Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  During these years Chicago anarchists hardly constituted a movement, but they did seek a wider audience, and they basked in the attention flowing from periodic visits of well-known activists based elsewhere, including de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and one of anarchy’s best-known theoreticians, Peter Kropotkin. Parsons also belonged to a wider radical community forged in the pages of papers published around the country. She read Lucifer the Lightbearer (edited in 1883–1907 by Moses Harman), Demonstrator (1903–1904, various editors), Firebrand (1895–1897, Henry Addis), and Free Society (1897–1904, Abe Isaak), among others. She found no ideological home in Benjamin Tucker’s Boston paper Liberty (1881–1908), with its focus on radical individualism as the basis of a new society, in opposition to her emphasis on trade unions. Writing for another Boston anarchist paper, Rebel: A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Exposition of Anarchist Communism, in 1895, she sought to contextualize the anxieties of the age, bringing Marx into conversation with the “frontier thesis” that historian Frederick Jackson Turner first explained at the 1893 Chicago exposition. Now that the East Coast cities were coming to resemble the crowded factory towns of England, it would not be long before “the billows of discontent will roll up from the masses, the ruling class will attempt to drive them back in a sea of blood, but the pages of history show how futile has ever been this attempt, when those billows were along the lines of evolution.”25

  IN THE LATE 1890S PARSONS RECOILED FROM WHAT SHE CONSIDERED a shocking new trend in anarchist ideology—radical libertarianism in the form of sexual freedom for men and women, called “varietism” in sexual relations. Lucifer ran essays with titles such as “Nudity” (“Why should nudity be considered immodest?”), and Firebrand discussed “Sex Ethics” (against “false modesty”) and “The Sexual Organs” (men and women should succumb to each other’s “magnetism”). Parsons lost little time in distancing herself in print from the idea that “it is not greater restriction that is needed in sexual relations, but greater freedom,” as one writer in the Firebrand put it. The September 27, 1896, issue of the paper published a letter she wrote to the editor under the title “Objections to Variety.” Parsons ridiculed the idea of free sex as wishful thinking among people past reproductive age; but she also expressed apprehension about how such a “damnable doctrine” might corrupt younger people and ultimately poison the parent-child relationship, since presumably the mother could never be sure of the identity of the father of her offspring. To Parsons, “family life, child life” were the “sweetest words.” She held that women’s subordinate status stemmed not from a sexual double-standard that denied them “variety” in life, but from their dependence on men that made them perpetual drudges at home.26

  Parsons wrote that women would never freely choose “variety” in sex: “We love the names of father, home and children too well for that.” If “varietism” had anything to do with anarchism, she said, “then I am not an Anarchist.” In subsequent issues, writers chided her for allowing “old prejudices and time-worn theories to overpower her,” when what was needed was “a candid and scientific discussion of the question she has essayed to denounce.” By September 1897, the articles in response to her letter, plus other explicit writings, had attracted the attention of Portland, Oregon, authorities, where Firebrand was published, and they shut down the newspaper and jailed three of its editors—A. J. Pope, Abe Isaak, and Henry Addis—under the provisions of the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibited the use of the United States Postal Service for transmitting obscene material.27

  The way that Parsons upheld the traditional double sexual standard in public was, of course, at odds with the way she lived her life in private, including the affair with Martin Lacher, at least; but here, when it came to matters of sex, as with blackness, she protested too much. The false narrative she offered of herself as a Mexican Indian maiden mirrored the false narrative she presented of the respectable widow with morals beyond reproach. Parsons seemed to believe that certain sorts of suspect behavior, such as sexual promiscuity, along with her birth as a slave, would likely discredit her in the eyes of her supporters, while other kinds of behavior, such as her shocking language in the service of anarchy, would invariably please them. At any rate, she was convinced that neither the circumstances of her birth nor her personal life-choices had any relevance to her broader political message. Thus she would pick and choose among ways of being in the world, always calculating, at times dissembling: just being Lucy Parsons must have been exhausting.

