Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  The collapse of the United Labor Party signaled the end of independent labor politics in Chicago. The Knights of Labor, decimated by employers’ aggressive use of lockouts and private security forces, began to disintegrate. It was wracked by internal conflicts between local leaders and the head of the organization, Terence V. Powderly, and between “mixed” district assemblies and those that advocated strict autonomy among the various trades. A new, relatively conservative international group of unions for skilled craftspeople, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), benefited from the Knights’ decline. Employers took advantage of a swollen, hungry labor force, replacing strikers with scabs, and skilled workers with machines or with women and children. These lords of industry exulted in the new steel mills, skyscrapers, and department stores that showcased Chicago’s prosperity for a few.7

  At the same time, the city was emerging as a giant social laboratory for groups that were determined to smooth the rough edges of industrial capitalism without overturning the system itself. These groups included clergymen, wealthy clubwomen, members of the college-educated middle class, and sociologists and political scientists employed by the new University of Chicago. The reformers compared society to a living organism, with all parts interdependent for the health and well-being of the whole. “Social” served as the universal watchword as state-socialists became respectable, reformers founded social settlements, clergy preached the Social Gospel, and supporters of unfettered “free” enterprise took up the banner of social Darwinism. In 1888, both the Chicago Times and the Inter-Ocean ran stories on the 13,000 men, women, and children toiling in the city’s 800 squalid garment sweatshops. The title of the Times article of February 12, “Chicago’s White Slaves,” echoed the anarchists’ denunciations of wage slavery. Parsons admitted that the piece might prove “a revelation to those who live upon the wealthy avenues,” but, she added sarcastically, “My lords and ladies, I reveal to you a novelty—the human race exists!”8

  As an articulate woman proposing solutions to the ills of society, Lucy was no lone figure on the city’s political landscape. Still, within a public arena of competing ideas and legislative initiatives, she occupied a prominent niche—a revolutionary cadre of one—and fought to stay in the headlines and on the front page. Many in the white laboring classes applauded her fiery speeches as a bracing antidote to the voices of moderation and compromise that were the hallmarks of social reform. For these workers, Lucy’s message of dynamite-driven resistance represented a catharsis of sorts, since she was virtually the only person bold or foolish enough to persist in speaking the Haymarket anarchists’ language of force. In an effort to distinguish herself from a growing multiplicity of debaters and investigators, many of whom agreed with her basic premise about economic inequality, she began appearing at forums to which she had not been invited, emerging from the back of the hall and striding to the podium where she would hold forth, an ingenious new form of public performance.

  Lucy’s activities of 1888 blurred the line between agitating and money-making. In March she spoke before audiences in Boston and New York, and in December, on her first trip outside the United States, she attracted enthusiastic crowds in England and Scotland. In all these places she sold pictures of herself and copies of Albert’s Anarchism, and her hosts took up collections for her. By this time she was also receiving regular support from the Pioneer Aid and Support Association (PASA), a Chicago group founded in December 1887. PASA, composed mostly of German immigrant women who raised money for the widows and children of the Haymarket martyrs, received liberal support, in turn, from the Central Labor Union. In the summer of 1888, she began work on a biography of Albert, and solicited subscriptions to the new volume. She also founded Labor Assembly #1, which she called the Albert R. Parsons Assembly, establishing a library and a fund to publish books, newspapers, and tracts and “to encourage and promote public speaking among our members.” This group replaced Albert’s Knights assembly 1307, which Powderly had recently dissolved.9

  On June 20, 1888, she was driving around the city in a buggy decorated with banners that featured her husband’s last words—“Let the voice of the people be heard!”—and a variation of August Spies’s proclamation on the gallows—“My silence is more terrible than my speech.” (His actual words were “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”) Stopped by a police officer for distributing ads for Anarchism, she attracted a crowd by yelling: “You blue-coated murderer, the souls of my husband and his companions will creep from their graves to haunt you, your children, and your children’s children.” Hauled before Chief Inspector John Bonfield, she pleaded that her son and daughter were home alone, to which he replied, “You should have thought of that before.” Two days later she was back distributing handbills for the book, this time in the lobby of the elegant Grand Pacific Hotel, with Albert Junior in tow. Again people stopped to stare, “anxious to catch a glimpse of the notorious woman,” in the words of the Tribune.10

