Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Arbeiter-Zeitung building

  Johann Most, the world’s leading anarchist in 1885, exerted a strong hold on Parsons, Spies and the Chicago Internationals, but they did not fully embrace his view that individual acts of violence would provoke a revolution; indeed, they faithfully adhered to the lesson they had learned from Karl Marx: that socialism could be achieved only through the collective power of workers organized into aggressive trade unions—the “great lever by which the working class will be emancipated.” The anarchists imagined militant workers’ organizations as more than movement building blocks; these unions could be “the living germs of a new social order which would replace the bourgeois world,” or, as Parsons put it, the “embryonic” groups of a future “free society.” 10

  This concept of revolutionary unionism, later known as “the Chicago idea,” appealed to European artisans like Michael Schwab who were familiar with the watchmakers and other artisans in Europe who embraced Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchist ideas about free association and mutual aid. A few of them had even put these cooperative ideas into practice in their own shops and benefit societies. The notion of workshops controlled by intelligent craftsmen was not a utopian dream to them. Furthermore, the idea that artisans, shopkeepers and other ordinary citizens could govern a city was not simply a theoretical possibility, because this, they knew, was precisely what the people of Paris had done with some success during the days after they created the Commune in 1871.11

  American craftsmen like Parsons were also quite familiar with practical experiments in cooperative production and exchange, because the Knights of Labor and, on a much larger scale, the Farmers’ Alliance were busy creating them all over the country in 1885. Through these efforts, the popular movements of the time instilled a new kind of collective selfconfidence in working people and a new kind of hope that they could reconstruct the economy on a democratic basis. Thus, the dream of a self-governing community of equal producers articulated by Parsons and the Chicago anarchists had something in common with the idea of a cooperative commonwealth embraced by labor reformers and agrarian populists in the 1880s.12

  In any case, Parsons and his fellow agitators devoted themselves far more to practical activity—writing, speaking, agitating and organizing— than they did to creating coherent revolutionary theory. The Chicago anarchists applied Marx’s axioms when they seemed to explain what was happening before their eyes, but they also salted their speeches and pamphlets with songs and mottoes from the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; from the writings of Proudhon, who believed property was theft; and from the anarchist pronouncements of Mikhail Bakunin and Johann Most.

  The Chicago anarchists also drew inspiration from American revolutionaries: from Thomas Paine, the most influential of all propagandists; from Thomas Jefferson, who proclaimed the right and the duty to rebel against unjust authority; from Patrick Henry, whose words “Give me liberty or give me death” were often quoted; and from John Brown, the most heroic of all revolutionary martyrs. Albert Parsons, though raised in the slave South, considered himself an abolitionist at heart; that is why he devoted himself to winning political rights for emancipated blacks, why he never abandoned the language of Radical Republicanism he acquired in Texas and why he often cited John Brown and other abolitionists in his attacks on “wage slavery.” 13 In the process of cooking this stew of radical ideas, the Internationals of Chicago invented a peculiar, in some ways American, brand of revolutionary socialism they called anarchism.

  Parsons once wrote that the Chicago socialists initially accepted the anarchist label in defiance of their enemies who branded them with the name, but this bizarre explanation may have reflected his own pugnacious personality. In any case, adopting such a political identity seemed virtually self-defeating, because, to most Americans, anarchy simply meant chaos, violence and disorder. The word had been used, for example, to describe Paris in the last horrible days of the Commune and Pittsburgh in 1877, when enraged crowds surrounded the militia and set fire to the railyards. Anarchy was even thought to have appeared in the Arizona Territory, where, as one newspaper had it, the “savage” Apaches, “the Reds of America,” fought to preserve their “communal system of government.”14

