If all Americans who work for a just society can be judged by a single, dominant standard, it is the degree to which they confronted (and confront) the hard facts about the legacy of slavery. Though the Chicago anarchists hailed John Brown as their hero, they evinced little concern for the vast majority of blacks, a group deemed either unexceptional within, or totally outside, the bounds of the proletariat as defined by Karl Marx. These white radicals shared an active hostility toward the black men and women who took the jobs of striking white workers. Moreover, Lucy Parsons and her comrades denigrated the black freedom struggle as most Chicago South Siders perceived it—the right to vote and the opportunity to advance within the workplace, to swim at a lakefront beach on a hot summer day, to send their children to decent schools, and someday to buy a modest house to call their own. That these aspirations were identical to those of the white laboring classes (and, with the exception of the right to vote, to the Parsonses’ own aspirations, for that matter) only heightens the tragedy of white anarchists, socialists, and communists: these were men and women who claimed for themselves the mantle of radical change, but whose own prejudices served to replicate the unequal society against which they professed to be fighting.
Still, Parsons and her fellow radicals were correct in highlighting the unbridled aggression of local, state, and federal armed forces in attacking strikers, workers attending peaceful meetings, and speakers exercising their constitutional rights. In turn-of-the-century Chicago, anarchists were forced to defend themselves, just as the Black Panthers of the 1960s would later be forced to do, an effort that elites saw as a license for police officers to kill indiscriminately, both in the 1890s and in the 1960s. The Chicago Police Department’s Subversive Activities Unit (“Red Squad”) conducted unlawful surveillance of political dissenters until 1974, when it destroyed thousands of records related to radical individuals and organizations. Well underway during Lucy Parsons’s time, rogue policing fed off enforced residential segregation and the immiseration of much of the black population, and police-initiated violence ruined untold numbers of lives well into the twenty-first century. In her active, noisy resistance to restrictions on free speech and assembly, Lucy Parsons bequeathed a usable legacy to Americans today. For this reason, were she alive today, Parsons would no doubt laud the Chicago-based transparency nonprofit named in her honor. Lucy Parsons Labs declares that its mission is “to engage our community in a horizontal manner while organizing around digital rights issues, supporting free and open source projects and seeking the free flow of information globally”—information related, for example, to police expenditures and to illegal police activities such as surveillance, abuse, and cover-ups.13
In the end, there are few lives that are not a bundle of contradictions and shortcomings—saying one thing and doing another, abandoning deeply held principles in the midst of temptation or anger, turning a blind eye to conditions that do not fit one’s stubborn view of the world. Born a slave, Lucy Parsons lived a singularly eventful life that spanned more than nine decades, a life full of remarkable achievements in her roles as orator, editor, and writer, as well as a life full of unrequited longings and suppressed desires. Her early years on a Virginia slave plantation and later in Waco no doubt shaped her outlook in ways she never admitted to family or friends, or perhaps even to herself, influences impossible to know today. Although the considerable body of her commentary, both written and spoken, yields little about her inner struggles, her power to inform and fascinate is enduring, and her story, in all its complexity, remains a powerful one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.
As a freedman living in Waco, Texas, Oliver Benton, aka Oliver Gathings, claimed that a freedwoman twenty years younger than he, Lucia Carter, was his wife and the mother of his infant son. This image is from a photograph taken in September 1886, when Benton was fifty-four years old. “MRS. LUCY PARSONS,” ST. LOUIS GLOBE-DEMOCRAT, SEPTEMBER 18, 1886, 3.
In Chicago, the Great Upheaval of 1877 pitted striking workers against militia, private security forces, federal troops, and local police. This scene, depicting the Battle of the Viaduct on July 25, evokes a state of war. The workers, armed only with rocks, bricks, and sticks, were vastly overpowered. An estimated thirty-five workers died in the week-long clashes. MICHAEL J. SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS (CHICAGO: F. SCHULTE, 1889), 63.
Albert R. Parsons Jr. was born in September 1879. His birth certificate lists him as “Negro.” Lucy Parsons included this drawing, and one of Albert’s sister Lulu, in her tribute to her husband, Life of Albert Parsons, published in 1889. LUCY E. PARSONS, ED., LIFE OF ALBERT PARSONS WITH BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN AMERICA (CHICAGO: MRS. LUCY E. PARSONS, 1889), OPP. 49.
Lulu Eda Parsons was born in April 1881. On her birth certificate, her race is listed as “Niger.” She is listed as her mother’s third child, presumably an indirect reference to Lucy’s first baby, Champ, who died in infancy in Waco. PARSONS, ED., LIFE OF ALBERT PARSONS, OPP. 96.
