Parsons had no opportunity to learn firsthand of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but that did not prevent her from extolling the presumed virtues of the new regime. Like other anarchists, she hailed the fall of the Russian czar, Nicholas II, on November 7, 1917, as the culmination of radical trade unionism: the first working-class nation-state emerged as a beacon to people everywhere—in Gurley Flynn’s words, “Everything that we of the left-wing movement heard from there [Russia] through the press fired us with enthusiasm.” Comrades in Chicago bade farewell to the Russian dissidents Aron and Fanny Baron, who now returned to their homeland to, in Ralph Chaplin’s words, finish the process of “industrial freedom established along lines mapped out in the ‘One Big Union’ chart.” He added, “As good Wobblies, we promised to back the Russian revolution to the limit.” Presumably, the Bolsheviks’ bloody suppression of their political opponents, evidenced, for example, in genocidal pogroms against Jews, amounted to a temporary measure necessary to secure the success of the fragile new Soviet Republic. In late 1917, Russia withdrew from the war with Germany, and the Bolsheviks turned to defeating enemies at home.25
By this time, the IWW had left little doubt about where it stood on American involvement in the war. In August 1914, at its convention in Chicago, the delegates had declared that “while the army of the unemployed is growing by legions, the Masters of Bread are preparing to ship the murderous hordes of Europe the foodstuff that the workers have produced, and this with the connivance of the United States Government which has under way plans to subsidize ships for that purpose.” A resolution urged the masses to raid granaries and storehouses and “help yourselves” rather than waste time protesting at city hall or the state capitol: “Where food is being shipped, confiscate it, if you have the power.” Chaplin listened and later expressed his misgivings: “To me that declaration fell into the category of the ‘Call to Arms’ that found its way into the Arbeiter Zeitung just prior to the Haymarket bomb incident in 1886.”26
In 1912 and 1913 the IWW had sponsored a number of spectacular strikes in the East and South, labor actions that brought together workers from many different nationalities in the face of wage cuts, speed-ups, and the introduction of labor-saving machinery. Beginning in the spring of 1917, however, as the United States prepared to officially enter the war, the group tried a new tack—organizing industries essential to the war effort, such as lumber, copper, and oil, and encouraging workers in those industries to walk off the job and halt production in the process. That summer, thousands of miners in Bisbee, Arizona, and Butte, Montana, faced the wrath of local authorities. In Butte, six men dragged the IWW organizer Frank Little from his boardinghouse room, beat him, and hanged him from a railroad trestle. Despite lynch mobs and other extreme measures of repression—1,200 Bisbee miners were forced into stifling boxcars and deported to the New Mexico desert—the Wobblies were beginning to wed their denunciations of the war effort in general and the military draft in particular with real results in the forests and mines. In a related effort in Chicago, William Foster capitalized on the heightened wartime demand for meat to convince rival stockyard unions to come together in a Stockyards Labor Council. Subsequent arbitration resulted in an eight-hour day and a five-day workweek, but those gains evaporated in 1919, and the unions were still denied recognition. In 1917, IWW membership stood at an all-time high—an estimated 150,000.27
The response of governors, mayors, and local sheriffs was swift and furious. In an effort to obliterate the IWW, these officials conducted mass trials and imprisoned many of its members and supporters, viciously suppressing even the most innocuous forms of protest against the war. Authorities trained their sights on dissenters generally, and individuals across the political spectrum were caught up in the dragnet, with even the upstanding reformer Jane Addams labeled a “dangerous Red.” Still, neither the Progressive movement nor the Socialist Party felt the full wrath of the US Justice Department or its state and local allies the way the Wobblies did. This latest iteration of a “Red Scare” amounted to a renewal of the repression with which Lucy Parsons had contended for more than two decades, but she now remained conspicuous for her silence.28
Beginning on September 5, 1917, and continuing sporadically thereafter, federal and local officials nationwide raided and ransacked IWW halls and arrested IWW members, claiming that the organization was beginning to hamper the war effort in material ways. The June 1917 Espionage Act and the May 1918 Sedition Act provided legal cover for the silencing and punishing of dissenters. The Sedition Act mandated harsh prison sentences and crushing fines for any persons “disposed to utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of the government of the United States.” A number of states passed criminal syndicalism laws, vague statutes used as a pretext for breaking up radical groups and jailing their members. On September 28, 1917, a grand jury convened in Chicago—the international headquarters of the IWW—and indicted 166 Wobblies on a total of 10,000 charges. Two months later, 116 of those defendants stood trial, and 101 of them were convicted. During the months they languished in the Cook County jail awaiting arraignment, many of the defendants, including Ralph Chaplin and Bill Haywood, found themselves in the same cells that had been occupied by Albert Parsons and his comrades three decades before, the wooden beams of the gallows still visible at the far end of the cellblock. Haywood wrote, “Their words seemed to reverberate throughout the prison. Their silence spoke an undying tongue.”29
