Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  On the fiftieth anniversary of the Haymarket executions, the Free Society Group and the Pioneer Aid and Support Association organized a commemorative ceremony held in Ashland Auditorium. The Communist Party refused to contribute. Sam Dolgoff, who had been absent from Chicago for several years, remembered Parsons’s speech that day, a day the communist Daily Worker called her “yearly Gethsemane”: “Lucy stepped out on the platform, bent with age, almost totally blind—but still defiant, still hurtling curses at the powers-that-be, still calling for the overthrow of capitalism. We exchanged greetings, and I was almost overcome with emotion when she remembered me.” She was, he wrote, “the indomitable, fearless rebel.”54

  In an article for the IWW’s One Big Union Monthly around this time, Parsons felt called upon to disabuse the general public of the notion that the Haymarket defendants were bomb-throwers. (Sam Dolgoff spoke to the widespread negative associations with anarchists when he wrote, “The crackpots, fadists and theorists have always given anarchism a bad name.”) She recounted Albert’s composure on the gallows and her thwarted wish that the children could see him one last time. She ended the piece, “Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs but I am still a rebel.”55

  It was around this time, according to Alexander Trachtenberg, that Lucy Parsons joined the Communist Party. Trachtenberg was the “cultural commissioner” of the CPUSA and head of International Publishers, which in 1937 published Alan Calmer’s book Labor Agitator: The Story of Albert R. Parsons, to which Parsons had contributed a brief introduction. Trachtenberg’s claim is doubtful, however. Even at her advanced age, Parsons was still in possession of her faculties, and by this time she must have well understood that the kind of anarchist-communism she had championed bore no resemblance to Stalin’s communism. In CPUSA articles about her there was no mention that she was a member; certainly the party would have been glad to claim her as one of their own had she joined.56

  At an outdoor rally on the bitterly cold day of February 22, 1941, Parsons delivered her last recorded address. She spoke to a thousand strikers—members of the Farm Equipment Workers Union, which was affiliated with the CIO—at the International Harvester’s McCormick works, the location where workers had been killed during the May 3 demonstration leading up to Haymarket in 1886. Later that spring, to celebrate their victory, union members had Parsons ride on their float in the annual May Day parade, “a beautiful tribute to her past,” in the words of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.57

  In December 1941, the United States again went to war, and this conflict, too, would be followed by a Red Scare reminiscent of the state-sponsored repression in the wake of World War I. During the 1950s Lucy Parsons’s name would be invoked by those who sought to cast aspersions on the ILD and all its members as “un-American.”58

  Parsons, however, was not present to defend herself or her cause. On March 7, 1942, the woodstove in her frame house caught fire, and Lucy Parsons, age ninety-one, died in the conflagration; she had suffered burns over 25 percent of her body. Firefighters found her corpse in the kitchen. Markstall, who had been out shopping for groceries and arrived to see the building in flames, rushed in to try to save her, but he, too, was overcome by the smoke and fire, and he died in the hospital the next day.

  Epilogue

  THE RUINS OF THE HOUSE ON NORTH TROY WERE STILL smoldering when the many legacies of the enigmatic Lucy Parsons began to take shape. A neighbor named Estelle Golenda on Cortland Street provided details for the death certificate: that Lucy Ella Parsons Markstall, a woman “about 83” years of age, had been born in 1859, in Buffalo Creek, Texas, to parents who were natives of Mexico, Pedro Diez and Maries Gonzalez.1

  Early on the morning of the day after the fire, police officers and FBI agents, poking through the dwelling’s charred remains, prevented anyone else from getting near the house. At some point, what was left of Parsons’s personal library (before the fire, as many as 3,000 books) vanished from the premises. Many years later a British art and antiques dealer put a volume with an estimated value of £250 to £300 up for sale—a signed copy of William Morris’s book The Signs of Change: Seven Lectures inscribed “To Lucy E. Parsons, from William Morris, Nov. 15th 1888,” and bearing Library of Congress and FBI ink stamps. The Red Squad and federal agents had apparently hauled the library away to become part of the city’s collection of confiscated radical reading materials, and then either sold the books or otherwise disposed of them, perhaps sending them to the Library of Congress.2

  On March 12, three hundred people attended a double memorial service for Parsons and Markstall held in a funeral home at 3946 Milwaukee Avenue. As Parsons had requested, Ben Reitman presided; she must have been grateful to the faux hobo for the cash she was able to earn from his Fellowship of Reconciliation tours, and for his willingness to drive her out to Waldheim Cemetery every once in a while. During the service, Reitman referred to Parsons as “the last of the dinosaurs, that brave group of Chicago Anarchists.” It is true that she represented the first generation of Chicago anarchists; however, she would have objected to this inelegant turn of phrase. A mourner sang one of her favorite songs, “Joe Hill,” about the Wobbly who had been framed for murder and executed by firing squad in 1915: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night / Alive as you and me / Says I, ‘But Joe, you’re ten years dead’ / ‘I never died,’ says he / ‘I never died,’ says he.” Some wondered why the choice was not “Annie Laurie,” the song Albert sang his last night on Earth, but those who knew her swore that “Joe Hill” was her favorite.3

