Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  Parsons was among the six women and fifteen men arrested during the incident. Mary H. Wilmarth, a wealthy widow who had supported Chicago waitresses in their recent strike, bailed Parsons and others out of jail soon after they were arrested. The arrest of the Reverend Irwin St. John Tucker, the twenty-nine-year-old editor of The Christian Socialist, represented a departure from the usual roundup of labor leaders and anarchists. At a hearing on January 18, the defendants (many of them wearing bandages to bind up their wounds) asked for a jury trial. Sophonisba Breckinridge, a Hull House settlement worker, disputed newspaper accounts that Parsons had urged the men to go out and break windows, explaining that she had merely distinguished labor from other commodities—hardly an incendiary statement. Still, Detective Schuettler claimed, “I know Lucy Parsons’ record and I know what she says when she makes a speech.” He needed no eyewitness to tell him otherwise. Jane Addams spoke out against the arrests, saying that the only crime of those who had been sent to jail was parading without a permit. She also defended Parsons as an advocate for the long-term unemployed, a group often ignored by labor organizers. Local papers ran a photograph of Parsons behind bars wearing a floral-trimmed hat with a brim. With the urging of Addams and other prominent reformers, authorities dismissed the charges against all the accused.10

  Two weeks later, on January 31, Parsons was determined to lead another parade, this time through a wintry mix of rain and sleet. Addams disapproved: the marchers had already won “a splendid victory” two weeks before, she said, and, considering the bad weather and lack of a permit, they should not press their luck. Nevertheless, with Parsons at the forefront, the procession got underway. Leaving nothing to chance, the “Cossacks” watched and listened warily as she exhorted her listeners. “If you want jobs,” she said, according to one reporter, “then make the warehouses of the rich so insecure that through fear they will give you work.” Parsons continued to speak out, exasperated by the timid socialists and the no-show IWW. The anarchists resolved, “From now on we will take such steps as we deem necessary to alleviate our conditions, whether or not such actions are considered legal or illegal. Necessity knows no law.”11

  In 1915, Parsons was keenly aware of the lack of organized resistance, apart from a handful of militant trade unions, that might challenge city elites in a swaggering way via street theater. Indeed, radicalism now encompassed new, not altogether welcome, meanings. Popular perceptions of anarchism had shifted, with poets and writers claiming the label and embracing individualistic or “Bohemian” impulses that challenged the stultifying moral codes of the respectable middle classes. These new anarchists replaced shock-talk about abject wage slaves with shock-talk about long-standing sexual taboos, using rhetoric (and action) certain to offend churchgoers. At the same time, Progressives were co-opting elements of the socialist program related to public ownership of utilities and regulation of the workplace, ameliorating conditions in a way that seemed to make the overthrow of government not only unnecessary but also counterproductive. Few could deny that Jane Addams’s April 1915 testimony before Illinois state legislators describing the effects of punishingly long hours on the health and well-being of garment workers was more effective in ushering in an eight-hour day than Lucy Parsons’s impassioned speeches (accompanied by the inevitable street skirmishes with police), though the two women were making the same point.12

  The IWW had drained some trade unions of their radical members, leaving those groups more conservative and focused exclusively on bread-and-butter issues. William Z. Foster threw himself into the heavy work of union organizing, but his theory-minded comrades did not; too many of them, he thought, were retreating into lofty discussions of Plato and Nietzsche, and “bellyaching about the stupidity of the masses assuming an air of intellectual ‘hauteur.’” He and other syndicalists began to adopt a more measured tone about the possibilities of radical change: “Impractical dreamers,” he wrote, must recognize that “our ideas are not immediately recognizable; we do not hesitate to admit it. But they will become so through the energy exerted by more who understand them.” By the end of 1914, the Syndicalist League of North America was defunct.13

