Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Newspaper editors also defended wage cuts, not just as economic necessities, but as moral instructions to misguided union workers. Employers could now take back everything they had conceded to union employees, said the New York Times, and then “bring wages down for all time.” If workers resisted with some “insane imitations of the miserable class warfare” afflicting Europe, they should be replaced by men who understood the law of supply and demand. The results of the depression were not all evil, according to the Chicago Evening Journal. It would be good if the crisis taught workers “the folly and danger of trade organizations, strikes and combinations against . . . capital.”46

  Stern editorial prescriptions combined with the harsh medicine of layoffs and wage cuts were expected to cure workingmen of the delusions they acquired from socialists and trade unionists. If these remedies failed, more forceful measures should be taken. When the Workingmen’s Party organized another march on the Relief and Aid Society, its organizers were intimidated by the appearance of a large armed force of policemen reinforced by the new First Regiment, a unit comprised of militiamen who were largely clerks, bookkeepers and managers of Chicago firms. Frightened by this show of force, unemployed workers stayed off the streets.47 The call to arms issued by the Citizens’ Association reassured Chicago’s commercial and industrial leaders that the city would soon be back in the firm control of its “best men.”

  DURING THE SPRING of 1874, Chicagoans could look back on five years of terrible trouble when they had endured more fear and anxiety than other urban dwellers experienced in a lifetime. During that time social tensions had been ratcheted up again and again, creating class antipathies among fellow citizens, common enough in “miserable” European cities, but previously unknown to Americans. The middle and upper classes had been frightened by the most violent general strike the nation had experienced, one that led to the worst riots a city had endured after the Civil War. Three years later Chicagoans survived the most catastrophic fire an American city had ever suffered—a disaster that leveled social distinctions and threatened the city with anarchy. After an exhilarating period of recovery and reconstruction, wealthy Chicagoans had been surprised when immigrants stormed City Hall in 1872 to protest the ban on wooden housing and public drinking on Sunday; this riotous behavior was followed late in 1873 by even more disturbing events, when the foreigners in the People’s Party won control of city government and when the socialists appeared out of nowhere to mobilize the unemployed and to make unimaginable demands for work and relief. In May of 1874 it appeared the troubles might end: the socialists had been vanquished at the polls, strikers had been put back to work and the unemployed marchers had disappeared from the streets. The police and the militia seemed to be in firm control of the city, and yet, as they faced a second year of depression, few Chicago businessmen felt relaxed.

  Chapter Four

  A Liberty-Thirsty People

  MAY 1874 –MARCH 1876

  WHILE COLD WEATHER lingered into the spring of 1874, unemployed people thronged the West Side. They looked for free lunches in saloons, surrounded the city’s police stations seeking shelter in the night and prowled the factory districts hoping to find the odd job. And despite it all, trains and boats still arrived bringing more job seekers and fortune hunters to Chicago. Among the new arrivals were militant nationalists from Ireland and Poland and, in even greater numbers, socialists from Germany, Bohemia and Scandinavia. Many were admirers of the Paris Commune, and some were willing recruits for the International and its new Workingmen’s Party. The Tribune expressed alarm over this influx of political exiles who swore loyalty not to their new nation, but to the Communist International formerly headquartered in London. Its leaders, the paper charged, were secretly manipulating the new socialist party and were “maturing plans to burn down Chicago and other large cities in the United States.”1

  Given these anxieties about the arrival of internationalists from European cities, no one noticed the small eddy of former Confederate rebels who made their way to Chicago, and no one would have guessed that one of them would become the most feared agitator in the city.2 He came not from London, but from Waco, Texas, and his name was Albert R. Parsons.

  Sometime in 1874, Parsons, accompanied by his wife, Lucy, arrived at the old St. Louis Depot wedged between Canal Street and the Chicago River. As they stepped out of the smoking station, the great pounding city would have assaulted their senses: steam engines hissing and clanging behind them in the depot, boat horns bleating on the river, horse-drawn trolleys careening down Canal Street, men shouting at each other to be heard above the unceasing din.

  Albert was a slender young man with a sunburned face and the long mustaches favored by ex-soldiers. Though short in stature, he carried himself with a self-assured bearing. His young wife no doubt attracted the eyes of passersby: Lucy was a stunningly beautiful dark-skinned woman, with high cheekbones that accentuated her prominent brown eyes. She walked with an erect posture and seemed a well-fashioned lady, though she wore clothing of simple cotton she had made into a dress. An interracial couple was an odd sight on the Chicago streets. In the Levee District to the south on Harrison Street, white men consorted with black women in bordellos, but few respectable white men in Chicago were ever seen in public with a woman of color. 3

