Goddess of Anarchy
Page 39
Parsons defended the Bolsheviks through the 1920s, although later she would admit that the news out of Russia in those years was too spotty to allow for reasoned judgments to be made about the emerging soviets. She rationalized the bloody suppression of rebellious sailors in the port city of Kronstadt in 1921 by arguing that the revolution must be secured at all costs, and that by taking up arms against the new government, the sailors were by definition reactionary enemies of the state. The fact that the Bolsheviks used military force—well, there was “nothing new about it.” She almost certainly did not learn about the fate of her comrades Aron and Fanny Baron, with whom she had marched in the 1915 hunger demonstration. Full of hope, in 1917 the couple had returned to Kiev, where Aron was elected as a delegate to the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Soon both he and Fannie began to denounce the Bolsheviks as agents of totalitarianism, and together the couple launched a new anarchist paper. Feared by Communist Party leaders, Fannie was executed for terrorism in 1921. Over the next sixteen years Aron Baron was in and out of Soviet prisons and concentration camps. He remained steadfast through hunger strikes, exile, and hard labor, never renouncing his conviction that the party had betrayed the ideals of the revolution. He was executed in 1937.19
Parsons remained alert to the possibilities of introducing a new generation to Haymarket, and finding fresh markets for her books. In the spring of 1922, she reacted indignantly to the recent publication of Daily News editor Melville Stone’s book Fifty Years a Journalist. In the book and in magazine articles, Stone claimed that venerated Chicago socialist George Schilling, among others, had regularly informed him of “the progress of ‘the impending revolution.’” Parsons’s defense of Schilling rested on the fact that he had never been “a part of the revolutionary anarchist groups,” as Stone alleged. Parsons did, however, confirm that Stone had offered a “substantial monetary consideration” if Albert would surrender to him and not the court in June 1886. (Albert’s attorney, Captain Black, had declined the offer.) This spat over Stone’s book offered Parsons an opportunity to send letters to the editors of several newspapers and remind readers about the history of Haymarket.20
In March 1926, Parsons wrote to Eugene Debs to congratulate him on his decision not to beg for the restoration of his citizenship after his release from prison in 1921. She saluted him as “Grand Old Rebel!” and reminded him that her husband, too, had refused to prostrate himself before a judge for a pardon. Furthermore, she noted, if Debs saw fit to cite her works in his own writings, he should note that Life of Albert R. Parsons was available for $3.25, and a copy of Speeches could be had for $1.25. Debs died in October of that year, his health compromised by long years of incarceration. In an elegy for the famous socialist, Sandburg wrote, “Over in Valhalla, if Valhalla is not demolished, rebuilt, renamed, he [Debs] speaks at ease with Garrison, John Brown, Albert Parsons, Spartacus.”21
Parsons lost a number of other comrades during the 1920s, including those with direct links to Haymarket and the IWW. Bill Haywood died alone and embittered in a Moscow hotel room in 1928. His ashes were divided between the Kremlin Wall and Waldheim Cemetery. Lizzie Swank Holmes died in Denver in 1926, and her husband, William, died two years later. Mother Jones rallied striking Chicago dressmakers in 1924; it would be her last visit to the city before her death in 1930. Gone by the late 1920s were virtually all the other principals of the Haymarket trial, including Samuel Fielden, who died in 1921, the last remaining defendant, and the only one not to be buried at Waldheim; Judge Joseph Gary; the twelve jurors; all the lawyers except for Sigmund Zeisler; the seven justices of the Illinois Supreme Court; and the nine justices of the US Supreme Court.
Parsons’s personal losses, combined with the fractious relations among radicals in the city and beyond, left her bereft of an ideological community. By simultaneously maintaining ties with the communist International Labor Defense and its bitter rivals, the Free Society Group and the IWW (which had its own Workers’ Defense League), she managed to alienate at least some members of all these groups. At the same time, she had to deal with young labor radicals, mostly men, who were determined to start over and remake the world. Some—no doubt those whom she considered ill-informed—found her sharp-tongued, quick to ridicule them and to belittle their ideas. She refused to mellow with age.22
One of these young men was Sam Dolgoff, a house painter. Born in Russia in 1902, he moved to the United States as a child, and in the early 1920s became a Wobbly and a popular Bughouse soapboxer. He met Parsons at a Free Society Group when she congratulated him on a paper he delivered, “Is Anarcho-Syndicalism Possible?” (His answer was not only yes, but yes, it was inevitable.) Though Dolgoff was dismayed when she became what he called a “Communist sympathizer,” he took it upon himself to respond to charges leveled by his comrades that she was a “turncoat.” He believed, instead, that “she was very naïve.” Moreover, “she was not able to grasp the distinction between anarchism and bolshevism and other ideologies. For her, anyone against capitalism was ipso facto a revolutionist and she saw no reason why all of them should not bury the hatchet and get together.” And then came the most cutting comment: “Besides, she was most susceptible to flattery, which the communists applied in large doses.”23
