Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  With the approval of Fox, the Chicago syndicalists took over The Agitator and renamed it The Syndicalist. In the first issue, published on New Year’s Day in 1913, Fox outlined the aims of the new organization with a series of negative statements, a less than promising beginning, to be sure: The SLNA, he wrote, was not a party, not a union, and not a “body of theorists.” It had “no new fangled ideas to propagate.” It did not urge workers to quit their jobs or join a new party or union, nor did it seek to “take them into new fields of effort, where they were unacquainted.” It would not confuse them with the idea “that they could be a member of the IWW and the AFL at the same time.” It was, in essence, a “modern” approach to labor organizing, requiring only that the workers appreciate their own power to “bore from within” and transform traditional craft unions into agents of anti-capitalist theory and action. The SLNA rejected arbitration but promoted sabotage, the “means whereby our working class enemies, the scabs, who support the capitalist system, as well as the capitalists themselves, can be defeated.” In sum, “the workers must realize that the ‘brotherhood of man’ of capitalism is a sham, and that the only way they will ever better their condition is by open warfare with their masters.”50

  The Syndicalist maintained strong ties with and ran articles by the English-language editor of Regeneración, William C. Owen, a Los Angeles anarchist. Included in the pages of the SLNA paper were sporadic dispatches from the few other syndicalist leagues around the country along with reports on strikes with revolutionary potential. Yet in Chicago, pitched battles between and within unions held little promise for a new society; in the buildings trades, for example, the plumbers and the steamfitters vied for power with one another, rather than with the bosses, and relied on slugging and drive-by shootings (the “death car”) to maintain dominance.51

  The Syndicalist paid special attention to developments from abroad, highlighting strategies there that American workers were exhorted to emulate. Foster had toured Europe in 1910 and 1911, and he made the time-honored mistake of believing that lessons learned there were easily transferable to the United States. In a lengthy pamphlet he wrote with Earl C. Ford, Foster drew upon the General Confederation of France as a model, denouncing America’s “barren” socialists and hailing the “militant minority, organized and conscious of its strength” in France as a transformative force in labor relations. As for the nature of the struggle, he wrote that “every forward pace humanity has taken has been gained at the cost of untold suffering and loss of life, and the accomplishment of the revolution will probably be no exception.” Foster would soon change the name of the SLNA to the International Trade Union Educational League, and become an officer in the Chicago local of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen.52

  The high-water mark of political Progressivism came in November, with the election of Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson. Wilson defeated the incumbent, William Howard Taft, and former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was now running on the Progressive Party ticket. Debs ran again as well and won 900,000 votes. As usual, Lucy Parsons remained aloof from mainstream politics; indeed, not even the IWW or the SLNA could hold her attention or allegiance, even as she remained close to some of their leading members. Both groups illustrated a common characteristic of US radicalism—the seemingly endless splintering, reconfiguring, and renaming of organizations.

  Instead of involving herself in the internecine fighting, Parsons continued on her own path. In Cleveland in February 1913 she lectured on “Syndicalism, Sabotage, and Direct Action,” and “Dynamite Conspiracies of the Capitalist Class.” The Plain Dealer printed what it claimed were excerpts from her speech; if rendered accurately, her comments indicated that authorities in that city were much more tolerant of her provocations than those in Chicago. Explaining syndicalism as a form of “French trade unionism,” she urged her listeners to disrupt production at its source: “If this cannot be done by peaceful methods, use force, tear machines apart, destroy property, and force capitalists to listen to the demands of their employees.” She reportedly ended by saying, “An anarchist is a man with a bomb in each hand and a knife between his teeth.”53

