Goddess of Anarchy
Page 38
Now well into her seventies, Lucy Parsons continued to agitate against what she considered Haymarket-like injustices—the incarceration of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been accused of murder and armed robbery in Massachusetts, and of the Chicago-born militant socialist Tom Mooney, who was accused of a bombing in San Francisco in 1916. By the mid-1920s, Parsons had joined a new group of comrades in the International Labor Defense (ILD), which, founded in 1925 by Chicago communists, served as the American section of the Soviet Union’s International Red Aid network. Its aim was to provide lawyers and arouse public outrage on behalf of jailed leftists. Headed jointly by William Z. Foster and former Wobbly James P. Cannon (until the two had a falling-out in 1928), the ILD never seemed to lack for causes, given the persistently high level of repression against radicals of all stripes during the postwar period. Parsons later explained that she became active in the organization “because I wanted to do a little something to help defend the victims of capitalism who got into trouble, and not always be talking, talking and doing nothing.” Yet increasingly, accounts of her speeches appeared not on the front pages of the mainstream press, as they once had, but in nostalgic features, such as “From the Tribune’s Columns,” recounting her exploits ten or twenty-five years before.2
In the popular imagination, 1920s Chicago was the era of the Dreamland Ballroom, where a pert, bob-haired flapper, cigarette in one hand and glass of bootlegged gin in the other, swayed to the seductive lyrics of “My daddy rocks me in a steady jelly roll / My daddy rocks me and he never lets go.” Yet the reality was less glamourous: The end of the war had ushered in a recession that threw many black people out of work and left many whites chronically underemployed. The drop in demand for labor wiped out the wartime gains made by unions representing the steel, meatpacking, and farm-machinery industries. A continual influx of blacks and Mexicans to Chicago kept wages low and the number of scabs in reserve high. (Perhaps it was not a coincidence that, as Chicago’s Mexican immigrant community grew, in her public speeches, at least, Parsons failed to mention her previously oft-repeated claim that she was of indigenous and Spanish descent.) Chicago’s largest firms created in-house unions and instituted the trappings of welfare capitalism, as if company baseball teams could compensate for long hours, poor pay, and hazardous working conditions. Finley Peter Dunne, writing as the sharp-eyed Irish immigrant Mr. Dooley, described the employer’s ideal company union: “No strikes, no rules, no contracts, no scales, hardly any wages, an’ dam’ few members.” And as unions declined, the ranks of a revived Ku Klux Klan swelled; Chicago proved fertile territory for the Klan’s antiblack, antiforeign, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic diatribes, and the city was home to 50,000 members of the hate group out of a total of 2 million nationwide.3
Lucy Parsons had once lived in a dusty horse-and-buggy Texas cow-town; now, in the 1920s, Chicago’s State Street was clogged with automobiles. She and the city had grown up together, and over the decades she watched as the place added hundreds of thousands of people, while Gilded Age inequities persisted despite dramatic structural changes in the economy. And certainly the emergence of a new iteration of the KKK indicated that the more the pace of technological innovation accelerated, the more likely it became that a significant portion of the white laboring classes would seek refuge in a narrow tribalism.