  Albert Parsons, who was twenty-six years old in 1874, had learned the printing trade in Texas, and possessed a set of valuable skills that made it possible for a typesetter to tramp around the country and find work with relative ease, even during a depression, because every small town had at least one newspaper and the big cities had far more. In 1874 eight dailies were published in Chicago, including the Times, where Parsons found permanent work setting hot type in a building that had survived the fire. He immediately became a member of Typographical Union No. 16, where some old-time union printers had followed Andrew Cameron in his crusade for the eight-hour day and still read his Workingman’s Advocate.4

  The legendary publisher and editor of the Times, Wilbur Storey, was a cranky, fiercely independent man who loved controversy. He became notorious during the Civil War as a “copperhead” Democrat who hated Lincoln and his draft, and who defiantly locked out Andy Cameron and his union printers in 1863. Storey was also a pioneer of modern big-city journalism, whose daily paper covered national and world politics in minute detail while featuring gruesome reports of murder, rape and mutilation. Public hangings created the most exciting news of all. For instance, in 1875, when four murderers repented their sins on the gallows, the Times headline read JERKED TO JESUS.5

  Storey believed city people were on their own in a world where fear and disorder ruled. If workingmen were unemployed, they deserved nothing from the city, and if their demonstrations turned violent, they deserved to be put down with force such as the French army used against the communists in Paris. Rejecting all public solutions to the problems of the poor, Storey called instead for a “dismantling of city government.”6

  In his first months as a typesetter at the Times, Albert Parsons took a special interest in the heated public debate over the use of fire relief funds. He read the words of critics who charged the Relief and Aid Society with misusing its funds and denying them to the needy, and he read the furious editorials of Wilbur Storey, who dismissed the critics as “communists, robbers, loafers.” Intrigued by the controversy, Parsons decided to investigate the matter. After studying the case, he concluded that the complaints against the Relief and Aid Society were “just and proper.” Indeed, as the depression deepened during the hard winter of 1875, Parsons saw that the Chicago socialists were the only people who dared to protest on the behalf of the unemployed or to propose public remedies for their plight. The radicals’ protests, and the abuse heaped upon the “communists” by the “organs of the rich,” convinced him that “there was a great fundamental wrong at work in society.”7

  Albert Parsons had been born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1848 to Yankee parents who died when he was a boy. He was cared f
or by a slave woman he called Aunt Ester until his older brother William brought him to Texas. There the youngster enjoyed an adventurous youth on a ranch in the Brazos River valley, where he learned to ride and to shoot from the saddle. His brother, a wealthy, influential landowner, sent Albert to school in Waco and then to Galveston, where he served as an apprentice “printer’s devil” in a newspaper office until the War for Southern Independence captured his soul.8

  Socialist-led march on Relief and Aid Society headquarters on LaSalle Street, 1875

  At age fifteen Albert talked his way into a famous company of cavalry scouts commanded by his brother. He saw action in battles along the Mississippi against federal troops and fought in one of the last skirmishes of the war, which occurred just before the news of Appomattox reached rebel units in the Southwest. After the fighting ended, Albert returned to his home county in East Texas and traded a mule he owned for 40 acres of corn in a field that was ready for harvest. He hired two freed slaves and paid them the first wages they had ever earned to bring in the crop. He used the rest of his earnings to enroll at a college in Waco and then found work practicing his trade as a printer in a local newspaper office.9

  The columns Parsons set in type in the first years after the war carried news of stunning events in the Lone Star State. The first provisional governor found Texas in a state of anarchy, and in the worst condition of all the Confederate states because of the white population’s unrelenting hostility to the federal government and its policies. Federal officials reported that “Union men and Negroes were fleeing for their lives and that murders and outrages on Negroes were on the rise, and that the criminals were always acquitted.”10

  In the midst of the white terror in Texas, Parsons started a little newspaper in Waco he called the Spectator, and, much to the amazement of his friends and neighbors, he used it to advocate for “the political rights of the colored people.” The daring editor explained years later that he had been influenced in taking this step by the respect and love he had for the slave woman who raised him. In any case, Parsons became a Republican partisan and a supporter of federal reconstruction policies in Texas. It was an audacious stance for a Confederate veteran to take, and it earned him the hatred of his former army comrades, who stigmatized Parsons as a “scalawag”—a white southerner who betrayed his race. Displaying a boldness he had shown as a volunteer in the rebel army, the twenty-year-old veteran took to the campaign stump to vindicate his convictions. As a result, he was completely ostracized by his friends and associates and barred from shelter and lodging in white men’s houses on the campaign trail.11

  Parsons had picked a dangerous spot to start his political career. Waco was the county seat of McLennan County, the most violent place in Texas. When the county was protected by federal troops, several blacks were elected to the legislature, but soon Republican officeholders and Freedman’s Bureau officials found themselves overwhelmed by the forces of terror.12

