Goddess of Anarchy

by Jacqueline Jones

  53. Cleveland PD, February 3, 1913.

  54. Ahrens, ed., Lucy Parsons, 141–149; “Direct Action”: Regeneración, April 19, 1913; “Mrs. Parsons”: ibid.; “two burly”: IW, May 1, 1913; Syndicalist, May 1, 1913.

  55. City directories and 1920 FMC, Illinois, Cook County; New York DP, March 6, 1906; Omaha DB, April 5, 1905.

  CHAPTER 13: WARS AT HOME AND ABROAD

  1. Oregonian, July 16, 1913; ibid., July 17, 1913; New York DP, August 4, 1913; ibid., August 24, 1913; “white with rage”: ibid., August 24, 1913.

  2. “very deplorable”: Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations Created by the Act of Aug. 23, 1912, vol. 5, General Industrial Relations in Portland, Oregon (serial set vol. 6933, sess. vol. 23, 64th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 415), 4117; Heather Mayer, “Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women, Wobblies, Respectability and the Law in Oregon and Washington, 1905–1924,” Ph.D. diss., Simon Fraser University, Canada; Greg Hall, “The Fruits of Her Labor: Women, Children, and Progressive Era Reformers in the Pacific Northwest Canning Industry,” OHQ 109 (Summer 2008): 226–251.

  3. “mental prostitutes… Oregon”: New York DP, August 4, 1913; Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer, eds., Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1985), 142; “Forty cents”: quoted in Hall, “Fruits,” 239; Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 14–16.

  4. CT, October 3, 1913, 1; “Never mind… county jail”: Oregonian, October 3, 1913.

  5. “I am pretty”: LP to C. V. Cook, San Francisco, February 27, 1914, Cassius V. Cook Papers, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library Special Collections Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan (Cook Papers, Labadie Collection, hereafter); Tacoma DN, November 12, 1913; San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 1914; “Imitates”: Boise Statesman, January 21, 1914.

  6. “representative… being hungry”: International Socialist Review (ISR hereafter), March 1915.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); “I am a baker… boisterous”: Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 168–169; ISR, March 1915; Rockford (IL) Republic, January 4, 1915.

  9. CT, January 18, 1915, 1; “as the heroine”: Freedom (UK), March 15, 1915; “clever Indian… city blocks”: ibid.; CT, January 18, 1915, 1; “I.W.W.’s Start”: Washington (DC) Herald, January 18, 1915.

  10. NYT, January 18, 1915, 1; CT, January 18, 1915, 1; “I know”: ibid., January 19, 1915, 13; ibid., January 29, 1915, 13.

  11. “a splendid”: Rockford (IL) Republic, February 1, 1915; “If you want”: ibid.; CT, February 1, 1915, 1; “From now on”: ibid., February 11, 1915.

  12. Lillian Symes and Travers Clement, Rebel America: The Story of Social Revolt in the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), 277–278; Joseph Robert Conlin, Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 129–130; CT, April 11, 1915, 5.

  13. “bellyaching”: Why?, January 1913; “Impractical dreamers… understand them”: ibid., April 15, 1914.

  14. Syndicalist, September 1–15, 1913; C. V. Cook to LP, November 17, 1913, Cook Papers, Labadie Collection; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography. My First Life (1906–1926) (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 203.

  15. “Could wars ever”: Instead of a Magazine, September 1915.

  16. “War as a Great”: Chicago DB, January 6, 1917; ibid., September 23, 1916; ibid., November 20, 1915; ibid., January 20, 1917; ibid., January 27, 1917.

  17. Melvin G. Holli, “The Great War Sinks Chicago’s German Kultur,” in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995); “the sixth”: Literary Digest, July 7, 1917, 22.

  18. “a hazy notion”: Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002 [1941]), xvi; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 12.

  19. Junius B. Wood, “The Negro in Chicago: A First-Hand Study,” articles reprinted from the Chicago DN, December 11–27, 1916; “Hit Me”: Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217; “I am quite”: Emmett J. Scott, “More Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” JNH 4 (October 1919): 457; Spear, Black Chicago, 185; Emmett J. Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918, JNH 4 (July 1919): 291; Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

  20. “I would have… creep”: Lum quoted in David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 95; “unions cannot”: Defender quoted in Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 124; Linda J. Lumsden, Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900–1917 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014), 236–239.

  21. “plans were completed”: Broad Ax, May 15, 1915; “I shall not”: CT, March 4, 1913, 3; “perhaps not”: Ovington quoted in 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), 53.

