A steep economic downturn in November 1907 sent tens of thousands of unemployed men and women into the Chicago streets, and Lucy Parsons noted the predictable consequences: “The free coffee wagons and soup kitchens are in full operation, and cheap lodging houses are filled to suffocation.” The city’s established relief organizations, including the Bureau of Charities, could not keep up with the demand. Once again Parsons prepared to take her place at the head of marches and at the front of halls filled with those who were out of work or worried they soon would be. Yet now Goldman and her entourage seemed bent on dominating the scene and crowding Parsons off center-stage, if not the entire stage.32
On the evening of January 17, 1908, five hundred people who had gathered in Brand’s Hall for a meeting hissed at the mention of President Theodore Roosevelt and loudly demanded the overthrow of the US government. Mother Jones was there, calling the presence of uniformed police in the hall an “insult to honest workingmen.” Presiding over the meeting was Dr. Ben Reitman, an eccentric twenty-nine-year-old physician who dressed like a hobo; a gifted self-promoter, he had transformed communing with the dispossessed into a fashionable pastime. (He and Goldman would soon become lovers.) Reitman tried to ignore Parsons’s attempt to speak, but the repeated cries of “Mrs. Parsons! Mrs. Parsons!” forced him to relent. She mounted the stage, and, according to a reporter, “offered to lead an army to city hall next Thursday afternoon”; the demonstration would mark the third anniversary of St. Petersburg’s “Bloody Sunday” and force the city’s authorities to address the crisis of poor relief. She told the restless crowd that “she was ready to die on the scaffold as her husband had done if it would further the cause of human liberty.” The meeting resolved “to unite to overthrow the capitalist system.” Then Reitman stepped up and told Parsons, “I am sorry to refuse the lady, but this is strictly a men’s meeting and we don’t want women speakers.” He called for a motion to adjourn, but Parsons stood up once again, this time reminding him that she represented the many women who were out of work.33
The chief of police, George Shippy, was determined to prevent the “Bloody Sunday” march from taking place; he did not worry that the socialists would cause trouble—they only talked about revolution—but he feared that the anarchists, led by Parsons, might incite a riot. Shippy, warning that a renewed “Red peril” was menacing Chicago, claimed that “the Reds” were mimicking workers’ angry cries in the days before the Haymarket bombing. Lucy Parsons, he told reporters, had proved a chief instigator of the present disorder: “Never in the history of Chicago have anarchists and other enemies of law and order been more dangerous than at present.” He defended efforts to prevent radicals from speaking and boasted that the city’s current undercover “anarchist [or Red] squad” included ten veterans who had served the night of the Haymarket riot. (One of them, called to quell disorder at a mass meeting, exclaimed, “There’s Lucy Parsons…. I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, and she doesn’t look a day older.”)34
On March 2, a twenty-year-old Russian immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, made his way to Shippy’s home and, under circumstances that remain unclear, stabbed the chief and shot and wounded his son Harry, who had come to his father’s rescue. Shippy then mortally wounded Averbuch. Described as an acolyte of Emma Goldman, “Queen of the Reds,” Averbuch had reportedly become enraged when he had learned that Shippy had ordered the hall’s proprietors to deny Goldman a place to speak.35
The Averbuch attack on Shippy sent reporters rushing to Lucy Parsons’s home for her comments. Playing upon the fears of the police and the general public, she stated, menacingly, that “steadily the anarchist spirit has been growing.” She boasted that Chicago had forty such groups—which clearly was not the case—and that a number of University of Chicago professors were joining with sweatshop workers to advance the anarchist cause. Reporters speculated that the boardinghouse she operated was actually a school for anarchy. In her home, while standing in the kitchen cooking dinner, presumably she was instructing the young Jewish men living there in the principles of social disorder. As usual, Parsons gladly accepted credit for what the police claimed she was doing—presiding over a vast cabal of anarchists in Chicago and beyond.36
Goldman managed to evade the prohibition on her speaking when she accepted an invitation from the Anthropological Society to appear on March 15, and Parsons was present to hear her and Ben Reitman lecture on “The Use of Vaccination and Anti-Toxin.” Despite the heavy police presence, the event proceeded without incident. The Shippy shooting, and Goldman’s defiance in the face of efforts to silence her, prompted President Roosevelt to deliver a special message to Congress in April declaring that while the country must be free, “it must also be safe.” He added, “If the anarchist cares nothing for human life, then the government should not be particular about his,” and called for laws that would outlaw anarchists and deport them. Still, the Anthropological Society and other groups regularly invited socialist academics and Progressive reformers, as well as anarchists like Goldman, to speak: critiques of capitalism were a la mode. In November 1908, Eugene Debs ran for president on the socialist ticket and received more than 400,000 votes.37