  Nonetheless, during the fall of 1869 Parsons rode through East Texas campaigning for the interracial Republican Party. It was an unforgettable experience, “full of excitement and danger.” Many years later Parsons wrote to a comrade of those days of bitterness and the hostility filled with attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and reprisals from blacks. “On horseback, over prairie, or through the swamps of the Brazos River, accompanied generally by one or two intelligent colored men, we traveled,” he wrote in a memoir. “At noontime or nightfall our fare was only such as could be had in the rude and poverty stricken huts of the colored people.” When night fell, former slaves from nearby plantations would gather in a field to hear young Mr. Parsons speak. There, amid the rows of slave huts, he would mount a wagon or a bale of cotton and, by the faint glow of a tallow tip, harangue the hundreds assembled around him.13

  After the campaign, Parsons volunteered to become a militiaman, as his Connecticut Yankee grandfather, Samuel, had been in 1775. He saw plenty of action, including a standoff in one county seat, where he led twenty-five militiamen in defense of black men’s right to vote, “a most warlike and dangerous undertaking.” His career as a Radical Republican had begun in earnest.14 However, he became so “odious” to the local whites that he had to shut down his unionist newspaper in Waco. Instead, Parsons found work as a traveling reporter and salesman for a Houston newspaper.

  On one long trip for the paper, he returned to Johnson County, where he had spent his adventurous boyhood along the Brazos. He wrote later of stopping at a ranch on Buffalo Creek owned by a Mexican rancher named Gonzales and meeting the owner’s beautiful niece, Lucy. He lingered and then left the ranch reluctantly, only to return and ask her to be his wife. She agreed, and they were wed at Austin in 1872.15

  This was the story Albert and Lucy told of their union when they arrived in Chicago, but they invented some of it. Lucy identified herself as the daughter of John Waller, a “civilized” Creek Indian, and a Mexican woman named Marie del Gather, and denied any African ancestry, even though most people who met her assumed she was black. It is possible that Lucy did descend from Native American and Mexican people, but there is no direct evidence of this, or of a Hispanic uncle who raised her on a ranch. Lucy’s biographer speculates that she was probably born a slave on the plantation of James and Philip Gathings, who owned more than sixty slaves, and that she may have been the daughter of one of the owners. Other evidence suggests that Lucy may have lived for a while with a slave from that plantation named Oliver Gathings (and this is perhaps why she might have invented the name “del Gather” for her mother). When newspapers began to pay attention to Lucy’s activities, reporters described her as “colored” (or “bright colored”), indicating, as the Chicago Tribune suggested, that Lucy, despite her denials, had “at least one negro parent.”16

  Albert and Lucy probably met not on a Johnson County ranch, but in the contested terrain of nearby McLennan County, where Albert had become a hero to newly emancipated blacks and where a local newspaper later reported that Lucy was well known. There is no evidence to confirm young Lucy’s whereabouts during slavery days or during the events of Reconstruction, but she later recalled knowing of the atrocities committed by white terrorists against emancipated blacks in Texas.17 Lucy’s family history and that of her earlier years will remain forever clouded; it is clear, however, that she chose to deny any African ancestry and to identify herself with what she saw as two proud peoples who had escaped slavery and resisted the European “invader.” 18 In any case, Albert found in her the perfect mate, bold and beautiful, as fearless and righteous as he was. Friends and foes agreed that this man and woman of such different physical complexions and social backgrounds exuded a passion for each other rarely seen in married couples of their era.

  By 1872, the year the Parsons said they were wed in Austin, Albert had not only won the trust of emancipated blacks in East Texas, he had earned the admiration of his fellow Republicans in Austin. These officials helped this fearless, articulate young southerner win a federal appointment as a revenue inspector. If Reconstruction had endured in Texas, Albert Parsons might have gone far in state politics. This was not to be, because in the summer of 1873 the Democratic Party, armed with the guns and the votes it needed, “redeemed” Texas from the black officials and their scalawag allies.19

  After the Democrats returned to power in Texas and restored white rule by brute force, Parsons resigned as a federal revenue official and revived his career as a newspaperman. In that role he joined a group of editors on a trip through the Midwest sponsored by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway, no doubt to promote trade and train travel between the regions. During the trip, the Texan saw Chicago for the first time. He was impressed, as everyone was, by this booming city that had gloriously risen from its ashes. When he returned to Texas, Albert persuaded Lucy to come with him to start a new life in the big city up north.

  Parsons’s Republican Party career in Texas meant nothing in Chicago; there would be no federal appointment there. His skills as a typographer
stood him in good stead, and so with modest prospects he and Lucy began the search for lodgings all newcomers faced. They found a small flat on Mohawk Street north of the downtown, where three-quarters of the residents had been born in Germany. The young interracial couple experienced some hostility, but they chose to remain on the North Side, a place where almost everyone was from somewhere else.20

  DURING THE 1870S, Chicago’s overall population growth raced ahead of all other large American cities because young men like Parsons flocked there from the South as well as from the East, but mostly because 60,000 Europeans flooded the city, their numbers reaching a total of 204,859 by 1880. At that point, foreigners constituted 40 percent of the overall population and 56 percent of the workforce. By far the largest number of these newcomers—163,482—came from the German Empire.21