In “Tramps,” Lucy Parsons addressed the legions of famished men trudging through the streets of windswept Chicago. The city fathers blamed them for bringing misfortune on themselves, for wasting their wages on drink, and for ignoring basic principles of “economy” in their own homes. In fact, she wrote, these men had toiled for up to sixteen hours a day, but could eke out only the meanest existence: “With all your squeezing, pinching, and economizing, you never were enabled to keep but a few days ahead of the wolves of want.” Meanwhile, shop and factory owners lived luxurious lives in “voluptuous homes,” and carelessly invoked the mantra “overproduction” as a reason for firing a faithful employee. Long harnessed to “an iron horse,” the worker was now “turned upon the highway a tramp, with hunger in your stomach and rags upon your back.” Parsons urged these men to ignore the hypocritical capitalist who offered them only the salve of religious faith—the idea that the poor would receive their reward in heaven. And she dismissed the fear that presenting “a petition in too emphatic a manner, will mean certain death at the hands of the oppressor. So hearken not to them, but list!”12
Parsons aimed to take her audience from despair to a triumph that was at once intimate, grand, and existential. She reminded her readers of the “bitter tears and heart-pangs of your loving wife and helpless children.” Tramps must resist the urge to throw themselves “into the cold embrace” of Lake Michigan. Instead, they should hasten to the homes of the rich, and “awaken them from their wanton sport at your expense! Send forth your petition and let them read it by the red glare of destruction.” To strike against the ruling class required neither planning nor collective action: “You need no organization…. In fact, an organization would be a detriment to you; but each of you tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of these little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land.” To wit, “Learn the use of explosives!”13
“Tramps” folds late nineteenth-century Victorian literary devices into a gothic horror story of betrayal and revenge. The language is florid. The starving wife and child were stock figures of contemporary sentimental fiction; but here, in contrast to a conventional story of a desperate father redoubling his search for work, he commits premeditated murder by lobbing a bomb or stick of dynamite through the window of a Prairie-district mansion. Parsons observed that machines (“iron horses”) were allowing bosses to produce more and pay their workers less, a persistent theme for IWPA speakers and writers in the mid-1880s. By this time the Chicago chapter of the association had set its sights on unskilled laborers—not just skilled craftsmen—as incipient “revolutionists.” Moreover, the idea of the transformative power of dynamite, a product of Science with a capital S, would become a hallmark of subsequent issues of The Alarm. At the same time, the tramp in this piece is remarkable for his autonomy. Both Lucy and Albert remained committed to labor unions as the building blocks of a cooperative commonwealth; but here, in “Tramps,” a single, aggrieved victim acts on his own to bring justice to an immoral world. In fact, neither of the Parsonses was particularly dogmatic when appealing to the masses, yet both resorted increasingly to explicit threats in their speeches and writings. As a so-called bloodthirsty woman—and, furthermore, a woman of color of indeterminate origin—Lucy seized the attention of Chicagoans of all stripes and played the press well.14
The publication of “Tramps” marked her more robust participation in labor agitation generally. When speaking to crowds or giving interviews to alternately intrigued and horrified reporters, Parsons resisted moderating her language, to the point that she seemed to aspire to sheer outrageousness. At the same time, her distinctive prose style set her apart from other self-proclaimed anarchists of the time; in fact, she brought to anarchist propaganda a literary sensibility uncommon among writers for The Alarm and Arbeiter Zeitung, its German counterpart.
