Later, Lizzie Swank Holmes would provide a heartrending account of the morning—the children, their lips blue from the cold, shaking with fear, and Lucy frantic to the point of collapse. At 9:15, the two women and two children were loaded into a patrol wagon and taken to the police station on East Chicago Avenue. In separate cells, the women were strip-searched by a matron and then booked on the charge of obstructing the streets. Lizzie wrote, “Instead of being surrounded by loving friends, [Lucy] was caged in a cell, insulted and degraded until her heart was broken.” For their part, the police expressed grim satisfaction that the notorious Mrs. Parsons was nowhere near the jail at noon. But had she been there, she would have been proud of her husband for his composure during this most dreadful moment.41
With great ceremony, the condemned were retrieved from their cells, read the death warrant, and marched to the courtyard gallows. Along the way, Parsons said to one of the bailiffs, “I really feel sorry for Schwab and Fielden” (for refusing to embrace a noble death with the rest). Clad in white shrouds against the background of the jail’s dark walls, the doomed prisoners appeared as ghostly apparitions. A Dallas reporter compared Parsons on the scaffold to a great actor in a magnificent tableau, someone who had “wrought himself to an ecstasy of self-glorification” and intended to die “in a manner to impress, if possible, on all future generations that he was a martyr.” He continued: “No tragedian that has paced the stage in America ever made a more marvelous presentation of a self-chosen part, perfect in every detail. The upward turn of his eyes, his distant, far-away look, and above all, the attitude of complete resignation that every fold of the awkward shroud only seemed to make more distinct, was by far the most striking feature of the gallows picture.” After the death cap had been placed over his head, Parsons demanded, in a loud, firm voice, “Will I be allowed to speak, O men of America? Let me speak, Sheriff Matson.” A New York Times reporter said that he raised his voice, “as if beginning an emphatic speech,” and cried out, “Let the voice of the people be heard, O…” when suddenly the trap door fell and all four bodies dangled at once. The telegraph operators who were present immediately sent the news out across the wires. A physician pronounced Parsons dead seven minutes later, at 12:04 p.m. Witnesses differed over whether he had “died hard”—from strangulation—or “easy”—from a broken neck. When they heard the door fall, soldiers on the roof of the jail threw down their weapons and clapped and cheered. The prison guards mused aloud about the boredom that lay ahead of them: “No proxy wives, no fruit-baskets, no good-looking reporters, no nothing.” Front-page headlines trumpeted, “Justice Is Done.”42
At 2:15 in the afternoon the police released Lucy, Lizzie, and the children; the two women were ordered to appear in court Saturday morning. As they left the station they were met by a reporter (at least one would remain near “the dark skinned, lustrous eyed widow of Albert R. Parsons” for the next three days), who answered in the affirmative when Lucy asked him, “Is the bloody business over?” Prodded for a reaction, she exclaimed, “My God! I can’t talk to you now.” But then, tears streaming down her face, she proceeded to give a lengthy account of her travails that morning, and to interrupt Lizzie, who tried to say a few words. In the boisterous crowd outside the jail, no one noticed Lucy, and already the newsboys were yelling, “Full account of execution!” and trying to shove a paper in her hands. Dispatching the children to a friend’s house, the two women went directly to the undertaker a few blocks from the Parsons home on Milwaukee Avenue. There, holding Albert’s certificate of death and a permit for internment, Lucy stood by the coffin as the undertaker unscrewed the lid. She bent down and carefully removed the white death cap from the corpse, and stood stony-faced as Lizzie began to weep uncontrollably.43
That evening, members of the local IWPA Defense Association charged with visiting the wives of all the deceased found her lying on the floor of her apartment surrounded by women friends. Rousing herself, Lucy lifted her hands and cried, “Oh papa, papa! Come back to me! Just one word from those handsome lips! They have murdered him! They have murdered my noble, generous, loving husband, who never harmed a man in his life!” Clutching his picture, she paced up and down the room, wailing.44
