Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  From jail Lucy hastily made arrangements for Lizzie Swank Holmes to care for the children, then contacted the editors of the Arbeiter Zeitung to bail her out for $25. Three days later she entered the courtroom, alone, for a hearing about her case. She took a seat on a bench by a window and quietly read a newspaper. Soon the matron of the jail came in and sat beside her and asked about Lulu, who had been diagnosed with a relapse of scarlet fever the week before. According to the Chicago Mail, Parsons had lost much of her usual fire: “Sorrow and care were graven in deep lines on her swarthy face.” Allowed to address the court, she pointed out that people were always passing out circulars and handbills on the street without fear of arrest, and then made an uncharacteristic plea for sympathy: “Your honor, I am here alone, and while I wish to take no advantage of that fact, I do ask this: that you would treat me as you would have your wife treated were she in my place and you were situated as my husband is.” The judge, acknowledging her “unprotected situation,” pronounced her violation a “technical” one. He added, “There is not the slightest desire on my part to deal harshly with you as I know the depth of your sorrow.” (One report quoted him as also saying, “I am the last man in the world to add one feather’s weight to the burdens you bear.”) Suspending the fine of $5, he told her she was free to go, and Parsons meekly left the courtroom.23

  Around this time she also set about enlisting her brother-in-law in her campaign to separate Albert from his cellmates. On September 24, General William Parsons (now working for the federal customs service) gave a lengthy interview to the New York World from his home in Norfolk, Virginia, reminding readers that his grandfather had served as a general in the American Revolution and that his grand-uncle had lost an arm in the Battle of Bunker Hill; he was suggesting that his younger brother, though led astray by anarchists, was part of a long line of American patriots. William thought it should be noted that Albert, who had married a “talented and beautiful Mexican lady,… has never counseled revolution, but has prophesied it.” The general kept his own name in the news by suggesting that a mysterious New Yorker had passed through Indianapolis the day before the bombing and bragged that news emanating from Chicago in the next few days would reveal what he had been carrying in his carpet-bag. William also attacked the Chicago press for knowingly suppressing the truth about the bombing.24

  When Lucy was arrested for distributing Albert’s “Appeal,” she was not selling it, but giving it away. In fact, the Tribune had already printed a verbatim copy of it the day before. Some accounts had her welcoming the attention of police officers and even her two-hour stay in jail. As soon as she was released, she took new piles of the circulars and dropped them off at stores and saloons, and then went to see Albert, giving away more copies to prison guards and visitors. At the time, Nina van Zandt saw the arrest as a ploy, a cynical bid for publicity. Of Lucy’s latest foray into the public eye, van Zandt exclaimed, “O, my God! One trouble follows another. Why can’t she keep her mouth shut?”25

  Van Zandt was not alone. On September 25, Lucy attended a meeting of the Socialistic Labor Party and tried to interrupt Tommy Morgan while he was speaking. As she stood in the hall she was surrounded by half a dozen policemen in uniform. Getting no satisfaction from Morgan—he told her that interruptions “throw me off—make me forget my line of argument”—she exited the building without having her say. Morgan was no doubt asking himself whether associating with one of the “most implacable furies of the socialistic party” truly advanced his own cause.26

  A few days later, a telling encounter between Lucy and a Tribune reporter took place in the Cook County jail. Making her way past a throng of visitors, and clutching pieces of paper, Lucy approached the reporter and demanded that he look at them and see they were advertisements for a real estate firm; she had been handed them that morning as she walked down Milwaukee Avenue. She said she intended to go to police headquarters and find out if they were really interested in enforcing the ordinance that had landed her in jail the previous week. As he recorded the conversation, “the reporter hinted that unobtrusiveness would be the better policy for Mrs. Parsons at this time,” but she responded angrily, declaring that all of the men would rather die than confess to a crime that they did not commit, and that “death is nobler than a long imprisonment resulting from a so-called act of mercy.” To the suggestion that she would perhaps feel differently about the situation if she were soon to be hanged herself, she said indignantly, “Never. I would die, and die willingly, if I were with them or in their place.” At that point, Michael Schwab’s wife, Maria Ann, who was there with her children, pulled Lucy aside in an effort to end the conversation. Lucy’s attempt at attention-grabbing while Governor Oglesby was considering the fate of all eight men seemed wildly inappropriate, and, according to friends and foes alike, “only served to reawaken the dread of the community.”27