  The anarchists, however, regarded such outbreaks of violence as unnatural behavior provoked entirely by the oppressive actions of the state and the forces of private capital. They argued that anarchy, a society without a state, was natural to humanity, as compared to monarchy, the kind of rule that still prevailed in Europe, or as compared to democracy as it had evolved in the United States. Even with an elected government, they insisted, American citizens could be tyrannized by the police and the army just as they were in Europe. They lived in a society that called itself a democracy, but it was a sad state in which lords of industry behaved like monarchs who mocked democracy with their imperious actions.15 In the midst of the “great barbecue” held by the robber barons and politicos of the Gilded Age, agitators could produce plenty of evidence that money and influence had polluted the great republic, if not poisoned it to death. 16

  STILL, IT WAS a daunting endeavor, this anarchist effort to create an alternative intellectual and moral world in a city devoted to the pursuit of private property and personal wealth, a place that thrived on speculation and competition of every kind, a city that epitomized American capitalism. At times, Parsons and other movement evangelicals saw themselves acting out roles played by the early apostles of Jesus Christ as they led a sect of true believers out of a wilderness of sin and corruption. In fact, the anarchists were atheists, or at least freethinkers, who regarded organized religion as little more than a drug clergymen gave workers in order to pacify them. Yet, for all their contempt for churchmen, Christian charity and Victorian decency, the anarchists of Chicago were men and women who believed in monogamous marriage and craved respectable home lives. No talk of free love was heard among them. But this did not mean the anarchists were joyless puritans. In fact, they indulged in endless entertainments and celebrations and made performing, singing and dancing essential ingredients of their social and cultural lives. 17

  Each year the anarchists’ festive calendar began with the annual commemoration of the Paris Commune in March and continued until the Oktoberfest, when the dark beer arrived. By 1885, Die Commune Fieren had become too large to contain in a single hall, so the IWPA organized two memorials in Turner halls on the North and West sides that attracted international crowds. The Czechs sponsored their own “Paris Communal” at a new hall in Pilsen. The anarchists paid no attention to Easter and Passover, and instead eagerly waited for the spring Maifest, which came along with the bock beer. May 1 festivities inaugurated a high season of excursions, picnics, pageants, concert performances and poetry readings, as well as colorful demonstrations, parades and mass meetings on the lakefront, where city officials allowed the anarchists to congregate outdoors every Sunday. Come summertime, the IWPA groups and local unions picnicked together whenever possible—often at the conclusion of a rally and march to Ogden’s Grove on the North Side, where there would be a great deal of sausage to eat and beer to drink along with a lot of dancing and singing to enjoy after the speeches ended.18

  The Fourth of July, the one public holiday all Americans celebrated in the nineteenth century, was a grand occasion everywhere. The anarchists used the holiday to interpret the Declaration of Independence their own way and to honor their own red flag, not a star-spangled banner. “The flag of America” had “become the ensign of privilege,” the banner of monopoly, Albert Parsons proclaimed in 1885. “Wage slaves of Chicago,” he declared, “turn your eyes from that ensign of property and fix them upon the emblem of liberty, fraternity and equality—the red flag.”19

  Like his idols Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Parsons believed in honoring two revolutions, the American and the French. And so when Chicago’s colony of French immigrants celebrated Bastille Day in 1885, many of the anarchists joined them; but when the cit
y’s American families enjoyed the Yankee holiday of Thanksgiving that year, the Internationals arranged for “an indignation meeting” at Market Square, where Parsons asked sarcastically what in the world “plundered workers” and “hungry tramps” had to be thankful for.20

  Given the anarchists’ penchant for theatrical street performances, it was not surprising that they created their own dramatic societies and performed their own plays, such as a popular melodrama, The Nihilists, in which Spies and Neebe, the managers of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, played minor roles. This production, which re-created the scenes from the lives of Russian revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the hated czar, was so popular that it was later performed in a commercial theater; so too was The Proletarian’s Daughter, the story of a working-class girl who falls in love with a factory owner’s son, only to be spurned by her class-conscious father.21

  Anarchist banners displayed in a Thanksgiving poor people’s march in 1885 and in other street demonstrations