  On the very day he presided at her funeral, Reitman wrote to the Chicago Daily News and pronounced her the “Dark Lady” of anarchism, and as distinctly subordinate to the two whom he considered the greatest women of the movement—Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman. It is unclear on what basis Reitman was judging Parsons, though she was certainly not an iconic cultural figure like Goldman, or an anarchist theoretician like de Cleyre. Reitman did believe, however, that while “Lucy Parsons was not a great woman,” she “did have great ideas to which she was faithful all her life.” His remarks perhaps reveal Parsons’s isolation and estrangement from certain members of subsequent generations of radicals, though Reitman himself was no champion of the laboring classes. Lucy Parsons’s ashes, together with those of Markstall and her son, Albert Junior (they had been retrieved from a small urn in the wreckage of her house), were buried under a marker near the Haymarket Monument at Waldheim Cemetery.4

  Most mainstream publications provided perfunctory notices of her death and burial, but some others were more revealing of editors’ views of the person the Daily News called “Dark Lucy.” The chief editorial writer for that paper, Charles H. Dennis, recounted the night of May 4, 1886, and repeated the myth that Lulu and Albert Junior had sat next to Lucy on the wagon at Haymarket Square. Most of his recollections (he had been on the staff of the paper since 1882) focused on Parsons’s relationship with Nina van Zandt; he portrayed the two women as competing for the public’s attention after Haymarket. He opined of Parsons that “until recently she was the sibyl of extreme radical movements in this country. Her Mexican blood was discernible in her pigmented features.” Her obituary in the Illinois State Journal, based in Springfield, read, in part, “Lucy Parsons, participant in one of the world’s most sensational peacetime dramas, ended her career at 83 years with a theatrical exit—she was burned to death in the little home in which she had lived in Chicago many, many years,” as if she had scripted her own gruesome death for maximum newsworthiness. This paper, like others, either consciously or unconsciously, invoked Parsons’s famously fiery persona, though such associations might be considered in poor taste, considering the way she had died: “She wrote well but spoiled her efforts by too strong a use of inflammatory abuse.”5

  The radical press was more respectful, but it painted a distorted picture of Parsons that has proved enduring. The New York socialist Call devoted two-thirds of her obituary to Albert Parsons, apparently considering her
long, active life ancillary to his career. The communist Daily Worker made the patently false claim that she “was proud of her Mexican and Negro ancestry.” Writing in the same publication, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn offered a bit of unfounded speculation: “What a great satisfaction to her it must have been to realize the number of splendid young women, many of her color, who are enrolled in [the CIO] today.”6

  In probate court, as she had in life, Parsons caused controversy. Her estate consisted of two fire-insurance policies totaling $2,500; $500 in personal property (including “one old gold wedding ring,” valued at $3); and a balance of $45.93 in a bank account she and Markstall shared. Since she died with no known next of kin, the court appointed an attorney named Bernard W. Mages to administer her estate. He dispersed funds to settle the hospital bill for Markstall and the rest of the Markstall estate ($500) to demolish what was left of the house and to pay miscellaneous other expenses associated with claims adjustment and legal paperwork. Mages also hired two men to appraise her library (presumably at an off-site location) as well as an undertaker. This last expense, of $470.13, charged by the Sademan and Finfrock funeral directors, caught Mages’s attention, and to his credit he hired another lawyer to challenge that exorbitant amount, which included $225 for a casket (over $3,000 in today’s dollars); $31.50 for a robe and underwear; and $75 for embalming. These preparations for burial might have made sense and pleased the ever fashion-conscious Lucy Parsons had there been an open-casket service and then burial, but instead the undertaker cremated the body, for $30. Mages managed to get the total charge reduced to $270. What was left after these disbursements (about $450) went to the Pioneer Aid and Support Association for the maintenance of the martyrs’ graves at Waldheim.7

  OVER THE NEXT THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY, ANARCHIST, socialist, communist, liberal-reformer, Hispanic, Indian, and African American activists and scholars would claim Lucy Parsons as one of their own. She was heralded as a “Chicana socialist labor organizer,” her name rendered in the Spanish way, Lucia González de Parsons, and as “the first Black woman to play a prominent role in the American Left.” Much scholarly debate has ensued over how to define her, a task made more difficult not only by her reinvention of her ethnicity but also by her pragmatic approach to radical political theory. From the 1880s on she embraced core principles—that voting was counterproductive to revolutionary action; that trade unions were the building blocks of a new order; that the laboring classes must seize the material means to protect themselves from capitalists and their minions, including police; and that freedom of assembly and speech were integral in the fight for a good society. Yet she was never an ideologue, and she always confounded the labels of “socialist” and “anarchist.”8