  22. Chaplin, Wobbly, 178–179; Irving S. Abrams, Haymarket Heritage: The Memoirs of Irving S. Abrams, ed. David Roediger and Phyllis Boanes (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1989), 19–20; Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013 [1976]), 234; “We tell”: ME 10 (1915/1916): 88; “Thanks to our”: Freedom (UK), February 1917, 9; Why?, September 1913; Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); 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).

  23. Shelley Streeby, “Labor, Memory, and the Boundaries of Print Culture: From Haymarket to the Mexican Revolution,” ALH 19 (Summer 2007): 421–422; C. V. Cook to LP, July 31, 1914, Cook Papers, Labadie Collection.

  24. “My First Impressions… comrades”: ME, November 1916, 674–675.

  25. Carlotta R. Anderson, All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 225; “Everything that we”: Flynn, Rebel Girl, 283–284; “industrial freedom… limit”: Chaplin, Wobbly, 213.

  26. “while the army”: Chaplin, Wobbly, 166–167.

  27. Eric Thomas Chester, The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World During the World War I Era (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014).

  28. Chester, Wobblies, viii; “dangerous Red”: Symes and Clement, Rebel America, 299.

  29. “Their words”: Haywood quoted in Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 115; Chester, Wobblies, 170–172; Chaplin, Wobbly, 231.

  30. “Thou shalt”: Flynn, Rebel Girl, 241; Lumsden, Black, White, 276–283.

  31. “I would rather”: Debs quoted in Flynn, Rebel Girl, 239–240; “the red flag”: ibid., 252; Bird et al., Solidarity, 142; David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 248–298; ME 1 (April 1918); Mark Leier, Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy (Vancouver: New Start Books, 2013), 35–36.

  32. “anarchic scum”: quoted in L
ouis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1931), 211; Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U. S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 21, 141–143, 149, 159–160, 233 (Joe Hill); 147, 182 (Frank Little); 147–148 (Wesley Everest); 114, 143, 181, 184, 198, 215, 219 (Tom Mooney).

  33. Ernesto A. Longa, Anarchist Periodicals in English Published in the United States (1833–1955): An Annotated Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 241.

  34. “from the other… I think”: Regeneración, April 15, 1919.

  35. “War, class war”: “Plain Words” flyer in Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 81; Gage, Day Wall Street Exploded, 207–228.

  36. “The anarchists will”: Edwardsville (IL) Intelligencer, June 16, 1919; “grafter … out of the way”: CT, June 6, 1919, 3; NYT, June 6, 1919, 1.

  37. “holiness”: CT, June 13, 1915, VIII, 1.

  38. “Shall we”: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 118.

  39. “he was put”: Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 208–209 (nn. 21, 22), 276.

  CHAPTER 14: FACTS AND FINE-SPUN THEORIES

  1. “poorly dressed… Wobbly:” “Conversation with Studs Terkel about May Day…” Democracy Now, May 1, 1997, www.democracynow.org/1997/5/1/conversation_with_studs_terkel_about_may; “Studs Terkel Recalls Lucy Parsons,” YouTube, posted October 9, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFdKTIbBGbI.

  2. “because I wanted”: LP to Carl Nold, Chicago, February 27, 1934, Nold Papers (1883–1934), Labadie Collection; “From the Tribune’s”: CT, February 1, 1925, 8; ibid., August 6, 1925, 8; Vanzetti to Debs, September 29, 1923, in J. Robert Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs, vol. 3, (1919–1926) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 405.

  3. “My daddy”: Studs Terkel’s Chicago (New York: New Press, 1985), 41; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3, 102; “No strike”: Dunne quoted in Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 236; Ku Klux Klan entry in Encyclopedia of Chicago, www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/696.html.

  4. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 49; “turn the world”: Mother Jones quoted in Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 264; Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928–35 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 19.

  5. “pineapple primary”: Laurence Bergreen, Capone: The Man and the Era (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 280; Gus Russo, The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America (London: Bloomsbury, 2001); Michael Lesy, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

  6. Cohen, Racketeer’s Progress, 233, 260.

  7. Jackson Lears, “The Managerial Revitalization of the Rich,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 206, 211.

  8. “more and more”: Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 80–81.

  9. “the dreams… setting sun”: LP to C. V. and Sadie Cook, August 16, 1921; Cassius V. Cook letters, 1908–1950, Cook Papers, Labadie Collection.

  10. David DeLeon, The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 98–99; Kenyon Zimmer, “Premature Anti-Communists? American Anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and Left-Wing Libertarian Anti-Communism, 1917–1939,” Labor 6 (2009): 45–71; Fred Thompson, “They Didn’t Suppress the Wobblies,” RA 1 (1967): 1–5.