Parsons was happy to claim credit as Chicago’s leading anarchist in the coverage of Averbuch’s attack on Shippy, but she wanted nothing to do with Averbuch specifically and began to distance herself from him, just as she had distanced herself from Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, seven years before. Indeed, her readers and listeners would not have been able to tell from her writings and speeches that, beginning in 1899, political assassination and dynamite explosions had become the favorite strategies of disaffected groups and individuals. And these strategies would remain popular for two decades thereafter. In 1899 in Idaho, the Western Federation of Miners had used 4,000 pounds of dynamite to blow up a huge piece of mining equipment, retaliating against an employer who refused to raise wages or recognize the union. Strikers in a number of cities dynamited the machinery they operated (such as streetcars), or structures that nonunion labor had built (dams, bridges). The brothers James and John McNamara confessed to the October 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, a blast that killed twenty-two workmen; they were not anarchists, but members of the AFL-affiliated International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. Between 1906 and 1911, the same union dynamited one hundred worksites financed by antiunion employers.38
On the East Coast, a new cadre of anarchists, mainly Italian immigrants under the leadership of Luigi Galleani, pursued Johann Most’s propaganda-by-deed strategy, openly advocating spontaneous insurrection. In his paper Cronaca Sovversiva (“Subversive Chronicle,” published from 1903 to 1918), Galleani refused to offer his vision of the good society; the future would reveal itself after the revolution, he said. The Galleanist terrorists seemed to constitute a tangible upwelling of The Alarm’s rhetorical threats two decades before, but Lucy Parsons was now retreating, haltingly, from her own earlier bluster.39
Beginning in the spring of 1909 and continuing for another nine years, she spent less time in Chicago and more time on the West Coast and in the Northwest. The repressive conditions in her home city meant that she could not even distribute handbills there without facing arrest—as she tried in October 1908 to publicize an upcoming meeting to raise money for the estimated 15,000 children who went to school hungry every day. Too, the Chicago-based IWW continued to disappoint her, its leadership verging on the desultory. Ralph Chaplin, a fearless Wobbly agitator in his own right and a gifted poet, artist, and songwriter, believed that even the newest hero of the Left had become too self-involved to accomplish anything, writing, years later, “Bill Haywood was swivel-chair king of an almost uninhabited revolutionary domain”—presumably, Haywood was content to hold forth in his Chicago office, unwilling to venture into the fray of IWW-led strikes around the country. The titular head of the IWW, Vincent Saint John, had arrived in Chicago in 1907, but as long as he held that post—until 1915—he
dismissed Lucy Parsons and her ilk as “anarchist freaks.” And Emma Goldman’s frequent appearances in lecture halls throughout the city, combined with Mother Earth’s promotion of free love, birth control, and au courant literary sensibilities, seemed to distract the public from Parsons and her unwavering message of class struggle.40
It was no wonder then that Parsons was drawn to the IWW’s bloody free-speech campaigns in the West. In an effort to organize migratory laborers, the Wobblies targeted local prohibitions on radicals’ outdoor meetings. These efforts began in September 1909 in Missoula, Montana, and then in Spokane, Washington, later that year, lasting through 1916 in a total of twenty-six cities. Parsons appreciated the organizers’ emphasis on declaiming freely from sidewalk soapboxes and park benches. The protests had a strong performative component: in concerted acts of civil disobedience, activists encouraged their listeners to resist arrest and pack the jails. Jury trials became show trials and in many cases elicited sympathy from middle-class Americans and not just the laboring classes, with activists testifying to the beatings they suffered at the hands of police and prison guards. In Spokane, jailers used brutal, life-threatening tactics, including switching prisoners from the sweatbox to a frigid room, in an effort to discourage other protesters from trying to get arrested. “But still they came,” Chaplin later noted. “Never, since the early Christian martyrs, were men more fanatically willing to sacrifice for a cause they believed in.” Here was exemplary evidence of the “direct action” necessary to organize harvest-time wage hands, lumberjacks, miners, and marine transport workers. As transients, these men were ineligible to vote in any case. “To hell with politics!” was their motto. One of the original “jawsmiths,” Lucy Parsons approved.41
