Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  29. “the idea”: Oregonian, October 29, 1887; Caspar’s Directory of the American Book, News, and Stationery Trade (Milwaukee: C. N. Caspar’s Book Emporium, 1889), 32f.

  30. “a very bright girl… unusual intelligence”: Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1887, 1; “pretty children”: Atchison DG, October 17, 1887; Canton (OH) Repository, October 15, 1887, 5.

  31. “enemies of labor”: CT, November 7, 1887, 1.

  32. “the greed, cruelty”: Alarm, November 5, 1887; NYT, November 6, 1887, 3; “intoxicated”: Melville E. Stone, Fifty Years a Journalist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1920), 176; “good (Medium)”: ibid., 175; “cried out… his fate”: ibid., 176.

  33. Dallas MN, November 9, 1887, 2.

  34. “his wife… perverseness”: Parsons, ed. Life, 113; “I am innocent”: NYT, November 9, 1887, 5; “Darling, Precious… obey her”: images in Parsons, ed., Life, between 248 and 249.

  35. “on the ground”: Baltimore Sun, November 11, 1887, 1; “If he… terrible”: Buchanan, Story, 393–394.

  36. “for the pearly”: Salisbury, Career, 110; “to beg… trick”: William Holmes, “Reminiscences,” ME (November 1907), 290; “Die, Parsons”: Lum quoted in Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 364–365.

  37. “he had never”: Parsons, Anarchism, 8.

  38. “scene… dead faint”: Baltimore Sun, November 11, 1887, 1.

  39. CT, November 11, 1887, 2; ibid., November 12, 1887, 2; “Caesar kept”: Alarm, November 19, 1887; “his efforts”: Baltimore Sun, November 11, 1887, 1.

  40. “were poorly dressed… if you will”: DI-O, November 12, 1887, 1; Columbus DE, November 12, 1887; “I don’t want”: DI-O, November 12, 1887, 1.

  41. “Instead of being”: CT, November 12, 1887, 2; Parsons, Anarchism, 194–200.

  42. “I really feel”: DI-O, November 12, 1887, 1; “wrought himself… gallows picture”: Dallas MN, November 12, 1887; “Will I be allowed… heard, O”: NYT, November 12, 1887, 1; “No proxy”: CT, November 12, 1887, 2; “Justice Is Done”: DI-O, November 12, 1887.

  43. “the dark skinned… business over”: St. Paul Globe, November 13, 1887, 1; “My God!”: CT, November 12, 1887, 2; “Full account”: Bismarck Tribune, November 12, 1887, 1; DI-O, November 12, 1887, 1.

  44. “Oh papa… his life!”: NYT, November 12, 1887, 1.

  45. Dallas MN, November 13, 1887; “Every little”: NYT, November 12, 1887, 2.

  46. “She was not”: LE, November 19, 1887.

  47. Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 190–194; “Let the voice”: DI-O, November 14, 1887, 1; Alarm, November 19, 1887.

  48. Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013 [1976]), 137; “It is a duty”: CT, November 16, 1887, 3; “Most bravely… Parsons”: Alarm, November 19, 1887.

  49. CT, December 18, 1887, 10.

  50. “Our Papa… Freunde”: New Orleans T-P, December 19, 1887, 2; “Mrs. Parsons Getting”: CT, December 18, 1887, 10.

  CHAPTER 10: THE WIDOW PARSONS SETS HER COURSE

  1. “The sordid”: Debs: His Life, Writings, and Speeches (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1908), 285–286; “the most decisive… birth and growth”: Emma Goldman, Living My Life, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: New American Library, 1977), 508; Shelley Streeby, “Looking at State Violence: Lucy Parsons, Jose Marti, and Haymarket,” in Russ Castronovo, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 115–136; “ the chief tragedy”: Lucy E. Parsons, ed., Life of Albert R. Parsons with Brief History of the Labor Movement in America (Chicago: Mrs. Lucy E. Parsons, 1889), xxvi; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 401–414; Kristin Boudreau, The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases (New York: Prometheus, 2006), 67–104.

  2. “Look at me”: Cincinnati Gazette, October 11, 1886, as quoted in KL, November 20, 1886.