  Lucy Parsons absorbed these changes directly. In Chicago, to more and more workers, Labor Day was a day of rest, not protest; they preferred to spend precious free time picnicking rather than listening to orators call for the liberation of the laboring classes. On her speaking tours, Parsons at times now found herself hosted by artists rather than members of the proletariat. She spoke under the auspices of groups that attracted middle-class reformers and university professors, including the Modern Thought League of Chicago, the Spokane Economic Club, the Tacoma Social Science League, and the San Francisco Materialistic Association. She remained alienated from the Chicago IWW, which was headed by the anarchist-averse Vincent Saint John.14

  More generally, by this time Wobbly free-speech campaigners were wondering where their short-term victories would lead them. Did the repeal of municipal anti-street-speaking ordinances offer salvation to the underemployed lumberjack or the exhausted cannery girl? Despite the spectacular strikes of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and of silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913—which both garnered intense publicity and enlisted the energies of thousands of workers and high-profile organizers, such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Bill Haywood—the Wobblies, even in those two cities, could point to few long-term gains for the working class.

  Meanwhile, Parsons had to make a living for herself, and that meant not only selling books and pamphlets and charging for lectures (she kept a strict accounting) but also staying out of jail. Indeed, whether out of fatigue (in 1915 she was sixty-four years old), or devotion to her lover George Markstall, who had settled in with her in the house on North Troy Street, or eagerness to avoid the discomforts of incarceration, she maintained a remarkably low profile through turbulent times that upended the very foundations of her world.

  AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WAR IN EUROPE IN JULY 1914, MANY Americans seemed content to let the great empires reconfigure or destroy themselves without aid or interference from the United States. In 1915, Jane Addams became active in the Woman’s Peace Party; she and other Progressives and anti-imperialists favored a peaceful resolution of the conflict, fearing that the war would only divert resources away from domestic problems and enrich arms makers and other suppliers of military materiel. Socialists went further, arguing that virtually all of the combatants were both exploiting the indigenous populations of Africa and Asia and oppressing their own citizens, who were now being forcibly enlisted to serve as cogs in a modern war machine. Anarchists saw the state as ultimately culpable, for without its administrative apparatus, global conflicts would not exist: in September 1915, Lucy Parsons asked, “Could wars ever be carried on were it not for that institutionalized credulity which manifests in reliance upon ‘The State’?” She took aim at “German scientific Socialism”—that is, state-sponsored socialism—which, she said, had once seemed “so promising” but now was offering up the rationale for war, helping “their imperial master lay a war levy of a billion marks or more for the prosecution of a war on workers of other countries.”15

  In January 1917, Parsons lectured on “War as a Great Equalizer” at Chicago’s Economic Forum; but for the most part she limited her speaking and writing in these years to Haymarket commemorations, the plight of modern-day labor martyrs, and a non-suffragist brand of “woman’s advancement,” eschewing comment on either the war abroad or its impact at home. She did, however, continue to place ads for her edited books in such publications as Songs of the Workers: On the Road, in the Jungles and in the Shops (1910), a collection of Wobbly favorites; Mother Earth (1909–1912); and The Public: An International Journal of Fundamental Democracy (1916).16

  Although the United States did not enter World War I until April 6, 1917, the battles in Europe nevertheless had an immediate impact on Chicago. The city’s large German and Irish communities felt a historical af
finity for the Central Powers, including Germany, Austria-Hungry, Turkey, and Bulgaria, in opposition to the Entente—Britain, France, and Russia. Republican mayor William Thompson, boasting that he led “the sixth largest German city in the world,” urged the United States to remain neutral, hoping to retain the support of two vital ethnic constituencies. This stance became untenable after a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger ship Lusitania in May 1915, an attack that took the lives of 1,198 people, including 124 Americans. Faced with increasing hostility, German Americans downplayed their cultural roots—changing the name of the Germania Club, for example, to the Lincoln Club. As foreign immigration to the United States slowed, Chicago’s Deutschtum—Germany-away-from-home—could not replenish itself with newcomers, and radical labor politics held little appeal for the second generation. A once-proud, vibrant community, Parsons’s longtime home, became a casualty of a wartime fear of all names and words German.17

