Not to let the matter end there, on September 19 the Globe-Democrat carried a story that recounted dramatic developments the day before. A Chicago reporter had finally located Lucy and presented her with a letter from Waco, together with Oliver Benton’s photograph, and she had agreed to let him accompany her to the jail and solicit her husband’s response to the allegations. After “carefully scanning” the picture, Albert said, “Yes, that is Gathings; I know him. I was raised in Waco, and was in those days very popular among the colored people there. I had something to do with his wife or the woman he lived with.” He continued, “Well, it was sort of custom in that town in those days. I was wild when I was young, and had many escapades with girls. Of course, Gathings did not like what I did.” Lucy urged Albert to elaborate, saying: “Now, don’t go beating about the bush. Tell the whole story as it is. I won’t rest under this false imputation any longer.” According to the reporter, “Thus adjured, Parsons said that he had lived with the woman who was known as Gathings’ wife; but that he left her some time before meeting the present Mrs. Parsons in Austin…. This was positively all there was to it and his wife knew no more of Gathings than the child unborn.” A Chicago reporter representing the Tribune was apparently the source of this story, or at least present for the interview. On the twentieth the Tribune added a detail provided by Lucy—that Albert’s paramour at the time was twenty years older than she. Lucy said that, as his wife, she was “not accountable for any wild oats Mr. Parsons may have sown before me.” Albert embellished the fiction: “He said he found [Lucy] a pure and beautiful and talented young orphan girl in the wilds of Texas and married her, and that she ever has been noble, pure and true.” He added, “She is Indian and Spanish, and has no African blood in her veins.”42
This exchange in a cellblock of the Cook County jail represented one more chapter in a press campaign to feed the public’s hunger for details about Albert and Lucy Parsons. Beginning with the lengthy article in the Waco Day shortly after the Haymarket bombing on May 6 and continuing for the next four months, papers in Chicago and elsewhere seized on gossip about the pair and about Albert’s extended family near and far. (The headline in the Day on May 8 was “Beast Parsons: The Sneaking Snarl from Some Moral Morass in Which He Hides; Miscegenationist, Murderer, Moral Outlaw, for Whom the Gallows Waits.”) Meanwhile, both Lucy and Albert apparently considered all publicity about the two of them good publicity. Appealing to a variety of journalists, he presented himself as a defender of all-American political values. Lucy submitted to interviews that helped her promote a counternarrative to the inconvenient story of her Waco origins: she was preparing to introduce herself to a larger national and international audience as a person of Spanish and indigenous descent. The reaction of a Kansas City Star editor suggested some of the potential pitfalls in this strategy, contrasting her attempt to pass “as a dusky descendant of the extinct race of powerful Aztecs” with the facts of her life—that this “notorious woman is probably a straight case of an illegitimate mulatto.” The writer concluded, “She is not responsible for her being, but she can not escape her environments.”43
Lucy created her identity as a Latina at a time when very few Mexican Americans lived in Chicago, and the city had no Mexican American press to confirm or deny her claims—for instance, by testing her knowledge of Spanish or demanding specific information about her forebears. In the coming months, as she and Albert fought to overturn his conviction, she would seek to construct her own “environments” and create a new life-story for herself. In this effort she enlisted the powerful newspapers that had vilified her husband and his codefendants. Whether Lucy Parsons helped or hurt her husband’s cause in the process would remain an open question.