However, at least during her initial visits to the Northwest, Parsons did not partake of any of the city-specific free-speech campaigns. Working adjacent to the Wobblies rather than within the group, she sought to capitalize on the enthusiasm they generated for radical ideas by selling more copies of her books—in the spring of 1909, and then again in the spring of 1910, in the fall of 1913, and for most of 1914. Indeed, with the exception of her visit to Los Angeles in 1910, she missed the months-long free-speech brawls in other places—Spokane, Missoula, and Denver—though she made stops in all those cities in quieter times. She boasted of selling many thousands of copies of Famous Speeches and Life of Albert R. Parsons, great pieces of “propaganda literature” that, she believed, “when circulated among organized labor are bound to bear fruit.”42
By the time Parsons began her western tours she was well known not only as a Haymarket widow but also as the editor of the short-lived Liberator and a frequent contributor to Firebrand, Agitator, and Demonstrator, all of which ran ads for her books and featured the anniversary of Haymarket prominently every November. When seeking lodging and speaking venues, she drew upon a dense network of comrades as hosts, primarily men who were agents and writers for these papers, members of anarchist groups, and owners of bookstores. (This last group included Cassius V. Cook and his wife, Sadie, of Vancouver; Cassius had served as a bail bondsman for Goldman when she was arrested in 1909 in San Francisco, where he was active in the city’s Libertarian League and Free Speech League.) Parsons must have been pleased by the attentiveness of local reporters, such as the one in Seattle who wrote, “Mrs. Parsons is still a fine-looking woman, despite her years and what she has gone through.” Even editors of the Intermountain Catholic, published in Salt Lake City, accorded her a respectful hearing, though her lecture in that city “pleads for the abolition of marriage and the Catholic church.”43
Parsons’s two-month trip in the spring of 1909 took her to Kansas City, Seattle, Butte, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Salt Lake City. She focused on AFL unions, describing the topic as a “new field” for her—“that of conservative organized labor, and indeed it is a field from which an Anarchist speaker is nearly always excluded.” She took pleasure in traveling as much as speaking, providing, for example, a vivid description of the Rocky Mountains that she saw from her train, which, “like a giant serpent, winds its way in and out among the cliffs that tower three thousand feet above”; its whistles echoed through the canyons more shrilly than the roars of a “deep-lunged” giant in a fairy tale. She also visited with the writer Jack London and his wife at their home in Glen Ellen, California, where she spent a lovely few days in their tiny guest house—“No paint, no varnish, no veneering for covering up dirt of any kind, but just a sweet, clean cottage. I fear I shall never sleep so soundly or dream such pleasant dreams again!” The fifty-nine-year-old traveler arrived home in Chicago feeling “worn out” but pleased with herself.44
Upon her return, Parsons soon learned of the renewed police crackdown on radicals in her hometown, and so, during the summer and fall of 1909, she conducted a virtual one-person free-speech campaign. She believed she could find a way around the new prohibitions by presenting herself as “the apostle of a new religion,” one of her own devising. In the process she would expose the double standard that allowed foot soldiers of the Salvation Army free access to city parks and street corners while radicals were routinely harassed. Denied a speaking permit by the acting police chief, Herman Schuettler (present at Haymarket, and an early member of the Chicago anti-anarchist Red Squad), she decided to go forth mockingly clutching a Bible: “Religions seem to be the style, and I do not see why I should not start one. I have some decided opinions on the matter of religion and I do not think the police have any right to interfere with me so long as I am not infringing on the rights of others.” On August 29, the police arrested her while she was speaking in Washington Square Park (nicknamed Bughouse), across from the Newberry Library. According to one account, “Mrs. Parsons was considered the real brains of the Anarchist gang, and the police take no chances with her.” In trying to elude the authorities, her ingenuity knew no bounds—but rarely worked for long.45
