Black asked Swank Holmes whether or not she had accompanied “Mr. and Mrs. Parsons and their children” to the American Group meeting at the AZ offices that night. When she answered in the affirmative, he repeated, “And the children?” to which she replied, “Yes.” For his part, Albert testified that after dinner on the fourth, “I left my house in company with Mrs. Holmes, my wife and two children.” Other witnesses remembered Albert taking Albert Junior and Lulu downstairs to a saloon to get a drink of water after the meeting there disbanded, and before he and Lucy headed off to Haymarket. A number of witnesses said they saw the children with their parents en route to the meeting at the newspaper offices, but none testified to seeing the children at the Haymarket rally or later that evening. On the stand, Albert did not mention the children’s presence at Haymarket; they dropped out of his narrative of that evening after the party arrived at the newspaper offices. It seems clear that someone who left from the offices must have taken the children with him or her; nevertheless, for the rest of their lives, both Albert and Lucy would invoke the image of Junior and Lulu sitting in the wagon at Haymarket as proof of Albert’s innocence.25
On August 9, as part of his testimony, Albert reprised his Haymarket speech, reconstructed (he said) with the aid of notes. Relishing the grand stage that the courtroom afforded him, he delivered a forty-five-minute oration. In it he described the struggles of the miners throughout the Midwest; the “compulsory idleness” among the poor; the main newspapers’ determination to persecute him; and the homicidal class biases of the two major political parties, the federal government, and the legal and judicial establishment. He decried the railroad magnates and newspaper editors who advocated shooting workers or poisoning and blowing them to bits with hand grenades, all part of a larger war initiated by private security agents, vigilante groups, city police officers, Illinois National Guard units, and US Army regiments. He admitted that he had said the Chicago Times “was the original dynamiter in the interest of monopoly in this country, and of throwing bombs,” but denied that he was a proponent of the use of dynamite. If anyone was to be blamed for the bloodshed, it was Police Inspector Bonfield and his men.26
Taken as a whole, the trial transcript reveals several omissions, contradictions, and inconsistencies related to Albert Parsons’s comings and goings on May 4, all issues ignored by the prosecution, which was preoccupied with more sensational evidence. For his part, Albert gave an incomplete accounting of his movements during the day of the bombing and then that evening—his stop at the Haymarket, and then on to 107 Fifth Avenue, and back to the Haymarket, followed by a brief stint at Zepf’s, and to the depot to purchase a last-minute train ticket out of town.27
Contrary to the story offered by the Parsonses and Swank Holmes, the hastily called and quickly ended meeting of the American Group almost certainly dealt with some issue other than the impoverished needlewomen of Chicago. Later, Albert, Lucy, and Lizzie implied that Albert himself had placed the ad about the meeting in the Chicago Daily News, but under oath, he was vague, noting, “At least I wrote the notice, and it was carried to the office by some one.” Lizzie arrived in Chicago from Geneva on Tuesday morning, so the story later promoted widely that she and Lucy had led the previous day’s demonstration of sewing women cannot be true (and indeed, Lizzie did not mention it in her published reminiscences about May 4). In any case, the ad mentioned nothing about sewing women, and the meeting itself transpired in a space other than the American Group’s traditional gathering place, its headquarters on East Randolph. One witness testified that an organizational meeting of female garment workers was indeed underway that night—but at Foltz Hall, and under the sponsorship of some group other than the IWPA.28
Albert, Lucy, Lizzie, and the children did not arrive at the American Group meeting until 8:30 p.m., an hour after it was scheduled to start. The party had stopped first at the Haymarket, sometime between 7:30 and 8, where Albert had bantered with the reporters Owen of the Times and Heinemann of the Tribune. On the witness stand, William Snyder, the head of the IWPA, told of his irritation that the Parsonses had kept everyone else waiting at the AZ offices, a breach of etiquette considering that Albert had written the ad that called for people to gather at “7:30 sharp.” Snyder was elected chair of the meeting, but had to be informed of its purpose (as did others there). During testimony, the defense sought to quash questions about the substance of the meeting. Other witnesses did report that those in attendance were asked to appropriate money from the treasury of the American Group to support an organizing drive among the sewing girls led by Lucy and Lizzie. The fact that no needlewomen were present at what was called an organizational meeting was not surprising; still, it was curious that only three women attended—Parsons, Swank Holmes, and a Mrs. Timmons. Presumably such a timely undertaking, ignited by the eight-hour-day demonstrations, would have claimed the energies of other women associated with the American Group, the reliable Sarah Ames among them. Samuel Fielden testified that people at the meeting allocated $5 to publish and distribute a handbill related to the sewing girls, the only business that any of the participants conducted.29
Perhaps most curious is Albert’s seemingly spontaneous decision to go into hiding and stay there for six weeks. Flight in and of itself was no proof of guilt, but it is likely that Albert, Lucy, and Lizzie all knew that someone had planned some kind of action for the Haymarket that night, and that Albert needed the ruse of his children’s presence there in order to dispel suspicions that he was privy to the information.
