Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  Parsons found the paper useful when she wanted to defend herself from her critics across the ideological spectrum. In October, she attended a dance sponsored by The Liberator and Arbeiter Ring (a Russian workingmen’s circle) for Jews “who had recently participated in ghetto riots” against the czar in the old country. The event, held on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of fasting and atonement, had the apparent purpose of riling the Orthodox, for it featured a lavish spread of ice cream, pickles, cake, and cream puffs. A police contingent appeared in the hall just as Parsons rose to speak; they claimed that the affair had been billed as a dance (advertised in The Liberator in English and Hebrew as the “Grand Yom Kippur Concert and Ball”), and that Parsons had failed to secure permission to turn it into a political rally. She backed down, but proceeded to sell copies of the paper to the merry-makers. Afterward, a reporter from the Daily Inter-Ocean ridiculed Parsons in an article with the headline “Anarchists Have Degenerated into Eaters of Ice Cream Puffs Instead of Drinkers of Blood and Throwers of Bombs.” In the October 15 issue, a regular writer for The Liberator, “Rex” (probably Parsons herself) denounced the mainstream press as “liars and lickspittles,” and reminded readers that she was “a woman who has borne more sorrow and troubles for the good of humanity than these scurrilous little writers ever heard of.”17

  The Liberator’s pages contained little mention of Chicago’s recent labor strife, but did follow the unrest in Russia (“Russia to Be Free” read one optimistic headline on October 29). It lauded the uprisings, which were, it said, winning the workers grudging respect from the czar and “other rich loafers.” In contrast, in America, home-grown “aristocrats” had nothing but contempt for “the whimpering lot of whipped curs who sneak back buttonless [i.e., because they had been forbidden by their bosses to wear their union buttons] and beg for work”—a not-so-veiled reference to Chicago workers’ capitulation in the wake of recently lost strikes.18

  And, somewhat belatedly, a decade after the demise of the Populists, Parsons began to write about farmers’ rights to land and machinery, and their need to market their crops without the encumbrance of predatory middlemen. Apparently rural folk were only now “awakening” to their true interests. Or perhaps Parsons was moved by the recent book written by International Socialist Review editor Algie Simons, The American Farmer (1902); in it Simons observed that American family farmers (some over-mortgaged, the rest landless) were more akin to an industrial proletariat than Marx had realized. He argued convincingly that American farmers did not fit the traditional category of the “hereditary peasant, generally ignorant and reactionary, and looking to the ruling class for all new ideas even concerning his own industry.” At the same time, The Liberator ignored the struggles of African Americans, North or South, with the exception of an account of a recent meeting of a black civil rights group, the Georgia Equal Rights Association, in the April 1, 1906, issue. Not an article—or a paragraph, for that matter—covered the distressed Chicago black laboring classes, which were rapidly losing their jobs to immigrants and to white women, and widely reviled among whites for the strike-breaking activities of a desperate few.19

  Parsons was no different from her anarchist comrades in consistently turning a blind eye toward black workers. Nevertheless, she proved a prescient observer of certain critical elements of the American political economy. In the pages of The Liberator, she continued to warn about the erosion of the middle class in the face of technological innovation. She decried the profit-making imperatives that made so many workplaces sites of soul-deadening boredom, repetition, and physical danger. In the new consumer economy, “everything now has a price”: but in the future, “when labor is no longer for sale, society will produce free men and women who will think free, act free, and be free.” She exposed the corrupting influence of corporate money on politics, and charged that authorities used prisons as a means of controlling their critics. She lamented the vulnerability of the elderly, “worn-out working people” reduced to penury after a long life of honest toil. She railed against the employers who one day professed horror at workers defending themselves and the next day paid thugs to beat strikers nigh unto death. She exposed the hypocritical arrogance of reformers who chided the working man for spending 5 cents for a beer on a Saturday afternoon. She excoriated a system that placed property rights over human rights. Even her Victorian-inflected defense of children—for example, comparing the little brother and sister on their way to a sweatshop with the vulgar, lavish wedding of a daughter of John Jacob Astor—had a universal, timeless quality. Still, she paid obeisance to gender conventions when she went on about woman’s “highest aim and ambition”—to find a husband, because “she wants a quiet place she can call home, a haven where she and he can sometimes retire from the storms of the world and be at rest.”20

  The Liberator avoided discussion of “sexual varietism,” though Parsons did discuss the problem of woman’s persistent dependence on man, which she considered a throwback to ancient times, when physical strength determined one’s place in the world. She also penned a series titled “Famous Women of History” that included Florence Nightingale, Jenny Lind, and Louise Michel, among others. She alluded to birth control in a piece titled “The Woman Question Again,” which dealt with the tragic end of one Mary Markham of Kewanee, Illinois. Markham had killed her seven children, all under eleven years old, and then killed herself: “Poor, burden-bearing, poverty stricken, care worn, child-bearing to excess, Mary Markham, you are gone!… but you were a victim of our false society which makes it a crime to impart information that would have made your young life a mother’s joy with a few healthy children to caress you, but instead, you saw from day to day, a helpless burden of poverty and despair.”21