Chapter 8
“The Dusky Goddess of Anarchy Speaks Her Mind”
ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1886, A BONE-TIRED LUCY BOARDED A late-night train bound for Cincinnati. Looking out the window into the darkness, Chicago receding into the distance, she felt a welter of emotions wash over her. She had endured three drama-filled days in the courtroom of the criminal court building, and listened as Judge Gary that morning had pronounced a final sentence on her husband and the seven other defendants. Now she was embarking on a grueling, weeks-long, multistate speaking tour to raise money for the appeal of the guilty verdicts and to expound upon anarchy to cynics and skeptics. Her challenge was to present herself as the fierce widow-in-waiting, unyielding to the forces that threatened to obliterate radicalism and destroy her family. Albert had given his blessing: after the jury’s decision, he had written from his cell to her, saying, “You I bequeath to the people, a woman of the people.” She, his “darling wife,” must continue the fight “where I am compelled to lay it down.” With her children being taken care of by friends, Lucy would tell audiences: “The boy is in Wisconsin, the little girl in another state, the father is in jail in Chicago awaiting an ignominious but glorious death, and the mother, broken in health if not in spirit, is before you.”1
The afternoon before, Albert had launched into the speech of his life, a speech to save his life. Seven weeks after he and his codefendants had been convicted of conspiracy to murder, Judge Gary permitted the men to address the court and explain why they believed that he should not sentence all but one of them to death, as the jury had recommended. Beginning with August Spies on Thursday morning, each of the prisoners in turn chose not only to defend himself against the charges but also to tell his own story, this time to a vast audience that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The courtroom was packed to capacity with two hundred people—politicians, judges, newspaper reporters and editors, and well-dressed curiosity-seekers, men and women. The prisoners’ close kin, including Lucy and the children, were there. And a crowd of an estimated one thousand had gathered outside the courthouse to await the climactic sentencing. Albert and his comrades knew full well that they were in fact speaking not only to Chicagoans but to all those who would read the latest dispatches published in the largest city newspapers and picked up by smaller outlets all over the country. For him, the courtroom afforded a grand stage, and he was prepared.2
Parsons spoke last. He had spent weeks getting ready for the day, and now he was primed for the occasion, his hair and mustache neatly trimmed, his suit well-pressed, with a boutonniere in the lapel. Occasionally he referred to his notes, speaking for two hours on Friday afternoon and another five hours and forty minutes on Saturday—a display of stamina that was remarkable even by his own standards. Over the nearly eight hours that he spoke (almost half of the total time consumed by all eight speeches), he sought to enlighten an audience that was alternately enthralled—here is a man doomed to be hanged!—and bored (on Saturday, some of his famished listeners took a lunch break, while he forged on). As he had countless times before, Parsons reiterated the crimes committed by American capitalists; one reporter rightly termed his speech a bit of “stump speaking.” When he charged that nefarious agents of Wall Street had actually planted the Haymarket bomb, murmurs of surprise rippled through the courtroom. Finally, he ended with his now familiar account of what he said happened on May 4. That fateful evening, he claimed, he took his wife and two little children to Haymarket Square: “Your honor, is it possible that a man would go into the dynamite-bomb business under those conditions and those circumstances? It is incredible. It is beyond human nature to believe such a thing, absolutely.” At 3:15 p.m., he collapsed, utterly depleted, with the words, “I have nothing, not even now, to regret.”3
In the weeks running up to the hearing, Judge Gary had had an opportunity to review the transcript of the trial and to consider the affidavits of those who aimed to impeach the prosecution’s star witnesses. On October 7, he announced that he had rejected the defense attorneys’ arguments for a new trial. So it came as no surprise that he seemed unmoved by the prisoners’ speeches. As soon as Parsons took his seat, Gary announced that he found that the men had “advised murder” as a means of political resistance, a
nd that the bomb-thrower, whoever he was, had committed a heinous crime “in pursuance of such advice.” The judge sentenced Oscar Neebe to jail for fifteen years, but ordered the other seven “to be hanged ’til you are dead.” The execution was to be carried out on December 3. Before the prisoners could be led away, Lucy rushed up to her husband, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him passionately—“vehemently,” according to one observer—on the lips.4
Despite the theatricality of the moment, the condemned men considered Judge Gary’s decision neither wholly unexpected nor final, and they were already planning the next phase of their defense. Later that day, Lucy visited Albert in his cell to say goodbye; she would not see him for several weeks. Lawyers had advised her that an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court would cost an estimated $12,500, and she hoped not only to raise those funds but also to enlighten all of America “upon this all-important judicial murdering operation in Chicago”: the people themselves must sit in judgment and arrive at their own verdict on the Haymarket bombing. As she stood in the Cook County jail, she was overcome with fatigue, not only by the intensity of the past three days in Judge Gary’s court, but because, she told a reporter, “she had worked her fingers off dressmaking night and day for the past four weeks to keep body and soul together.” By this time she had made arrangements for the care of the children while she was gone. Albert Junior would be staying with Daniel Hoan’s family in Waukesha, and Lulu with another family (unnamed) in Chicago. Lucy roused herself enough to give the reporter some quotable material, saying, in the reporter’s words, that “there was work to be done. Her husband’s voice was silenced perhaps forever, and the world must hear from her now. Their cause was worth fighting for and dying for.” The next night, Sunday, she was speaking to a crowd of four hundred at Cincinnati’s Druid’s Hall.5