The May 4 narrative that Albert told after the trial in his writings and a series of interviews included patent falsehoods, such as his contention that he had not left Chicago for Geneva until May 5 or later, and then only because in the day or days following the bombing he saw that “many innocent people who were not even present at the meeting were being dragooned and imprisoned by the authorities, and not courting such indignities for myself I left the city, intending to return in a few days.” During her testimony, Swank Holmes was not asked about urging Albert to take his leave of the city or going with him to the train station to buy his ticket; nor did she offer any information on the subject. Thomas Brown, an IWPA member who had attended the American Group meeting, had walked with the Parsonses to Haymarket from the meeting, and after the bombing he had lent Albert $5 for his travels. He later described to the police his final conversation with Albert: the two had been standing on the corner of Kinzie and Desplaines Streets in the company of Lucy and Lizzie. Albert had expressed uncertainty about what he should do next. According to Brown, “he said he had no money, wanted some money, to get out of town with, thought he better be away for a day or two, or a little while, until the thing had blown over.”30
In his courtroom testimony, Albert either denied altogether that he had urged workers to use force against their capitalist tormentors or claimed that he had always seen dynamite only as a defense against trigger-happy, club-wielding police, not as an offensive weapon. His speeches and his previous articles in The Alarm of course told a different story, one that much of the public found convincing. That he and Lucy chose to promote the fiction about their children’s presence at the Haymarket Square that night suggests that they both were desperate to counter his history as an angry anarchist agitator with the sentimental narrative of his loving care for a son and daughter.
ALBERT AND LUCY FOUND SOME UNANTICIPATED SUPPORT AMONG the courtroom observers during the trial. William H. Parsons, Albert’s older brother, had traveled to Chicago from his home in Virginia to reunite with him and hear him testify. Later the former general would claim that he had lost track of Albert in 1871, and had not laid eyes on him again until he entered the Chicago courtroom. William, now himself a member of the Knights of Labor, had served as a representative of Texas on the commission to celebrate the 1876 national centennial. He had worked as a lawyer and writer and a promoter of Mexican economic development, and was now an employee of the US Treasury Department. He told a repo
rter for the Tribune that he had come to Chicago “to be near his brother in this perilous hour,” and contradicted recent reports that the extended family had “repudiated and disowned” their kinsman, for, according to William, they knew him to be “a man of integrity and of profound political convictions.” Though he himself was not an anarchist, and he had not followed Albert’s career closely, William declared that he intended to stand by Albert because “blood is stronger than water,” and “from brotherly sympathy”—and also because their sister had asked him to do so. He was convinced that Albert was innocent, “as he has not murder in his heart.”31
