Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  Perhaps other Wacoites also pondered the fate of Lucy and Albert Parsons, wondering what might have been had she not fallen in love with the ambitious young Republican. Lucy’s former owner, T. J. Taliaferro, had died in 1886. Oliver Benton had married a woman named Della when she was just seventeen—about the same age as Lucy when he had first met her—and he would turn sixty-five in 1900. Living at home with Oliver and Della were eight children ranging in age from seven to twenty-five, with Effie, thirteen, and Mary, twelve, in school, a testament to Oliver’s reliability as a breadwinner and his abiding faith in schooling for girls. For all Lucy Parsons’s insistent evocations of those sweetest of words, “family life, child life,” she had chosen to sever, irrevocably, her connections to her son, Albert; her mother, Charlotte; her stepfather, Charlie; and Oliver Benton.41

  IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF THE NEW CENTURY, LUCY PARSONS SEEMED unmoored. The police feared her, and social reformers regarded her with curiosity touched with pity. The immigrant laboring classes honored her as the widow of a Haymarket martyr, but their leaders marginalized her and tried to keep her off the platform at their meetings. She remained at war with the local anarchist press. In 1897, the anarchist periodical Free Society (the successor to the defunct Firebrand) moved to Chicago; its editors, the Russian Mennonites Abe Isaak and his wife, Maria, and their son, Abe Junior, published pieces by well-known radicals, including Goldman, de Cleyre, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joseph Labadie, and Jay Fox, a blacksmith and member of Debs’s American Railway Union who had been wounded at the Haymarket when he was sixteen. As for Lucy Parsons, she no longer had an outlet in the form of a periodical that she controlled.

  Still, Parsons remained one of Chicago’s best-known radicals. In October 1900, she seemed pleased to talk to a reporter, and he returned the favor by writing that she was “the dominating figure in the anarchist circles of Chicago.” The story ran in several newspapers with the headline, “An Anarchist Queen: Lucy Parsons, the Head of the Chicago Reds.” Like many of his profession before him, the reporter was struck by her appearance: “Her face is brown, oval, and well shaped, although her ears are rather badly turned.” He wrote that Parsons had been born “on the brown barrens of a Texas ranch” of a Creek mother and a “pure Mexican father.” Relatively little space in the piece was given over to her ideas, which in any case received lighthearted treatment: “Her creed is education, agitation, evolution, with an occasional revolution thrown in to make things lively.” In subsequent months Parsons would be featured in other articles on “Noted Women Anarchists.” The Cleveland Leader ran a story suggesting that her career “goes far to justify a theory lately pronounced, namely, that anarchy is most virulent in races of African and Oriental admixture.” Anarchism’s appeal for Albert Parsons could be found most clearly in his marriage to a woman who “claims Mexican descent, but is unmistakenly a mulatto.” According to this new pseudoscientific racism, Lucy was a radical because it came to her “naturally,” via her genes.42

  Over the next few years, dramatic developments at home and abroad convinced Chicago’s authorities that Parsons still represented a real threat to national and local security. Robert Pinkerton, the brother of Allan Pinkerton and now the head of the eponymous private security force, recommended that the United States establish “an anarchist colony, a place where every person who wants anarchy can have it”—preferably on some island in the Philippines. There, Parsons, Goldman, and Most might rant and rave, but they would be forced to support themselves by tilling the soil as peasants of old.43

  The authorities’ renewed apprehension over Parsons and other radicals stemmed from instances of political violence abroad, fears of crime and other sources of disorder in Chicago, and the growing—to some observers insidious—respectability of socialists in the United States. US journalists’ accounts of the assassination of King Umberto I in Italy by an anarchist in July 1900 often mentioned Parsons as either a possible influence on the killer or one of his backers, connections she did not seek to discourage. In early August, at a boisterous meeting called to express approval of the recent “removal” of the Italian king, Parsons announced to the press that she was helping to plan a conference of like-minded radicals in Paris the following month (if it took place, she did not attend). On August 5, she was on her way to a daytime meeting to discuss “the Execution of the King of Italy” when she found the door to the hall locked. Seeking shade from the sun on the steps of a nearby building, she was taken aback when several police officers rushed her. One seized her by the arm and ordered her to move along, which she refused to do. He charged her (and four others) with disorderly conduct, obstructing the street, distributing incendiary literature, and resisting arrest. In dispersing the crowd that had gathered, forty-five policemen beat and wounded twenty-five protesters. They hesitated to detain Parsons, but her “defiant manner” left them no choice. She was subsequently fined $50, which she refused to pay, and the newly formed Chicago Free Speech League offered to defend her. Gradually, violent events abroad were putting Parsons on the defensive; anarchy, she now maintained, stemmed not from the desire to create chaos, but from the need to recapture “the democracy of 70 years ago.”44