As Lucy sought to defend her husband in the wider court of public opinion, union leaders in Chicago were reconfiguring the labor movement, in part in response to the Haymarket convictions (which at least some now had decided were unjust), and in part in response to the actions of Democratic politicians who they believed had once again betrayed the interests of working people. Prominent socialists and Knights of Labor in the city as well as around the country were arguing that, whatever their rhetorical indiscretions, Parsons and the other defendants had been tried under blatantly unfair conditions with a judge and a jury that were openly hostile to them. Many also charged that the major prosecution witnesses were guilty of perjury, and that the state’s attorney had been determined to put the idea of anarchism, as much as the men who propounded it, on trial. Furthermore, all laboring people, men and women, unorganized and organized, lived under a death sentence, one arbitrarily enforced: the sophisticated weaponry wielded with reckless abandon by law enforcement authorities gave credence to the argument that workers needed the means to defend themselves during peaceful rallies no less than violent strikes.
On Monday, September 5, Labor Day, before the verdicts had been rendered, Chicago socialists, who had once been wary of the anarchists, had sponsored an outing to Sheffield, Indiana, with the explicit purpose of raising money for the defense. Three thousand people listened as Lucy, the featured speaker, quoted Thomas Jefferson—“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God”—and urged all to defy the court; otherwise they were “unworthy to be called men.” She ended by imagining a scenario both mournful and full of promise: “It is your duty and I demand of you to echo the crash of those seven scaffold traps by a counter crash that all this country will hear and hearing tremble. You know that it is for you and our glorious principles that these men now suffer in their cells. See that their prosecutors do not go unrewarded.” Despite the violent repression of labor radicals in the wake of Haymarket, Lucy Parsons refused to moderate her language of revenge.6
During the late summer and early fall, white workers of diverse ethnicities and ideologies coalesced into a new political party that was national in scope, the United Labor Party (ULP). In Chicago, the ULP aimed to challenge the Republicans and Democrats, including Mayor Carter Harrison, who was responsible for the original appointment of labor’s archenemy, Inspector John Bonfield. The new party grew out of a meeting on August 21—the day after the conclusion of the trial—that brought together 251 delegates representing 47 trade and labor organizations and 41 Knights of Labor assemblies. Many prominent Knights dissented from the view of their national leader, Terence Powderly, who had denounced the doomed anarchists—including Parsons, himself a long-term Knight in good standing. The beginning of Lucy’s lecture tour in October coincided with the annual General Assembly of the Knights in Richmond, Virginia, where delegates voted in favor of “mercy” for Parsons and his comrades; an indignant minority countered that the Chicago men were in fact deserving of a just verdict of innocence, rather than mercy, which amounted to little more than pity for the presumed guilty.7
Intending to bridge the enduring gaps between anarchists and socialists, Knights and conservative trade unionists, and immigrants and the native-born, the ULP positioned itself as a third party fully committed to the white workingman. Its municipal and county platforms called for the eight-hour day, a strong public school system, the public control of utilities and transportation, the abolition of child and convict labor, the outlawing of land speculation, and an end to private security forces such as the Pinkertons. At the helm of the Chicago ULP were the socialists George A. Schilling and Thomas J. Morgan, who were determined to weld disparate, often warring factions into a formidable force in city and county politics. Seeking to heal the fractious relations that had caused them to break with the anarchists years before, they became outspoken in Albert’s defense, and tolerant, if not always enthusiastic, about Lucy’s new prominence as a public speaker. Although she had long expressed an unwavering hostility toward political action of any kind, the indomitable “Widow Parsons” would nevertheless prove useful to the ULP; the party came to understand that her searing rhetoric would continue to amaze, delight, and inspire workers in a post-Haymarket world, where widespread anti-labor sentiment threatened to extinguish the spark of radical speechifying.8
BETWEEN OCTOBER 1886 AND JANUARY 1887, LUCY PARSONS MADE three extended trips. The first, from October 10 to November 25, 1886, took her (in order) to Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland, New York City, Jersey City and Orange (New Jersey), Philadelphia, back to New York City and Jersey City, Paterson (New Jersey), New Haven (Connecticut), Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and back to Cleveland. The second, during the month of December, included trips to St. Louis, Omaha, Kansas City, back to Omaha, and Saint Joseph (Missouri). In January 1887 she lectured in Detroit and Buffalo. Three weeks into the first tour, on November 2, the Illinois Supreme Court announced that it would consider an appeal from the defendants, and on the twenty-seventh of that month that court issued a stay of execution, investing her fundraising efforts with urgency and purpose.