  By the end of October, both Albert and Lucy seemed resigned to his fate. He admitted to a reporter that “hope and fear had almost worn themselves out, and I have become quite callous,” with Lucy by his side, nodding in agreement, saying, “So have I.” Albert could do little but take solace in the certainty that the laboring classes would avenge his death: “Workingmen and their friends will demand blood for blood, and they will, no doubt, have it afterward.” Perhaps he felt his labors were almost complete; he was in the process of finishing his book, titled Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis. Quoting liberally from Karl Marx, he predicted the inevitable downfall of capitalism: the drive for efficiency, he said in the book, would eventually eliminate middle-class jobs, and the collapse of a consumer market would lead to “the catastrophe of production” and the demise of the system. All members of the laboring classes would find themselves pitted against each other, forced to accept starvation wages, and the most impoverished among them would not have the means they needed to survive. Indeed, according to Albert Parsons, the American worker resembled the former slave of the South: “He was free to compete with his fellow wage-worker for an opportunity to serve capital.”28

  In promoting this extended essay to reporters and jailhouse visitors, Albert went out of his way to give credit to Lucy, not only for “the idea of authorship, but for the plan of the work, and for some of its most interesting chapters.” He said she had helped with much of the research: “She ransacked every labor headquarters and socialistic library in the city for facts and figures on the rise and growth of anarchy in the world. The book, therefore, is largely the work of Mrs. Lucy Parsons.” Through the late spring and summer of 1887 and into the fall, Lucy had maintained a desk in an office of a local paper, the Western Newsman, on Third Avenue, where she had worked on the book.29

  As the execution loomed, guards and reporters began to take careful note of the way each prisoner faced his awful fate. Reporters highlighted the plight of the wives and children who were cast into misery by the upcoming deaths of their spouses and fathers. Lulu was described to newspaper audiences as “a very bright girl,” and Albert Junior as showing a “fondness for investigation and constructive talent rare in one so young”; both were said to be “of unusual intelligence.” Readers were left to ponder the fate of all the “pretty children” who would soon be left fatherless.30

  ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, THE COOK COUNTY SHERIFF BEGAN TO issue tickets to the execution, to be held nine days hence. The two hundred tickets were reserved for members of the jury, the reporters and editors of Chicago, and the attorneys involved in the case—none were given to family members. An Amnesty Association was aiming to present the governor with a stack of petitions no later than the ninth. General Parsons sent his own plea for his brother’s life, a letter in which he claimed to have more information about the bombing, which had been perpetrated, he said, by “enemies of labor” in order to frame innocent men. Meanwhile, anticipating trouble, the authorities were making elaborate preparations for security. They sent wagonloads of arms and ammunition to the jail and posted twenty-four officers there on
three rotating eight-hour shifts.31

  On Thursday, November 3, Lucy Parsons attracted a large crowd on Clark Street as she tried to sell copies of a pamphlet titled “Was It a Fair Trial?,” in the process snarling wagon traffic and attracting crowds. The police ordered her to move on, and so she walked a short way to a nearby building and stood on the steps, proceeding to sell within a couple of hours (she said) 5,000 copies at 5 cents each.

  That day, Albert issued a farewell in The Alarm, which had been temporarily revived by Dyer Lum. Parsons urged his supporters to continue the battle against “the greed, cruelty, and abominations of the privileged class who riot and revel on the labor of their wage slaves.” He refuted rumors that he had asked for clemency. Two of his cellmates, Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab, had in fact signed such a petition. They had renounced the use of force and expressed regret if their work had caused others to believe that violence “was a proper instrument of reform.” (Conventional wisdom held that Fielden had become “intoxicated with his own verbosity,” an assessment that could have applied equally to Parsons.) Melville Stone, the editor of the Chicago Daily News, later wrote that he had responded to a request from Parsons on Sunday for a box of “good (Medium) Havana’s” (cigars). Sitting on Parsons’s prison cot, Stone had listened as Parsons begged him to intercede with the governor for a commutation of his sentence. Stone later recounted that Parsons had “cried out that he could never leave his children a legacy of dishonor; that at least he was not a coward,” and that Stone and the other editors were “responsible for his fate.” Stone cited his own duty to uphold the law, and Parsons suddenly lunged at him. A bailiff intervened, and Stone, shaken, quickly departed.32