  By April, she was back in Los Angeles, and on Sunday the eighteenth she was arrested for selling copies of the Famous Speeches without a license (the book would soon appear in its seventh edition). She was in town to speak at the local Labor Temple on “Direct Action, as Exhibited in Mexico and Throughout the Labor Movement.” Her arrest attracted attention because, once she was in the police station, a matron made her take off all her clothes, even though she was charged with only a misdemeanor. According to the Industrial Worker, when she refused to remove a ring, “two burly policemen pounced upon her and forcibly removed it from her finger.” Regeneración also covered the story, outraged that “Mrs. Parsons—naturally a woman most conservative in statements”—had to spend a night in jail, while various other purveyors of literature were allowed to sell their wares on streets throughout the city. It was not the last time that Parsons was roughly treated by the police. However, this incident marked the first time that the name George Markstall was linked to Parsons in newspaper articles. He had been arrested with her, and they were both arraigned and confined to the city jail overnight.54

  The son of German immigrants, Markstall was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1871. He had led a nomadic life, spending most of his years before 1913 in Omaha (where he worked as a steamfitter), but also taking up residence briefly in Waukesha, Wisconsin, as well as Kansas City. (The possible Waukesha connection is intriguing; Parsons might have met Markstall during her visit there, or perhaps through mutual acquaintances who lived there.) In 1910 he was staying in an Omaha boardinghouse as a single lodger and working as a day laborer. He had been active in Socialist Party politics in Omaha and Kansas City, running for the local school board in the former, and the city council in the latter. He might have gravitated toward the West Coast and the free-speech fights there, or Parsons might have met him on her recent speaking tour. In any case, they apparently arrived together in Los Angeles in April, and they would remain inseparable for the rest of their lives. Markstall’s companionship did not tempt Parsons to return to housekeeping in Chicago, however; she continued to travel widely, to do battle with the police wherever she went, and to tend the flickering flame of Haymarket.55

  The Wobblies’ first decade prompted Parsons to hold out hope that itinerant laborers, no less than factory workers, might be mobilized and brought into the anarchists’ fold, ready and willing to join the still-elusive revolution. Though she remained supportive of the IWW, Parsons nevertheless remained untethered from it, preferring to make a living from the Haymarket legacy, as interest in Albert’s trial waxed with each new instance of labor-related strife. Like most radicals, though, she could not foresee the fierce backlash soon to come.

  Chapter 13

  Wars at Home and Abroad

  FROM 1913 TO 1915, LUCY PARSONS WOULD BE BACK IN THE NEWS, reprising her fin de siècle street fights with the police. In the midst of state-sponsored repression brought on by a confluence of crises—global war and the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, and, at home, mass migrations, wartime dissent, and labor strife—she seethed at scenes and situations that were all too familiar to her: peaceful rallies of workers disrupted by nightstick-wielding police, the speakers rounded up and jailed. These years represented a coda of sorts to her career as a fearless provocateur dodging police and vexing reformers. Somehow she managed to avoid more than a few hours of incarceration herself, but she witnessed firsthand the persecution of union leaders and the evisceration of the IWW.

  If the upheavals and crackdowns of the 1910s effectively brought to a halt Parsons’s decades-long role as a menace to the established order, they also posed a distinct challenge to her own political ideology, which had remained remarkably—stubbornly—consistent for many years. The intense radical activity leading up to and during the war years prompted her and other anarchists to believe that the wo
rld was aflame with far-reaching revolutions, that capitalism was dying. Yet in the United States, heavy-handed authorities were hollowing out civil liberties in a way that only seemed to confirm the insistent warnings of Parsons and others about the inherent tyranny of government. Her long-held view that capitalism had run its course crashed headlong into an expanding national state intent on flexing its muscle at home as well as abroad.

