Goddess of Anarchy
Page 21
An eclectic collection of individuals and groups sponsored Lucy’s lectures and played host to her while she was on tour. She spoke at resorts, in saloons, and at lecture halls, in modest venues as well as in storied places such as Cooper Union and Clarendon Hall in New York City. In the Midwest she often followed in the footsteps of her husband, and appeared in Germania and Turner Halls, or under the auspices of branches of the International Working People’s Association or Knights of Labor assemblies. The price of admission, from 5 to 25 cents per person—ladies free sometimes—helped to pay for the hall rental and her travel expenses and added to the defense fund. In some cities her visit was arranged by a woman’s organization, such as a Frauenbund (German women’s society), which was connected to a local socialists’ group, or the Ladies of the Golden Rule, an auxiliary of a secret benevolent society, the Knights of the Golden Rule. Prominent local anarchists—such as Joseph Labadie and Sam Goldwater in Detroit—hosted and introduced her, and in the process showed the world that they could withstand and even thrive in spite of the public vitriol aimed at radicals in the aftermath of Haymarket.12
Certainly Parsons’s reputation preceded her as she made her way through small towns and large cities. One sponsor in a small town in Pennsylvania (probably Allegheny, near Pittsburgh) panicked at the possibility that she might cancel her appearance and seek a larger venue: “Alles ist hier vorbereitet,” he wrote, meaning that everything was in a state of commotion in anticipation of her visit. And she received commensurate press coverage: her speech at New York’s Cooper Union in November 1886 was covered by all the city’s major papers—the Sun, the World, the Evening Journal, the Times, the Star, and the Tribune.13
More generally, Parsons tapped into a vibrant 1880s reform impulse that had only grown wider and deeper since she and Albert had first stepped foot in Chicago—a sensibility that animated not only anarchists and socialists but also suffragists and supporters of Henry George, a writer and politician who promoted the idea of land reform as a way to eliminate poverty. (His 1879 book Progress and Poverty was a late nineteenth-century bestseller.) In New York Lucy was introduced by Cynthia H. Van Name Leonard, a noted suffragist, socialist, and philanthropist, the first woman to run for mayor of New York City (on the National Equal Rights Party ticket, in 1888), and the mother of the famous actress Lillian Russell. Parsons also exhibited her characteristic recklessness in New York City when she made her “headquarters” at the home of the widow of Charles W. Zaddick, who had boasted of sending dynamite to Chicago’s anarchists. Zaddick had died in a recent explosion, reportedly of a blast by a bomb of his own making.14
Securing a venue could prove a formidable barrier to Parsons, as she had to contend with proprietors who refused to rent their hall to her as well as authorities trying to intimidate people from attending. In some instances she encountered silent sentries of uniformed police who blocked the entrance of the place where she was scheduled to appear, or stood watch over the crowd as she talked. Routinely, undercover police (“like thieves in citizens’ clothes,” she sneered) monitored her actions and words. In Buffalo, her hosts identified themselves only by numbers, so fearful were they of a police crackdown. The reporter covering her visit there noted that the “committee of arrangements” consisted of “Nos. 3, 19, 9, 23, and 7, for they refused to give their names.” In Cleveland, the handbills had all been printed and the circulars all distributed, but the hall’s owner, disapproving or scared, refused to allow her to speak. Parsons promptly located a chair, placed it in the middle of the street, and stood on it to address the crowd.15
In most places she could count on an aggressive marketing campaign for her upcoming talk, billed variously as “The Nineteenth Century and What It Has Done for the Masses,” or simply “The Chicago Trial,” or “LABOR PROBLEM!” Printed circulars and handbills and notices in local papers heralded her arrival. Kansas City residents were informed, on one handbill, that “everybody should avail themselves of this opportunity to hear the most Talented and Eloquent Woman of her Age.” Another notice, in New Haven, said, “Mrs. Lucy E. Parsons will appeal this case to the Grand Jury of the American People! Workingmen, give your brethren fair play!” More elaborate announcements included testimonials from the mainstream press lauding her for her message, courage, beauty, wit, poise, mode of delivery, or some combination of these. By the end of her tour in the spring of 1887, one circular advertised her upcoming appearance in Bordeau’s Hall, Iron Mountain, Michigan, by listing a dozen such extracts from papers in major cities in as many states: “She is a very fluent talker and worked the audience into the highest pitch of enthusiasm and excitement” (Pittsburgh’s Daily Dispatch); and “Mrs. Parsons is a woman of commanding appearance, has pleasant features, and a good command of the language” (Milwaukee’s Evening Wisconsin). Many of her lectures were standing-room-only affairs.16