  On the evening of Monday, November 7, Lucy issued a statement:

  My husband is dead to me, and I return home to my children to mourn for him. I spoke good-bye to him for the last time this afternoon, for I will never cross the threshold of the jail again, to be insulted and humiliated. The other women can go there and grieve before the men who turned us out this afternoon, but I will never go until I can sit at the side of my husband and talk with him without an infamous guard at my side. I want to live with the picture of my husband in a dungeon ever before my eyes. That will give me strength to bring up two revolutionists. The four men who will not belie their manhood are kept in dark dungeons because they will not sign the petition. Mr. Parsons will never sign any begging appeal. He will die, and I hope they will make a clean sweep of it and hang the whole seven. Let them hang them all, and let the men who cry for blood have all they want of it. The blood of my husband be upon them.

  Although Lucy declared herself done with the effort to save Albert, others did not: the next day, the defense attorneys Captain William Black and Sigmund Zeisler, and even the jailer, appealed to the hold-outs, Parsons, Lingg, Fischer, Spies, and Engel, to petition for clemency.33

  Black urged Parsons to petition for the sake of “his wife and babes,” if not for his own sake, and believed he was a good candidate for clemency, yet Parsons refused. Parsons thought if he held out from making such a request, somehow he and the others might be saved together, since he was so obviously innocent; but in his “perverseness,” in Black’s words, he sealed his fate. Still, Parsons seemed to be in a good mood: “I am innocent,” he said. “There is no proof connecting me with throwing the bomb…. I will say nothing more, and I stand by my innocence.” He wrote farewell letters—one to his “Darling, Precious Little Children,” telling them “how deeply, dearly your Papa loves you,” and that “your Father is a self-offered Sacrifice upon the Altar of Liberty and Happiness.” He urged them to “be industrious, sober and cheerful,” and concluded, “Your mother! Ah! she is the grandest, noblest of women. Love, honor, and obey her.”34

  Thursday evening, the night before the scheduled hangings, Captain Black, Labor Enquirer editor Joseph Buchanan, and several other interested parties secured an audience with Governor Oglesby, who had decided to spare Fielden and Schwab from the hangman’s noose; the two would serve life sentences at the state penitentiary at Joliet. Black argued that Parsons should be included with them, “on the ground that [he] is insane, and has been for many months, and is not responsible for his acts.” A short, shocking letter written by Albert Parsons and sent via Black to Oglesby seemed to confirm this assessment; Buchanan read it aloud to the governor, but whatever chance there was for a stay of execution evaporated soon thereafter. Buchanan summarized the letter in this way: “If he [Parsons] was guilty, and must be hanged because of his presence at the Haymarket meeting, then he hoped a reprieve would be granted in his case until his wife and two children who were also at the meeting could be convicted and hanged with him.” Oglesby replied, “My God, this is terrible.” Parsons’s claim that his children Junior and Lulu had been at Haymarket Square that night was always a frayed lifeline (because it was untrue), and now he seemed to take that claim to a bizarre, callous conclusion—if he was guilty, so, too, were his loved ones, who must also die.35

  Why did Parsons not follow the lead of Schwab and Fielden, and confess to error in writing about dynamite as a means of resolving the sufferings of the laboring classes? First, he clearly did not throw the bomb that night at the Haymarket, and so always knew himself to be innocent of the deaths that occurred there. Second, perhaps he wanted to die, and there is evidence that some of his acquaintances—William Holmes and Dyer Lum among them—had encouraged him to aim (in the words of a reporter) “for the pearly gates by the rope route.” Holmes urged Parsons not “to beg for mercy,” believing his enemies had concocted a “trick” not only to kill him but disgrace him in the process by making him seem weak. Parsons reportedly asked Lum what he should do, and Lum had answered, “Die, Parsons.”36