  In May 2004, the Park District Board of the City of Chicago approved the “Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons” pocket park on Belmont Avenue between North Keating and North Kilpatrick, about a mile west of the site of her former home on North Troy. (During her lifetime she used the middle name Eldine more than Ella.) Some Chicagoans were appalled that the city would honor a professed advocate of dynamite; others sought to memorialize the anarchist, socialist, communist, anticommunist, or suffragist that she was (or was not) as an inspiration to subsequent struggles; and still others expressed skepticism that she would want any type of governmental entity to honor her in any way. Truly, Parsons Park is a park for all seasons of radical sensibilities.9

  LUCY PARSONS PROMOTED ANARCHY BY WRITING AND SPEAKING about it; she declared herself an anarchist. But did she live as an anarchist?10

  For her, the anarchic ideal offered a road map that led up from and out of the dark pit of wage slavery and into the bright light of voluntary associations of like-minded, generous people. Her particular brand of anarchy amounted to a literal call to arms among the laboring classes—men, women, and children at risk from predatory police and private security thugs no less than from the soul-crushing might of industrial capitalism. She and Albert thought in terms of grand economic forces, the relentless march of history, and he, especially, had a penchant for quantitative data that reduced workers to so many factors in a scientific equation. Yet if their sweeping message was life-and-death grim, their day-to-day existence certainly was not. As a mixed-race married couple, they showed considerable courage in the face of widespread disapproval among whites, a testament to the love they had for each other. Together and alone they shared pleasurable times with their children and comrades, partaking of the music, dancing, picnicking, and general conviviality that were the hallmarks of the German American community in Chicago. Lucy Parsons knew the exhilaration that flowed from defiance to authority—the protest march that blocked the flow of downtown traffic, the disrupted meeting that caused consternation among its leaders, the editorial that shocked the respectable classes. Perhaps most indelible are the images of her dodging the police, running from one street corner to the next, barging her way into a lecture hall, sprinting past a barricade. For Lucy Parsons, those were moments of joy and deep satisfaction.

  At the same time, mostly on account of her circumstances, she never achieved a kind of anarchic life that was both more playful and more profound. This kind of life presupposes freedom from material deprivation, to be sure, but also freedom from stifling social conventions, and from the everyday tyranny of mean-spirited bosses and abusive parents and partners. It suggests a kind of liberation that would have allowed her to speak openly and honestly of her enslavement as a youth and of her free-spirited sexuality. Instead, she remained bound by the prejudices of the overwhelming majority of white Americans, including the Chicagoans and others who stared at her on the street and cruelly labeled her and her children “niggers.” Among the many ironies and contradictions of her life, perhaps the greatest was her own fractured existence, a bifurcated way of being in a world that forced her to deny, or suppress, her childhood as a slave and her adulthood as a sexual being even as she became an infamous radical.

  Parsons gave little public expression to that collection of memories, resentments, and regrets that derived from her enslaved past and her love affairs, which remained hidden to all but herself. Nevertheless, her private self constantly intruded on her public life. She no doubt assumed that the absence of a Mexican American community in Chicago would allow her to “pass” as a Latina, albeit one who did not speak Spanish. She did not anticipate that Wacoites would point out that the young freedwoman they once knew and the famous Chicago anarchist were one and the same. In a similar vein, Emma Goldman and others called attention to her hypocritical bid for conventional (sexual) respectability. Because of these various efforts to “expose” her, Parsons had to conduct a perennial rearguard action in order to bolster her claim that her only real identity was as a champion of the laboring classes, the wife and then widow of Albert Parsons. Looking forward to a time when wages did not exist, “when labor is no longer for sale,” a time when “society will produce free men and women who will think free, act free, and be free,” she tacitly acknowledged the strictures under which she, too, lived and labored.11

  ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES OF PARSONS’S ACTIVISM WAS her self-proclaimed love of informed debate and disquisition, on the one hand, and her unswerving invocation of the virtues of explosive devices, on the other. At some point, surely she understood that dynamite has no politics. Through her association with Johann Most, and through her own writings, calculated to send fear into the hearts of the capitalist class, she exhibited not only a callous disregard for human life, but also a willful thoughtlessness about the consequences of what she advocated. Certainly, subsequent attacks on American soil by terrorists, whether on the Left or the Right; whether foreign-born or native; whether the Weather Underground, the Ku Klux Klan, Al Qaeda, or the Tsarnaev brothers, have resulted not only in the loss of innocent lives, but also in furious backlashes against civil liberties.12

  The notion that, by asserting the blessings of dynamite, Lucy and Albert and their comrades hoped merely to issue a stern thre
at to elites hardly serves to exculpate the anarchists. In their own time, the Parsonses insisted on being taken seriously, and articles in The Alarm went so far as to suggest that the deaths of members of the laboring classes constituted an acceptable form of collateral damage in the service of the class struggle. Later, defenders of the pair would take Albert’s lead and suggest that his roles as loving husband and father absolved him of any charges that his motives had been tainted or his actions criminal: hence the recurring image of Lucy Parsons and Junior and Lulu sitting on the wagon together the night of the Haymarket bombing. Yet that image was based on myth, and the fact is that both she and Albert, strenuously and unapologetically, had repeatedly called for the use of violence against capitalists and government officials.