Although Parsons would revel in the adulation of the crowds she addressed on all three tours, raising money (for her rent, as well as for the defense) was uppermost in her mind. Just before she began the first tour she approached the owner of the Chicago Vine Street Dime Museum, a collection of “freaks” and other curiosities, suggesting that he pay her a salary and tap into the current public obsession with all things Haymarket. She would sell portraits of herself, her husband, and his comrades, plus copies of their speeches, to patrons of the museum. The price of admission would buy any man, woman, or child the opportunity to meet the famous Mrs. Parsons and engage her in conversation. Nevertheless, the museum’s proprietor concluded, according to the New York Times, that “the case of the anarchists was not of that healthy nature which would make the wife of the leader of the revolutionists a good and talking feature in a dime museum, and Mrs. Parsons’s offer was refused.”9
On the road, Lucy collected—or had her hosts later send her—newspaper articles covering her lectures, which she presented to her husband when she returned to Chicago. His scrapbook
, filled with such reports, some of them identified by publication and date and others not, some of them neatly cut out and others torn with jagged edges, serve as an illuminating chronicle of Lucy’s fast-paced tour—and more. Included in the scrapbook is a November 20 article disputing her “Montezuma Princess story” and claiming that she was actually the daughter of an enslaved woman and a Mexican peon, the servant of a couple living in Houston. It is possible that both Parsonses welcomed speculation about Lucy’s background, for such questions bolstered attendance at her lectures and thus filled the coffers of the defense fund.10
Aware of her growing stature as a featured speaker in the city’s labor circles, the Chicago Tribune cautioned all Americans against granting Lucy Parsons the kind of respectful hearing that a man in a similar situation would be denied: she deserved “no more consideration by reason of being a female.” In fact, the editors declared, after her Labor Day oration in Sheffield, that “if Mrs. Parsons thinks she is another Joan of Arc she should make an effort to un-deceive herself. She is only a very ordinary blatherkite. The country is not in the mood to hear the gospel of hate and murder preached any longer, even by a woman.” This warning was picked up by national publications, including Harper’s Weekly, which opined that authorities in Chicago “feared this one woman more than all the chief Anarchists combined. By her talk and other means of instilling their devilish sentiments into the minds of the people, she could at all times escape arrest and do tenfold more harm than the men.” Other publications used Parsons’s own denunciation of the law against her: “Lucy Parsons, you are right—one of the imperfections of our laws is that which allows women like you to rant and rave all over the country.” It is true that the “dusky representative of Anarchy,” this “sanguinary Amazon,” the “quadroon anarchist of Chicago,” caused a sensation wherever she went. People who would never see her face or hear her voice could nevertheless form an opinion about Parsons, “one of the most notorious women” in America. Meanwhile, Chicagoans followed her tour via the Tribune and other local papers, and the Citizens’ Association saw fit to keep tabs on her, listening with apprehension as, in the words of one headline, “The Dusky Goddess of Anarchy Speaks Her Mind.”11
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