  Other women in her circle chose differently. While Parsons fell back on Victorian platitudes extolling family life, Lizzie Swank Holmes grappled in the open with complicated issues of female sexuality and independence. In 1893, Moses Harman’s free-love paper Lucifer serialized Swank Holmes’s novel Hagar Lyndon, which portrayed a young woman struggling to maintain her integrity in the midst of a disapproving world. The novel includes several elements that appear to be at least semiautobiographical: Hagar has two children but yearns for the carefree days of her youth. She leaves her hot-tempered husband and works as a seamstress, eventually choosing to become a single mother; but even in the big city she faces stern disapproval from neighbors and acquaintances. She throws herself into organizing impoverished sewing women, only to have them resent her meddlesome ways. To save her son from disgrace, she finally agrees to marry a friend, who offers her the refuge of respectability as well as a measure of freedom. Thus Hagar compromises her principles against marriage to live in a world that seemingly has no room for a woman truly free.28

  Lucy Parsons eschewed that kind of public soul-searching, but it was not often that she endured the scorn of other anarchists, who now took her to task for her narrow-mindedness, citing her defense of “slavery”—in this case the “bondage” that was monogamy. As if that were not insult enough, she also probably resented the emerging fame of the most famous free-love proponent, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who made Chicago a regular stop on her tours around the country. Goldman expressed little faith in labor unions—indeed, one of her favorite themes was “the cancer of trade unionism and the corruption of its leaders.” Instead, she stressed the destructive effects of laws that promoted marriage and punished adultery in an effort to regulate the sex lives of men and women. Although both anarchists were prone to fiery pronouncements, Parsons and Goldman preached different gospels to the faithful.29

  Much to Parsons’s aggravation, the popular press in Chicago and around the country often yoked her to Goldman—both were called “red-mouthed anarchists”—although the two women were not shy about acknowledging their differences. In October 1897, Goldman arrived in Chicago to raise money for the defense of the three jailed Firebrand editors, finding a dirty, smoky city overwhelmed by the stench of slaughterhouses and full of “tattered creatures, crippled, gaunt faces.” She observed, “Chicago is undoubtedly London on a reduced scale; in no other city in America does gray misery stare you so glaringly in the face as here.” She spoke to a large group at a fundraiser on October 13, and later expressed dismay about the event:

  The success of the meeting was unfortunately weakened by Lucy Parsons who, instead of condemning the unjustified, vile arrest of the three comrades in Portland and the ever increasing censorship by Comstock and associates, took a stand against the editor of the Firebrand, H. Addis, because he tolerated articles about free love in the columns of the Firebrand. Apart from the fact that anarchism not only teaches freedom in economic and political areas, but also in social and sexual life, L. Parsons has the least cause to object to treatises on free love…. I spoke after Parsons and had a hard time changing the unpleasant mood that her remarks elicited.

  Goldman considered Parsons a hypocrite who followed free-love principles in her own life, but spoke openly only of her desire for conventional respectability. More generally, Goldman would become convinced that Parsons’s fame depended wholly on her widow-martyrdom, rather than on any original contributions she made to the cause of anarchism. In spreading this view, Gol
dman failed to appreciate Parsons’s courage as an orator-agitator and as a source of inspiration to a segment of the laboring classes.30

  Goldman and Parsons had appeared together on a Chicago stage several months earlier, in June, when they were among the delegates to the founding convention of the Social Democracy of America (SDA), a group launched by Eugene Debs. Emerging from prison after the Pullman strike a committed socialist, Debs favored a cooperative commonwealth that hearkened back to agitation in the 1870s and 1880s. Lucy Parsons admired Debs’s commitment to industrial unionism, and, for a while, together with Honoré Jaxon, she played a leadership role in the SDA, serving on its board of directors. She also headed its Branch 2. Yet within a matter of weeks Debs sought to censor her and the branch. On September 10, 1897, police had killed nineteen striking miners in Pennsylvania, prompting Branch 2 to issue a statement in which its leaders “not only denounced the Hazleton shooting as a well-planned murder, but endorsed the eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth policy of killing millionaires in retaliation and of burning the homes of the rich.” Debs quickly suspended the charter of the branch, declaring, “We believe in the ballot, not in bullets.” By this time authorities were condemning the SDA as a plot instigated by “Herr Most, Mrs. Lucy Parsons and others of that ilk”—in other words, it was treason under the guise of free speech. Debs had hoped that his faith in political action would inoculate him from criticism, but his association with what the press called “the anarchist negress” and her “bloodthirsty followers” threatened to cripple his efforts. Speaking to a rowdy meeting of Branch 2 members, Parsons had denounced Debs—“there is not a fool in all the world with a bigger heart and a smaller brain”—and the “toads” who were his followers. In feuding with Goldman and Debs, Parsons set herself apart from the most prominent anarchist and the most prominent socialist of that generation.31

  AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, REPORTERS BEGAN TO take note of Parsons’s relative inactivity, what they called her “fretful silence,” as defined by her absence from the columns of the daily newspaper. Meanwhile, her life had settled into a largely predictable routine. She still lived with her son in the same two-and-a-half-story frame dwelling in Avondale (the street name and number would change to 1777 North Troy Street). She enjoyed tending her front-yard flower garden. For income she depended on her stipend from Pioneer Aid, the proceeds from Life of Albert R. Parsons, and the boarders who occupied part of the house. She also made small sums teaching anarchist Sunday school and selling eggs and chickens. In April 1898, she went on a speaking tour of the East Coast, addressing audiences in Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.32

  Around this time she became a peddler, traveling around her neighborhood selling tea, coffee, soap, and spices from a horse-drawn wagon. She thus joined several thousand other Chicagoans who took up this livelihood because of its low capitalization costs (she did not need to keep her wares hot like the pieman or cold like the iceman), the flexibility it offered in terms of working hours, and the sociability inherent in going door-to-door among neighbors. The 15th Ward was still home to sturdy German immigrant householders, mainly small entrepreneurs and skilled craftsmen and women. Although it is hard to reconcile the image of the plodding peddler of teas with the famous labor agitator, Parsons needed to make money, and she could probably count on the patronage of those who knew her best.33

  Perhaps mistakenly believing that the legendary Mrs. Parsons had entered into genteel retirement, reporters would come to her door periodically and ask for an interview. On a Friday in December 1894, M. I. Dexter found her at home; it was her day off from peddling. Once he assured her he was not a bill collector, she received him, dressed (he wrote) in “blood-red garments,” her long, dark hair straight, “comely for one in whose veins flows a considerable infusion of negro blood, and of much more than average intelligence.” “Altogether she presents a striking appearance,” he wrote, more taken with her looks than with her views.34

  Parsons continued to suffer her share of personal crises, some of her own making. In February 1895, she took a nasty fall, hurting her arm, and employed a neighbor, a Mrs. Witherspoon, to help her around the house. Later that month Parsons sued the woman’s husband, John Witherspoon, for breaking down her front door. He explained to the judge that “Mrs. Parsons was trying to pour socialistic teachings into the mind” of his wife, but the court did not consider this a sufficient defense, and fined him $25. And then early one morning in August 1896, Parsons left a gas stove on while she went to the basement, and came back upstairs to find the house engulfed in flames. Lost were mementos of Haymarket, including the easy chair that Albert had used in jail, and one of the toy boats he carved, as well as part of her extensive library, painstakingly assembled over many years. Her son managed to escape, as did her boarders—John McIntosh and his mother, and Charles M. Secondo, a thirty-six-year-old Swiss-born marble-cutter. She tried to sell the hundreds of copies of Life of Albert R. Parsons damaged by smoke and water for 30 cents each, a literal fire sale.35

  Parsons had spent her East Coast tour of 1898 denouncing the atrocities of the Spanish toward the Cuban people as well as the US imperialist ventures that she believed had been conducted under the pretext of ending those atrocities. Anarchists around the world played a prominent role in the anticolonial struggles of this period, although Parsons seems not to have engaged in her writings with these freedom fighters. In July 1899, however, the US-Spanish-Cuban-Filipino War assumed a personal dimension for her. On the blistering hot day of the sixteenth, she was standing on a State Street sidewalk, calling upon young men to shun military service. The United States was seeking to crush Filipino rebels, the heirs of freedom movements everywhere, including the American Revolution of 1776: “Every stripe of the American flag has become a whip for the monopolist to thrash your backs with. Every star in that flag represents the distilled tears of the children who work out their lives in the factories.” American troops would only do the bidding of American millionaires bent on subjugating the Filipino people.36