Indeed, this former slave had grown into a confident writer who delighted in her own voice. In April 1885, she followed her “Tramps” sensation with an article titled “Dynamite” in the Denver-based Labor Enquirer. She rejected the idea that anarchists were only “a lot of thirsty blood-drinkers, who go up and down this broad earth, howling themselves for gore.” Instead, she claimed, they aimed to install a whole new “free society” that flowed from “the good judgment of the people” and not the dictates of government. The “dear stuff (dynamite),” which put power in the hands of the people and fear in the hearts of the bosses, was critical to this effort: “Thus the ‘terror’ becomes a great educator and agitator.” The emerging “dynamite era” enacted a new principle: “The more oppressors dead, and the fewer alive, the freer will be the world.”15
In an Alarm article from the summer of 1885, titled “Our Civilization: Is It Worth Saving?,” Parsons answered her own titular question in the negative. Alluding to recent inventions such as the telegraph, the telescope, and electricity, she noted, “We have stolen the lightning from the gods and made it an obedient servant to the will of man; have pierced the clouds and read the starry page of time.” Although the dizzying heights of Chicago’s skyscrapers proclaimed the city’s progress, in their shadows lived the “the young girl offering her virtue for a few paltry dollars” as well as other miserable, degraded toilers. Why was labor not credited for its part in building wealth? “Is it not that a few idlers may rot in luxury and ease—said few having dignified themselves as ‘upper classes’?” Echoing “Tramps,” she ended with a rhetorical flourish that was part challenge, part recrimination, demanding that the downtrodden workingman boldly enter “into the arena with those who declare that ‘Not to be a slave is to dare and DO.’”16
In another piece, “The Factory Child,” Parsons offered a deeply felt, poetic meditation on the ravages of capitalism as visited upon its youngest victims. She contrasted the carefree life of the privileged boy or girl, whose “giddy laughter and wine-bibed mirth rings out within soft silken-hung walls,” with the plight of the “little factory serf,” his (or her) eyelids “flooded with hot, burning tears,” and body wracked by “twitching nerves and aching limbs [that] refuse to be calmed after the long strain of the day’s drudging.” And yet in their torment these little ones go unnoticed: “Oh! Factory child, what sage has sung thy song correct?” Someday, “brave hearts and strong arms will annihilate the hell-born system which binds you down to drudgery and death.” Yet this new day depended upon men of courage: “Be men! Dare and do!”17
In “A Christmas Story,” published in December 1885, she drew upon a popular late nineteenth-century form of social criticism that provided an outsider’s perspective on a corrupt society rotting from within. Foreigners from a distant, isolated, and seemingly backward isle marvel at the wonders of the modern American city with its material abundance, including “marble halls where banquet boards were spread and lovely women came and went, fairy-like, all bespangled with precious jewels and gems of greatest worth” (no doubt a nod to the Board of Trade opening the April before). A sanctimonious preacher of the gospel soothes his wealthy listeners, invoking the goodness of the meek and lowly Jesus while ignoring the “pale-faced, care-worn and hard-worked people who seemed to have no time nor desire to stop and enjoy the beautiful displays in the show windows as the well-dressed ones whom we had during the day seen doing so.” Ultimately, the outsider concludes that the government of such a place “is simply organized fraud and oppression”; it is the residents of this so-called advanced society (and not his own) who are the “barbarians” in need of lessons in how to live a decent life.18
In “Communistic Monopoly” from March 1886, Parsons provided a critique of state socialism in the form of a dream transporting the writer to a land of “Communist anarchy,” where associations of people—“monopolies”—make decisions for everyone else. Shopping for shoes and dresses, the bewildered dreamer finds only limited styles because the huge distribution departments worship at the false idol of efficiency, and produce g
oods en masse regardless of individual consumers’ tastes. As portrayed here, communism allows for social groupings of all kinds, including religious ones, and so permits Christians to sustain “the church with all its nunneries, monasteries and theological factories where men and women were trained to become the teachers of superstition and stupidity.” Such diverse, inherently tyrannical foundational institutions would inevitably lead to conflict, according to Parsons, in contrast to “an individualistic state of society,” which would give free rein to people’s idiosyncratic needs and desires.19
As a literary stylist, Parsons was noteworthy among the writers for anarchist periodicals. Several common elements run throughout her writing regardless of the topic of the piece or its genre—news reportage, analysis, or fiction. Beginning in the 1870s, she showed a particular interest in imaginative renderings of political ideas as well as in contemporary gender relations and in violent rhetoric intended to startle readers regardless of political persuasion.