  Finally, none of the original defendants had a realistic expectation of being set at liberty; the lives of Neebe, Schwab, and Fielden were spared, but Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years and the other two to life in prison. In all likelihood, Parsons made a terrible calculation—weighing his options—and decided that the power of his death as a rallying cry for the masses was preferable to spending the rest of his life in a tiny cell. In her introduction to his book Anarchism, Lucy hinted at this: ever since he had surrendered himself, she wrote, “he had never breathed a breath of pure, fresh air, never looked upon a growing sprig of grass, never beheld earth or sky; that nothing met his eye, but the frowning, bare stone walls relieved only by bolts, bars, and chains; that in his 6×8 inner tomb he was confined twenty-one hours, six days in the week, and forty hours on ‘the Lord’s day’ from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning.” Or perhaps in contemplating his future, he considered the fact that one of his greatest pleasures—declaiming in front of large numbers of people—would forever be denied him. He would never again thrill to the sound of his own voice cheered by the multitudes.37

  On Thursday morning Lucy had again created a “scene.” She arrived at the jail (despite her promise on Monday that she would never do so again), and, denied admission, “threw up her hands and fell to the floor in a dead faint.” Efforts to revive her took twenty minutes, after which guards escorted her out of the building. When, that afternoon, one by one the other wives were granted a final meeting with their loved ones, Lucy was not among them. That day, Louis Lingg cheated the hangman by taking his own life, biting off the top of a dynamite cap that had been smuggled into his cell; the blast blew off part of his face, and he lingered for six hours before dying.38

  Albert spent a restless night into Friday morning, and his mournful rendition of the Scottish ballad “Annie Laurie” before daybreak became legendary. In the song, the singer praises his lover for her brow as gentle as a snowdrift, her throat as graceful as a swan’s, and her dark blue eyes: “And for bonnie Annie Laurie / I’ll lay me down and die.” Widely regarded at the time as a hymn to erotic self-sacrifice, the song did not seem to impress Lucy, who left it out of her accounts of Albert’s last hours.

  Friday morning dawned on a ci
ty girded for war. Awaiting orders, military companies were stationed at various armories, the soldiers armed with Springfield and Remington breech-loaders outfitted with bayonets. Some carried the brand new Winchester “repeating riot gun.” Two Gatling guns and four Howitzers stood ready for quick deployment wherever they might be needed. Government officials issued rifles to their clerks to fend off any invasion of federal buildings by enraged “Reds.” Albert Parsons complained that he had not been able to sleep because of the buzz of conversation between reporters and deputies, and, as he put it in a letter to Dyer Lum: “Caesar kept me awake till late at night with the noise (music), of hammer and saw, erecting my throne, his scaffold.” He passed up the offer of a big breakfast (including alcohol) in favor of fried oysters and coffee. Taking care to dress neatly and brush his hair, he objected loudly when he was denied use of a wash basin. Beginning at 8 a.m., the Reverend Dr. H. W. Bolton of the First Methodist Church made his rounds to minister to the men, but apparently “his efforts to get Parsons to consider spiritual matters were of no avail.”39

  While Albert was fending off the insistent Dr. Bolton, Lucy and her two children, together with Lizzie and three other women kin of the condemned, were trying to gain admission to the jail to say goodbye to Albert one last time. At the Dearborn Avenue entrance they encountered a gauntlet of three hundred police officers, who, awkwardly carrying their heavy arms, were standing shoulder to shoulder to cordon off the perimeter at least two blocks from the jail. Lucy wore a black mourning dress. The children, according to an Inter-Ocean reporter, “were poorly dressed with dark clothes, well-worn shoes and hats; with real woolen stockings and blue scarfs around their necks, and they clung to their mother, without any apparent idea of what was going on.” (This reporter mistook Lulu for a boy.) Lucy informed one officer, “I must go. I am Lucy Parsons. These are my children. We must go to jail. They must see their father.” Lucy, Lizzie, and the children ran from one checkpoint to the next, trying to get in, and finally, holding a child by each hand, Lucy tried to crawl under a rope and push her way through. When she was told that she must obey the law, she exclaimed, “The law! What do I care for the law, and my husband being murdered? Shoot me, kill me if you will.” To a passerby who expressed concern, Lucy screamed, “I don’t want your help, nor your sympathy; I don’t know who you are.” The efforts of “Parsons’ mulatto wife” to force her way through police lines constituted the only notable “violence” of the day.40