  Parsons was in her element when, in mid-July 1913, a bitter strike at a local fruit cannery roiled downtown Portland, Oregon. On Tuesday, July 15, IWW speakers mounted a wooden soapbox one after another to condemn the Oregon Packing Company and urge support for the women and children workers who were protesting starvation wages and filthy working conditions. An IWW organizer, Tom Burns, called for the red flag of anarchy to fly over the city, prompting the police to arrest not only him but also each of the nine speakers who followed him in turn on the box. The next evening, under police orders to curtail their meeting at 10 p.m., the strikers gathered at three different locations, where they listened to more speakers who were willing to risk jail time. One of them was Lucy Parsons, who positioned herself on a wooden stool at Sixth and Washington Streets and began to speak at 9:50. In response, a police captain maneuvered his car through the crowd, driving straight toward Parsons; she continued to talk, managing to leap onto the curb (in a long dress no less) just before the car crashed into the box and smashed it to bits. She escaped the captain’s grasp and ran to another strikers’ meeting on Main Street, where she resumed her speech and charged the police with trying to run her over. A month later, Parsons was still taunting the police, such as the one officer, who, in the words of a reporter, his face “white with rage or fear, one could not tell,” pulled her off a soapbox.1

  By this time, the strikers had won a few of their demands but lost their jobs. The protest had started on Friday, June 27, when some of the workers had walked out of the factory. Employed only in the summertime, and often cheated out of their full pay, girls as young as twelve or thirteen and women as old as sixty were making 40 cents for a workday that lasted as long as nineteen hours at the height of the season. Working elbow-deep in decayed fruit, they suffered from swollen arms and hands; members of an investigative commission called the unsanitary conditions “very deplorable.” The strikers demanded a minimum weekly wage of $9 and a maximum workday of nine hours. A strike committee fed as many as two hundred girls lunch every day, and nightly speakers sought to keep their morale high. Nevertheless, the strike ultimately collapsed when the packers agreed to a wage of $1 a day, $6 a week, and fired all of those who had walked off the job.2

  The Portland cannery strike had all the hallmarks of an IWW organizing drive, including an impressive cast of women agitators, mass spectacle, and a vicious response from authorities in the form of clubbings and jailings. Rudolph Schwab, son of Haymarket defendant Michael Schwab, and Rudolph’s wife, Mary Rantz Schwab, were there, working as Socialist Labor Party organizers. Rudolph labeled the three newspapers in town “mental prostitutes” and warned that “the iron fist of the Employers Association has crushed out the law of the state of Oregon.” “Girl pickets” marched from 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. under the supervision of Rantz Schwab and Dr. Marie Equi, a forty-one-year-old physician and lesbian who cut an eye-catching figure in her man’s suit. Rantz Schwab, after being arrested three times and bailed out each time, persisted in addressing the strikers. Equi tried to intervene and prevent a police officer from manhandling a pregnant woman, and jabbed an officer with a hatpin when he attempted to arrest her. The striking workers marched through downtown Portland under the banner of a cannery apron stretched across two poles; another banner read, “Forty cents a day makes prostitutes.” When police forbade picketing, the girls marched to the plant and stood outside, three rows deep, their arms folded in silent protest. The picketers brandished steel pipes, the legs of a speakers’ stand recently dismantled.3

  Parsons left Portland in the wake of the failed cannery strike, and on September 13 arrived in Seattle, where another free-speech campaign was underway. There protesters faced the wrath of superior court judge John E. Humphries, who seemed bent on accommodating the Wobbly strategy of filling the jails to capacity with defiant speakers. At a dramatic court hearing on October 2, Humphries sentenced twelve men and six women to jail for ignoring his injunction against street-speaking. Included in the group were the attorney for the local Free Speech Defense League and a mother with her little boy and baby. When the judge said he did not want to send the baby to jail, the woman responded sharply, “Never mind. The baby is as guilty as I am.” During this hearing, the judge saw fit to lecture the packed courtroom on “the evil of street speaking,” invoking the name of Albert R. Parsons, hanged because he “was guilty of murder through incitement to riot.” According to a reporter, at those words, “an elderly woman dressed in black, standing on a chair in the rear of the courtroom, cried, ‘That is untrue. He was an innocent man. I am Parsons’s widow.’ To which the judge shot back: ‘Widow or no widow, you had better keep quiet or you’ll find yourself in the county jail.’”4