Lizzie Swank’s demure appearance belied her radical political ideology and fierce devotion to the plight of Chicago’s needlewomen. A regular contributor to and sometime editor of The Alarm, she (like Lucy Parsons) nevertheless managed to avoid prosecution for the Haymarket bombing. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
Born in Germany in 1850, George A. Schilling, a cooper, was a prominent Chicago labor leader. An early friend of Albert and Lucy Parsons, he remained a committed socialist and a firm believer in electoral politics while they turned to anarchy. He admired Lucy Parsons, but believed her provocative speaking style was responsible for painting all union activity with the brush of radicalism and violence. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
Born in Luxembourg in 1843, Michael J. Schaak ascended the ranks of the Chicago police force after becoming a patrolman in 1869. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1879, captain in 1887, and inspector in 1896. The lead investigator for the Haymarket “riot,” he was dogged and dismissive of civil liberties in his pursuit of Chicago anarchists. SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, FRONTISPIECE.
Chicago was well known for its vibrant radical labor press. This building at 107 Fifth Avenue (now 41 North Wells Street) housed two anarchist papers: the German-language Arbeiter Zeitung (Workers’ Paper) as well as Albert Parsons’s Alarm. Other labor papers published here included Vorbote (The Harbinger, Herald) and Die Fackel (The Torch). SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 76.
Anarchist parades were colorful affairs, with banners and floats. The talented seamstresses Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Swank probably designed and sewed these banners, several of which were displayed during the boisterous Thanksgiving demonstrations of 1884 and 1885. SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 69.
This portrayal of two women holding flags is no doubt a distorted rendering of the petite Lizzie Swank and her taller comrade Lucy Parsons. Swank and Parsons often appeared at the head of anarchist marches carrying the two revolutionary flags—the black one symbolized the plight of the starving poor, the red one the unity of all peoples across national boundaries. SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 78.
Contemporaries often commented on Albert Parsons’s dapper appearance, which ran counter to the stereotypical portrayal of the anarchist as slovenly, bewhiskered, and wild-eyed. Lucy Parsons considered this drawing to be a good likeness of her husband, and she included a variation of it in her Life of Albert Parsons (1889). SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 166.
Detective Michael Schaak considered Lucy Parsons a dangerous woman who, because of her gender, was unfairly absolved of accountability for her words and actions. He noted that, despite her claim of “Mexican extraction,… her swarthy complexion and distinctly negro features do not bear out her assertions.” SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 167.
On the night of May 4, 1886, Captain John Bonfield led a contingent of police into Haymarket Square, where the anarchist Samuel Fielden was addressing a crowd. Ordered off the speaker’s stand, Fiel
den began to protest, and an unknown person threw a bomb that landed near the entrance to Crane’s Alley (to the left of the lamppost). SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 140.
The bomb killed one police officer immediately, and later six more officers died. Sixty police and an unknown number of workers were wounded. Although this image shows workers shooting at police, the Chicago Tribune reported on June 27, 1886, that an internal police department investigation revealed that in the chaos “a very large number of the police were wounded by each other’s revolvers,” and that the police “emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.” SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 142.
August Brauneck, a German-born portrait photographer, took these pictures of Lucy Parsons in his New York City studio, probably in late 1886. Her fashion sense is on full display, evidenced by her elegant striped silk dress, delicate lace collar fastened with a gold pin, and hat decorated with ostrich feathers. Absent is her favorite piece of jewelry: a necklace with a charm in the shape of a gallows. PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-DIG-DS-10459.
PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-USZ62–48791.
By modern standards, Illinois v. August Spies et al. was a carnivalesque affair, with the jury playing cards, the judge flirting with his female admirers, and the on-lookers restless and unruly. The trial lasted from June 21 to August 11, 1886, and featured testimony from 118 “witnesses.” SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 410.
Joseph R. Buchanan, editor of the Denver-based Labor Enquirer, demonstrated an ideological fluidity in his role as an advocate for organized labor in the 1880s. Buchanan’s paper promoted the Knights of Labor but also served as an advocate for individual trade unions and published Albert and Lucy Parsons and other anarchists. Buchanan’s steadfast support for the Haymarket defendants led to his expulsion from the Knights. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
This illustration shows “murderers’ row” in the Cook County jail. The defendants are in the “cage,” in the foreground; to the left of the man in the bowler hat, Albert Parsons talks with Lucy. The image is embellished with pictures of Nina van Zandt and August Spies, whom the press portrayed as star-crossed lovers. After a proxy wedding in January 1887, van Zandt referred to herself as Nina Spies and remained devoted to his memory for the rest of her life. FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER, OCTOBER 1, 1887.
Standing on the scaffold on November 11, 1887, the four remaining Haymarket defendants appear as ghostly apparitions. Left to right are August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and Albert Parsons. Each of the condemned men spoke very briefly in turn, with Parsons’s exhortation, “Let the voice of the people be heard, O…,” cut short by the dropping of the trap door. SCHAAK, ANARCHY AND ANARCHISTS, 645.