By and large, Parsons stuck to her routine—a standard, two-and-a-half-hour speech (some days delivered once in the afternoon and again at a different venue in the evening), followed by a passing of the collection plate, and culminating with sales of Albert’s images or printed speeches. She almost always began her address by declaring, “I am an anarchist,” mocking the stereotype of the wild-eyed, shabbily dressed, unshaven immigrant bomb-thrower. After describing the starving, homeless masses, the products of a cruel system that rewarded the exploitation of children and punished hardworking men and women, she went on to give a full-throated defense of the Haymarket prisoners. She told the story of the May 1 strikes, and recounted the night of the bombing: “Do you think that if Parsons intended to murder he would have taken his wife, two other ladies and his own children there?” She asked the audience, “Is that the way a man acts when he is going to throw bombs?”17
For the most part, Parsons downplayed the finer points of anarchist ideology in favor of a more universal appeal that stressed workers’ need for self-defense. She refrained from ridiculing the United States and its legal institutions, a signature theme in The Alarm. Indeed, she could sound downright patriotic: “Free speech must be maintained or all the blood it took to float the Stars and Stripes would have gone for naught.”18
Still, she liked to embellish her message with color—literally and figuratively. Reporters often highlighted her description of the red flag of anarchy: “But the red flag, the horrible red flag, what does that mean? Not that the streets should run with gore, but that the same red blood courses through the whole human race.” During lectures she took out a scarlet silk handkerchief, and, with a dramatic flourish, said that no matter whether she died on the gallows or in her bed, she wished it to be her shroud. She would laugh and taunt the audience, urging calm: “This is our color,” the color of revolution. In Cincinnati she was pleased that even “conservative trade unionists… applauded my utterances to the echo, and accepted my definition of the red flag with rapture.” (It was no coincidence that headline writers at times termed hers a “red-hot” or “bloodthirsty” speech.) Her hosts appreciated the symbolism and festooned lecture halls with large red flags; some arranged for little girls to present her with bouquets of red roses. Women came to the lectures wearing red ribbons in their hair, the men red neckties. These colorful displays added to the entertainment value of her appearance. Backdrops included large red flags or portraits of the Chicago eight, or German anarchist assassins. Bands played “John Brown’s Body” and “La Marseillaise,” and choral groups such as the Communist Singing Society performed a “revolutionary hymn.”19
Parsons could also depart from her prepared remarks, playing to the crowd and commenting on local news of note. In New York soon after the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in late October, she seized on the occasion to point out that in the city over which “Bartholdi’s big girl casts her light,” less than one-half of 1 percent of the people owned their own homes. (When Cynthia Leonard introduced Parsons as the true “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the audience erupted in cheers.) In Cincinnati, Parsons made pointed c
omments about the reactionary stance of the local Law and Order League and contrasted the soft, pampered babies being wheeled by their nursemaids in the city parks with the impoverished children of factory hands in the same city.20
Only rarely did Parsons offer a hint of her childhood or background as a younger woman, though at times she recited a fictitious origins story that reporters reproduced in detail:
Mrs. Lucy E. Parsons is the daughter of Senora Marie del Gather, a Spanish-Mexican lady, and John Waller, a civilized Creek. She was left an orphan at the age of three years in charge of her mother’s brother, a Mexican ranchero and farmer, of Texas, where at her uncle’s house at 16 years of age, A. R. Parsons, himself a mere youth but a travelling correspondent of the Houston Telegraph, first met and became enamored with her. This was in 1869. Having been raised by her uncle, she always bore her mother’s and uncle’s name.