Albert derived hope not only from his brother’s outspoken and unconditional support but also from the instructions that Judge Gary gave the jurors on August 19: that they must establish a link between the defendants’ writings and speeches and “the consummation of the crime”—that is, the throwing of the bomb. The jury took just three hours to deliberate and arrived at a verdict at 7 that evening. The following morning, when the court reconvened to hear their decision, a cordon of police stretched across the main entrance to the building. In the courtroom, police stood in a line to form a barrier between the defendants and the spectators. Albert went up to a window and waved a red silk handkerchief to the crowd of spectators gathered on the street below. Lucy found herself seated between two police officers—one on either side of her—with another two immediately behind her. The foreman then read the verdict: the jury had found seven of the men—Parsons, Spies, Schwab, Fielden, Fischer, Lingg, and Engel—guilty of murder, and it was recommending the death penalty (formal sentencing, however, would not take place until October). Neebe, who was nowhere near Haymarket Square that night and did not even learn about the bombing until the following day, was nonetheless found guilty by virtue of his association with the Arbeiter Zeitung; the jury recommended that he serve fifteen years in prison. One reporter described Albert as looking “disconsolate and broken down” but still possessed “of his Texas nerve,” and Lucy as “sharing her husband’s gritty spirit” but looking “haggard.” She left the courtroom for a minute, then returned to confer with William Parsons about an appeal.32
Defense lawyer Black was stunned, finding the verdict “a profound and universal surprise.” He would have to live with the fact that he had urged Albert to turn himself in, a decision that he now believed to have been a terrible mistake. Attorney Zeisler declared the verdict “against anarchy and not the anarchists on trial.” William Parsons predicted that the defendants would be vindicated, since the police had broken the law by trying to break up a peaceful meeting. He believed that the right of peaceable assembly had been on trial. Supporters of the defendants immediately cited a large number of irregularities during the trial proceedings: the obvious biases of the jurors and the fact that they had not been properly sequestered; the unapologetic bias of Judge Gary against the defendants; the fact that the trial had taken place too soon after the bombing and too close to the police victims’ homes to ensure a fair hearing for the eight men; and the failure of the prosecution to prove who threw the bomb.33
After the trial, reporters were eager to hear from Detective Schaak and other authorities about a possible role played by women in the Haymarket bombing. Rumors abounded that the names of Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Swank Holmes were among those on a list of hundreds of anarchists who would soon be arrested. The day after the verdict was rendered, Schaak assured reporters that his work to defeat the anarchist scourge had just begun. Pressed about whether any future arrests would include “the women,” Schaak exclaimed, “Why not the women! Some of them are a good sight worse than the men,” to which the reporter added, “Then Mrs. Parsons and Lizzie Holmes will of course be arrested.” Schaak replied that no good card player ever tipped his hand to his opponent, and that his next moves would be revealed only in due time. His coyness was enough to spawn headlines such as “Secret Meeting of the Chicago Female Anarchists.”34
The verdict constituted a bitter irony for the defendants. For years—ever since the Great Uprising of 1877—Albert Parsons and his comrades had sought to convince the city of Chicago that, although their numbers were small, they represented a potent threat to the American economic system. By convicting the eight men of conspiracy to murder, jurors confirmed that view—that a handful of men who boasted about the virtues of dynamite could indeed wreak havoc on a whole city, and deserved the ultimate punishment as a result. In that sense, Lucy’s “To Tramps” article was prophetic, highlighting as it did a lone assailant whose one bomb could reverberate throughout Chicago and beyond.