In 1910 she spent April, May, and most of June visiting Los Angeles, Vancouver, Anaconda (Montana), and Salt Lake City. The following year she made at least two trips to New York City, appearing with Haywood and pitching her appeal specifically to the “young bloods” among the radicals she met. She still had the ability to inspire, as she did on a final visit to Philadelphia, when she impressed a little girl named Emma Gilbert, named after Goldman (little Emma’s brother, Voltaire, was named after de Cleyre). In an interview, Gilbert later said: “My first recollection of a black person was Lucy Parsons, who came through Philadelphia several times to lecture and would stay with us at the Radical Library, where we lived, at 424 Pine Street.” Parsons also traveled to Milwaukee in the company of her friend Carl Nold from Detroit, who noted, to a correspondent, “If a white [man] is in her company in public, he is naturally subjected to the gawking of the public, but of course I made nothing of it, and we merrily drank.”46
It is possible that Parsons was out of town in mid-May 1911, when Voltairine de Cleyre came to Chicago and met with a number of comrades to found the Chicago Mexican Liberal Defense League. For several years a small group of American radicals had followed events in Mexico, where an uprising against the dictator Porfirio Díaz had led to brutal reprisals against his critics, some of whom had fled to the United States. Working out of Los Angeles, they published a bilingual (Spanish and English) newspaper, Regeneración, and formed a “junta” on behalf of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM—Mexican Liberal Party), which had been founded in 1905. In 1911, four of these junta leaders, including Cipriano Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother Enrique Flores Magón, were serving twenty-one-month sentences in the McNeil Island penitentiary on Puget Sound in Washington State on charges of conspiracy. (They would be in and out of jail for years.) De Cleyre’s group rejected the conventional wisdom that only the urban proletariat could spark a revolution, writing, “The longer we studied developments, the clearer it became that this was a social phenomenon offering the greatest field for genuine anarchist propaganda that has ever been
presented on this continent.” By seizing the lands of the elites (with the approval of the PLM), Mexico’s peasants were engaging in the kind of “direct expropriation” that anarchists had been advocating for years. De Cleyre urged uncompromising support for Regeneración, and, alluding to Goldman, shamed those who would “squander their money in cafes while they discuss ‘Chanticleer’” and preferred to live in “clouds of theory.” Now that the opportunity for action presented itself, de Cleyre said, “we are so theory-rotted that we are hopeless to face it.” In Chicago, she had a staunch ally in Ralph Chaplin, who had spent two years, 1907 to 1909, in Mexico. Regeneración’s records in 1911 and 1912 listed both Parsons and de Cleyre as subscribers.47
Parsons would later write and speak in more detail about the Mexican revolutionaries, but for now she could not help but notice the loss of several comrades. De Cleyre’s work on behalf of the PLM rebels was one of her last radical acts. Always in poor health, she died of meningitis on June 20, 1912, at the age of forty-six, and was buried near Albert Parsons and his comrades in Waldheim Cemetery. A few months later, Tommy Morgan, Parsons’s former friend and recent nemesis, was killed in a train wreck en route to California, where he had planned to retire. General William H. Parsons, Albert’s brother, had also passed from the scene, dying at the home of his son, in Chicago, in October 1907. Parsons was losing touch with Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband, William, who for a while lived in Colorado, not far from where pardoned Haymarket defendant Sam Fielden was leading a reclusive life on a modest ranch.48
In April 1912, a group of Chicago IWW members went public with their charge that the organization consistently denigrated traditional craft unions, including those affiliated with the AFL. They argued that the IWW should concentrate on cultivating radical factions within those unions, factions that would serve as revolutionary vanguards and gradually lead toward “direct action” and away from the timid policies espoused by the parent body. Perhaps because of her recent travels, where she had received a warm welcome from trade unionists on the West Coast, Parsons embraced this idea, and not only lent her name, but also her living room, to the founding of a new group that sought to pursue this goal—the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA). Others present at that initial meeting were Agitator editor Jay Fox (who had recently relocated from Washington State); William Z. Foster and his wife, Esther Abramowitz, who were boarding in Parsons’s home at the time; the Norwegian-born Samuel Hammersmark, who had been radicalized by Haymarket when he was a teenager; and the activist Earl Browder, based in Kansas City. Foster, born in Massachusetts in 1881, had joined the IWW in 1909, when he took part in the free-speech struggle in Spokane. He would soon become one of Chicago’s most effective union organizers.49
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