  When Parsons predicted that the assassination in Italy would spark “a renaissance of anarchy,” she did little to calm the nerves of anxious Chicagoans, who saw mayhem everywhere. In the city, peaceful demonstrations by striking workers often turned bloody, thanks to the brutal tactics of police and private security forces. An 1890s uptick in violent crime (especially domestic abuse, murder, and armed robbery) reflected not only a growing population in the city but also the proliferation of street gangs and chronic underemployment among young men. Armed now with service revolvers and not just batons, and instructed to “shoot to kill,” police on the beat shot innocent bystanders as well as suspected criminals. As a result, the police homicide rate increased fivefold between 1870 and 1920, and Chicago became the most violent city in the nation. Muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffens summed up Chicago this way: “First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nations.”45

  So disgusted were middle-class reformers at the rot that lay at the heart of the city’s political economy that they were willing to listen to almost anyone who had a plan to restore democracy and take government out of the hands of what Steffens called “the enemies of the republic.” In April 1901, the anarchist Kropotkin visited Chicago as a guest of Jane Addams, and received a respectful hearing at, among other places, the Hull House–based Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, the High School Teachers Club, the Twentieth Century Club, the Industrial Art League, and the University of Illinois. Lucy Parsons believed that Kropotkin would surely enhance the credibility of local anarchists among the do-gooding, chattering classes who were seeking a way out of pervasive municipal corruption. On April 18, the prince and Parsons, who had met twelve years earlier in London, reunited at Hull House. She proposed starting a school of “elementary studies in anarchy” and naming it after him, but he declined the honor.46

  Addressing a large audience at Central Music Hall on the evening of April 21, Kropotkin spoke at length about the Haymarket martyrs—presiding over the event, attorney Clarence Darrow had noted that at least Russia exiled its anarchists, while America hanged them. The prince made a point to acknowledge the presence of Parsons, who was seated on the platform next to him. Of her dead husband and his comrades, he said, “Their names are not forgotten in Europe, nor in any place where the fight is being carried on in the cause for which they bravely died.” At the same time, Kropotkin disavowed the use of violence, which, he said, is “not characteristic of anarchists or the Anarchist party.” He told his listeners that true anarchists accepted “the principle that no man nor no society has the right to take another man’s life.”47

  On September 6 of that year, in Buffalo, New York, an attack on President William McKinley by
a self-proclaimed anarchist led to renewed scrutiny of Parsons. McKinley died nine days later. Parsons was under a cloud of suspicion in any case because the editors of Free Society, the Isaaks, had moved to Chicago earlier that year. Going out of their way to applaud the killing of King Umberto, they tainted everyone who was a Free Society subscriber or personal acquaintance, including Parsons. When questioned about the attack on McKinley, she condemned it, averring that the assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was “undeniably a lunatic,” despite his claim at the time: “I am an anarchist. I did my duty.” She told a reporter, “No person of sound intellect would assail the head of this republic.” When the president dies, she noted, his place is immediately filled by his successor. Lest the interviewer think that she had mellowed, she added, “The trusts and those persons who control the necessaries of life are the ones against whom the energies of all classes must be focused.” Moreover, she said, “anarchism is crankism nowadays,” with ignorant, violent characters eager to wrap themselves in its mantle.48

  After the McKinley assassination, Chicago authorities immediately rounded up a number of anarchists as accessories to the crime, including the Isaak family and Emma Goldman, who described the assassin as a man with the “beautiful soul of a child and the energy of a giant.” Johann Most and Carl Nold, a Detroit anarchist whom Parsons knew, were imprisoned for their alleged encouragement of the deed. McKinley’s death stoked fears of anarchy nationwide. Chicago’s Jane Addams automatically linked the assassination to anarchism and the fear it inspired: “It is impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the unfathomable sense of horror with which the community regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation as a crime against government itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens.”49

  Even within this charged political atmosphere, on occasion Parsons did penetrate the walls of Chicago’s major middle-class reform institutions. She spoke before the Friendship Liberal League, the Chicago Philosophical Society, and the New Century Club. In January 1902, the Community Club of the Chicago Commons settlement house invited her to appear on the same stage with a Protestant minister, the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and a resident of the Commons, Raymond Robinson, to discuss anarchy.50

  This appearance proved a challenge for both Parsons and her hosts. The head of the Commons, Graham Taylor, had heard her speak on November 11, 1896, and had been impressed by her dignified bearing then, but he expressed second thoughts once the invitation from the Commons had been tendered: “I offered no objection to the proposal, which I knew would be regarded as a supreme test of the freedom of the floor,” he said. Still, before her talk,

  I suggested to her it might be an opportunity to disappoint her enemies by the calmness of her manner and the reasonableness of her speech, of which she was reputed to be incapable. Reminding her that she was not likely to be interrupted and silenced by arrest at such a privately conducted meeting, as she had been hitherto on public occasions, I expressed a hope that she could and would frankly and freely state the underlying motive which justified, to herself at least, her attitude toward the social order. The suspicioning look of one who was hunted faded from her face as she replied; “You will not be disappointed in having spoken kindly to me.”