The city still reeked of offal emanating from the stockyards even as it was growing out and up at a rapid rate—its 2.7 million residents in 1920 would mushroom to 3.3 million a decade later. Skyscrapers in the art-deco, neo-Gothic, Beaux Arts, and Prairie styles sprang up on Michigan Avenue and its environs; the magnificent new 605-foot-tall limestone Board of Trade Building on West Jackson Avenue was embellished with stone carvings of crops, and topped off by Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, on its copper pyramid roof. Yet in the midst of all the new construction and the expanding economy, many Chicagoans continued to live in tight-knit neighborhoods bounded by their workplaces, houses of worship, and cultural and charitable organizations. As always, Democratic and Republican politicians paid only lip service to the laboring classes, denouncing all radicals as foreign and inherently un-American. The object of their ire included the dwindling number of anarchists and Wobblies, which had been weakened almost to extinction by state-sponsored persecution, as well as the members of a new group that had been founded in Chicago in 1919, the Communist Party, acolytes of Russia’s revolutionary Bolsheviks. Despite these radicals’ thin ranks, as Mother Jones noted, the members of any group trying to “turn the world upside down” were dismissed as “Reds.”4
Parsons saw stubborn continuities even as a powerful new political economy in the form of mobster capitalism was taking hold in the city. In 1923, the gangster Al Capone moved into the Lexington Hotel at East Twenty-Second Street and South Michigan Avenue and began his murderous reign over bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling in the city. Capone operated as the quintessential predatory capitalist; at the same time, his modus operandi departed from that of the anarchists’ stereotypical villain: his seat of power was not the workshop or the factory, but the bookie joint, the brothel, the speakeasy, the police station, and the district courthouse. His method of enforcement was not the club-wielding cop or private-security thug, but the loyalist with a Thompson submachine gun, aka the “Chicago typewriter.” By 1929 he was making $6 million a week. The political system was corrupt and violent; the “pineapple primary” of 1928 was named for the hand grenades that rival groups of Republicans lobbed at each other.5
With their brutal sense of territorial imperative, keen organizational skills, and hypermasculine demeanor, the Prohibition-era gangsters seemed to Chicago elites to resemble nothing so much as leaders of Parsons’s beloved trade unions: Did not union leaders and mobsters both extort distributors in an effort to fix prices and fatten their profits at the expense of consumers? Indeed, many politicians and businessmen began to see workers’ organizations as inherently criminal enterprises, and, with the backing of local courts, to treat them as such. In 1927, local judges and members of the Employers’ Association were using the term “racketeers” to describe not only bootleggers but also organized barbers, dry cleaners, and truckers. Labor unions in general felt the full weight of “anti-corruption” courts and prosecutors.6
Meanwhile, Chicagoans gradually began to create new kinds of communities among themselves, proclaiming themselves “fans” of certain movie actors, radio and nightclub singers, and professional athletic teams. They listened to political debates, comedy, and music on the radio station WGN (sponsored by the Chicago Tribune—“the world’s greatest newspaper”)—including new musical forms, such as jazz, ragtime, and the blues, which had been brought north by Louis Armstrong and other southern black migrants. Moviegoers flocked to the immense Uptown Theater, a 25,000-square-foot “picture palace” in the Spanish Renaissance style with a 34-piece orchestra, a staff of 130, and seats for 4,400 patrons. On the silver screen Hollywood glorified gangster shootouts with the cops.7
The ideal of a wageless economy, a cooperative commonwealth, had long since receded. The masses had turned out to be consumers, not revolutionaries. Now people worked to make money, not just to feed their families, but also to buy new radios, phonographs, telephones, and tickets to movie theaters and amusement parks. As the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd observed in 1925, “more and more of the activities of living [were] strained through the bars of the dollar sign.” These new consumer communities forged social bonds that at times competed with those among workers on the job, in the union hall, or on the picket line.8
Despite her involvement in the International Labor Defense, Parsons regretted her own increasingly constricted world of action and thought. She wrote to her old friends Cassius and Sadie Cook (they were by this time divorced, he living in Los Angeles, she in Chicago) lamenting that “the dreams of us dreamers, are, after all, but dreams; iridesent [sic] dreams!” Chicago possessed a vibrant cultural scene, but to
Parsons the city seemed pinched, parochial, ungenerous: “The great, rushing, restless, headless mob, called ‘the public,’ or the people, care nothing, absolutely nothing for the pleadings and philosophizing of the radical who wishes to change the economic conditions,” Parsons wrote her friends. “There is careless indifference, a supreme contempt for all progressive ideas that is simply amazing!” She advised them, “Lay a solid foundation for your personal comfort when the shadows of life’s journey are slanting toward the setting sun.”9