  On November 12, Parsons spoke on “The Judicial Murder of 1887” in Tacoma, Washington. Later that month immigration authorities refused to allow her to board a steamer bound for Vancouver, where she was scheduled to deliver a lecture arranged by bookstore owner Cassius V. Cook. She remained on the West Coast for another year, however, spending January through April in San Francisco, then moving on to Washington and Montana, and back to Washington. With its large numbers of migratory workers in agriculture, mining, food packing, and lumbering, the West and Northwest offered fertile ground for labor organizing—and for speechifying and book selling: “I am pretty well known out here now,” Parsons told Cook in a letter. In January 1914 she took a leading role in protests against the San Francisco Co-Operative Employment Bureau, which was notorious for its fraudulent practices. On the twenty-first, she was charged with rioting, after a street meeting ended in window-smashing. One headline read “Imitates Husband’s Work.”5

  In early 1915, Parsons took the fight back to Chicago. For seven years, Hull House had sponsored weekly meetings of the jobless on Sunday afternoons in its Bowen Hall. Parsons appeared at the meeting of January 3, a cold, windy day, and tried in vain to get the assembled throng to leave the hall and march into the streets. Two weeks later, a large group once again crammed into the settlement house. Ralph Chaplin was there, and he described the men as “representative of Chicago’s unemployed; Slavic and Latin laborers, wintering migratories and white-collared ‘stiffs,’ still proud and dreading the plunge into the yawning depths beneath them.” Mingling among the crowd were “the red, beefy faces of the ‘gum-shoe’ thugs, watching the jobless crowd with cat-like care, and waiting uneasily for the signal to spring the plot that was to cover them with ‘glory’—the plot that was to punish men for the crime of being hungry.”6

  The crowd listened glumly to a series of speakers, the most radical of whom, according to Chaplin, was Lucy Parsons, though even her comments were relatively mild. She said, “The only property working men possess is their own bodies, and they should guard and protect these bodies as jealously as the master class guards and protects their possessions…. As long as the capitalists can throw their cast-off rags and a few crusts of bread at the working class in the name of ‘Charity,’ just so long will they have an easy and cheap solution for the unemployed.” Chaplin expressed his disappointment: “Mrs. Parsons was, as a rule, both frightening and beautiful in her intense earnestness. But at Bowen Hall she proved to be anything but a firebrand.”7

  More compelling as a speaker that afternoon was a young Jewish immigrant, a Russian-born baker named Aron Baron, a veteran of the 1905 uprising in his homeland who had been arrested in Russia during the events of that year and exiled two years later. Baron exclaimed to the group, “I am a baker, and I am expected to starve because I cannot get work baking the bread you people need and cannot buy!” His wife, Fanny
, led a group called the Russian Revolutionary Chorus in song. (The following winter, Aron Baron and Parsons would work together in a new Chicago group founded by Russian Jewish anarchists, the Free Society Group, and serve as coeditors of a revived Alarm, which lasted only a few issues, from December 1915 to February 1916.) Noted Chaplin, “As a whole the speaking was far from fiery, and the audience was anything but boisterous.”8

  Despite the relative tame speeches, the meeting then voted to take their grievances outside, displaying banners that read “Hunger” and “Give Us this Day our Daily Bread” in white letters against a black background. Honoré Jaxon, who provided an account of the event for the London-based anarchist paper Freedom, singled out Parsons “as the heroine of this latest episode,” which, he thought, had the potential to lift the Chicago anarchists out of their recent doldrums. Parsons and the others had barely begun to march through the streets when they were set upon by plainclothes police swinging billy clubs and by uniformed officers firing shots over their heads. Before long, thirty mounted police appeared—Chaplin called them Cossacks—scattering the crowd. Jaxon described the group’s “clever Indian tactics of dissolving at each police barrier, ‘leaking through’ amid the crowds of spectators, and reforming automatically on the farther side,” with a determined few avoiding capture and marching “an astonishing number of city blocks.” The next day, the papers lied: one headline read, “I.W.W.’s Start Riot at Meeting in Hull House. Led by Widow of Haymarket Anarchist, Smash Windows and Maul Cops.”9