Dolgoff was probably referring to the blandisher James P. Cannon, secretary of the ILD from 1925 to 1928. Cannon had joined the Wobblies in 1911 at the age of twenty-one and, under the tutelage of Haywood, had set about organizing workers in his native Kansas and the greater Midwest. When he read Speeches in 1917, the story of the Haymarket martyrs made a lasting impression on him. He joined the communists and, after a brief visit to the new Soviet Union, moved to Chicago, where William Z. Foster introduced him to Parsons. Cannon seemed to have a genuine appreciation for the legendary Mrs. Parsons, and he was eager to use her name and still considerable oratorical abilities to advance the ILD. In seeking to win her favor, he made sure that the ILD sold her books and gave her the proceeds.24
Parsons was drawn to the ILD for a number of reasons. Ever since she had embarked on her defense-fund tour of the country through the fall of 1886 and the spring of 1887, she had argued for the creation of a permanent organization that could pay the legal fees of jailed leftists. She had known Foster for many years. Perhaps she paid close attention to the early defense efforts of Sacco and Vanzetti, which seemed to prove the deficiencies of anarchism as a means of coordinating legal strategy. Italian anarchist defense committee members on the East Coast remained true to their principles, rejecting effective organization and snubbing potential middle-class allies in the effort to save the accused men.25
Parsons found the Sacco and Vanzetti case a worthy claim on her money and energies because of the trial’s familiar themes of prejudiced judge and packed jury, which created real doubts about the defendants’ responsibility for the murder of which they were convicted. Subsumed under that popular narrative, however, was the fact that both men had professed devotion to the militant, bomb-throwing Galleanists. And it is possible that, to avenge their arrests, one of their compatriots was responsible for the Wall Street explosion on September 16, 1920, that killed thirty-eight people—not the lords of finance, but messengers, clerks, and bookkeepers. Vanzetti was pleased with her visit, remarking in the fall of 1923 that of all the people in the world, he had wished to meet Eugene Debs and Lucy Parsons, and his wish had come true. Despite the worldwide outcry over the unfair trial that Sacco and Vanzetti received, the two were put to death in 1927. Cannon sought to make the relevance of Haymarket explicit, writing, “America shows its real face to the world and the mask of democracy is thrown aside.”26
That year Parsons joined the ILD executive committee, which included the writer Upton Sinclair as well as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clarence Darrow, and Ralph Chaplin, among others. At the November annual meeting in New York City (which also marked the fortieth anniversary of Haymarket), she was the guest of honor, accepting accolades from the 286 delegates representing thirty countries
. The following year she lectured in support of the ILD in Milwaukee and Cleveland, where activists cheered her, a living link to history, and in 1930 she made an appearance in Detroit, home to an ILD branch that was named for her.27
Although Parsons worked with the ILD, she eschewed any broader participation in Chicago’s Communist Party. In July 1929, she wrote a piece for the ILD’s monthly Equal Justice—the renamed Labor Defender—focusing on a textile workers’ strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. Communists helped to lead the strike, but Parsons confined her observations to a warning that an upcoming trial of its leaders might rely on twelve openly prejudiced jurors: if so, she wrote, “the electric chair looms in the not far distance!” As was now customary, her purview remained limited to Haymarket and the state’s efforts to frame innocent men and women, rather than extending to the injustices that had prompted the workers to strike to begin with.28
Still, for Parsons, aspects of the party’s activities in the 1920s must have recalled the 1880s, a time of mass demonstrations and surefire certainty that lessons from abroad would speed the revolution at home. Sponsoring concerts, picnics, and other social events to build solidarity and raise money for the Daily Worker, the party evoked the efforts of the German immigrant anarchists to support The Alarm years before. And, much like the anarchists of the late nineteenth century, the communists ultimately fell victim to infighting and factional disputes; as one Chicago Communist Party member put it, no doubt referring, at least in part, to the split between Foster and Cannon, the “political differences hardened into personal antagonisms…. The factionalism was incapacitating the Party, and we were unable to resolve it ourselves.”29
Nevertheless, Chicago communists were notable for their willingness to break from the tradition of socialists, anarchists, Democrats, and Republicans and began to address black civil rights. In 1915, the head of the Soviet Communist Party, Vladimir Lenin, declared southern black sharecroppers to be a modern vanguard of the proletariat, and later the Communist International (Comintern) argued that black Americans were deserving of their own “nation-within-a-nation” status. Chicago party members launched concerted organizing efforts on the city’s South Side. They hoped to tap into the deep well of discontent among the black men and women who lived there and help them win real power, in contrast to what they considered to be the window-dressing offered by established local organizations, such as the National Urban League and the NAACP.