Politically, Parsons found herself caught between her anarchist principles and the communists’ headline-grabbing activism. By this time, the center of American anarchism had shifted from the Germans and the Russian Jews of Chicago to the Italians of Boston and New York. Younger Chicago anarchists honored Parsons’s effort to keep alive the Haymarket legacy, but some, such as Irving Abrams (a member of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association), considered her a dupe of the communists because of her new association with the ILD. The communists, in turn, labeled her a purveyor of hopelessly outdated ideas favoring anarcho-syndicalism. (The term, which came into use in the 1920s, was a new label for Parsons’s long-held belief that trade unions were the vehicles of revolutionary change—the overthrow of the wage system and capitalism.) In Chicago, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) underwent bitter factional fights, splintering in the process. The IWW seemed to recover from the government repression of World War I only to cannibalize itself in its own disputes over ideology and decentralized leadership over the next two years. For yet another period of her life, Lucy Parsons found herself with no natural political home.10
AFTER WORLD WAR I, PARSONS MADE FEWER OUT-OF-TOWN TRIPS. She apparently visited Bartolomeo Vanzetti in prison in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1923 (a trip paid for by the men’s defense committee), and on occasion she represented the ILD at official events. Still, increasingly, she traveled outside Chicago under the cloak of anonymity, in contrast to her speaking tours of old, when the mainstream press had covered her obsessively. Now she generally confined her perambulations to Chicago’s Water Tower neighborhood, defined by the landmark 1869 North Michigan Avenue structure that survived the Great Fire of 1871, and to the West Side of the city. Living in her longtime home in the “Old World ghetto” of North Troy Street, she would take a streetcar for the four-and-a-half-mile ride to Bughouse Square on Walton and the Dil Pickle Club tucked away in Tooker Alley. On the West Side was Turner Hall, at Twelfth and Halsted, Wobbly headquarters at 1001 West Madison, the ILD offices at 23 South Lincoln Street, and Ben Reitman’s Hobo College in a basement at Washington and Desplaines, where university professors debated politics with the homeless and the unemployed.11 It was a well-trod sidewalk that took Parsons around the block from Bughouse Square to the Dil Pickle, Chicago’s lively public-forum-cum-coffeehouse operated by the estranged husband of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Jack Jones. (The couple had married in 1908, separated in 1910, and divorced in 1920.) An unprepossessing entrance led into a converted barn furnished with chairs and benches, a lectern, a sandwich and coffee bar, and a stage. In the evenings, speakers expounded on a range of topics, from birth control and homosexuality to vegetarianism and Hinduism. There, patrons could hear Gordon Owens of the African Blood Brotherhood speak on black nationalism (the absence of a color line was an unusual feature for even the most daring free-speech forum); Harry “Kill Christ” Wilson on atheism; and Dorothy Day on Catholic socialism. Poetry as a form of political advocacy found expression in the works of Ralph Chaplin and journalist Carl Sandburg, who were regulars at both IWW headquarters and the Pickle. Sandburg described his ambitions: “I had high hopes the new poetry one way or another would be able to get at the real stuff of American life, slipping its fingers into the steel meshes and copper coils of it under the streets and over the houses and people and factories and groceries.”12
Although Lucy Parsons made appearances at the Pickle during its heyday, from 1917 to 1926 or so, she was not a regular, nor did she see the raucous place as a particularly congenial space. A number of her old acquaintances, including George Schilling and August Spies’s wife-by-proxy, Nina van Zandt, frequented the club, and she empathized with the prostitutes, alcoholics, and hoboes who gathered there (the “tramps” of her 1884 manifesto), but many of the patrons shared neither her class consciousness nor her voracious reading habits. She probably agreed, at least in theory, with the premise that a panhandler, con artist, or roughneck had just as much to say about the meaning of life as a Northwestern University sociologist—in fact, the Pickle was “looking for bums who talked like professors,” according to one patron—but, as someone who had always aspired to a higher level of respectability, she was likely offended by the profusion of self-proclaimed “cranks” and misfits. The sign outside the club warned: “Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside.”13
Moreover, with their dilettantish ways, members of the “Near North Side intelligentsia” probably struck her as silly and self-indulgent. No doubt she also objected to the Pickle’s performative culture—its motto was “Heckling Is a Fine Art and Intelligence Sandbags the Cliché-Klingers,” and Parsons always hated interruptions from the audience. Yet there were moments to savor: a game requiring players to talk about a topic for three minutes one night featured the Irish-born former-Wobbly-turned-communist Jim Larkin on the necktie: “There are all kinds of neckties. There is the bow, the four-in-hand, the Ascot, the striped, the plaid, the polka dot…. But the greatest tie a man ever wore, was the tie in the rope around his neck when he went to the scaffold for freedom.”14