The following day, Saturday, Albert’s body was delivered to the apartment, where a piece of black cloth hung on the door together with the sign “Parsons & Co., Fashionable Dressmaking.” (The court case against Lucy and Lizzie scheduled for that morning had been dismissed in the absence of a prosecutor.) A distraught Lucy was there to receive the coffin, as were her children, who huddled together in a corner, crying. Outside, where a crowd had gathered, police jostled with pickpockets; all of them could hear Lucy inside, calling Albert’s name as her friends sought to keep her from looking at the corpse. Meanwhile, members of the Defense Association went to the apartments of all four deceased, collecting the clothes, shrouds, and other effects of the men to prevent them from being stolen and displayed for profit: “Every little memento and relic has been carefully preserved and placed in a secure place where it will be impossible for the enterprising showman to secure a grip on this desirable material.”45
On Sunday at noon, a huge cortege started down Milwaukee Avenue, stopping at the homes of the dead anarchists to add their bodies to the procession of an estimated 6,000 marchers. At the Parsons residence, mourners had been coming through over the past twenty hours to pay their respects. Now a great throng assembled outside the building to watch as Albert Parsons’s coffin was loaded onto a wagon bearing an immense floral display that said, “From Knights of Labor Assembly No. 1307.” Accompanying Lucy and the children was Joseph Buchanan. The editor was struck by the widow’s appearance: “She was not the Mrs. Parsons of old. Grief had traced its handmarks upon the comely features; long hours, days, weeks, and months of fearful suspense had been ended by an awful tragedy. With a moan scarcely human in its thrilling intensity, she fell upon the body of him whom she loved so well in life and will worship in death.”46
Mayor John A. Roche had banned flags, speeches, and public demonstrations, but the brass bands and muffled drums played dirges. As the procession moved forward, the crowd continued to swell, with flashes of red abounding—neckties, ribbons, badges on men’s coats, trimmings on women’s hats. Onlookers fell silent as the hearses passed in what was a reprise of Central Labor Union parades, with German singing societies and labor unions predominating. Halting at the Wisconsin Central depot, an estimated 3,000 mourners boarded thirty-five coaches to Waldheim Cemetery, a nondenominational German burying ground located in a nearby suburb. The train had to inch its way forward because of the crush of people lining the tracks. At the cemetery, the bodies would remain in a vault for five weeks until a proper burial could take place. Tommy Morgan began his brief eulogy with Albert’s last words, “Let the voice of the people be heard!” A bell tolling loudly, insistently, reminded some present of the inspiration for Albert’s paper The Alarm.47
By Tuesday Lucy was back at her desk in the offices of the Western Newsman, editing Albert’s manuscript of Anarchism; the first copies (which she self-published) would appear on December 10 and include the speeches the eight defendants had made to the court in October the year before, essays by Lucy and Dyer Lum on anarchy, and testimonials by William Parsons on Albert’s life and by Lizzie Swank Holmes on his last hours. Lucy seemed surprisingly calm; she told a reporter that she was determined to honor the life’s work of her dead husband: “It is a duty I owe to him and to the world and shall be sacredly performed. I shall give my whole time to this work for months to come. Plans for the future? I have none. I am drifting along on the river of time, knowing little and caring less where it will take me.” Yet perhaps she consoled herself at the thought that, as of November 11, she, too, was enshrined in the pantheon of anarchist heroes, along with the dead, as already poems were being written to honor her: “Most bravely has thou faced the fight / And nobly battled for the right” (“To Mrs. Lucy Parsons”).48
; ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, LUCY PARSONS SEEMED IN AN EXPANSIVE mood, eager to talk to a Tribune reporter and remark upon the calm that had pervaded the day of the executions. Bonfield and his henchmen had badly misjudged things, she contended, when “they thought we would be fools enough to dynamite some of their buildings, which a drove of slaves could rebuild in a year.” The time was not right for revolution, she said. Yet among her anarchist comrades, she said cryptically, “the subject [of violence] was thoroughly discussed and a line of policy decided upon.” She recalled the awful morning when the sheriff had asked Albert her address, so officers would know where his body could be deposited after his death. Sheriff Matson, she said, “knew perfectly well where I lived, and so did every policeman and detective in the city.”49