The ghetto, hailed as a “Black Metropolis,” boasted large black-owned businesses, such as Robert Abbott’s Defender and Jesse Binga’s bank, as well as a flowering of the arts akin to the Harlem renaissance during the same decade. Community leaders, so-called New Negroes, expressed a relentless optimism for the future if only residents would patronize their neighbors’ stores and professional services in the area, which was, in the words of writer Dempsey J. Travis, “100 percent black after sundown when the white landlords and merchants closed their offices and shops and went home to the suburbs.”30
Such boosterism, however, could not overcome the effects of the recession on Chicago’s black population. Throughout the 1920s, at a time when black musicians, painters, and writers were experimenting and innovating, black workers were suffering from high unemployment and chronic layoffs. Investigators from the Women’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor documented the health risks and occupational hazards borne by black women who worked at washing the fat off slabs of meat, packing sausages, and stacking boxes. These workers were forced to stand all day to do their jobs, and the toilets made available to them were dirty and unventilated. In the early evening, workers returned home to dark, cramped rooms where the commotion emanating from next-door speakeasies and brothels made it difficult to get a good night’s sleep.31
Not all white communists believed it necessary to reach out to blacks. The views of Karl Marx (which Parsons had spent much of her life promoting) held that black people constituted a subset of workers and not a unique, historically aggrieved group in their own right. Furthermore, in the 1920s, the Communist Party in Chicago persisted in elevating dogmatism over pragmatism (and common sense), alternately refusing to reach out to the black community and reaching out in a way that was hamstrung by ideology: the party attacked A. Philip Randolph and his new all-black union of 12,000 members, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, on the grounds that it was insufficiently radical and hence harmful to the well-being of the working class as a whole. White party leaders disapproved of all forms of profit-making, seemingly oblivious to the fact that successful black businesses were the pride of the South Side. The charge that government workers were puppets of capitalist masters found little traction among blacks in a city where almost a third of all postal carriers were black, the highest rate in the nation, and where southern migrants saw the ballot as a precious, hard-won right. To entertain and instruct South Side residents, communist groups staged Russian plays with Russian actors speaking Russian. The party founded a workers’ group, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), in 1925, only to see it founder from doctrinal squabbling within a couple of years. Some members argued that even anti-lynching campaigns were an unnecessary distraction from the class struggle.32
At the same time, a host of other groups competed aggressively for black membership and dollars—among them the NAACP and the Urban League, which both focused on opening up “white” jobs to blacks; and the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Blood Brotherhood, attempts to offer an alternative to the communists’ ANLC. In the eyes of William Foster and other whites, black-led groups, including churches, were little more than bourgeois collaborators, and all black people remained a “problem.” Parsons, however, was not a part of these discussions, in keeping with her lifelong effort to distance herself from black struggles.
On May 1, 1930, Chicago communists led an estimated 25,000 marchers through the West Side, an event advertised via 200,000 leaflets distributed throughout the city in the weeks before. The procession, which was escorted by a squad of police on motorcycles, featured marchers singing Russian folk songs and carrying red banners. At the end of the route, the march culminated with an address by Lucy Parsons to a mass meeting in Ashland Auditorium. At the beginning of her speech, Parsons expressed the fear that her voice was not strong enough to carry through the vast hall—not because of her advanced age, but because of the poor acoustics, she assured the crowd—and then took the audience back to 1886, when thousands of men, women, and children walked off the job and told the bosses, “I will be damned if I go back to work under such conditions.”33
Parsons said she had lived long enough to know that each generation of radicals left its own mark on history, and she believed that the communists would “go on and on, and will not pass away like the other organizations, because I think they have the substantiality.” Nevertheless, she must have startled her hosts when she declared, “I am an anarchist: I have no apology to make to a single man, woman, or child, because I am an anarchist, because anarchism carries the very germ of liberty in its womb.” She took heart from the size of the audience, people willing to “drop their work in times like this, when work is so scarce, to come out in the mid-week [Thursday] and defy the capitalist classes, and come out in the sunlight.” Holding aloft a scarlet cloth, she recited a poem: “The workers’ flag is deepest red / It shrouded oft our martyred dead.” In the near future, she predicted, women would not have to sell their bodies for a morsel to eat, able-bodied men would not lack for work, children would not have to toil in a factory. She ended by extolling her dead husband and his comrades for their noble and enduring contributions to the class struggle. And if anyone wanted to learn more, they could purchase copies of her edition of their speeches, available right there in the hall that day.34
The stock market crash of October 1929 plunged Chicago and the rest of the country into a deep economic depression. Because of its factory base and shaky municipal finances, the city immediately registered the dire e
ffects of bank closures and the lack of available credit. The few unions in the city were either too weak to act, or too corrupt to care. Within a few months, unemployment was approaching a third of the working-age population—with fully half of all black workers and manual laborers unable to find jobs. Religious and private charities were overwhelmed by the needs of destitute families. Between 1930 and 1940, the city’s population of 3,376,438 would grow by only 20,000, a sure sign that the local economy had ground to a virtual halt.
When the federal census-taker came calling in the spring of 1930, Parsons offered a narrative of her life: She reported that she was the proprietor of a boardinghouse and had two lodgers: the sixty-six-year-old marble-cutter Charles Condo (Secondo), who had boarded with her since 1896; and George Markstall, who reported his occupation as drill press operator. She said she was sixty-five years old (in fact she was seventy-nine), and she estimated the value of her frame house at $6,000 (about $83,000 in today’s money). Her anarchist colleague Irving Abrams, who remained active in the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, later claimed that Parsons and Markstall had married in 1927, but it is doubtful that the antigovernment couple formalized their union in any way. No marriage certificate is on file in the Cook County offices.