  11. Steve Nelson, Steve Nelson, American Radical (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 72.

  12. “I had high hopes”: Carl Sandburg, Billy Sunday and Other Poems, eds. George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), 56; Franklin Rosemont, ed., The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago’s Wildest and Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004).

  13. “looking for bums… outside”: Rosemont, ed., Rise and Fall, 89.

  14. “Near North Side”: Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 170–171; “Heckling Is”: Rosemont, ed., Rise and Fall, 45; “There are all”: ibid., 67.

  15. “Field Marshal”: Albert Parry, Garretts and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), 204; “Women Are”: WST, May 19, 1919; “prove the majority”: Rosemont, ed., Rise and Fall, 31; Roger A. Bruns, The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman, Chicago’s Celebrated Social Reformer, Hobo King, and Whorehouse Physician (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 271; “included almost”: Frank O. Beck, Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman and Other Agitators and Outsiders in 1920/30s Chicago (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2000), 77.

  16. “Little Hell… World Ills”: DN, April 29, 1930; ibid., July 30, 1929; ibid., August 6, 1929; Beck, Hobohemia, 81; Ben R. Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002), 59.

  17. “We had to harden”: Chaplin, Wobbly, 258; “I have seen”: ibid., 260; Joseph Robert Conlin, Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 140–145.

  18. “Bolshevism is rotten… workers”: Goldman quoted in CT, June 18, 1920, 1; ibid., May 7, 1920, 3; “a delusion”: Emma Goldman to Debs, May 28, 1926, in Constantine, ed., Letters, 3:559; “severely”: William Haywood, “An Anarchist on Russia: A Reply to Emma Goldman,” Communist Review 3 (August 1922), Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/communist_review/1922/04/emma_goldman.htm; Sander Garlin, “Lucy Parsons Carried Out Bequest of Her Husband, a Hero of American Labor,” Daily Worker, March 11, 1942.

  19. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955), 274; Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (New York: Norton, 1970); “nothing new”: LP to Carl Nold, May 30, 1932, Nold Papers, Labadie Collection; Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 205, 222, 227, 233, 245.

  20. “the progress”: Melville E. Stone, Fifty Years a Journalist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1920), 174; “substantial”: Gail Ahrens, ed., Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity. Writings and Speeches, 1878–1937 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 151–152; Voice of Labor, March 10, 1922; folder “Ashbaugh File: Melville Stone on George A. Schilling,” Box 3, Ashbaugh Papers.

  21. “Grand Old”: Constantine, ed., Letters, 3:557–558; “Over in Valhalla”: “Eugene V. Debs,” in Sandburg, Billy Sunday, 97.

  22. See, for example, the quotations in the folder “Memos and Drafts on Motivation,” Box 1, Ashbaugh Papers.

  23. “Is Anarcho-Syndicalism… sympathizer”: Dolgoff in Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 226; “turncoat… large doses”: Sam Dolgoff, Fragments: A Memoir (Cambridge, UK: Refract, 1986), 42.

  24. Bryan D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Ashbaugh interview with Cannon, Box 1, Ashbaugh Papers.

  25. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U. S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 198; Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

  26. Vanzetti to Debs, September 29, 1923, in Constantine, ed., Letters, 3:405; “America shows”:
Cannon quoted in Hill, Men, Mobs, 198; Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 211–263.

  27. NYT, November 13, 1927, 3; Cleveland PD, November 3, 1928; Palmer, Cannon, 311; Cora Meyer to Mother Jones, Milwaukee, January 9, 1928, in Edward M. Steel, ed., Correspondence of Mother Jones (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 338.

  28. “the electric chair”: Equal Justice, July 1929, 139.

  29. “political differences”: Nelson, American Radical, 63; Storch, Red Chicago, 19, 76; DeLeon, American as Anarchist, 107.

  30. “100 percent”: Travis in Richard R. Guzman, ed., Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 135; St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 83.

  31. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 69–97; Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr., The Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Gareth Canaan, “‘Part of the Loaf’: Economic Conditions of Chicago’s African-American Working Class During the 1920s,” JSH 35 (Autumn 2001): 160–161; E. Franklin Frazier, “Chicago: A Cross-Section of Negro Life,” Opportunity 7 (March 1929): 70–73; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 131–162.

  32. Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 129, 135, 144; Oscar Berland, “The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the ‘Negro Question’ in America: 1919–1931, Part One,” Science and Society 63 (Winter 1999/2000): 411–432.

  33. NYT, May 2, 1930, 18; Storch, Red Chicago, 73–74; Ahrens, ed., Lucy Parsons, 155–159.