  In August Lucy took the children to Waukesha to visit with Daniel Hoan and his family, who had sheltered Albert during his flight. She received a warm welcome from those who remembered her husband fondly and who had come to know her son from his previous extended stay, while she was on her national speaking tour. Accompanying the Parsons family, Lizzie Swank Holmes found herself sympathetic to these simple Waukesha folk, but she believed that their dislike of capitalism was emotional and intuitive rather than the result of the necessarily difficult, extensive reading that anarchism required. For her part, Lucy Parsons resisted succumbing to any Wisconsin reverie; while there, she wrote an article for The Alarm reminding her readers that the Haymarket bomb had proved “that a powerful weapon could be placed in the hands of the people at small expense.”11

  In late October Parsons traveled to New York City, and on the thirtieth she set sail for London. She made the trip at the invitation of the British Social Democrats, chiefly William Morris and other well-known socialists who had vociferously denounced the Haymarket trial and pressed for the prisoners’ release. The eight-day voyage on the passenger ship Arizona proved a delightful diversion for her, as she found herself in the company of pleasant, non-steerage strangers. The officers and staff were polite and attentive. The passengers took their meals together, and on deck they played games, drank ale, discussed socialism, and applauded Parsons’s rendering of John Greenleaf Whittier’s eighty-eight-line poem “The Reformer.” By the middle of the journey they had come to think of themselves as a unit, all bound together by the pitching of the seas and the onslaught of seasickness, a malady that respected neither social class nor age nor gender. Free of the usual cant, her article in The Alarm detailing this voyage is one of the very few pieces she wrote in her life in which she admitted that she had actually enjoyed herself somewhere.12

  Disembarking in Liverpool, Parsons traveled by train to London, marveling at the lovely English countryside. Jane Burden, the glamourous wife of William Morris, took her sightseeing to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. During her stay in the city, she met the Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, a famous theorist of anarchism. In Trafalgar Square, a fog-bound Hyde Park, and other venues she regaled crowds with her claim to American authenticity: “When Columbus first came in sight of the Western continent, my father’s ancestors were there to give them a native greeting. When the conquering hosts of Cortez moved into Mexico, my mother’s ancestors were there to repel the invader.” The Trafalgar rally of November 13 carried special meaning: it was the site of “Bloody Sunday,” November 13, 1887, when, at a mass meeting protesting the Haymarket executions, the police had shot and killed three men. Now, though, memories of that clash and fears of violence had depressed the attendance at Parsons’s talk. The secretary of the Social Democratic Federation assured a reporter that, although the group remained outraged over Haymarket, “we wish it to be distinctly understood, on the other hand, that as Social Democrats we are necessarily in direct oppositi
on to anarchism.”13

  With three lectures prepared—on anarchism, the Haymarket trial, and the evils of child labor—Parsons spoke to crowds in Norwich and Ipswich and to intimate gatherings of socialists and anarchists in London. William Morris told a correspondent that “she is a curious looking woman: No signs of European blood in her, Indian with a touch of negro; but she speaks pure Yankee.” The Alarm saw fit to republish a description offered by a London paper: “She has the full lips, the black hair, the gleaming black eyes, and the rich warm complexion that tell of the mingling of the blood. She is handsome with a strange beauty. But it is not until she speaks that the full power of her personality strikes you, for she has a perfect speaking voice. Rich, sweet, clear, and low it carries itself without any effort on her part with ten times the effect of ten times greater lung power. It is a voice mobile to every changing sentiment it expresses.” Parsons considered the trip a great success, marred only by the words and deeds of a few, small-minded people: an English labor organizer named Annie Besant, who had just led a successful strike of female matchstick makers, caused a stir by condemning Parsons’s “wicked and foolish advice” about the necessity of force. And then, on the return voyage, an “insolent” crew and captain went out of their way to insult her.14