ALTHOUGH ALBERT AND LUCY WERE DISPIRITED BY THE JURY’S verdict, they anticipated a more favorable outcome during the sentencing phase in October or after the case had been appealed to higher courts. There was still time to write, speak, and agitate. However, less than a month after the verdict came down, the couple found themselves distracted by a wholly unexpected development—a public airing of their courtship seventeen years earlier in Waco. On September 15, 1886, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat published a “Special Dispatch” from the Central Texas town under the headline “Mrs. Parsons’ Negro Husband.” The article informed readers that the day before, Mrs. M. A. Cooper—the wife of a well-to-do Waco grocer—“induced Oliver Gathens (colored) to go to Stapley’s photograph gallery” to have his picture taken so that his likeness could be distributed to Cooper’s friends in Chicago. Referring to Oliver Benton with a misspelling of his former surname, Gathings, the story stated that “the face is that of a very good-natured negro.” Mrs. Cooper aimed to have Lucy “look upon the face, if she reads the Chicago papers, of the husband [she] deserted in Waco to become the mistress of Albert R. Parsons.”35
An enterprising reporter had interviewed Lucy’s mother’s (former) husband, Charlie Carter (he described himself as Lucy’s “step-father”), who was still living in East Waco and working in a brickyard. Benton was described as “a negro—not light-colored, either.” It had been about twenty years since he and Lucy had lived as husband and wife, he claimed. Benton told of the couple’s child, now long dead, and his solicitous treatment of his young wife—paying her school tuition and buying her textbooks “to elevate her to as high a place as he could.” Albert Parsons, in Benton’s words, began “attracting her attention and drawing her away.”36
Readers were assured, however, that “there is nothing of the ‘Hostler Joe’ in his [Benton’s] composition,” a reference to the main character in a sensational poem, “’Ostler Joe,” written by journalist and reformer George Robert Sims in the spring of 1886. The poem tells the story of a humble, hardworking man named Joe who is seduced by the beautiful Annie, a woman “who lured men’s souls to the shores of sin with the light of her wanton eyes.” Joe weds Annie, and together they have a son. Yet soon she abandons her family for a stranger with a “tempting tongue.” The villain whisks her off to London, where “her beauty won men’s homage, and she prospered in her shame.” She proceeds to discard one lover after another and make a spectacle of herself: “Next she trod the stage half naked, and she dragged a temple down / To the level of a market for the women of the town.” She eventually returns to America, where, consumed by her own sinfulness, she falls ill. The loyal Joe rushes to her deathbed and forgives her. The poem, with its vivid description of a fallen woman, became a favorite of dramatists at the time.37
The Globe-Democrat reporter was correct that Benton had not remained eternally faithful to the mother of his first child. A gardener and general laborer, he was now married to a woman named Della, and they had started a family. Lucy’s mother, Charlotte, was still working in Waco as a cook, domestic servant, and laundress. By this time, Lucy’s brothers, Webster and Tanner, had either changed their names or moved to another place.38
The Globe-Democrat reported that as Albert’s “wife and ally” in the cause of anarchism, Lucy “has achieved a kind of fame that has gone throughout the world. All her utterances, and especially her speeches at the anarchist ga
therings, are wired throughout the country as fully and eagerly as though she were a Louise Michel or a Petrolouse of the Paris commune,” a reference to a real woman, and women in general, who fought on behalf of the French uprising. Though the author might have exaggerated Lucy’s public reputation at this point, he was correct in labeling her lifetime trajectory “a queer whirligig career.” In Waco, “old negroes here who knew her when she was humble Oliver’s contented wife still talk of the pretty mulatto that Albert Parsons stole away, and wonder if she ever thinks of Oliver now.” The Globe-Democrat’s article was picked up by the New York Times, the Chicago papers, and others around the country, and even the Anglo American Times for the edification of Americans living in London.39
Within three days another dispatch from Waco reached the St. Louis paper. This one, published alongside a woodcut of Oliver Benton, recounted the schadenfreude that had gripped white Wacoites now that Albert Parsons, “the radical scalawag,” had met his downfall. Waco whites also seemed eager to ridicule the lowly “Gathens,” who was in the habit of donning “tony clothes” and generally acting above his station. His decision to discard the surname of his owner in favor of that of his father was an act of personal liberation that the white community refused to recognize or honor.40
Appended to this story was a brief notice that several Chicago reporters had approached Albert in his cell for comment on the earlier report, “and have all received from him a flat denial of the story, and a statement that his wife was of Spanish-Indian descent, born and raised on the Western frontier of Texas, and that she had never been near Waco.” Recent efforts to locate Lucy at the apartment on West Indiana Street had been futile; she and the children had been evicted, since she had apparently not paid rent in the four months they lived there. She in fact had moved her shop, with the sign “Parsons & Co., Dressmakers,” to 785 Milwaukee Avenue.41
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