  3. CT, December 30, 1887, 8; “innocent women… professor”: Alarm, January 28, 1888; Liberty, June 7, 1890, 93.

  4. Michael R. Johnson, “Albert R. Parsons: An American Architect of Syndicalism,” MQ (Winter 1968): 196–205; David DeLeon, The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 93.

  5. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005).

  6. Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 3, The Rise of a Modern City, 1871–1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 300–500; Edith Abbott, “Wages of Unskilled Labor in the United States, 1850–1900,” JPE 13, no. 3 (June 1905): 361–363.

  7. William Scharnau, “Thomas J. Morgan and the United Labor Party of Chicago,” JISHS 66 (Spring 1973): 60; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 241–267.

  8. “Chicago’s White Slaves”: Chicago Times, February 12, 1888; “My lords”: Alarm, September 15, 1888.

  9. Alarm, September 22, 1888; “to encourage”: DI-O, December 27, 1888, 4.

  10. “Let the voice… children’s children”: CT, June 21, 1888, 4; “You should have”: CT, June 21, 1888, 5; “anxious to catch”: CT, June 23, 1888, 8.

  11. Milwaukee DJ, August 9, 1888; “that a powerful”: Alarm, August 25, 1888.

  12. Sigmund Zeisler, Reminiscences of the Anarchist Case (Chicago: Literary Club, 1927), 36; Alarm, November 24, 1888.

  13. “When Columbus”: Alarm, December 8, 1888; CT, November 19, 1888, 5; Birmingham (UK) Daily Post, November 12, 1888; Reynolds’s Newspaper (London), November 18, 1888.

  14. Evening Telegraph and Star and Sheffield (UK) Daily Times, November 16, 1888, 4; “she is a curious”: The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin, vol. 2, Part B: “1885–1888” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 837–839; “She has the full lips”: Alarm, December 8, 1888; London American Register, July 7, 1888; Echo-London Middlesex, November 6, 1888; Rosemary Taylor, “‘The City of Dreadful Delight’: William Morris in the East End of London,” Journal of William Morris Studies 18 (Winter 2009): 9–28.

  15. DI-O, December 11, 1888; Milwaukee DJ, December 11, 1888; “an infernal lie”: CT, December 12, 1888, 1; “chain of unmitigated… our movement”: New York EW, December 11, 1888; “it would be a strange”: CT, December 12, 1888, 1; CT, December 11, 1888, 1.

  16. CT, December 5, 1888, 3; CT, December 18, 1888, 7; “revolutionary gatherings”: CT, December 9, 1888, 9; “boarder”: DI-O, December 18, 1888, 7.

  17. Chicago Herald, May 27, 1890; “on account”: DI-O, December 27, 1888; Milwaukee DJ, May 16, 1887; Wisconsin State Register, December 29, 1888; “an exceptionally”: CT, December 31, 1888. See Ancestry.com for marriage and birth records.

  18. “black haired… accompany[ing] her”: DI-O, June 17, 1889, 7.

  19. “violent anarchistic… stars and stripes”: ibid., December 27, 1888, 4; ibid., December 28, 1888; Alarm, January 5, 1889; “The truth”: CT, January 23, 1889, 4; CT, February 3, 1890, 3.

  20. CT, February 3, 1890, 3; Centralia E and T, September 20, 1890; DI-O, March 4, 1889, 7.

  21. CT, October 17, 1889, 3; “Do you suppose… supreme”: Atchison DG, November 18, 1889.

  22. CT, October 28, 1889, 3; “O, my children”: Alarm, November 17, 1888.

  23. “queer little cottage… boy”: Milwaukee YN, December 11, 1889.

  24. “I do not want… keeping a boarder”: CT, September 17, 1890, 2.

  25. “a couple of houses… acquaintances”: CT, September 15, 1890, 1; “Row Among the Reds”: CT, January 10, 1891, 11; Minutes of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, September 2, 14, and October 12, 1890, Records, 1888–1957, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Special Collecti
ons Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The minutes are in German; the author would like to thank Matthew Bunn for his translation.

  26. Chicago Herald, January 24, 1889; “the picture”: CT, December 5, 1888, 3; “Let the children”: CT, March 21, 1892, 2; “a kind of human”: DI-O, August 6, 1888; Chicago Herald, January 24, 1890; “for dramatic… baby show”: St. Paul DG, April 6, 1888.