Parsons explained that her interest in anarchy stemmed from her “taking sides with the opposition against the proprietors of a factory in the South, where a number of children were employed.” She had championed them when they requested a twelve-cent raise per week. Parsons said she “gained the enmity of whites and was forced to leave the place” because of her agitation against the factory—perhaps an allusion to the Waco Manufacturing Company.21
Her lectures provided generous amounts of crowd-pleasing bluster and invective. Those who expected to hear a pathetic wife begging for her husband’s life and invoking the names of her soon-to-be fatherless babes were sorely disappointed. She declared, “I don’t come here to plead for my husband. No couple ever lived more happily together than we have, but when it comes to principles we revolutionists sacrifice everything. I now give him up to the cause for which we have struggled so long side by side.” And the “cause” she put forward in no-holds-barred terms. She sought to use gender conventions to good effect, claiming credibility as a wife and mother when she disputed the argument that anarchism “would rend the fabric of the family home”; and she could draw upon her own maternal feelings when describing the young workers who never saw the light of day or a blade of grass. Yet she also departed from that sentimental script to declare that she would never apologize for her actions or those of her anarchist comrades.22
Claiming that she herself would have thrown the bomb in Haymarket Square, had she possessed one when the police charged the meeting, Parsons lauded “the missiles of today” as an improvement over weapons of war in the past. “Science” had advanced beyond the bow-and-arrow stage and given the worker the gift of dynamite, she said (often to loud applause): “You want to take advantage of it.” She excoriated the jury in the Haymarket trial “as a waltzing, fiddling, card-playing jury that reached a verdict in three hours, making six widows and numberless orphans.” The meatpacker Philip Armour she termed “a slaughterer of children as well as hogs,” John Bonfield “that chief of sewer rats.” Chicago police were “the scum of the sewers and gutters, and as bloodhounds, worse than those trained in Russia for bloodwork.” She denounced as “dumb as oysters” the churches that sided with the capitalists. Should anyone doubt her courage, “she would have no more compunction wiping a detective off the face of the earth than a fly,” one paper reported, paraphrasing her, and, should anyone doubt her intentions, another quoted her saying, “I will take the red flag of the Commune and plant it all over New England in mills and factories.”23
Parsons could salt a single speech with language rarely heard by ladies in public, let alone uttered by them, condemning the “damnable judicial murders about to take place in Chicago,” and the “damnable capitalist” who refused to rent her a hall while she “left [Albert] to go to the scaffold” and “[went] forth to herald the damnable wrong to the American people.” More than one reporter found her statements “at times positively indecent,” though it is not certain that the women in the audience invariably “hid their heads in shame,” as some men charged. Most people who attended her lectures associated her with vitriolic hyperbole, and they expected no less.24
At the same time, Parsons’s assertive command of the room, no matter how large or small, took many by surprise. She would interrupt herself to point out and ridicule men whom she suspected of being plainclothes detectives, admonish the crowd to refrain from interrupting her with applause, “as it bothered her,” and demand that yapping dogs be removed from the hall. She asked the rowdies to cease their talking: “Keep quiet, won’t you? There’s no need to make a disturbance. I only ask the courtesy of a stranger to be heard.” She instructed members of the audience to stop smoking: “My dear sir, you with the big pipe at the door, must bear in mind that smoking is strictly prohibited in this room while I am talking.” In Detroit, she “remarked that smoking violated the atmosphere of the hall, and in any event it wasn’t good manners, and several cigars went out with celerity.” Most of the men of the day were accustomed to debating politics through the haze of tobacco smoke, but Parsons was not about to defer to the custom.25
