Parsons could hardly have anticipated that the year 1905 would mark a new beginning for anti-capitalist activists, not only in the United States, but also abroad, where a real revolution was already taking hold. As the dramatic events began to unfold, she would find renewed purpose and embrace yet another generation of friends and foes.
Chapter 12
Tending the Sacred Flame of Haymarket
IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, LUCY PARSONS was in danger of being rendered superfluous—relegated to a ceremonial role at annual Haymarket commemorations. For many Chicagoans, she had become an enduring, if increasingly irrelevant, presence on the political scene. Although she might still excite—and incite—crowds of white laboring men, she had little to say about the brutal turf wars among various labor unions, and in her writings she focused more on national and international issues than on working conditions in her own city. She continued to delight in tormenting the local police; but it was during this time that she found a new mission in life—keeping alive the memory of her husband, relentless in her denunciation of the miscarriage of justice that was the Haymarket trial. Lessons from the past could help to inform organizing strategies for the present, she argued. In promoting this message, she sought out new audiences and new customers for her books on the West Coast, an effort that revitalized her. And she retained staying power among ordinary working men and women who saw her as a symbol of ongoing resistance to bosses, capitalists, and the state.
In seeking to revive memories of Haymarket and at the same time agitate for a new approach to labor organizing, Parsons found a vehicle in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in Chicago in 1905. Members of the group, including socialists, anarchists, and other labor radicals—Wobblies, as they were sometimes called—aimed to position themselves in opposition to the conservative, exclusionary, craft-based American Federation of Labor. Coming together in Brand’s Hall on June 27 was an eclectic, ideologically diverse lot aiming to form “one big union” that would inspire the masses and destroy capitalism. The preamble of the IWW’s constitution featured the uncompromising rhetoric favored by the anarchists: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”1
Yet from the very beginning, the IWW amounted to an imperfect vehicle for Parsons’s message. She remained a solo activist-entrepreneur, unwilling to bow to the demands of the group over her own interests in selling her husband’s writings, starting her own newspaper, and advancing her name as principled contrarian. Her role in the founding of the IWW was an inauspicious one: it was not a triumphant resurgence of her career, but rather a troubling encounter with men who regarded her as more icon than leader. Eugene Debs was one of the founders of the group, and other native-born socialists like him predominated. On the first day of the proceedings, two of the twelve women in attendance, Lucy Parsons (now age fifty-four) and the venerable Mary “Mother” Jones (sixty-eight), sat on the platform flanking William D. “Big Bill” Haywood (thirty-six), secretary of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and chair of the convention. It was Haywood who famously remarked, “Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class”—a comment interpreted by some anarchists, at least, as evoking the American Revolution and legitimizing the violent overthrow of the current government. Later, chroniclers of the event would describe Parsons’s role primarily as that of an “honored guest,” a kind of “platform decoration” providing “dramatic visual continuity” between past and present.2
Predictably, Parsons chafed at this dismissive view of her role. On the afternoon of June 28 she made an angry speech protesting the rule that only official delegates representing specific labor organizations could vote during the proceedings. Such a rule, she charged, stifled the free exchange of ideas and encouraged power-plays based on the number of votes that delegates “carry around in their pockets.” For herself, she wanted the official status of delegate, though not the ballot that came with it. Always principled in her opposition to voting anytime, anywhere, for any person or cause, Parsons now decried “the force of numbers,” the notion that ultimately “Might makes Right.” As an informal “individual delegate,” she spoke on behalf of factory children, weary mothers, and even “that great mass of outraged humanity,” the prostitutes of Chicago. Sarcastically, she noted, “Had I simply come here to represent myself, I might as well have remained at home and not taken up the time of your deliberative body.” Her inferior status seemed to mock the core principle of the new organization, for supposedly “we are here as one brotherhood and one sisterhood,” and not as men and women invested with varying degrees of electoral privilege.3
The following day, responding to an invitation to address the convention, Parsons seemed mollified, but began her speech with false humility: “I tell you that I stand before you and feel much like a pigmy before intellectual giants.” She went on to lecture her listeners on the “solid work” that lay before them, arrayed as they all were against a common enemy fortified with money and legislative power, with guns and the hangman’s noose at the ready. She warned against making the IWW a creature of the ballot box and urged the new group to leave “no room for politics at all.” The vote had never freed a single man from the wage system, nor had it prevented man from tyrannizing woman, “the slave of a slave.” The general strike was labor’s most formidable weapon: if the landless would only seize the land, and the toilers their tools, “then there is no army large enough to overcome you, for you yourself constitute the army.”4
Calling for unity in the midst of “such differences as nationality, religion, [and] politics,” Parsons urged the delegates to rally under the banner of “revolutionary socialism,” and reminded them of that fateful day eighteen years ago, when, just two blocks away, courageous men had met their death. After the executions, the doubters had crowed, “Anarchy is dead, and these miscreants have been put out of the way.” Pausing, Parsons noted slyly, “Oh friends, I am sorry that I even had to use that word, ‘anarchy,’ just now in your presence, which was not in my mind at the outset.” She must have enjoyed the sight of the socialists squirming in their seats.5
