 West Indiana Street (pressed for funds, she had moved to a cheaper place after the events of May 4) “in a pleasant, well-furnished flat,” sipping a beer and reading the paper. Parsons recalled the disrespectful treatment she had suffered at the hands of the officers who had ransacked her apartment and rummaged through her clothes the month before. She ridiculed the notion that a handful of anarchists would be accused of “terrorizing an entire city, if not the world.” At one point she went to the back of the flat, and, shoving aside a wardrobe, opened a trap door in the floor and took out a framed picture of her husband taken on May 1. “My husband is good looking, don’t you think? But oh! The horrid pictures of him they did print.” She said she would be following the example of Spies’s friends and relatives, who were raising money selling his likeness. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer published a story titled “How the Negro Wife of Parsons, the Anarchist, Will Support Herself,” the headline suggesting that she had an uphill climb to convince the public of her new biography.) Parsons maintained her husband’s innocence but also said that “our cause will never be a cause until we have a few martyrs to write about. That is what we need.” She had no doubt that the defense would be adequately funded: “As it is, I have been very liberally supported by my admirers—I don’t mean personal admirers—rather sympathizers.” The reporter suggested it was she and not her husband who had written Alarm articles published under his name, a point she did not dispute.11

  Many other supporters of the defendants shared Lucy’s belief that the movement needed martyrs. Once incarcerated, Albert was often compared to nineteenth-century abolitionists, and especially to John Brown, who had been executed for his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Brown had died so that the slaves might go free, just as Albert Parsons would (if necessary) die for the righteousness of the anarchists’ cause. Yet few of his supporters then or since paused to consider that the analogy might be as troubling as it was telling: Brown had an indisputable history of domestic terrorism, hacking pro-slavery men to death on the Kansas frontier.

  Once the jury was seated, the trial began; with the court in session every day of the week except Sunday, it stretched from July 16 until August 11, for a total of fifty-four days. By modern standards the courtroom seemed a carnivalesque affair. The judge was surrounded by a coterie of well-dressed female acquaintances to keep him company, the wives and children of the defendants mingled with the lawyers before and after the day’s events, members of the jury played cards during the proceedings, and a crush of curiosity-seekers and reporters filled the tense, stiflingly hot courtroom.12

  Meanwhile, the city was in an uproar, consumed by the tragedy of the policemen who had died at Haymarket. Of the wounded police, most were in critical condition. Not unexpectedly, many Chicagoans—and not only members of the Citizens’ Association and the Board of Trade—had been quick to condemn the defendants. Workers, including many socialists and Knights of Labor members, distanced themselves from the accused men in no uncertain terms. Even Bosto
n anarchists charged their Chicago counterparts with “falsely sailing under anarchist colors, committing murder, arson, and mob violence.” Right after the bombing, Labor Enquirer editor Joseph Buchanan made what was at the time a bold statement, saying that he did not intend “to defend the actions of the wild men of Chicago,” but “neither do I unqualifiedly condemn” them. After all, he wrote, “there can be no effect without a cause,” and certainly the arrogance of capital presented abundant cause. Few shared William Holmes’s conviction that Haymarket would bear anarchist fruit by stirring the American people, and thus bringing into focus a revolutionary imperative heretofore only dimly appreciated by the masses.13

  In presenting the case before the grand jury back in May, Grinnell had claimed that the identity of the bomber was irrelevant, and that a suspect need not have attended the Haymarket rally in order to be found guilty. Detective Schaak proposed that “the core of conspiracy” revolved around a generalized “moral responsibility” for the carnage; Spies, Fielden, Schwab, and Parsons, though not connected directly to the alleged May 3 secret meeting, had nonetheless paved the way to mayhem with their “seditious utterances.” The taint of treason—the crime of trying to destroy the US government—hung over the trial as part of the sixty-nine-count indictment.14