  At the same time, a severe labor shortage forced employers to look to new sources of workers. For decades, Chicago industrialists had welcomed large numbers of Eastern Europeans willing to toil for pitiable wages in factories and meatpacking plants. Bosses preferred to hire non-English-speaking immigrants rather than open up the workplace to southern native-born Americans identified as “black.” From an employer’s point of view, the ideal workplace consisted of whites separated from each other by language, religion, and ethnic loyalties, and cowed by the possibility that scabs-in-waiting would take their jobs if they went out on strike. Now, however, key sectors of the Chicago labor market opened up jobs to southern blacks for the first time. Rather than endure a white-supremacist reign of terror any longer, thousands of black men, women, and children voted with their feet and boarded trains all over the Mississippi Valley, arriving at Chicago’s Twelfth Street Station eager to begin a new life. One of them, a young man named Richard Wright, from Jackson, Mississippi, spoke for many when he wrote that he had “a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their being on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.” Between 1910 and 1920, the city’s black population increased from 44,103 (2 percent of the total) to 109,458 (4.1 percent). Migrants entered previously all-white workplaces in packinghouses, stockyards, farm machinery plants, steel mills, and foundries. They also registered to vote for the first time. If Lucy Parsons, an avid reader of the local Chicago press, perused the new black paper The Defender, she might have appreciated these developments and readjusted her idea of the industrial proletariat.18

  Life in Chicago was hardly the paradise that some migrants expected—or that The Defender promised. Hemmed in by predatory real estate practices on the city’s South Side, black Southerners found crowded, overpriced lodgings in the midst of Chicago’s red-light district, and had no choice but to take the worst jobs that employers had to offer—the kill floor of the packinghouse, the stifling foundry in the steel mill. Many of their white coworkers regarded them with suspicion, and unions persisted in their exclusionary policies. Ragen’s Colts, an Irish American street gang on the South Side that became a Democratic political organization and athletic club, deliberately stoked white resentment against blacks. (The group’s motto, “Hit Me and You Hit 2,000,” gave potent meaning to the term “worker solidarity.”) Yet the southern refugees continued to arrive—for the steady work, or the chance to see a White Sox game, or to sit at the front of the bus. Wrote one black woman to her sister back home: “I am quite busy. I work in Swifts packing Co. in the sausage department. My daughter and I work for the same company—We get $1.50 a day and we pack so many sausages we dont have much time to play but it is a matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein.”19

  By 1920, almost three out of every ten black men in Chicago were employed in factory work, up from virtually none ten years earlier. Nevertheless, many of the radical periodicals that Parsons read portrayed black people as lazy, ignorant creatures, scabbing when they were working at all. Some of her acquaintances—Dyer Lum and Jack London, for example—were unapologetic bigots. (In a letter to de Cleyre, Lum expressed satisfaction upon hearing that a southern mob had burned a black man at the stake: “I would have carried the wood myself if I had been there!” Torture served a larger purpose, he thought: “Burning him made the flesh of every nigger brute in the South to creep.”) Such opinions would have clearly discomfited Parsons—but at the same time, she would have adamantly rejected The Defender’s defense of black strikebreakers, the view that “unions cannot expect to close the working door in his [the black person’s] face in peaceful times and expect his co-operation in troublesome times.” She no doubt dismissed the eagerness with which black men and (after 1920) black women began to vote; indeed, compared to eligible white voters, they registered in disproportionately large numbers, and some of them, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, were rewarded by Mayor Thompson with political patronage jobs.20

