In the summer of 1890, Louis Zeller, a member of the Central Labor Union, initiated an effort to withhold PASA funds from Parsons. The Central Labor Union taxed its members for her support, and some of them had grown weary of what they considered Parsons’s disingenuous complaints about straitened circumstances. At a meeting where she was accused of uttering half-truths and prevarications, she became so angry that she seized a book and tried to hit Zeller over the head with it; she would have used a chair for the same ends had someone not restrained her. Lacher, who happened to be the treasurer of PASA, was called to account for abandoning his wife and daughters for Parsons. He replied, “I do not want to conceal that my domestic relations are unhappy. My wife and I have separated, but I have supported her all the time. There is nothing out of the way in Mrs. Parsons keeping a boarder.” He believed Zeller and Schilling had a vendetta against him and Parsons.24
In September, the CLU enumerated several charges against Parsons: She had raised money for herself in Europe and New York all the while neglecting to inform supporters in those places that she was receiving assistance in Chicago. She had insisted on stipends for two children even after Lulu’s death (PASA had paid for Lulu’s funeral). She had “a couple of houses and lots in this city,” and presumably made a decent living from renting these out, as well as from accepting lecture fees and the proceeds from sales of publications. She had failed to repay the construction loan for her cottage on Hammond Avenue. She kept a “boarder, Mr. Lacher, who has a sickly wife and two children, who are certain to be neglected by the absence of the husband and father, for nobody can serve two masters at once.” In response to Parsons’s supporters, who felt it “was the sacred duty of the association” to keep her on the payroll in perpetuity, her critics charged that “her conduct is not such as to meet the approval of her acquaintances.” Within a few months, her request from the association for $300 in cash to offset expenses incurred in the publication of Life of Albert R. Parsons met with another round of protests from a group of benefactors. PASA leaders called her machinations “eine erste Klasse Schwindel” (a first-class swindle). The Tribune wrote about a “Row Among the Reds.”25
Parsons’s personal life with Lacher had attracted notice and censure. At the same time, she betrayed no doubts about thrusting her children into the public spotlight. She considered Junior “the picture of his father,” her dead husband’s heir apparent in the struggle against capitalism, saying, “Let the children take up the work where the fathers left off.” She told reporters that she was raising her son to avenge the injustice visited upon his father, a comment that prompted some angry editorializing about her determination that he become (in the words of the Tribune) “a kind of human blood hound whose sole purpose in life shall be to spill the blood of his fellow beings.” Apparently she had decided soon after Albert’s death that, positioned carefully next to their grief-stricken mother at certain events, the children could provide a compelling tableau vivant. In New York, before Lulu’s death, she had provoked the ire of Johann Most, who had refused to appear with Parsons on stage when she had announced that she was planning to bring her son and daughter along “for dramatic effect”; he said he would not be part of her “baby show.”26
Increasingly, Parsons pressed her son into helping her sell tracts and his father’s writings. Still, she confounded her critics with her domestic life in her “humble home.” In late December 1888, she welcomed a reporter, who described the scene—a picture of Albert on an easel, a Christmas tree, and the children’s toys strewn about the floor. Noting that the “babies” had just gone off to school, Parsons proceeded to give her stock speech, prompting the headline writer to title the piece, “Lucy Wanted Blood.” She presented herself as a weary, widowed mother, at the same time declaring that “her life would be devoted to agitation, organization, and revolution, the latter of which was sure to come.” Responding to questions from another reporter, this time with Junior present, she told of running into Judge Joseph Gary on the sidewalk a few days earlier and berating him: “You bloody old murderer, if I had a knife I’d stab you where you stand, you miserable old villain.” For the reporter, she then pulled out a red scarf and put it around Junior’s collar, saying, “He is my brave little anarchist,” while “affectionately hugging the little fellow.”27
Perhaps for Albert Junior all of this seemed too much; one morning in the middle of April 1891, instead of going off to school as usual, he disappeared again. This time Parsons contacted the police for help. Six weeks later, the thirteen-year-old was finally located in Waukesha, presumably with the Hoans, though why no one there contacted Parsons to tell her that he was safe is a mystery. Perhaps he missed his sister and went off to grieve, or craved the attention of the Hoans and the peace of Waukesha, or resented his mother’s efforts to offer him up as his father’s successor.28
Or Albert Junior might have been reacting to an escalation of tensions between Parsons and her lover. In early July, she swore out a warrant for Lacher’s arrest, charging him with “malicious trespass,” and the police took him into custody on July 15. By this time the couple’s relationship had devolved into mutual, bitter recrimination. Apparently Parsons had given an “entertainment” at her house and, when one of her invited guests met with Lacher’s disfavor, they had quarreled, and he had hit her in the face. She had fought back, flinging a flatiron at him. On the sixteenth she told a judge that she had locked Lacher out of the house, only to have him return with an axe, which he had used to smash in the front door and reduce much of her furniture to splinters.29
In his defense Lacher said that it was he who had written most of Life of Albert R. Parsons, and that he had also paid many of Parsons’s bills while the two were living together. The furniture that he chopped to pieces was his, he said. He told the court that “for the past three years this woman and I have lived together as man and wife. During that time I learned to love her devotedly, notwithstanding that I was cognizant of the fact that she was continually intimate with other men. It was at her continued solicitations that I abandoned my wife and two children, and when my wife threatened to have her arrested I myself bribed her with a folding bed to drop the case. Our intimacy continued up till two weeks ago.” As proof that they cared deeply for each other, he showed the judge a pin in his possession, a miniature gallows and noose, “a love token” that she had given him. According to a reporter present, Lacher added that he had recently lost his job, “and that Mrs. Parsons had seen fit to transfer her favors to some one better able to pay for them.” Parsons was standing nearby in the courtroom and listening; enraged, she shook her parasol at him and cried, “If you say that again I’ll kill you.” The judge fined Lacher $25 and court costs; but the drama would continue.30
The year of her fortieth birthday, Lucy Parsons was bereft of her husband and daughter, rid of a lover, and apparently estranged from her son. Her iconic status as Haymarket widow had suffered among even some former allies from her tempestuous affair with Lacher and her suspect claims to financial assistance. Yet the attention paid her by adoring crowds, solicitous reporters, resentful comrades, and paranoid police and politicians gave her life purpose and meaning.