  Four months into the publication of The Liberator, Parsons was reporting that the paper, which cost $50 a week to produce, was in dire straits, and that subscribers should send her postage stamps as an economy measure. Announcing she would be going east to drum up subscriptions, she blamed The Liberator’s troubles on “a small clique of so-called Anarchists [who] did everything to prevent the paper from coming out” by traveling around the country to discourage radicals from subscribing or contributing (no doubt a reference to Fox and his allies). She predicted “the little ‘bunch’ of soreheads will soon be left alone to nurse their own little boils.”22

  In the spring of 1906, Parsons set out on an “agitation tour” of the East. New York City anarchists had started a Liberator group, and she hoped to lecture and sell subscriptions and copies of her books. In offering an account of her trip, she once again proved herself a gifted writer of travelogues. She enjoyed the long train ride, speeding along at fifty miles per hour through the open countryside, eavesdropping on conversations of the other passengers (no doubt embellished in the telling), and contemplating the resources buried in the earth: “It was the Lehigh Valley that proved most interesting to us… the heart of the great anthracite coal region. Think of it, beneath those frowning hills nature stored up her forests, floods, and sunbeams; then by her eruptions she covered them deep down, far out of sight, until long ages should elapse, when her children could delve for them and bring them to the surface for light and cheer and comfort. But man, because of his stupidity, is not utilizing these free gifts to all for all.” Arriving in New York City, she was struck by the sad faces of hungry children on the Lower East Side. There, while on a “‘slumming’ expedition,” she found “thousands of human beings living in heaps, piled upon one another, packed like sardines in tenement houses, poor, ignorant and dejected, helplessness and despair deep furrowed upon their blank faces.” She described the early evening, when “the tall factories belch forth their quota of human beings” who must find their way to their “stuffy little rooms” and fall into a fitful slumber to prepare themselves for yet another day of misery. She recounted being set upon by gang members, who made off with her handbag and $20: “New York, nevertheless, is a great and wonderful city.”23

 
; On April 1, Parsons addressed a memorial service at New York’s Grand Central Palace for Johann Most, who had died on March 17. The crowded hall was awash in color, with red banners, hats, and badges set against the blue uniforms of the dozens of police present, and she delivered a characteristically stirring speech to the overflow audience. The New York Times titled its story “Woman Anarchist Calls Our Flag a Sham,” a reference to her mention of the Stars and Stripes as a mere rag for luring immigrants, “a brazen lie.” She had called the officers standing near her “vile hirelings of the capitalistic spirit personified in a club and a few brass buttons.” She ended, however, on an optimistic note, saying that “there never has been a time when there was so much unrest in the world, and from this unrest will be born the sturdy child of liberty.”24

  The Liberator could not survive without money, nor could it survive without Parsons. Soon after she returned from the East, she set off on another trip, this one to Cleveland and Cincinnati. At that point she was forced to abandon the paper for good. She thought that anarchism was “too far away from the mental level of the masses; hence they have not been attached to us.” Many “young, inexperienced people” lacked the mental discipline to pursue “the realization of the anarchistic ideal.” Meanwhile, Emma Goldman, in April, had announced the first issue of her own paper, Mother Earth; the publication, which included reviews, criticism, poetry, fiction, and cartoons, reflected its editor’s view that art was a critical weapon in the arsenal of class struggle. Compared to The Liberator, Mother Earth was more creative, more in tune with modern literary trends, and more appealing to a wide range of radicals—cultural as well as political—and not just anarchists. By this time Parsons had become disillusioned with the inaction of the IWW, writing, in one of the last issues of The Liberator, that the group, with its official organ, Industrial Worker, proposing “no line of action,” appeared “to be floundering around like a ship lost at sea without a rudder.”25

  With The Liberator no longer publishing and the IWW no longer holding her interest, Parsons now began to agitate on behalf of a series of labor leaders whose persecution or death at the hands of mobs or judicial authorities made Haymarket’s legacy still meaningful and instructive. In December 1905, three members of the Western Federation of Miners were accused of murdering the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, by planting a bomb at the entrance to his home. Grilled for three days by the police, WFM member Harry Orchard claimed that Charles Moyer, the president of the WFM; Bill Haywood, the group’s secretary; and George A. Pettibone, a labor activist, had hired him to kill more than two dozen mining bosses throughout the West. Rather than go through the extradition process, in February Idaho officials enlisted a Pinkerton agent to engineer the kidnapping of the three accused men, who were in Denver at the time, and spirit them to Boise to stand trial. Their defense quickly became a cause célèbre among the white laboring classes.26