The following afternoon, several hundred mourners boarded a specially chartered train to Waldheim Cemetery for a ceremony to mark the internment of the five bodies—those of the four who had been executed plus Lingg. It was a cold, bleak day. Atop Parsons’s coffin was a large flower arrangement in the shape of a pillow that said, “Our Papa.” Captain Black spoke, among others, and soon after he began, someone called out, “Make way for Mrs. Parsons!” The estimated 2,000 mourners stood back as Lucy, supported on either side by Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband William Holmes, slowly approached the caskets positioned near the open graves. At Albert’s coffin, “she gave voice to a wail which startled the crowd,” according to a reporter who was present. Black stood transfixed, watching Lucy struggle to speak. Finally, he took control of the situation, saying, “Someone please take some fresh snow and rub the lady’s face.” Soft snowballs rubbed against her temples were apparently sufficient to revive her, and a group of friends carried her away. As the coffins were lowered into their graves, a German choral society sang “Am Grabe Unserer Freunde” (At the Grave of Our Friends). In covering the funeral, the Tribune announced, in a headline, “Mrs. Parsons Getting Back Some of Her Old-Time Spirit.” Indeed, she was—if she had ever lost it.50
PART 3
BLATHERKITE-GODDESS OF FREE SPEECH
Chapter 10
The Widow Parsons Sets Her Course
THE COLLAPSE OF THE TRAP DOOR ON THE COOK COUNTY JAIL’S scaffold generated depths of emotion that words can scarcely convey. The self-proclaimed “respectable classes” rejoiced, hopeful that the pernicious doctrine of anarchism had been eradicated and its murderous preacher-practitioners silenced forever. At the other end of the political spectrum, beginning at noon on November 11, 1887, radicals of various political persuasions vowed a new, or renewed, commitment to the cause. Many years later, the socialist Eugene V. Debs, who still felt overwhelmed by his sense of outrage, described the executions in terms that would not have sounded out of place in an address by Lucy Parsons herself: “The sordid capitalism which preys upon the life-blood of labor, whose ethics are expressed in beastly gluttony and insatiable greed, and whose track of conquest is strewn with the bones of countless victims, pounced upon these men with the cruel malignity of fiends and strangled them to death.” The anarchist Emma Goldman, eighteen years old in 1887, considered the deaths of the martyrs “the most decisive influence in my existence.” Throughout her life, their spirits “seemed to hover over me and give deeper meaning to the events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth.” In Latin America, images of the four men on the gallows entered the pantheon of radical iconography. In Europe, portraits of the eight anarchists who had originally been sentenced to die adorned the wall of labor halls so that none would forget, in George Schilling’s words, “the chief tragedy of the closing years of the nineteenth century.”1
Lucy suffered deeply and in her own way. She rarely spoke about her marriage, but in 1886, before Albert’s execution, she said, to a crowd in Cincinnati: “Look at me. Fourteen years ago in September I was married to Albert Parsons. Seven years after that a boy was born to us, and twenty-one months later a girl. My husband seldom spoke an unkind word and never a vulgar word, and each night when he came home the children ran into his arms, and each morning at his departure each one of us received a parting kiss. Where is that happy home now?” Still, the mantle of revered Haymarket widow did not rest lightly on her shoulders. Within six months of Albert’s execution she scandalized the radical and respectable classes alike by taking a young lover, a married man. And she seemed all too eager to exploit—in a literal sense—the goodwill and sympathy extended to her by the German community in Chicago in the wake of Albert’s death. She brushed off the public censure; the combined effects of her hunger for companionship, sexual and otherwise, and her need to support herself, were just too great.2
At the same time, she tried to stake out a new purpose for her life. She continued to speak about anarchism, but she also seemed intent on pushing the boundaries of the First Amendment, and in the process became a leading proponent of free speech—this in an age when, as she knew all too well, advocating anarchy could lead to a death sentence. Her battles with the Chicago police over what she could and could not say, and which flag she must or must not display, became legend. Indeed, the more the anarchist movement diminished in numbers and influence, the more the city’s authorities—aided and abetted by the mainstream press—hounded its adherents. To carry on the fight, then, Lucy began to groom her son as a worthy namesake of his famous father. In this particular role, though, she would fail in a notably newsworthy and ultimately tragic way.