Parsons took note of the turmoil now engulfing Russia. An attack on peaceful protesters at the St. Petersburg imperial palace six months earlier, on “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, had unleashed a torrent of strikes and demonstrations, which had been countered by brutal repression. She alluded to a headline on the front page of the June 27 issue of the Chicago Tribune—“Red Flag Raised All Over Russia”—as peasant revolts and urban insurrections shook the continent from Poland to the Caucasus. She saw the crimson banner as “the greatest terror to the capitalist class throughout the world—the emblem that has been the terror of all tyrants through all the ages.” Just as the czar and his murderous minions, the Cossacks, were awed by the sight of the flag, so, too, were the cruel robber barons of America, who understood that “the red current that flows through the veins of all humanity is identical, that the ideas of all humanity are identical.”6
At the same time, Parsons made only oblique reference to the upheaval taking place that day on the streets of Chicago. Indeed, while she was extolling the latent power of the laboring classes, a “Great Labor War” was raging there outside Brand’s Hall. In December 1904, nineteen cloth-cutters had struck against the Montgomery Ward department store for its use of nonunion subcontractors. Before long, the city was reeling from sympathy strikes, not only among other garment workers, but also, by early April, among the teamsters and the various unions of the building trades. Merchants belonging to the Employers’ Association hastily formed an Employers’ Teaming Association, which b
egan to bring in hundreds of black strikebreakers from St. Louis and other points south. Pitched battles broke out between union sluggers and strikebreakers, between strikers and the police, and between blacks and whites. On April 29, the police fought hundreds of strikers, bringing business to a halt; a week later, a riot erupted involving 5,000 people. On May 21, two people were killed and twelve injured as a result of clashes between black scabs and white strikers. By midsummer, 21 people lay dead and 416 had been wounded.7
Several street demonstrations took place throughout the night of June 26, the eve of the first day of the IWW convention. By this time, leaked grand jury testimony implicated merchants and strike leaders alike in systematic bribe-taking; at the convention, Debs would denounce the heads of both the AFL and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT, a union formed two years before), calling them “misleaders of the working class.” Yet in her speech Parsons mentioned the ongoing strife only in passing, when she blandly suggested that the strike might have been successful had women banded together to boycott State Street stores in solidarity with the workers. She also scolded women consumers for oppressing their toiling sisters “when we go down to the department store and look around so cheap.” As for the revolutionary potential of Chicago’s laboring classes, she had nothing specific to say.8
From a great distance, Parsons could see in the Russian revolutionaries a purity of motive that was absent in her own working-class neighbors. Certainly, to a degree, Chicago’s labor conflicts lacked moral clarity. (Around this time the journalist Hutchins Hapgood searched in vain for a “typical” worker in Chicago, “the place where labor is most riotous, most expressive,” but he found that diverse, “vigorous personalities” and “the richness of human material” made generalizations about labor impossible.) Within the wagoners’ retail, construction, and service industries, craft-union labor leaders and small-business employers were in the process of developing systems of self-governance enforced with threats, fists, and guns. These trade systems remained apart from the large companies that dominated meatpacking, steel, retail sales, and banking—businesses for which Chicago’s corporate elite was world-famous. The craft economy depended on clusters of laborers, some skilled, some not, who provided fuel, food, and shelter to the city’s swelling population (it had grown by more than 800,000 in the last decade and a half). Within this subeconomy, union leaders colluded with small businessmen and bribed public officials to enforce territorial imperatives—neighborhood boundaries fixed by one group or another—that remained outside the reach of lawmakers and reformers.9
This state of affairs contradicted Parsons’s narrative of a monumental clash between good worker and evil employer. During a 1902 teamsters’ strike, members of that union attacked meatpackers trying to make deliveries. Restaurants and commercial laundries were firing black workers and hiring white women, and even the tentatively egalitarian Culinary Alliance was forcing black members from its ranks. Slaughterhouse workers contended with deskilling, not only as a result of new machinery, but also because bosses reduced their jobs to many small tasks and replaced skilled butchers (the “aristocrats” of their craft) with unskilled immigrants. Unrest in the spring of 1905 seemed a grim reprise of the stockyard and packinghouse workers’ actions the summer before, when employers imported 2,000 black scabs, and then fired them after the defeat of the strike. Had Parsons faced up to facts such as these, she would not have expressed bafflement that the “ordinary, everyday wealth producers” remained dispirited and passive even “as the aggressions of capital become more and more acute.” Despite the city’s many violent strikes, she saw no sign of a radicalized working class, no sign that anarchism was gaining broad-based favor.10