Compared to the dry and predictable articles offered up by other writers (including the statistics-laden pieces written by her husband), Lucy Parsons’s work was descriptive and colorful. She exploited melodramatic themes and took considerable care in fashioning her prose. Parsons’s tramps are not merely hungry; they suffer from “pangs of hunger now knawing [sic] at [their] vitals.” They do not merely work; they are “harnessed to a machine that was harnessed to steam.” She speaks directly to the reader, questioning his manhood and taunting him: “Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?” In “Factory Child” she employs repetition to emphasize her grief and outrage: “Toil on, toil on, thou victim of private capital. One day thy tears will be dried; one day thy chest will cease to heave.” She was also adept at bringing vividly to life the juxtapositions that implicitly formed the core of radical thought: socialists and even moderate reformers appreciated her descriptions of emaciated workers set against a backdrop of Chicago skyscrapers, the ill-clad children gazing upon storehouses stuffed with moldering food and moth-eaten clothing. Her articles had a strong narrative thread; these are stories in which, over time, characters suffer, learn, and finally redeem and avenge themselves.
With the parting salvo in “Tramps”—“Learn the use of explosives!”—Lucy Parsons invited and received the scrutiny of authorities, who were already preoccupied by the potential of dynamite in the hands of radicals. In February 1885, she was speaking at regular weekly IWPA meetings on Wednesday nights, prompting papers in places as far away as Cleveland, Ohio, and Macon, Georgia, to take note. As the Cleveland Leader reported,
Mrs. A. R. Parsons, a “lady” of Chicago, is a dynamiter woman. She made a very fiery speech, berating her hearers as cowards, unworthy of the name of manhood, because they allowed the aggressions of capital to continue. If they were men, as they claimed to be, she said they would blow up every house on the adjoining avenues before they would submit to it. If they were afraid to do this, however, they need not look for a captain, for she would fill her apron with dynamite and lead them along the avenues of the city where the rich reside, destroying as they went.
That same month, the American Group leader Samuel Fielden was speaking to Ohio audiences consisting of what a Cleveland Leader reporter called “the local dynamiters, Socialists, and would-be murderers,” and distributing the “Lucy E. Parsons handbill.” Several papers quoted from “Tramps” at length as an example of “the gospel of murder and dynamite,” a “rank production” of “the colored female socialist of Chicago.” The Illinois State Journal, based in Springfield, reported that Parsons had said, “Dynamite is our savior. We don’t want a better savior. Let us learn how to make it, and then not spare its use.” Similarly newsworthy was a speech in which she urged the use of “little dynamite bombs” to ensure that of aggressive National Guard troops, “very few would be left to report at headquarters when the muster roll was called.” She assured listeners and readers alike that “death had no terrors for her.”20
In their embrace of dynamite, the Parsonses and other Chicago anarchists were seizing on a particular historical moment. For years, the German anarchist Johann Most had been promoting the gospel of terror—the attentat—but recent events were sending shockwaves through major cities in the United States, Europe, and Russia. In 1881, anarchists had used handmade grenades to assassinate Czar Alexander II. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians, conducted a four-year series of dynamite attacks on British military barracks, gasworks, canal viaducts, and the London Underground. The attacks culminated on January 24, 1885, with the detonation of three bombs in the House of Commons chamber, Westminster Hall, and a banquet room in the Tower of London. The New York Times sent a reporter to an IWPA meeting that night, and he had taken note of Lucy Parsons, whom he described as “a negro woman, wife of the rabid white Socialist, A. R. Parsons.” “She had often wanted to be a man,” the reporter wrote, “but since she had heard that it was a woman who had blown up the Parliament Buildings in London, she would not swap places with any man in the country.” Meanwhile, Chicago shuddered: in February alone, the Tribune published eighty-eight articles dealing with dynamite.21