  27. “humble home… Lucy Wanted Blood”: Chicago Mail, c. December 29, 1888, ARP Papers; “her life would be devoted”: Wisconsin State Register, December 22, 1888; “You bloody old… little fellow”: CT, August 9, 1888, 1; CT, December 31, 1888, ARP Papers.

  28. CT, April 28, 1891, 3; CT, May 23, 1891, 3.

  29. “malicious trespass”: CT, July 16, 1891, 3.

  30. Wheeling (WV) Register, July 20, 1891, 6; “for the past three… kill you”: DI-O, July 17, 1891, 7.

  31. CT, December 3, 1881, 1.

  32. “only hush money”: Chicago Herald, January 24, 1889; CT, March 10, 1890, 7.

  33. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, ed. Victoria Bissel Brown (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 114, 117.

  34. “sweater [boss]”: “The New Slavery: Investigation into the Sweating System as Applied to the Manufacture of Wearing Apparel by the Chicago Trade and Labor Assembly” (Chicago: Detweiler, 1891), 4; Addams, Hull-House, 101–102, 127, 128, 254.

  35. Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985): 658–677.

  36. World article reprinted in Indianapolis Freeman, January 3, 1891, 3.

  37. “election crowd… was her failing”: Waco EN, April 3, 1889.

  38. “the only English”: quoted in Ernesto A. Longa, Anarchist Periodicals in English Published in the United States (1833–1955): An Annotated Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 95; Freedom, November 11, 1890; “it is a mere trick”: ibid., May 1892; CT, May 23, 1889, 3; CT, April 18, 1892, 3; Freedom, October 1, 1891; Denver RMN, July 5, 1897.

  39. Wheeling Register, March 25, 1889; CT, October 27, 1890, 3; Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 75–78; clipping, n.p. [Chicago], February 11, 1889, ARP Papers.

  40. “folly… revolutionary gatherings”: CT, December 9, 1888, 9.

  41. “the anarchistic element… crush it out”: Bismarck DT, November 9, 1890; NYT, November 8, 1890, 1; ibid., November 11, 1890, 3.

  42. CT, May 30, 1892, 3; “buy yourselves… conservative Socialists”: Michael J. Schaak, Anarchists and Anarchy: A History of the Red Terror, and the Social Revolution in America and Europe, Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and Deed, the Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators (Chicago: F. Schulte, 1889), 666; CT, June 15, 1891, 3; “too much red”: CT, May 2, 1892, 6.

  43. CT, December 31, 1888, 3; DI-O, January 29, 1889, 4; Salt Lake City Herald, January 1, 1889; CT, January 7, 1889, 1; “and about a dozen… leading socialists”: DI-O, June 17, 1889, 7; “indicates a low degree… use force”: ibid., December 31, 1888, 1.

  44. “Before we can have”: DI-O, December 31, 1888; NYT, July 29, 1889, 1; “When the great”: CT, March 21, 1892, 2; “In years to come”: DI-O, November 12, 1892.

  45. “A Just Blow… like Berkman”: Freedom, August 1892; Paul and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 51–97; Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57–64.

  46. McCook (NE) Tribune, March 10, 1889; Tacoma DN, November 12, 1913.

  47. “I will not tolerate”: CT, November 10, 1891, 3; CT, November 11, 1888, 5; CT, November 10, 1890, 1; CT, November 9, 1891, 1; Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 403–404; “Hiss after hiss”: Aberdeen (SD) Sun, November 13, 1891; “Hang the murderers… infamous lie”: Atchison DG, November 12, 1891; CT, November 13, 1891, 1; CT, December 14, 1891, 3; “Every star”: DI-O, December 14, 1891; “severely plain”: CT, November 12, 1892, 1. See F. O. Bennett’s poem “The Red Flag” (“emblem of treason and hate”) in Paul Hull, The Chicago Riot: A Record of the Terrible Scenes of May 4, 1886 (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1886), 5.

  48. NY Tribune, June 21, 1888; “verbal pyrotechnics”: DI-O, February 27, 1888, 4; “fiery”: ibid., July 29, 1889, 2; “inflammatory”: Philadelphia Inquirer, December 14, 1891; “incendiary”: Wheeling Register, July 29, 1889; “fire-eating”: Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1904; “red mouthed”: Charleston N and C, August 25, 1893; “red hot”: DI-O, February 27, 1893, 3; “I don’t want to be respectable”: Milwaukee YN, February 2, 1890.