  Another black paper, The Broad Ax, carried a May 15, 1915, notice of a recent meeting of the African American Alpha Suffrage Club, formed by Wells-Barnett, at which “plans were completed for an entertainment at which Mrs. Lucy Parsons, whose husband lost his life in the Haymarket riot, will be the chief speaker.” Yet no evidence exists that Parsons ever delivered the speech. By this time, Wells-Barnett had fallen from favor among the city’s black women’s clubs. For years she had suffered humiliation at the hands of the white women of the city and the nation. In 1913, an Illinois delegation to a Washington, DC, suffragist parade dithered and debated over allowing her to march with them, preferring that she stay with the other black women in the march. She refused: “I shall not march with the colored women. Either I go with you or not at all. I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.” Later, although the white suffragists had denied her the privilege, she slipped unobtrusively into the ranks of the white delegates anyway. Yet, as Chicago’s black population swelled, and institutions created by the old-timers were supplanted by new groups, such as the National Urban League, Wells-Barnett lost her leadership status. She also lost her patronage job as a probation officer. The white head of the NAACP from 1917 to 1932, Mary White Ovington, with whom Wells-Barnett frequently disagreed over the group’s less-than-confrontational tactics, remarked at one point that the black woman was “perhaps not fitted to accept the restraint of organization”—a rebuke that could also have been leveled at Parsons.21

  Parsons ignored the stirrings of black activism nationwide and in her city, instead continuing to find in revolutions elsewhere the promise that was eluding workers in the United States. The story of Haymarket had resonated with oppressed peoples around the world. The Cuban freedom fighter José Martí, for example, wrote a series of articles on the bombing and trial in 1888 for the Buenos Aires paper La Nación. In 1913, Parsons began raising money for the defense of Mexicans-in-exile who had been charged with trying to return to their native country to support the revolution, and for the beleaguered Magón brothers, who were still editing Regeneración in Los Angeles. The brothers reached out to the American radical community, vowing to the readers of Mother Earth, “We tell you: Lead us in solidarity and we will bury the capitalist system in Mexico.” Enrique Flores Magón boasted of the revolutionaries’ indigenous roots, which he believed made him and his comrades less corrupt than anarchists elsewhere: “Thanks to our tribal traditions; thanks to our being mostly Indians and, therefore, close-to-Nature agricultural people; thanks to our being illiterate and, hence, unspoiled by the so-called education of the capitalist class, our national or race soul and mind are apt to assimilate modern ideas.”22

  Emissaries from the Mexican revolutionaries found a receptive audience in Chicago’s Free Society Group, which sponsored a weekl
y speakers’ forum. However, not all American radicals were convinced that peasants’ “tribal traditions” could ignite a true class-based revolt, and socialists were uneasy with the rebels’ embrace of anarchism. Parsons herself ignored the question of whether or not rural peasants might form the vanguard of a workers’ revolution. Speaking to audiences in Chicago and elsewhere, she nevertheless claimed to be a native of Mexico and also a native speaker of Spanish. She focused on the Magón brothers’ struggle to sustain Regeneración, assailing the raid on their offices and the recurrent jailings of the men.23

  For his part, Enrique Flores Magón drew lessons from Haymarket in a direct way. In the fall of 1916, he wrote a piece called “My First Impressions” for the paper, and it was translated into English and published in Mother Earth in November. He recalled as a little boy hearing of the execution of “our comrades Parsons, Fischer, Engel and Spies”; yet at the time, “under the bloody tyrant Porfirio Diaz’ regime, it was so common to learn of men being shot, hanged or who had otherwise vanished from the face of the earth, that the news of the tragedy, read by my father to my mother, did not attract my attention except the fact that it happened in the United States.” Later, when his father read an account of a Haymarket memorial meeting to him, Magón wrote, “I listened intently and wondered how the bodies of the hanged men must have looked, dangling from the ropes fastened to the branches of a tall and leafy oak, as men are hanged in Mexico.” Even now in his mind’s eye he could see them ascend the gallows “with manly poise, serene, smiling, conscious of the end, but conscious also of the immortality of their Ideals for which they were made to die. I thought of the human herd, humbly placing their necks in their daily yoke in factories and sweat-shops instead of rising in rebellious protest against the murder of their comrades.”24