Following the example set by the Labor Enquirer, The Alarm offered ringing affirmations of the power of dynamite as the perfect weapon. Articles focused on the manufacture and deployment of explosive devices of various kinds as well as directions for street-fighting and calls for martyrdom and the execution of Chicago’s business leaders. In pieces such as “Bombs! The Manufacture and Use of the Deadly Dynamite Bomb Made Easy,” the appeal was straightforward: “One man armed with a dynamite bomb is equal to one regiment of militia, when it is used at the right time and place.” Albert waxed eloquent about the potential of explosives to achieve “the equilibrium,” the diffusion of power, with this ultimate deterrent to evil: “It is the abolition of authority; it is the dawn of peace; it is the end of war, because war cannot exist unless there is somebody to make war upon, and dynamite makes that unsafe, is undesirable, and absolutely impossible.” Dynamite, in fact, was both a harbinger and an agent of progress, he said, the climax of a historical process: “Gunpowder brought the world some liberty and dynamite will bring the world as much more as it is stronger than gunpowder. No man has a right to boost himself by even treading on another’s toes. Dynamite will produce equality.”22
From the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 onward, the Parsonses and other anarchists and socialists wrote and spoke often about the need for the laboring classes to defend themselves against armed authorities: when the police, or militia, or federal troops used force to break up peaceful assemblies, the masses must respond in kind. Yet by 1885 the anarchists’ invocation of violence had gone well beyond the rationale of immediate self-defense. For his part, Johann Most urged followers to plant bombs in (or torch) such places as ballrooms, banquet halls, and churches. Yet curiously, considering their eagerness to parse the doctrines of various political ideologies, few, if any, Chicago anarchists seem to have devoted much serious thought to the larger implications of a strategy based on terror. How could one be certain that only the capitalist, and not innocents, would fall to a stick of dynamite, no matter how careful the assailant’s aim? Was it credible that the death of a single employer could impel his Board of Trade colleagues to embrace anarchistic principles? At one IWPA mass meeting, a speaker asserted, “We believe in, if necessary, sacrificing 1,000,000 lives to-day, to save uncounted millions who otherwise must be sacrificed to the demon of greed.” The Alarm reworked the ratio: “It is clearly more humane to blow ten men into eternity than to make ten men starve to death.” Yet the Chicago anarchists’ failure to think past their own words suggests that the alarm they raised about their intentions was a false one; these men and women sought primarily to be heard and heeded within the cacophony of the city’s labor politics.23
According to the anarchists, if talk of dynamite had the potential to terrify elites,
it also had the potential to galvanize the laboring classes by showing them that these radicals had evolved out of the “talking” phase into doing. Lizzie Swank observed that words alone seemed unequal to the task at hand. Glorifying dynamite offered a rhetorical strategy meant to impress upon ordinary people their ability to change the world: “You can talk much more effectually to ignorant and careless working people when you tell them that they have the power to enforce their claims, than if you merely point out their wrongs and tell them what ought to be,” Swank wrote. Dynamite—not as much the material but the idea of it—amounted to the ultimate weapon of the dispossessed.24
In the words of one contemporary, this focus on dynamite amounted to loose “bomb-talk,” a sign of weakness and desperation on the part of news-media-savvy anarchists, but largely harmless in fact. Regardless, it is probable that both Lucy and Albert felt validated when, by the spring of 1885, the Chicago press had begun to associate both of them with the making, using, and praise of dynamite. The police detective Michael Schaak reported that his agents had infiltrated “secret” IWPA meetings where Albert was demonstrating methods for assembling what he (Albert) called “the dear stuff dynamite” in a little tin box that could be carried around in an unobtrusive handbasket and used to level hundreds of houses. The description of this incident and others, however, suggests that Parsons was fully aware that an undercover agent was present, and that he intended to impress upon Chicago authorities that he and his comrades were prepared to move beyond street skirmishes with the police into a more deadly phase of class warfare. Writers for The Alarm understood, and seemed to welcome, the panic their words instilled in the public at large. Dynamite could only become a viable weapon if its potential was widely appreciated by both the laboring classes and their enemies.25
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