  Upon arriving back in New York City, Parsons happily acquiesced in a reporter’s request for an interview, and, according to the reporter, made a startling announcement—that she was to be married to thirty-eight-year-old Eduard Bernstein, a resident of London and the editor of The German Social Democrat, a newspaper based there. A Jewish anarchist, the married Bernstein had been hounded out of Switzerland and now published his paper in Kentish Town. Informed of the engagement that same day, Justus Schwab, a New York City acolyte of Johann Most, denounced it as “an infernal lie,” maintaining that Mrs. Parsons would never tarnish the memory of her dead husband. By the next morning Parsons was denying the whole shocking story, this “chain of unmitigated falsehoods,” claiming it was “merely gotten up for sensational effect and to kill whatever little influence my return might have on our movement.” She was the first to admit that “it would be a strange kind of conglomeration for me to go to London to speak at memorial meetings and return betrothed to another man.” Fabricated or not, the story served as a cautionary tale about the kind of behavior the radical community deemed appropriate for Albert Parsons’s widow.15

  Lucy Parsons had told her friends that she would return to Chicago on December 17, and so that morning, George Schilling and other comrades gathered at Union Depot, planning to welcome her home. Also there were Junior and Lulu, who had been staying with separate German immigrant families during their mother’s six-week absence; a Mrs. Cordts had escorted them to the station. Without notifying anyone, however, Parsons got off the train at an earlier stop and took a cab home. Later that day, Mrs. Cordts appeared at the Milwaukee Avenue apartment with the children, who were both suffering from the cold, having waited at the train station all day. Perhaps Parsons knew that a week earlier the new chief of police, George W. Hubbard, had vowed that anarchists would no longer be permitted to hold “revolutionary gatherings,” including any demonstration in honor of her return; or perhaps she wanted to avoid questions about her alleged attachment to Bernstein; or perhaps she was eager to see the man who had been staying in her flat while she was abroad—twenty-eight-year-old Martin Robert Lacher, her “boarder.”16

  Born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1860, Lacher had come to the United States as a twenty-year-old and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1883, still in St. Paul, he had become a naturalized citizen and married the eighteen-year-old Helen Engelsipen, also German-born. The following year they had a daughter, Olga, and shortly thereafter they had moved to Milwaukee, where Lacher had worked as a printer for the Evening Wisconsin. He soon became active in socialist politics, earning the nickname “Anarchist” for his vocal support of the Haymarket defendants. He was in Chicago the day before the execution, and had been arrested “on account of his injudicious talk.” In January 1888, he and his wife and daughter were living at 413 North Paulina Street, where his second child was born on the twenty-eighth of that month. That he quickly became infatuated—or obsessed—with Parsons is suggested by the fact that this daughter was named Lulu Lucy. A Chicago Tribune reporter described him as “an exceptionally nice-looking and intelligent young man. He has a finely shaped head, expressive brown eyes, a small black mustache, and wears rimless glasses.”17

  In the summer of 1888, Lacher left his family and moved in with Parsons. He had apparently offered to help her with the new volume she was editing, Life of Albert R. Parsons. Soon after Parsons returned from her trip abroad, she and Lacher began to appear in public together, and over the next two and a half years his name would frequently be linked to hers—he was probably the “black haired young man” who was described by the press in June 1889 as “usually accompany[ing] her” to anarchist meetings.18