  Parsons had placed an ad in the paper the night before announcing this sidewalk address, and so a large and expectant, if sweat-drenched, crowd gathered to hear her. Regardless of their reaction, her argument, directed to young men—suggesting that they “refuse to go to those far-off islands for the purpose of riveting the chains of a new slavery on the limbs of the Filipinos”—failed to resonate with her own son. Now twenty-one, Albert Junior was a high school graduate and employed as a clerk. Ignoring his mother’s agitation against the deployment of young male “fighting machines” to serve abroad, he announced that he intended to enlist in one of the new regiments and ship off to the Philippines. The news precipitated a physical altercation between the two of them, and on July 21 Lucy Parsons took her son to court, claiming he tried to stab her with a knife. A week later, she switched venues, moving the case from Cook County’s criminal court to the county insane court. At a hearing she made the startling charge that Albert Junior was “mentally unsound.” In response to the judge’s queries, according to a reporter, the youth answered “in a calm, well-balanced intelligent manner,” and then accused his mother of wanting to be rid of him so she could get hold of his property. Several of Albert’s friends told the judge they saw no signs of mental instability. Nevertheless, the judge pronounced him insane and ordered him sent to the Elgin Asylum, where he would spend the rest of his life in misery.37

  It is impossible to account fully for what appears to be Parsons’s act of gratuitous cruelty toward her son (not to mention the willingness of the judge to comply with her spiteful wishes). Certainly Junior’s decision to join the army represented a dramatic repudiation of his own mother, and she was not one to suffer public humiliation in silence. It is possible that she genuinely feared that he posed a physical threat to her; perhaps the losses he had suffered in life had made him an angry, resentful young man. Certainly, Albert was not the dutiful son she had wanted; by this time he had turned to spirituali
sm, signaling he would not be following in his father’s footsteps. He might have considered his mother’s extramarital sexual activity unforgivably disrespectful toward the memory of his father. And he had run away before. Whether Parsons intended to teach her son a (temporary) lesson, or truly wanted him out of her life altogether, and whether she saw Elgin as the better alternative compared to the Cook County jail or the state prison in Joliet, cannot be known; regardless, mental institutions such as this one had a well-deserved reputation for the physical and emotional abuse of their inmates.38

  On June 5, 1900, a federal census-taker recorded that Lucy Parsons was living in her mortgaged Troy Street house and that her business was “coffee.” She gave her birthdate as 1854 and reported that she and her father had been born in Texas, her mother in Mexico. Living with her since at least 1896 was Charles M. Secondo, the Swiss-born marble-cutter. Accurate or not, rumors persisted about Lucy Parsons’s proclivity for young immigrant men—her long-term “boarders.”39

  Parsons was forty-nine years old, and more than a quarter century removed from Waco. She might have left behind small-town Texas, never to think of it again, but the citizens of Waco still reminisced about the Parsonses. In 1896, speaking to a reporter for The American Magazine of Civics, the president of Baylor University, the Reverend Rufus C. Burleson, talked about Albert Parsons and took the opportunity to muse upon the evils of drink. Burleson said that Parsons had become “a victim of the saloon, left college, lost caste, and joined his fortunes with the corrupt elements in local politics, and sunk so low that even white scalawags turned against him. An unusually intelligent mulatto woman, until then a respectable married woman, became infatuated with him, and the pair fled together to Chicago, where the subsequent record of both is well known.” It is doubtful that Albert Parsons ever overindulged in alcohol; indeed, he always showed remarkable self-discipline in his roles as editor and orator. Yet the portrait of the upstanding-young-man-gone-wrong offered a narrative that absolved Baylor (if not the good citizens of Waco, who licensed the saloon) of any responsibility for his later waywardness.40