Immediately after the executions, the condemned men became memorialized as martyrs to the cause of liberty. Louis Lingg committed suicide in his cell the day before the hangings were to take place. Albert Parsons, the only one of the five who was American-born, is placed in the center of the montage. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
Lucy Parsons was not the only radical female labor agitator to garner national attention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several of her contemporaries had Chicago connections. The Irish-born Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837–1930) moved to Chicago from Memphis after her husband and four young children died in a yellow fever epidemic. Jones disapproved of the anarchists’ demonstrations and lakeside meetings, convinced they were counterproductive to labor organizing. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
Born a slave in 1862, Ida B. Wells-Barnett lived in Chicago from 1893 until her death in 1931. She shared with Lucy Parsons certain life history experiences, such as early years in enslavement and a national reputation as an agitator, but apparently their paths never crossed. Wells-Barnett dedicated her life to fighting for civil rights while Parsons largely ignored the plight of the black laboring classes. PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-USZ62-107756.
Born in Michigan in 1866, Voltairine de Cleyre (shown here in 1901) was a well-known writer and theorist of anarchy in her day. She favored radical individualism, in contrast to Lucy Parsons, who argued that the good society began with trade unions. In the spring of 1911, de Cleyre moved to Chicago and began to promote the cause of Mexican revolutionaries. She died the following year. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
Like Mary “Mother” Jones and Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) claimed the Haymarket affair radicalized her. Goldman, who visited Chicago often, considered Lucy Parsons a rival for local and national press attention. Goldman promoted the idea of “free love,” whereas Parsons publicly favored conventional gender norms. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
As an icon of the labor movement and a living link to Haymarket, Lucy Parsons remained a sought-after speaker until her death. During the Great Depression, she was dismayed that many Chicago workers cast their lot with the Democratic Party and embraced the New Deal. The anarchist revolution seemed as remote as ever. JOSEPH A. LABADIE COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY.
Acknowledgments
MANY INDIVIDUALS CONTRIBUTED TO THIS BOOK WHILE I WAS researching, writing, and revising it, and I am grateful to each and every one of them for their expertise and generosity.
At the outset I would like to highlight the work of Carolyn Ashbaugh, who early appreciated and wrote about Lucy Parsons as a significant labor agitator, editor, and orator in American history. In 1976, Ashbaugh published the first full-length biography of Parsons, titled Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary, and soon after publication donated her notes as well as newspaper clippings, correspondence, and audio recordings to the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Carolyn Ashbaugh Collection ensures that future scholars will continue to benefit from her research. The collection includes not only documents but also taped interviews with some of the men and women who knew Parsons later in her life.
I relied on reference librarians and archivists who located and duplicated a wide range of materials for me. In my quest for the Texas marriage records of Lucy and Albert Parsons, I am indebted to Christy Costlow, Travis County archivist; Marion Loftin, deputy clerk, Cherokee County, Texas; Kerry McGuire, researcher, McLennan County Archives; and especially Rick Toms, Travis County Clerk’s Office. I am also grateful to Tony Black, appraisal archivist, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. At the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) of the University of Texas (UT)at Austin, the librarian Paul S. Rascoe in Government Documents, Maps and Electronic Information Services helped me find elusive government documents. The interlibrary loan staff was efficient and resourceful in tracking down essential books, articles, and pamphlets in libraries all over the country. Thanks, too, to the PCL circulation and microfilm staffs. At the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Brenda Gunn, director for research and collections, and Margaret Schlankey, head of reference services, assisted me on a number of fronts as the project progressed.
Eric Frazier in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress provided guidance as I navigated through the Paul Avrich Collection, a treasure trove of materials related to the history of anarchy and anarchists. In Chicago, Carolyn Sanders, Cook County Clerk’s Office, and Bureau of Vital Records–Genealogy, helped me locate birth certificates for Albert Junior and Lulu. Special thanks to Julie Herrada, curator, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, and Kate Hutchens, reader services coordinator, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan; Lee Grady, reference archivist, Library Archives Division, and Jonathan Nelson, collection development archivist, Wisconsin Historical Society; Christine Colburn, reader services manager, and Barbara Gilbert, Reading Room coordinator, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; Sean Sutcliffe, Waco Public Library; Cheryl Schni
rring, curator of manuscripts, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois; Alison Hinderliter, manuscript and archives librarian, and Martha Briggs, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts, Newberry Library, Chicago; and Peggy Glowacki, special collections librarian, University of Illinois at Chicago, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, Chicago. Dr. Rob Heinrich took time from writing his own book to assist me in collecting materials in the Boston area. I would also like to acknowledge the special skills of Dr. Matthew Bunn, German translator, and of Suloni Robertson and Bethany Wong, University of Texas Liberal Arts Technology Services image scanners. I relied on a number of efficient graduate research assistants, including Deirdre Lannon Albrecht, Juan Carlos De Orellana, Nick Roland, and Henry Wiencek.
I appreciated the enthusiasm and encouragement that I received from the very first audiences for this work, both of them close to home—those at the University of Texas at Austin Gender Symposium, and those at the President’s Luncheon of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Texas State Historical Association.
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