Not surprisingly, given the political heterogeneity of its supporters, the IWW soon dissolved into factionalism and infighting. Delegates to the founding convention disagreed about whether or not the new organization should endorse sabotage in the form of machine breaking, working slowly, or supporting guerrilla tactics over strikes. Debs and Jones opposed the IWW’s stance against partisan politicking, Debs because he hoped the group would become an arm of the Socialist Party, Jones because she believed that two million AFL members represented a formidable potential voting bloc, which, if weaned off retrograde leaders, might add to the Wobblies’ clout. In Detroit, IWW members disapproved of what they considered their Chicago counterparts’ fixation on free speech. And though the founders agreed that organizing all industrial workers would help to bring about the revolution, the efficacy of the AFL remained in question—were craft unions obsolete, or were they useful tools for the eventual dismantling of capitalism? These ongoing disputes, combined with Chicago’s chaotic labor scene, meant that the “one big union” would not make much headway in the city of its birth.11
Nevertheless, Lucy Parsons quickly began to build on the excitement generated by the IWW among radicals of various persuasions; the new group offered up possibilities for her as editor, speaker, and purveyor of radical literature. On September 3, she launched The Liberator, a new publication named for the abolitionist paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The masthead of the weekly stated that it was “Issued under the label of the IWW” (though not as an official organ of the group) and “devoted to revolutionary propaganda along lines of anarchist thought.” Readers were assured that the new union was a product of “industrial evolution[;] hence it is bound to succeed.” Subscribers paid $1 a year, and single copies sold for 2 cents each. Parsons, the sole editor, worked out of an office at 466 Van Buren Street.12
This latest publishing venture represented an exhilarating challenge for Parsons. She controlled the content of each issue, and wrote many of the articles herself, demonstrating her reach and erudition. “Everyday Reflections” served up exhortations: “Workingmen, the landlords and bosses generally trust you to provide the army and the police to protect their right to plunder you. Let their ‘trust’ be in vain.” Her series “Labor’s Long Struggle with Capitalism” began with Greek and Roman slavery and progressed through feudalism and the dawn of industry up to the present day, with trade unions gradually passing into the mists of history. She included poetry and recycled speeches and writings by herself and her late husband. She also published material by the famous anarchist C. L. James; Andrew (Al) Klemencic, a tailor who had worked as a labor organizer in Hawaii; and Albert Ryan of the Western Federation of Miners. Issues of The Liberator carried ads for her books, the sales of which served as the bedrock of her livelihood—Life of Albert R. Parsons (available clothbound for $1.25, in half-morocco for $1.75), Altgeld’s Pardon of the Anarchists, and Famous Speeches, reproducing speeches of the Haymarket martyrs. The special issue of November 11, 1905, took the form of a commemorative pamphlet ($2 for one hundred copies, $1.50 for fifty).13
In the April 1906 Liberator, Parsons offered a succinct endorsement of a free press: “The press is the medium through which we exchange ideas, keep abreast of the times, take gauge of battle and see how far the class conflict has progressed. It is by the press we educate the public mind and link the people of most distant parts together in bonds of fraternity and comradeship. We can keep track of the work and accomplishments of our comrades in no other way, except by the medium of paper.” It was as an editor, as well as both writer and speaker, that Parsons earned distinction as a consistent fighter on the free-speech frontlines and found a way to associate herself with, and at the same time remain outside, the IWW, whose leaders saw her as merely decorative.14
The Liberator Group, a small band of devoted followers of the paper who raised money for it, also provided the kind of community that had been sorely lacking in Parsons’s life for several years. Reminiscent of the old days, the group met fortnightly and heard lectures (some in Yiddish); it also sponsored picnics, debates, and evening concerts. In what was perhaps an effort to compete with more modern entertainment fare, the group held an Easter “Necktie Party” in the spring of 1906. In the March 11, 1906, issue of the paper, w
edged between the fourteenth installment of “Labor’s Long Struggle with Capital” (on the Great Railroad Strike of 1877) and Albert Parsons’s speech to the court of October 9, 1887, was a notice, “More about the Necktie Party”:
Girls, don’t bring a small tie
like you buy in the stores, but a
large one to match your apron,
and so you can make a
BEAUTIFUL, LARGE
BOW
When you tie it on the gentle-
man’s neck, and he will look just lovely!
The evening included an auction and a “grand necktie march” followed by a “Necktie quadrille.” The fundraiser sought to appeal to the flirtatious inclinations of the younger set, who were increasingly drawn to dimly lighted dance halls that were home to the risqué tango and shimmy.15
The effort to sustain The Liberator was an ongoing struggle. Initially Parsons had faced opposition over her decision to start the paper and publish it in Chicago. Jay Fox, whom Parsons knew as a frequent writer for Free Society, was an aspiring editor himself. He wanted to launch the paper in the anarchist commune of Home, Washington, where production costs for such a weekly would be much lower than in Chicago. Apparently he also felt that Parsons’s Liberator was geared more toward immigrants (mainly Russian Jews), and that it focused too narrowly on labor conflict. He believed that the paper needed a strong native-born contingent to manage it—what he called an “American committee.” (Parsons was quick to remind her readers that Fox himself had been born in Ireland.) She would later accuse him of stealing money from Liberator fundraisers, and of dissuading her readers from supporting the paper in favor of his own Demonstrator. As usual, though, she seemed to relish the feud, which spawned indignant articles, editorials, and letters to the editor lamenting what she called “the split,” caused by “the dirty work of genuine political rascals.” Though she promised that in the paper “personalities will be rigidly excluded; we are working for the good of humanity at large,” her own personality was certainly an integral part of the content.16
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