These prosecutions represented the country’s most egregious assault on civil liberties since the founding of the republic, abrogating constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and the vast majority of citizens remained mute, apathetic, or cowed. Antiwar speakers faced arrest and conviction for criticizing the war, informing young men of their rights as draftees, denouncing war profiteers, expressing optimism about the Bolshevik Revolution, displaying a red flag, or writing for a socialist or anarchist publication. Gurley Flynn noted that “‘Thou shalt not kill’ became subversive doctrine, sending even religious conscientious objectors to prison.” By 1918, papers such as Regeneración and Mother Earth were either shut down or banned from the mails.30
Many people whom Parsons knew well, or organizers she had encountered on her trips around the country, now faced long prison terms—Ricardo and Enrique Magón, Ralph Chaplin, Bill Haywood, Vincent Saint John, Eugene Debs, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Cassius V. Cook, who had recently arrived in Chicago to head the League of Humanity, a new civil liberties group, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft. Debs had declared, “I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than be a coward or a sycophant on the streets…. Our hearts are with the Bolsheviki of Russia.” Sitting in jail, he once again ran for president and in 1920 polled a million votes, even though the federal government had stripped him of his citizenship. Marie Equi joined the IWW after the Portland cannery strike and participated in militant antiwar marches. Arrested and convicted under the Sedition Act for speaking out against US involvement in the conflict and denouncing those industrialists who profited from it, she was sentenced to San Quentin. The prosecutor in her case had warned the jury that “the red flag is floating over Russia, Germany, and a great part of Europe. Unless you put this woman in jail, I tell you it will float over the world!” After an eight-day trial in July 1917, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were convicted of obstructing the draft. The two of them, both “alien anarchists,” along with hundreds of others, were deported to Russia the following year.31
As this fresh wave of hysteria washed over the country, Parsons chose to focus not on the plight of her friends and acquaintances, but on national cases of individual labor organizers who had been killed by mobs, wrongly accused of violent crimes, or incarcerated for their radical writings—Joe Hill, executed November 15, 1915, for murder; Frank Little, lynched in Butte; Thomas Mooney, convicted of a bombing at a 1916 San Francisco Preparedness Day parade and im
prisoned for twenty-two years before he was pardoned. Parsons had refrained from defending the McNamara brothers in the Los Angeles Times case. They had no connection to anarchists, though the paper’s publisher called them “anarchic scum.”32
During these years, Parsons’s writings were sparse. She did support a short-lived paper—this one, The Social War, edited in Chicago by Hippolyte Havel, lasted only a few months, from May to November 1917. According to the first issue, “We want a state of society where the individual, freed from every fetter, having only to fight against natural difficulties, may be able to move at ease, associate according to his needs and affinities, breaking the association whenever it fetters him, or when it shall have accomplished the work for which it was formed, and to remake other groups, to satisfy fresh needs, and to attain new ends.” The paper folded after its editor was called to appear before a Chicago grand jury in September.33
On November 11, 1918—the thirty-first anniversary of the Haymarket executions—the Allies signed an armistice with Germany and ended the Great War. Nevertheless, the year 1919 saw the continuation of civil unrest in the United States, with Chicago its epicenter: a toxic mix of labor conflict, racial tensions, and persecution of labor radicals would ensure that the city would have no peace. Strikes engulfed US Steel, Armour and Swift, and International Harvester, part of a general wave of labor actions claiming the energies of four million workers nationwide throughout the early 1920s.
The traumatic events that spanned the twelve months of 1919 paved the way for the ultraconservative politics of the 1920s, as many Americans conflated labor strife and other forms of social conflict with domestic terrorism. Parsons caught a brief glimmer of white working-class consciousness in early 1919 only to see that light quickly extinguished. In January and February, a Seattle shipyard workers’ walkout sparked a general strike among employees in a wide range of workplaces throughout the country. Around this time, 3,700 inmates at Leavenworth, many of them her friends, engaged in a massive protest against the lack of food, and the poor quality of what there was of it. In late April a series of booby-trap bombs were sent to politicians, judges, and other prominent Americans, including US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and oil baron John D. Rockefeller. That month, Lucy Parsons announced in Regeneración, which was revived after the war, that she intended to begin a speaking tour in the East to defend the jailed Magón brothers and to explain the Mexican Revolution “from the other [i.e., Mexican] side.” She wrote, “As I read Spanish, I can show what has been accomplished within Mexico, I think.”34
June brought more domestic terrorist attacks, with eight bombs planted in eight cities, this time larger than the ones used in April, and Palmer targeted again. These bombings were carried out by followers of Luigi Galleani, who was determined to advance Johann Most’s “propaganda by deed” with mass murder. The Galleanists told victims of the June 2 bombs: “War, class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.”35
On June 5, Chicago police arrested Parsons’s lover George Markstall, charging him with making comments that were overheard on a streetcar threatening the life of President Woodrow Wilson. Markstall reportedly exclaimed, “The anarchists will soon run this country. The American people can’t stop us.” He also called Wilson a “grafter” and said he wished he were “out of the way,” ill-timed remarks, coming so soon after the June 2 bombings. Markstall was placed under $10,000 bond, packed off to a psychiatric hospital for observation, and released soon thereafter. The Tribune identified him as Parsons’s second husband.36