Parsons appeared at least once at the Dil Pickle with Martha (“Red Martha”) Biegler, a tall, imposing woman who had graduated from Indiana University with a major in philosophy. In 1919, the fifty-five-year-old “Field Marshal” Biegler enlisted Parsons as a speaker on the topic “Women Are the Slaves of Men’s Suppression, Oppression, and Depression.” The program had been announced in a local labor paper as intending to “prove the majority of men are low-grade morons.” Frank O. Beck, an ordained Methodist preacher and chronicler of Hobohemia, probably had Parsons in mind when he wrote that Biegler’s acquaintances “included almost all of the manifold varieties of female crackpots of the city’s underworld.”15
Such language suggests how Parsons had become something of a cultural artifact, an object of curiosity among Chicago’s middle classes. Frank Beck and Ben Reitman sponsored what they called Fellowship of Reconciliation tours, which catered to the city’s reformers and intellectuals and to college students who saw encounters with the city’s “exotics” as a form of high-minded entertainment. Bringing well-to-do whites in conversation with sexologists, black activists, labor radicals, and diverse clergy, the all-day bus tours cost 50 cents a person and alighted at stops around the city, with short lectures punctuating the day. A story in the Northwestern University student newspaper chronicled a trip to “Little Hell” (a reference to a Sicilian-immigrant neighborhood at the time) that included a visit to the Dil Pickle, where Lucy Parsons “described vividly some of the revolutionary leaders she has known.” (The headline read “Atheists, Free Lovers, Hoboes Discourse on World Ills.”) Later, Beck would write that Parsons, at his behest, had often recounted her life’s journey to small groups of college students. Her lectures on Haymarket, the IWW, the history of anarchism, and other aspects of her background—including her early years as Lucy Diaz, born in El Paso, Texas—earned her a little cash and kept her in the public eye, but definitely not in the political vanguard where she had once been.16
THE EARLY 1920S CAUSED PARSONS TO DESPAIR, AND WITH GOOD reason. Many of her old Wobbly comrades had emerged from prison broken in health and spirit, ready to give up the fight and the IWW. Ralph Chaplin was the exception: in his memoir, Wobbly, he recounted in graphic detail the ordeals that he and other alleged “conspirators” had faced at the hands of sadistic guards and prison wardens—including being handcuffed to the bars of their cells, beaten mercile
ssly, thrown into isolation for months at a time, and starved nigh unto death. Richard Flores Magón, in the cell next to his, had a heart attack and died in the absence of timely medical care. The physical and emotional torture exacted a lasting toll: “We had to harden ourselves in order to avoid cracking up,” Chaplin wrote. “I have seen strong men broken and weak men hounded to madness.” Nevertheless, when President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in 1923, Chaplin immediately returned to work for the IWW, now in San Francisco as an editor of Industrial Worker, bent on exposing unions that were under the sway of dictatorial strongmen.17
Other Wobblies, including Jay Fox, Sam Hammersmark, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, embraced the Communist Party as a harbinger of a worldwide revolution. Some former anarchists turned to Christianity, or sought out a reclusive life. Honoré Jaxon moved to the Bronx, where he built a dwelling out of pieces of wood and corrugated tin, and dabbled in real estate. Nina van Zandt ran a Chicago boardinghouse, where she took in stray cats and dogs. Her speech, dress, and movements became increasingly erratic, distressing those who remembered her as the glamorous society girl in love with the handsome, doomed anarchist.
With communists in the ascendancy and anarchists of the old school in a state of dissolution, Parsons found herself in the middle of debates over the meaning of the new Soviet Union. Such debates divided formerly like-minded individuals, tearing apart radical newspaper staffs, communes, and alternative schools all over the country. Exiled to Russia, Emma Goldman had quickly become disillusioned with the Soviet Union’s totalitarian tactics in suppressing dissent. In an interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, she declared that “Bolshevism is rotten”; the Soviet people, she said, were “entirely subject to the whims of a bureaucracy which excuses its tyranny on the ground. It all is done for the welfare of the workers.” Goldman wrote to Eugene Debs in 1926 that Soviet Russia was but “a delusion and snare. That in its stead there is a machine which has a stranglehold on the Russian masses and which is undermining the true revolutionary elements as represented by the socialist and anarchist wings in the country.” Bill Haywood, in contrast, remained a staunch supporter of the Bolsheviks, and he was disgusted that Goldman would withdraw her support for them. He had fled to Russia while out on bail in April 1921, leaving his comrades back home with the immense task of paying his $61,000 bond. He took Goldman to task, at one point invoking Lucy Parsons, who, he claimed, rightly or wrongly, “severely criticizes Emma Goldman because she sold herself to the capitalist press of the United States. She characterizes the Goldman articles as a rehash of the supercilious vapourings of capitalist reporters.”18