  Parsons had been back in Chicago for barely two weeks when she and Lacher tangled with Police Chief Hubbard. To the joy of Chicago radicals, in April 1889 Bonfield had been caught up in a corruption scandal and dismissed from the force. Hubbard, however, matched Bonfield in his animosity toward radicals. The new chief declared in late December that henceforth Parsons would be prohibited from delivering any “violent anarchistic harangue.” If there were any doubts about his intentions, he made them clear: “She simply can’t speak in Chicago.” Within a few days, a local judge would rescind this gag order against Parsons and other labor radicals, pronouncing it a violation of free speech. In the meantime, though, Hubbard ordered the proprietor of a hall where Parsons was to appear on December 26 to refuse her entrance. That day found her and Lacher defiant, standing on a sidewalk outside the hall. She cried, “O, men of America, degenerate Yankees, is this your boasted liberty? Is this your free speech? Is this your right to assemble? O, the glorious stars and stripes!” Agitated, Lacher began to yell at the police, and he was promptly arrested for disorderly conduct. In the coming months, this scene repeated itself, with Parsons trying to address a crowd, and Lacher joining in the fray and skirmishing with police in an effort to defend her. The Tribune interviewed Lacher at length and found him conversant about First Amendment issues, if inclined to stretch the meaning of “speech”: “The truth is that the right of free speech—if it be a positive right at all—carries with it the right of free action,” he said.19

  By 1890, the couple was socializing in public; at one point, they accompanied Lizzie and William Holmes to hear a lecture by Judge John Peter Altgeld on the injustice of incarcerating men and women who could not pay fines. It is not difficult to understand why the young German immigrant would become enamored with the beautiful and famously demonstrative Mrs. Parsons. And she had found a soul mate in the temperamental printer (the profession of her former husband), who relished a good fight with words and fists. No doubt she enjoyed his devotion and, presumably, the sexual gratification that he later said was an integral part of their relationship. Perhaps she thought of her early days in Waco, where she had never paid much mind to the sanctimonious gossips. And now, must the widow of a martyr take a vow of chastity?20

  In mid-October, Parsons suffered another major loss in her life when eight-year-old Lulu Eda Parsons died of lymphedema (blockage of the lymph glands). It is possible that the little girl had never fully recovered from her bout with scarlet fever. Characteristically, Parsons refused to betray any sorrow in public. Delivering a lecture at the Arbeiter Bund (a German workers’ group) in mid-November, she made only brief reference to her dead daughter and to any presumed heavenly reunion between Lulu and Albert: “Do you suppose they kissed each other in the beautifully described hereafter?” she asked the audience. “Bah. Don’t be deceived. So-called Christians will tell you such things.” She added, “The principles of anarchy will prevail, even though it takes blood to make them supreme.”21

  A week after Lulu died, Albert Junior disappeared. Parsons
looked for him herself, refusing to enlist the police in the search. After a few days, he returned home on his own; apparently, he had gone off to visit friends. He and Lulu had endured much together; because of their parents’ demanding travel and speaking schedules, they had been cared for by non-family members for weeks and even months at a time. They had lived through their father’s execution and witnessed their mother’s romantic entanglement with another man. While Parsons was abroad in November 1888, the two children had stood together at the annual memorial ceremony at Waldheim as Schilling had read them the letter their father had written two days before his death: “O, my children, how deeply, dearly your papa loves you. We show our love by living for our loved ones. We also prove our love by dying when necessary for them.” Albert Parsons’s ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter no doubt derived little comfort from the idea that he had died for them.22

  Around this time, Lucy Parsons began to clash with the officers of Pioneer Aid. Predictably, some comrades, especially those who were appalled at her relationship with Lacher, came to resent her insistent claims on the association. In 1890 she secured a loan from the group and with it paid off the mortgage on what a reporter called a “queer little cottage” she had built the year before in the northwest corner of the predominately German 15th Ward, at 999 Hammond Avenue (later North Troy Avenue) in the Avondale neighborhood. It was “a curious domicile” that she had designed herself: “It is unsymmetrically tall, almost perfectly square, built of pine and stands solitary in the midst of a clay waste,” the reporter wrote. Even the roughhewn furniture revealed “a woman at war with society.” This same reporter, who visited her there in December 1889, met Junior, whom he described as “a manly, healthy and apparently intelligent boy.”23