  During most of these demonstrations and festive occasions, the air was filled with music, often performed by German and Bohemian anarchists who created their own brass bands and singing clubs. IWPA club meetings and rallies usually opened and closed with songs that aroused a sense of collective confidence and martial spirit, most especially the much-loved “Marseillaise,” a song that Parsons often sang solo at meetings and rallies in his lilting tenor voice.22

  The International also sponsored dances in various halls every weekend, often to celebrate anniversaries and to raise money for the workers’ militia or the socialist press, or to celebrate the club’s founding date or an occasion like the Maifest or the birth of a movement hero like Tom Paine or Karl Marx. The German members usually chose the venue and the band, and the dances were frequented by various nationalities, such as the one described by a Chicago Times reporter who saw every couple at one anarchist ball enjoying a variety of European dance steps from waltzes to polkas.23

  Friedrich Sorge, who had served as Marx’s most trusted representative in the United States, described these festivities as “wonderful events” that drew enormous crowds, far more people than he had seen at similar socialist occasions in Europe. They highlighted what he called an “extraordinary and effective propaganda campaign carried on in public meetings held in halls and in the open”—a sustained effort “to shake up the people, the workers, and to frighten the philistines and the politicians.” 24 Through it all, even through the endless club meetings, the threatening speeches and noisy street demonstrations, the anarchists seemed to be having fun.

  In the early days of the IWPA’s development, Albert and Lucy Parsons appeared an odd couple of Americans in a German cultural world of beer gardens and concert halls, singing societies and drama clubs. Then, in 1885, their speeches and articles in the Alarm began to attract some English-speaking workers to the American Group they had formed. By the end of the year the group had grown to 150 activists, including a broad-shouldered Englishman named Samuel Fielden, who would become the anarchists’ most effective evangelist. 25

  Fielden joined the group in 1884 after spending fifteen years in the city digging ditches and hauling stone. He had learned about injustice from his father, a Lancashire handloom weaver who became an agitator for the ten-hour day, and had encountered it firsthand when at age seven he followed the children of other poor Lancashire folk into the cotton mills—an experience that left him with a memory of cruelty he called “satanic.”

  Young Fielden also received passionate religious instruction from his mother, a devoted Methodist, and before he turned twenty he had become a popular speaker at revival meetings in Lancashire. A restless youth who hated the cotton mills, Fielden left England in 1868. Landing in New York, he traveled far and wide, always working with his hands, and always reading and learning while listening to Americans. When he settled in Chicago, Fielden spent his days at hard labor and his free time in libraries and at meetings of the Liberal League, a group devoted to free thought and critical debate on social questions.26

  When business improved in 1880, Fielden bought a team of horses and used them for hauling stone to Chicago construction sites. He joined a fledging teamsters’ union and met George Schilling, the socialist labor activist, who became his mentor. Having gained a reputation at the Liberal League as a powerful speaker, Fielden was asked to address a labor meeting at the lakeshore in 1883, and there he met Parsons and Spies, who recognized his talent as an orator. By 1884 the stone hauler from Lancashire had become a devoted socialist and a popular speaker for the International.

  In the American Group, Fielden encountered a bevy of restless, intellectually voracious men and women, as dedicated to anarchism as he had once been to Methodism. He participated in lively group meetings at Grief’s Hall on Lake Street, where members delivered papers on political economy and anarchy followed by intense debate, and where they heard reports about ongoing strikes and assaults on workers. On occasion, he also listened to Albert Parsons and Lizzie Swank discuss the struggles of Indians, particularly the Métis, people of mixed French and native blood who rose up against British rule in the Northwest Territory of Canada, and the Apaches, who were making a last stand against the U.S. Army in the Arizona Territory.27