  Testifying at the trial were 118 witnesses, including 54 members of the Chicago Police Department as well as defendants Fielden, Schwab, Spies, and Parsons (but not the hot-headed and unpredictable Lingg). Testimony brought up many angles—that Johann Most’s books were sold at IWPA picnics and that The Alarm had published parts of the bloodthirsty 1871 Russian-anarchist manifesto Catechism of the Revolutionist; that there had been secret codes and secret meetings among the alleged conspirators; that Spies had boasted about the nitroglycerin pills in his possession; that receipts and orders for dynamite purchases and a mysterious package with a greasy substance had been discovered in Parsons’s desk in his Alarm office after the bombing; that some of the defendants had been involved in an aborted attack on the Board of Trade Building in April 1885; and that defendants had made endless calls for assassination and violent resistance in their anarchistic writings and speeches. A reporter for the Daily Inter-Ocean told of covering the lakefront meetings, where Albert Parsons had urged his listeners to arm themselves with pistols and dynamite; and where Lucy Parsons, asked what kind of pamphlets she was distributing, would say only that “she was doing missionary work.”15

  At the end of the trial, Judge Gary summarized the case against the men by making it clear that their words—written and spoken—had encouraged the bomb-thrower, whoever he might be: they had furthered the conspiracy “by general addresses to readers and hearers; by every argument they could frame; by every appeal to passion they could make; advising, encouraging, urging, and instructing how to perform acts within which the act of throwing the bomb was embraced.” Here, then, was the horrible culmination of the Parsonses’ provocative speeches, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and boasts to reporters and undercover police: they had convinced the state of Illinois that they were willing and capable of causing death and destruction. To the prosecution, the fact that only Spies and Fielden were actually in the square when the bomb was thrown was irrelevant; the groundwork for the crime had been laid at Sunday-afternoon lakefront gatherings, in the columns of The Alarm, and in Lucy’s tirade to tramps.16

  Although they were by no means equivalent in terms of political power, the prosecution and the defense proceeded to mount similar charges against each other. Each accused the other of representing a very few individuals who nonetheless wielded extraordinary power by virtue of the resources available to them—money and influence, on the part of elites, and dynamite, on the part of the anarchists. Each side supposedly had bypassed the ballot box in favor of more extreme and direct measures to further their own despicable agenda. They had revealed themselves to be “unmanly” (that is, lacking in moral character), and they needed martyrs (the dead policemen, the defendants) in order to stoke the rage of their fanatical supporters.17

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS CONFINED TO THE COOK COUNTY JAIL, ALBERT Parsons saw no reason to slacken his efforts to defend himself and spread the gospel of anarchy. He sent letters to editors of local papers and began working on his biography, which had been solicited by the new Chicago weekly publication Knights of Labor. He also wrote directly to Grand Master Workman Terence Powderly, the head of the Knights and a bitter critic of the defendants. In early July, members of the Chicago Knights District Assembly (DA) 24 had denounced the anarchists “as advocates of ‘riot and murder,’” and demanded that Parsons be expelled from the organization. The prisoner, confined to cell 106—as he put it, “Behind Bastile [sic] Doors”—ignored the protests of DA 24, whose members claimed that it was “an organization of peace,” and instead stressed that he had been a Knight in good standing, devoting much of his time to work as a union organizer. He also highlighted his New England roots—the fact that his “ancestors helped frame that declaration [of independence], and sacrificed and fought to maintain it.” In a bow to the Knights’ religious sensibilities, he ended with a quotation from the book of James: “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you” (5:3). Desperate times demanded Bible verses.18