IN EARLY DECEMBER 1888, WILLIAM HOLMES, LIZZIE SWANK HOLMES’S husband, addressed several hundred socialists at Waverly Hall on Lake Street. He felt compelled to answer a pointed question posed by the Chicago Tribune: During Thanksgiving week, the churches had fed the poor with turkey and soup, but what had the anarchists done? Holmes fumed, “We have done nothing to degrade the poor by making them recipients of charity,” and furthermore, “We are rousing that spirit of discontent that that is bound to bring its fruitage; above all we are arousing that feeling of independence characteristic of our forefathers.”31
What were anarchists actually doing for the poor? It was not a new question, but one that took on more resonance in an age of social reform. Lucy Parsons dismissed charity as “only hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers.” When she d
eclaimed upon the “Gospel of Discontent,” she seemed to be ridiculing the pervasive “Social Gospel” movement, which called upon religious-minded, well-to-do folks to address human suffering in a tangible way.32
The reformer Jane Addams called the 1890s the “decade of discussion,” and indeed, all of Chicago seemed to be debating the proper roles of different entities—city and state government, employers, labor unions, intellectuals, politicians, the clergy, and clubwomen—in the grand project of reform. Though Addams came to represent the spirit of the Progressive Era in turn-of-the-century America generally, in fact her ideas about social change were very much the product of Chicago’s ferment. Addams saw herself and other people of goodwill as being wedged between two dangerous, opposing forces—arrogant industrialists, on the one hand, and the impoverished, angry laboring classes, on the other; both groups were similarly unreasonable in that they promoted “propaganda as over against constructive social effort.” The reformer’s task, Addams said, was to find a middle way that would ease the everyday suffering of the poor while allowing the wealthy the pleasure of their profits. Addams’s social settlement, Hull House, was, in her words, “quite as much under the suspicion of one side as the other.” To a street heckler doubtful of her motives, she later wrote, “I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either of them.” Still, neither the railroad-car magnate George Pullman nor Lucy Parsons could abide Addams’s well-meaning ways.33
Late 1880s Chicago was a showcase for women leaders determined to deploy moral suasion and secure passage of municipal or state legislation to counter a coldhearted capitalism. In June 1888, Elizabeth Morgan, wife of socialist leader Tommy Morgan, helped to found the AFL-affiliated Ladies Federal Labor Union (LFLU) no. 2703, a group that included women in a variety of crafts, including candy-making, as well as typists and clerks. The LFLU and the Chicago Trade and Labor Association (by 1888 part of the AFL) appointed Elizabeth to head a commission charged with investigating the sweatshop system and its spawn, the “sweater [boss], a human parasite.” Morgan visited workshops throughout the city, documenting the miserable lives of men, women, and children who toiled for pennies a day in windowless attics, cellars, and sheds for six and a half days a week. Released in September 1891 and titled “The New Slavery,” her report highlighted the malnourished, sleep-deprived children who ate and slept in tenements surrounded by garbage and horse manure, and the workrooms overwhelmed with the stench of human excrement. In such close, filthy conditions, diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid spread quickly.34
The report prompted passage of a new factory-inspection law by the Illinois legislature that limited the hours for women in manufacturing to eight a day and established a factory inspector with a staff of twelve. Not surprisingly, the sweaters resisted the new law, and careworn parents continued to order their children to work. A dozen inspectors could not possibly inspect the many hundreds of small shops tucked away in the city’s vast neighborhoods. However, the Factory Act did reveal a larger impulse among the middle-class women and men of the city, who, it seemed, were willing to mediate between rapacious employers, on the one hand, and vulnerable workers, on the other.35
Albert Parsons would have appreciated the faith of the Progressives in the compilation of statistics related to social, economic, and demographic trends, and Lucy Parsons must have felt some satisfaction now that both reformers and newspaper editors were rendering the plight of sewing women as a form of slavery. Yet Lucy Parsons was neither a labor organizer nor a social reformer. A prominent actor in Chicago’s “decade of propaganda,” she could expound on history, literature, and political theory, and she specialized in rousing the indignation of the laboring classes. Yet unlike many of her debating partners (real or imagined), Parsons resisted describing in much detail the new social order she envisioned in a future, anarchistic world. In early 1891, a New York World reporter, partly tongue-in-cheek, tried to pin her down on controversial issues of the day. Striking in her all-black dress adorned with only a “blood red badge,” and her gold necklace with the gallows charm, she said she believed that the laboring classes “should rise and overthrow aristocracy by means of dynamite.”