  Meetings of the American Group were organized by Lucy Parsons’s close friend Lizzie Swank Holmes, who usually closed gatherings at the piano and led the members in singing “La Marseillaise.” She maintained a leading role in the group’s political affairs, even after she moved out of the city to Geneva, Illinois, to live with her sickly new husband, William Holmes, who served as secretary of the group. A slender, pale young man who had been a woodworker in Wisconsin, Holmes chaired meetings, moderated debates, kept records and with Lizzie contributed much to the growth of the American Group. In the process, he came to know and admire Albert Parsons, and the two men grew as close as their wives had become. 28 The two couples joined a small inner group of devoted comrades who loved one another’s company. Lizzie Holmes later wrote of many occasions she and William spent in lively communion with their friends. “I used to believe nothing could be more pleasant,” she recalled, “than to gather with Mr. Parsons and his wife, Mr. Spies, Mr. Fielden, and others around a table, or in a small circle, and listen to conversation that flowed and sparkled on so smoothly.”29

  By now Albert Parsons had become a notorious figure in Chicago, a working-class hero admired for his courage as a bold character who suffered the blacklist for speaking out. His infamy among employers only added to his allure among workers. He cut a dashing figure in public appearances, taking the lead in huge street marches of people carrying crimson banners as they wended a long red line through the downtown streets. Sometimes he rode on horseback as a marshal, displaying the impressive riding form he acquired as a young cavalryman. On a podium Parsons struck reporters and critics as a vain character who dyed his hair black, coiffed his mustache and put on the airs of a gentleman; they also found him arrogant, insulting and audacious. Plebeian audiences, however, loved his dramatic persona, his blunt talk, his cutting sarcasm and his angry temper.

  At the age of thirty-seven Parsons had reached the height of his growth as an orator. He displayed a scholarly command of history and demonstrated a remarkable memory for statistics. He often expressed his love for poetry and for the legacy of the French Revolution; these qualities appealed immensely to the German workers in his audience who were, in many cases, avid readers and “enlightened” thinkers themselves. Even those who did not share his passionate belief in anarchism often found Parsons impressive. 30

  In great demand as a speaker not only in local working-class venues but in other cities, the “famous labor agitator” even aroused curiosity among wealthy Chicagoans of a liberal bent. Early in 1885 he was invited to address a meeting of the West Side Philosophical Society. The hall was filled with well-to-do, respectable people. “I am the notorious Parsons, the fellow with long horns, as you know him from the daily press,” he said with a smile.
It was odd, he continued, for him to speak before an audience of gentlemen with nice white shirts and ladies wearing elegant and costly dresses. He usually spoke before meetings of people dressed in “coarse and common garments,” people whose labor allowed these swells to wear fancy clothes and live in fine palaces. “Are not these charitable people—these sans-culottes—very generous to you?” he asked, as hissing resounded through the hall. Undaunted, he pressed on, telling them that 35,000 people in Chicago went hungry every day and that on such a cold winter night the Desplaines Street Police Station sheltered “as many as 400 homeless, destitute men.” Then, his tone rising in anger, he exclaimed: “Listen now to the voice of hunger, when I tell you that unless you heed the cry of the people, unless you harken to the voice of reason, you will be awakened by the thunders of dynamite!” The hall exploded with angry cries and the speaker could not continue. 31 There would be no more invitations from respectable societies.

  Lucy Parsons joined her husband in many of his Chicago activities, contributing articles to the Alarm, marching by his side in parades, engaging in debates at meetings of the American Group and speaking at lakefront rallies. She did this while keeping up her dress shop on the North Side to supplement her husband’s meager earnings and caring for six-year-old Albert, Jr., and their daughter, Lulu Eda, who was born in 1881. Lucy’s activities started attracting the attention of reporters, who were not used to seeing married ladies, let alone black women, making such angry public displays. An Inter-Ocean reporter who heard her give a furious speech at a Sunday rally described Lucy as “a very determined negress” who insisted on speaking even with her two “anarchist sucklings” at her side. 32 Albert and Lucy Parsons expected to be harshly treated by the press; if anything, the abuse made them more heroic in the eyes of the American Group, whose members treated them with special affection and admiration.