  Certainly it was a great injustice that all eight men were tried together. The degree of alleged culpability for each varied, even taking into account witness testimony that was less than trustworthy. Although the evidence clearly revealed that none of the eight men had actually thrown the bomb, the prosecutors were able to tie Lingg, Spies, Fischer, and Engel more closely to the crime than the other defendants. A search of Lingg’s residence had turned up bomb-making materials, some of which matched the fragments of shells extracted from the bodies of dead and wounded police officers; but although Lingg was a “practiced bomb-maker” (in the words of one defense lawyer), he was not present at Haymarket the night of May 4. On the stand, August Spies admitted to having shown off dynamite bombs to reporters who had visited the AZ office; like Parsons, he had hoped to frighten the powers-that-be into thinking the anarchists were armed and ready to fight. Witnesses (though not necessarily credible ones) placed Adolph Fischer and George Engel at the secret May 3 evening meeting where presumably the plot for the next day’s violence had been hatched. The plan, according to the prosecution, had been to lure the police into Haymarket Square like so many lambs to the slaughter.19

  There was no such evidence against Parsons because he had been en route to Chicago from Cincinnati the night of the supposed May 3 meeting. Still, Black believed that the prosecution and the judge feared Parsons because of his “boldness and eloquence,” and that they might be inclined to treat him harshly for that reason. Trial testimony revealed a difference of opinion on that score. Some of the reporters who regularly covered Parsons made it clear that they considered his long-winded tirades to be little more than bombastic, self-important rantings combined with mind-numbing recitations of statistics. Clearly, however, neither the prosecution, nor the judge, nor the jury granted him special dispensation because he was native-born; in fact, some observers were convinced that because of his New England lineage and distinguished forebears, he should have known better.20

  Black was convinced that the evidence absolved all of the men of the charge of throwing the bomb that killed officer Mathias Degan. The attorney believed that he and his co-counsel had proved that the defendants were more “Braggadocio” than action. Nevertheless, Black considered himself a realist. As the trial progressed, he predicted that Neebe would be acquitted, that Spies, Lingg, Fischer, and Engel would be found guilty and executed; and that Parsons, Schwab, and Fielden would be found guilty and sent to prison.21

  Lucy figured in the proceedings as a presence in the courtroom throughout the trial and therefore a fixture in daily news accounts, and as a de facto unindicted co-conspirator by virtue of her inflammatory writings over the years. Prosecutors introduced a number of Alarm articles into
evidence, including one, “Dynamite: Instructions Regarding Its Use and Operations,” which dealt with Johann Most’s book The Science of Revolutionary War. Also read into evidence was People’s Exhibit Number 18, Lucy’s “To Tramps” piece of October 1884, and her article on the 1884 Thanksgiving procession and the unfurling of the black flag. Over the objections of the defense, the prosecution argued that The Alarm consisted of pieces that were “editorials, others extracts from other papers, but they are all in the same line. We desire to show that the whole paper is devoted to that subject [i.e., dynamite] and nothing else.”22

  In all, the prosecution presented to the jury sixty-two AZ and forty-one Alarm articles. From the latter publication were culled exhortations to “Learn the use of explosives!” (“To Tramps”); to wage “war with all means”; and to “get dynamite, get dynamite!” Other articles contained sayings such as “One man armed with dynamite is equal to one regiment of militia,” and “we say a vigorous use of dynamite is both humane and economical.” Some pieces voiced support for recent assassinations in Europe: “We rejoice over and applaud this noble and heroic act.” The Alarm published calls for arson, street-fighting, and the disobeying of laws in general.23

  Several witnesses placed Lucy at the Haymarket meeting, sitting with Lizzie Swank Holmes in the wagon some distance from the speaker’s wagon, and then later (the two of them together) in Zepf’s Hall. Yet during the trial, and consistently thereafter, the defense argued that Albert Parsons would never have taken his wife and two little children to the Haymarket that night had he known or even suspected that the square would erupt in dynamite and gunfire. Both parents would also pursue this line of reasoning after the trial, arguing that the presence of their children in the wagon with Lucy and Lizzie exonerated Albert of the charge of conspiracy, since had he known what was going to transpire in the square, he would have left the children at home. Black tried to pursue this line of defense when he questioned witnesses. Called to the stand on August 6, Lizzie Swank Holmes was identified in the court record as the “former assistant editor, Alarm,” but her halting, tentative courtroom performance contrasted with her seemingly fearless anarchist writings.24