LUCY’S PERIOD OF PUBLIC MOURNING WAS BRIEF: ON DECEMBER 30, less than two weeks after the formal interment at Waldheim, she appeared in court to demand the $5,000 worth of newly bound copies of Albert’s book Anarchism that had been seized by the police—they had been taken not because of Albert’s activities, but because the printer with whom Lucy had contracted had failed to pay his rent. By January it was clear that she would have her hands full protecting her husband’s legacy from the many purported friends who in her eyes would seek to despoil it. In The Alarm she attacked J. William Lloyd, an anarchist and author of an essay titled “Vengeance: An Open Letter to the Communist-Anarchists of Chicago.” Lloyd had admitted that Albert and his comrades had done much to advance the cause, but he had warned that those gains would vanish at the first instance of violence against “innocent women and babes.” In response, Lucy denounced Lloyd’s apparent “quaker policy” of pacifism and chided him for his patronizing tone, saying he was “like a good mother who… endeavors to impress upon her naughty children the importance of her advice.” As a final retort she wrote that it was a waste of her time trying to convert “one bourgeois professor.”3
By the late 1880s, the infighting among self-proclaimed anarchists in the United States had grown bitter. Lucy identified herself as an anarchist-communist, arguing that trade unions and other small, self-governing, voluntary groups should take the place of a central government. In general, anarchist-communists supported the abolition of the state as well as the abolition of money, private property, and capitalism; in this new society, workers would own the means of production and participate in a direct form of democracy that made political parties superfluous. In contrast, Lloyd represented anarchist-individualists, extreme libertarians who were hostile toward state-sponsored institutions of any kind and for the most part indifferent toward trade unions. The views of a third group overlapped with those of socialists, who favored a strong workers’ state to redistribute property; many German immigrants, including Johann Most, embraced this kind of heavy-handed anarchism. In general, anarchists rejected the ballot box, though they disagreed among themselves about the role of violence in bringing about a new society, with Most quite uniquely explicit on that score. Unlike many of her comrades, Lucy did not shrink from a close association with the reviled Most despite his call for what was essentially domestic terrorism.4
Around the globe, anarchists doing battle with repressive nation-states and colonial bureaucracies—in places such as Spain and the Philippines and Cuba—faced the constant threat of the firing squad. Some embra
ced assassination, bombings, and other forms of militant resistance as a matter of course. Citing the recent Haymarket executions, Lucy Parsons argued that her own politics amounted to a life-and-death ideology, and that violence was a necessary ingredient of the coming upheaval. Her call for revolution (crowd-pleasing to many brow-beaten workers, to be sure) was consistent to the point of rigidity.5
Chicago was undergoing rapid, dramatic transformations, but Lucy’s speeches and writings, though prescient about the depredations of big business at the time and in decades to come, echoed old themes and ignored new realities. Between 1880 and 1890, the city doubled its population, to 1,099,850, and also doubled its area in square miles and its manufacturing capacity. The number of bookkeepers and store clerks increased twenty-fold. Almost half a million of the city’s residents had been born in a foreign country, increasing numbers of them from Eastern Europe, and they constituted two-thirds of all factory workers. In the midst of widely heralded “progress,” workers faced the same brutal conditions: limited housing stock that forced thousands to subsist in cramped, fetid tenements, and stagnant wages for men, women, and children, who often labored six days a week for up to sixteen hours a day. However, the growth of the white-collar labor force suggested that industrial capitalism was better able than Lucy had anticipated to absorb at least native-born white surplus labor.6
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