She felt no hesitation in demanding that the men remove their hats and treat women in the audience with courtesy: “Are there not some Chesterfields in the audience who are gallant enough to give up their chairs to the ladies?” Still, in other cases her demand for respect from the crowd took an unexpected turn, as when she demanded angrily of one woman, “Put out that crying baby.” She sought to disabuse those who believed her black dress was in fact widow weeds, saying that she favored the color because it was flattering on her. (Indeed, she displayed no sense of false modesty, sending the New York World a picture of herself to refute the idea that all anarchists were “so hideous” that they could cause every watch in the hall to stop.) She was, in fact, a walking contradiction in terms, mesmerizing rapt admirers and hard-bitten reporters alike. In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she allowed herself a melodramatic moment, and with tears running down her cheeks pictured for the crowd her husband bound and with a noose around his neck; but then, “pausing for a moment[,] she turned to her followers on the stage, and in an entirely different tone said, ‘Get ready to take up the collection.’”26
LUCY PARSONS WAS HER OWN PERSON, AND TRY AS THEY MIGHT, no one could affix predictable labels to her or define her background with any precision. Her physical appearance and manner of speaking inspired in listeners a wide range of emotions, from scorn to admiration, but she always seemed quite unlike any woman they had ever encountered. Although Parsons was not the first or only sensational female speaker of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (a period bracketed by the free-love proponents Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman), she was unique as a woman of color with an aura of mystery. When reporters saw her for the first time, virtually all of them wrote at some length about her dress and hairstyle, the contours of her face, and her enunciation, hoping to divine from such tangible evidence not only her character but the circumstances of her birth. Although some editors sent a stenographer to record her speech verbatim, few assigned a sketch artist to her lectures (and the few images produced varied wildly in quality). Most newspaper readers had to rely on descriptions provided by reporters, white men who struggled to convey their own assessments of Lucy Parsons the person, who might or might not be the sum of her parts—a woman, a person of color, an anarchist, an orator, a wife and mother. These various roles often seemed at odds with each other, shattering reporters’ expectations. In Buffalo, “the detective and a crowd of reporters in the doorway were watching for Mrs. Parsons, but the good-looking, well-dressed mulatto walked by them so quietly and demurely that her identity was not known until she had got into the hall.” These men were expecting a more formidable-looking woman. And even the most “fear-laden” of her listeners had to admit that she was appealing in multiple ways.27
Parsons’s rhetorical strategies—her use of sarcasm and vibrant imagery, her off-the-cuff interactions with listeners—enthralled audiences, and those qualities, combined with her physical attractiveness, could prove quite alluring, even titillating, to the men in the room.
The incident in Orange, New Jersey, when, on the afternoon of Sunday, October 24, she muscled her way into Central Hall, is an apt example. She had enlisted the help of her host in breaking the hinges of the door and yanking it open. Once inside, she came face to face with the hall’s disapproving proprietor, W. H. Latimer. Parsons ran past him across the stage, flung open a window, and urged the crowd below to enter the building. His words unheeded, Latimer shoved a musket in the hands of a fifteen-year-old, telling him to keep the waiting crowd at bay, and then rushed off to the police station. There he managed to secure a phalanx of police officers, but, presented by Parsons with a receipt for $2 for the hall’s rental deposit, they refused to interfere, and with no further delay she proceeded to speak before the crowd of two hundred.28
Widely reported in newspapers (and in some cases featured on the front page), this incident earned Parsons some grudging praise from her opponents, for her “pluck.” A long article in the male “sporting” magazine National Police Gazette of November 6, apparently submitted by a detective who had been on the scene, noted that “Mrs. Parsons was equal to the occasion.” During the confusion, she had exhorted members of the audience to remain in the hall despite the police intimidation: “Are there not men among you? Will you let them put you out like slaves when I have hired a hall and have a contract for it? Stay where you are. Don’t move for them.” Added the reporter, “She looked positively handsome as she stood trembling with excitement and gazed around her” before beginning her lecture on what she termed “the history of the greatest crime of the century.” This description suggests the degree to which Parsons’s public image was being eroticized and commodified for the benefit of a nationwide male audience.29