  On February 17, 1907, Lucy Parsons helped to lead a tumultuous protest demonstration sponsored by the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL); later that day, though, CFL leaders signaled their disapproval as they listened to her “anarchistic doctrine, served hot,” in the words of the Tribune. In March the year before, she had written about the WFM defendants in an article for The Liberator called “The Proposed Slaughter.” She had drawn parallels between their treatment and that of the Haymarket martyrs—the pursuit by the police, charges of a mysterious conspiracy, the lack of evidence tying the accused to the crime, perjured testimony, the ensuing hysteria among the general public, which was kept “in breathless expectancy.” In the sensationalistic warning of the current Idaho governor—“a conspiracy that is going to shock civilization”—she heard distinct echoes of the hyperbolic police chief John Bonfield, Detective Michael J. Schaak, and State’s Attorney Julius S. Grinnell. In May and June, Parsons again took to the podium at mass meetings, but she clashed with organizers who counseled “moderation and education.” The display of red flags and banners proclaiming “To hell with the Constitution” embarrassed the Women’s Trade Union League, the CFL, and other sponsoring groups.27

  After hearing an eleven-hour summation by lead defense attorney Clarence Darrow, on July 29 a jury acquitted Haywood and the other two defendants, prompting a celebration in Chicago on August 1. Darrow had focused on the defendants’ advocacy of miners, urging a not-guilty verdict regardless of the evidence because “I know their cause is just.” At least some saw the trial’s outcome as a sign that Americans were becoming increasingly receptive to radical ideals and more skeptical of state-power overreach. Parsons proposed starting a national defense fund for labor leaders who might face crushing legal fees in the future. A few days later, she wrote an article for Fox’s Demonstrator comparing the Haywood and Haymarket trials. She claimed that although “the Pinkerton plague is still at large in society,” the recent acquittal of the men signaled a new era: “For the first time in American history the working class was united and stood shoulder to shoulder. They became ‘class conscious’ in recognizing the fact that it was not Haywood the mineowners were really after, but the labor organization he represented.”28

  Despite these hopeful signs, Parsons feared that anarchism had dissolved into a collection of individuals without a movement: “The anarchist cause has lacked concentration of effort, and a vivifying force to lend energy and direction toward a common aim.” She therefore conceived her newfound life’s work as highlighting every case of “judicial” or mob murder, and every trial of a major labor leader, as the kind of injustice that Haymarket had anticipated. She introduced Life of Albert R. Parsons, Famous Speeches, and Anarchism to a new generation of activists and would-be revolutionaries. She drew lessons about the need for direct action, and the danger in letting enemies “put their own interpretation upon our ideas,” as she saw more and more people “turning from the past to the future.” Younger activists hailed her as an honored forebear. Years later, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalled meeting Parsons for the first time at the 1907 IWW convention in Chicago: “I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons…. I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: ‘Clear our names!’ and she now made this her mission.”29

  Gradually, tending the sacred flame of Haymarket became a full-time preoccupation—and occupation—for Lucy Parsons. By this time, Albert Parsons had reached legendary status among anarchists, who called him “a pioneer in the American revolutionary labor movement and the first Anarchist-Communist agitator in America in the English language.” Lucy took it upon herself to correct anyone who had the temerity to lecture on “Lessons of the Haymarket Episode” (as one Terence Carlin did before the Chicago Social Science League) without also preaching “active resistance.” She disputed the label “Haymarket Riot,” reminding her listeners that “there was no riot at the Haymarket except a police riot.” She also defended her late husband in response to the fictional accounts of the Haymarket events that began to claim the public’s attention. In 1909, the Chicago-born journalist and novelist Frank Harris published a novel titled The Bomb, which made Louis Lingg the hero and Rudolph Schnaubelt the bomb-thrower. The book portrays Albert as a gifted orator and an honorable comrade, but also as “a little florid,” noting “it’s the shallow water [that] has the lace foam on it.” August Spies was “far better read than Parsons and a clearer thinker.” Lucy Parsons was incensed by the book; she thought “it was a lie from cover to cover,” and she also ridiculed Emma Goldman’s endorsement of the novel as of “more importance to the anarchist movement than the monument in Waldheim Cemetery.” Goldman later admitted that Parsons’s ire was to some extent justified, since “Harris had not kept to the actual facts, and also because Albert emerged from the pages of the book a rather colourless person.”30

&
nbsp; In the process of guarding the memory of her husband against those who would sully it, Parsons set herself apart from Goldman, her chief rival for publicity and resources. In May 1906, Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had recently been released from prison, set up housekeeping together in Chicago. Goldman used Mother Earth to needle American-born anarchists, whom she considered too attached to parlor-room theory while Russian Jews were carrying the weight of transforming the workplace. Yet Goldman herself made a comfortable living by traveling around the country and speaking, as she charged substantial admission fees for her lectures on modern drama (and later Russian literature). In her speeches and in Mother Earth she spoke directly to reformers and the intelligentsia, rather than to the unlettered working classes, and saw no need to apologize for doing so. Voltairine de Cleyre disapproved of Goldman’s financial acumen, telling Berkman, “To lecture for money for comrades I neither could nor would; to lecture to the general public on topics they would pay for I am not ‘business woman’ enough to undertake.” In 1910, de Cleyre despaired that radicalism had become a “kid glove thing,” appealing to well-heeled clubwomen. In contrast, Parsons stuck mainly to trade union and IWW venues, eking out a living selling her publications.31