  49. “living… questioned by some”: Parsons, ed., Life, xxvii; “more than ordinary… in which they live”: George Schilling to Lucy Parsons, Springfield, December 1, 1893, George A. Schilling Collection, Box 1893–1894, Abraham Lincoln Library, Illinois State Historical Society, Springfield, Illinois (Schilling Collection hereafter).

  50. Schilling to Lucy Parsons, December 1, 1893, Schilling Collection.

  CHAPTER 11: VARIETY IN LIFE, AND ITS CRITICS

  1. “By force”: CT, August 21, 1893, 2; “How long can this”: Freedom, August 1892.

  2. “men with that unsatiated”: Tacoma DN, September 11, 1893; “lunacy”: CT, August 22, 1893, 4; “she devil”: NYT, August 21, 1893, 8; “murder and other”: Abilene TCN, March 16, 1894; “an enraged tigress”: CT, August 22, 1893, 4.

  3. CT, June 26, 1893, 7; NYT, June 26, 1893, 1.

  4. “Gov. John P. Altgeld’s Pardon of the Anarchists and His Masterly Review of the Haymarket Riot” (Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1915; orig. pub. in the 1903 edition of Life of Albert R. Parsons); Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 399–419.

  5. “and I don’t want… personal conduct”: Galveston DN, December 2, 1894; Canton (OH) Repository, December 2, 1894; letter from Dyer Lum to Voltairine de Cleyre, [n.d., c. Lucy’s arrest in Newark], Box 197 [bMS Am 1614 (197)]; Dyer Daniel Lum, letters to Voltairine de Cleyre, in Joseph Ishill Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library (Ishill Papers hereafter).

  6. Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013 [1976]), 274.

  7. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Jane Addams, “A Modern Lear,” Survey 29 (November 2, 1912): 131–137; Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Donald B. Smith, Honoré Jaxon: Prairie Visionary (Regina, SK, Canada: Coteau Books, 2007); “the father of labor”: CT, September 18, 1915, 5.

  8. “prosperity”: Firebrand, May 1903; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 27–30, 69, 75–78.

  9. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 158, 191.

  10. CT, July 29, 1892, 2; Dallas MN, December 2, 1894; “as principally of”: NYT, August 2, 1891, 5; Edward P. Mittelman, “Chicago Labor Politics, 1877–1896,” JPE 28 (May 1920): 423–426.

  11. Rudyard Kipling, American Notes, online at Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/977/977-h/977-h.htm, chap. 5.

  12. “liberty-loving”: “New Slavery,” 7–8; “at ease in Zion”: William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1894), 258.

  13. Nasaw, Going Out, 66; “an element”: Brattleboro (VT) Phoenix, December 2, 1892; Margaret Garb, Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 138.

  14. Nasaw, Going Out, 75; Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvi
ne Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett, The Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Robert W. Rydell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), xvii, xix.

  15. “loiter around”: Miller quoted in Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (New York: Harper and Row, 1964 [1908]), 130; CT, April 18, 1892, 3; Garb, Freedom’s Ballot, 12; “the safety of woman”: Frances E. Willard, “The Race Problem: Miss Willard on the Political Puzzle of the South,” Voice, October 23, 1890; Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 138–148; Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991), 315, 332; Freedom, March 27, 1892.

  16. Garb, Freedom’s Ballot, 51, 54; “We ask to be known”: Barrier Williams quoted in Wells et al., Reason Why, xxix.

  17. “the better class”: Royster, ed., Southern Horrors, 43; Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad, 2008); Thomas C. Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 39–61.

  18. David Squires, “Outlawry: Ida B. Wells and Lynch Law,” AQ 67 (March 2015): 141–163; San Antonio Express, November 4, 1899; CT, July 26, 1896, 10.

  19. Dennis B. Downey, “The Congress of Labor at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” JISHS 76 (1893): 131–138; “We want work”: CT, August 22, 1893, 1.

  20. “to mention no names”: Chicago Times, September 23, 1895; Milwaukee Journal, November 13, 1896; Denver EP, June 14, 1897; CT, June 14, 1897, 11; “Liberty is dead”: Brownsville DH, September 26, 1895.