  During the presentations, she sat quietly as Robinson pointedly referred to her and said, “Progress does not come through noise and shrieks, and you cannot explode yourself into liberty.” She then delivered a prepared paper on the events and ideas that had radicalized her.51

  Taylor summarized the talk this way: “Sympathetic with the poor, indignant at the harsh treatment of the unemployed, especially the foreign born when attempting public demonstrations to call attention to their plight, she traced her gradually increasing convictions until she became convinced that nothing short of the end of the existing capitalistic industrial order would bring either justice or peace.” These comments must have struck him and other leading Chicago reformers as neither particularly novel nor very threatening. It was her demeanor as much as the substance of her talk that astonished her listeners: “Then, calmly as unexpectedly, and with a reserve that was as dramatic as it was surprising to me and everyone else in the crowded room, she took her seat.” To shouts for her to continue, she replied, simply, “I have finished.”52

  Parsons’s Commons speech represented no turning point in her life either in style or substance. She continued to parry with the Isaaks and other Chicago anarchists over the fate of their paper Free Society, which stressed sexual freedom and variety in life of all kinds (“We eat not one food, but many foods; health depends on judiciously varying our diet”). She tried to revive her publishing career by issuing a new edition of Life of Albert R. Parsons, telling potential buyers, “Friends, I am compelled to solicit your subscriptions in advance, because I am personally without means.” The 1903 edition featured an introduction by Clarence Darrow, who had become a noted labor lawyer and anti-imperialist; the October 1887 speeches of the convicted men; a testimonial from William H. Parsons; additional writings from Albert; and Governor Altgeld’s pardon. She replaced a drawing of herself with what she believed was a more flattering photograph—a three-quarter-length view showing her in a form-fitting striped dress. Left out of this edition were pictures of her children as well as the Pittsburgh Manifesto of the International Working People’s Association, which called for violent revolution.53

  Through the 1890s and into the new century, Parsons wrote for several anarchist papers, but she avoided a new Chicago publication, International Socialist Review (ISR), founded in 1900 by Charles H. Kerr, the son of abolitionists. The ISR, a passionate advocate of the laboring classes, featured exposés and editorials with which Parsons no doubt agreed. Kerr’s company would go on to publish many works related to radical thought and action, including the history of Haymarket. However, Parsons began to lump socialists and reformers together, and even to include some anarchists in her critique, lamenting, to an audience at the Chicago Philosophical Society in 1903, that the current push for social change was “not revolutionary, but consisted of kid-glove anarchists and philosophers, who had, so to say, killed the revolutionary spirit.” For their part, “the revolutionary anarchists had crawled into their holes since 1887,” and the younger generation had been duped into debating extraneous issues such as sex.54

  Parsons defined her own brand of anarchism in a speech she delivered around 1905 (probably to a well-educated, middle-class audience), and later distributed and sold in pamphlet form at 10 cents a copy. She began by reiterating her opposition to partisan politics: men running for office, she suggested, always engaged in bait-and-switch tactics, on the stump appealing for the support of the laboring classes, and then, once elected, serving the interests of the wealthy. In office, Republicans and Democrats alike pursued dictatorial policies limiting the freedom of all Americans. Anarchism, or the absence of government, was the safeguard of liberty: “Anarchism is the usher of science—the master of ceremonies of all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development.” Government relied on force, which was responsible for “nearly all the misery, poverty, crime, and confusion existing in society.” Capitalism was bound to collapse under its own weight as production became ever more efficient and increasing numbers of workers found themselves jobless. Hope lay in education and action. “Passivity while slavery is stealing over us is a crime,” and individuals had the responsibility to study and become “self-thinking” in the process. A violent revolution (if not the attentat to spark it) was inevitable because the powerful would not cede their power voluntarily.55

  Since nature had existed before government, anarchism represented a pure existence uncorrupted by “thrones and scaffolds, mitres and guns.” People were naturally generous and eager to improve themselves and their families, and they gravitated toward voluntary associations, such as those organized around specific trades. Parsons hesitated to outline in any detail the ideal so
ciety because “the best thought of today may become the useless vagary of tomorrow, and to crystallize it into a creed is to make it unwieldy.” Still, she predicted that a plethora of self-regulating bodies would rely on the goodwill of their members and not the coercive powers of a state: “Every man will stand on an equal footing with his brother in the race of life, and neither chains of economic thralldom nor menial drags of superstition shall handicap the one to the advantage of the other.”56

  People must free themselves from the shackles of money and labor for more noble aims: “Some higher incentive must, and will, supersede the greed for gold.” All people had “instinctive social inclinations,” as revealed in everyday family life: within a household, the members provided for themselves out of love, and protected and cared for the weakest among them. Indeed, the guiding emotion of fellow-feeling would unleash the potential of all humankind: “The Earth is so bountiful, so generous; man’s brain is so active; his hands so restless, that wealth will spring like magic, ready for the use of the world’s inhabitants. We will become as much ashamed to quarrel over its possession as we are now to squabble over the food spread before us on a loaded table.” Parsons ended with an exhortation befitting the times, as the American Federation of Labor continued to hawk its insipid reformism, despite the “manifestations of discontent now looming upon every side”: “I say to the wage class: Think clearly and act quickly, or you are lost. Strike not for a few more cents an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less.” It was no wonder that, of the countless lectures she gave, Parsons chose to reprint and sell this one, a succinct, forthright statement of her views. Copies were still available years later, and one ended up in the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (founded in 1908), the only one of Parsons’s works so recognized.57