On July 27, the sweltering heat sent thousands of Chicagoans to the lakeside. Not far from shore, a black youth named Eugene Williams held on to a railroad tie and drifted perilously close to a segregated beach, provoking a white man to throw a rock at him; Williams drowned. His death and the refusal of police to arrest his assailant led to thirteen days of fighting that left twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites dead and more than five hundred injured. The attacks on black people exposed the social fault lines of Chicago, where whites, regardless of age, religion, or ethnicity, could cheer for the Ku Klux Klan and the “holiness of its exploits.”37
Three years after the riot, an investigative panel, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, conducted an in-depth study of the working and living conditions among migrants from the South. Lucy Parsons’s theories and writings, derived mostly from European communists and anarchists, seemed wholly divorced from the awful reality faced by black Chicagoans. Between 1917 and 1921, whites set off nearly sixty bombs, which caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to homes owned by black people and killed two of them, all in an effort to keep black families from moving into white neighborhoods. A handbill distributed by a group of white homeowners screamed, “Shall we sacrifice our property for a third of its value and run like rats from a burning ship, or shall we put up a united front and keep Hyde Park desirable for ourselves?” For radicals who continued to insist that the liberation of the white laboring classes would eradicate prejudice based on skin color, Chicago offered abundant evidence to the contrary.38
On August 15, 1919, Albert Parsons Junior died of tuberculosis at Northern Illinois Hospital for the Insane (the Elgin Asylum). He had lived in the asylum for twenty years and fifteen days. Apparently, his father’s nephew—General William Parsons’s son Edgar—lived in Chicago during this time and received periodic reports from the hospital about Albert Junior’s condition. William Parsons’s children told Carolyn Ashbaugh, a biographer of Lucy Parsons, that the guards and other inmates had routinely abused him, presumably because of the activities of his notorious mother, and that “he was put in confinement and in constraints, and he repeatedly fought with guards and other patients.” On August 18, George Markstall accompanied the body to a local cemetery, where it was cremated. Lucy kept his ashes in her home. She had outlived not only her husband and all her children but also (probably unbeknownst to her) Oliver Benton, who had died in Waco in 1916.39
In early September 1919, a group of radicals met in Chicago and founded the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). William Z. Foster had spent the summer organizing steelworkers, a move that caused their employers to turn to large numbers of Mexican and African American strikebreakers. Around this time, in Centralia, Washington, members of the local American Legion attacked the IWW Hall, whose members had been organizing the region’s lumber workers, leaving six dead. Wesley Everest, a Wobbly who was arrested for his part in the melee, was seized from the jail and murdered, another martyr whom Parsons would compare to her husband. On December 21, when the Buford sailed from New York City, among the 249 deportees aboard were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Luigi Galleani had been sent back to Italy in June.
As the turbulent year of 1919 came to an end and a new decade dawned, George and Lucy were living together on North Troy Street. Boarding with them were a boilermaker and his wife and four children. George was working as a machinist, but Lucy, now sixty-eight years old, had no occupation, perhaps as a result of her failing eyesight. For more than four decades she had proved herself a resilient champion of the dispossessed, grabbing headlines and impressing even younger comrades with her fearlessness. Yet never again would she have access to the kind of boisterous public stage she’d had in the Hull House hunger demonstrations. The 1920s would usher in a new chapter in her life, with her sphere of influence now considerably diminished by her advanced age and by the uniquely reactionary nature of the times.
PART 4
THE FALLING CURTAIN OF MYSTERY
Chapter 14
Facts and Fine-Spun Theories
ON WARM-WEATHER DAYS, DENIZENS OF CHICAGO’S LOW-RENT district—called Hobohemia—congregated in leafy W
ashington Square Park, a vibrant, city-block-sized marketplace of sales pitches and unconventional ideas, where speakers held forth from five scattered soapboxes. Not far west of the mansions lining Lake Shore Drive, the park lived up to its popular name, Bughouse Square—“bughouse” was slang for insane asylum—and attracted political idealists, the artistic avant-garde, runaways, and drifters. In the 1920s, some Bughouse regulars knew Lucy Parsons only as a frail, somewhat eccentric orator among many others of the type; in her long, old-fashioned dress and floppy flowered hat, she looked like an interloper from a bygone era. Yet her voice was still strong, and her name still reverberated among many Hobohemians. A small boy named Louis Terkel who lived near the square was struck by her appearance—“poorly dressed, but genteel,” he later recalled—and by her “fiery” speeches. He vividly remembered his amazement at seeing one man, an “old, battered Wobbly,” reverently drop a whole dollar into the hat Parsons passed around after one speech. Parsons was in straitened circumstances—George Markstall was often out of work—and so to support herself she spoke frequently in the square. She also kept selling her pamphlets and books, which she carried around in tattered shopping bags.1
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