The wealth of this country should be equally distributed, she thinks. If one man through shrewdness should then amass more wealth than his neighbor, this surplus should be taken away from him. Every man should carry arms and have the right of self-defence. Shops and means of transit should be free. There would be no need of elections, police or a standing army to keep a handful of Indians in subjection. Give the Indians all the land they want, there is plenty of it. If they kill you let your friends kill them. Every man should bring his products to an immense clearinghouse in each city or town, and every family to receive an equal portion.
What to do with criminals? All of them “are more or less insane,” their misdeeds in most cases the result of greed for money. The mansions of the labor barons? “We will let them stand as monuments of shame for the elements to decay.” Coast and harbor defenses? No need for them: “We hope to conquer the world. This country is not our only field of conquest.” Free postage stamps and mail delivery; free beer, newspapers, and public schools. And her Chinese policy? “I really cannot say, said Mrs. Parsons after a moment’s meditation. These small details must be arranged afterwards.”36
In addition to continuing her hectic speaking schedule, Parsons remained a prolific writer and editor. In 1889 she published Life of Albert R. Parsons, with Brief History of the Labor Movement in America, a 255-page book that sold for $1.50 a copy. The volume included George Schilling’s lengthy testimonial for Albert in the form of a history of the Chicago labor movement; Albert’s autobiography as originally published in Knights of Labor; his letters to The Alarm and to Lucy recounting his agitation trips throughout the Midwest; accounts of the Haymarket trial; newspaper articles; reminiscences by Captain William Black (the attorney), Lizzie Swank Holmes, William Holmes, and others; and drawings of Albert, Lucy, and the children. (Lucy’s picture prompted a lively conversation in Waco in April 1889, when someone sent a copy of the book to the town newspaper, the Examiner. A leading Waco businessman, the insurance and real estate agent Captain John E. Elgin, took the book to a local polling place on April 2 and passed it around to the “election crowd.” Several of Lucy’s former employers recognized her, as did Oliver Benton, who confirmed it was his “truant wife,” saying, “Lucy was a good girl if she was smart and was too fond of fine clo’s[;] dat was her failing.”)37
From 1890 to 1892, Lucy Parsons edited Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly, described as “the only English organ in America advocating those principles for which our martyrs died and which we live to spread.” For her purposes, this publication superseded the second iteration of The Alarm, which had folded in February 1889, several months after its editor, Dyer Lum, had moved to New York City. As ever, in Freedom Lucy proved an eclectic writer, her essays and editorials including a learned survey of the history of communism from the pre-Christian era, as well as a sly explanation of “The Part Dynamite Plays”: in modern discourse, she said, “it is a mere trick on the part of capitalists to be always associating anarchists with dynamite.” Publishing the paper proved to be problematic, since apparently Martin Lacher was involved in it, at least through the summer of 1891. That autumn, after their falling out, Parsons used the editor’s column to charge him with embezzling from a local Arbeiter Bund. She also claimed that in collecting money for Freedom subscriptions, he issued “a guarantee that the comrade with whom he had trouble [that is, herself] should have nothing to do with the paper.” She warned of his “treachery” and his attempts to destroy the paper and injure the movement because of “personal spite.” By this time he had moved with his wife and two daughters to Denver, where he became active in socialist politics. Freedom ceased publication in August 189
2.38
Parsons’s speaking schedule continued to be robust. She bolstered the flagging spirits of Jewish cloak-makers. She lectured on what she considered the misguided (though, among socialists, wildly popular) new novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, which promoted the state socialism she despised. She spoke on the merits of compulsory education. As always, she relished a good debate, at one point taking on a sparring partner who suggested that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was an exemplar of anarchism in its contempt for the law; she countered that, to the contrary, anarchism promoted liberty, Standard Oil only slavery.39
This new phase of Parsons’s career took place within a city where elites were loudly and insistently urging the police to crack down on the remnant of anarchists, “Law or no Law.” When he took office, Chief Hubbard announced that it would be “folly” for the city to tolerate “revolutionary gatherings,” and that he would no longer allow anarchists to meet on the lakefront or at Market Square. However, his main strategy consisted in forcing hall proprietors to refuse to rent out spaces to radicals; failing that, he sent in uniformed and plainclothes police to intimidate the speakers and their audiences. Like his predecessors, Hubbard had to choose between tolerating the free expression of Parsons’s unsettling ideas or arresting her and drawing even more attention to them.40
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