The same dilemma bedeviled police chiefs in other cities Parsons visited—for example, in November 1890, in Newark, New Jersey, where she was scheduled to speak on the third anniversary of the executions. At the last minute she found herself locked out of a hall. The local police had made it clear that they intended to target “the anarchistic element” and “crush it out.” Loudly protesting, she was arrested for “attempted riot” and jailed; that, plus subsequent developments, including a bail hearing and an appearance before a judge, kept her in the local newspapers, inspiring mass protests for several days in the greater New York area.41
Back in Chicago, a strong law-enforcement presence at meetings unnerved some labor leaders, who at times blamed Lucy Parsons for the scrutiny accorded the most innocuous of gatherings. The prospect of dozens of officers hovering over a picnic or rally could demoralize those who favored speechifying over confrontation; one Pioneer Aid fundraiser attracted one hundred policemen, half in uniform, half in plain clothes. (Captain Michael Schaak, taking note of Parsons’s persistent calls for workers to “buy yourselves good Winchester rifles,” observed that her appeals to violence had “made herself obnoxious to the more peaceable and conservative Socialists.”) In June 1891, the committee to raise money for a monument to the Haymarket martyrs refused to let her speak. Some supporters of PASA had predicted as much, believing that her money-grab within that organization had discouraged donors from contributing to the proposed statue. The following year during the annual May Day celebration, the Coal Unloaders bowed out of the parade because of what they called “too much red in the line”—including Parsons, who, together with Junior, seized the occasion to sell stacks of copies of Freedom.42
Tommy Morgan came to dread Parsons’s attempts to hijack socialist meetings. Once she stood to talk, it was difficult to get her to sit down, especially in gatherings where a vocal segment of the audience venerated her as a secular saint. A reporter for the Inter-Ocean described the beginning of a routine meeting of socialists at Waverly Hall, when Parsons “and about a dozen fellow anarchists filed in to the rear of the hall.” The mere sight of the intruder rattled Morgan and the others: “Apprehensive and knowing glances were exchanged by the leading socialists,” the reporter recounted. More often, however, Parsons entered the hall quietly and sat in the back, only to rise dramatically from her seat later in the proceedings, march to the front, and mount the podium, to the delight of the crowd. At one meeting of two hundred persons, Morgan was decrying the use of physical force, claiming that it “indicates a low degree of civilization” and undermines the morality of social reform, when, according to a reporter, “at this juncture Mrs. Lucy Parsons, haughty and arrogant, strutted down the center aisle to a seat in front of the platform.” Morgan paused, “and a deafening and prolonged cheer went up from the crowd.” For a while Parsons listened, becoming more and more agitated, but finally she interrupted subsequent speakers, agreeing wholeheartedly that the rallying cry among the Haymarket martyrs had always been “Prepare to use force.”43
Despite the angst of leaders like Morgan, among the admirers of her heated rhetoric Parsons rarely failed to disappoint: “Before we can have peace in a society like ours, rivers of blood will have to run,” she would say. She condemned the ballot and vowed to see the heads of capitalists impaled on spikes. She taunted her enemies: “When the great revolution does come we will shake the upper classes like jelly.” And she defended the use of dynamite: “In years to come, those in America will bless the hand that threw the bomb in Haymarket square.”44
At times Parsons also gave her explicit approval of assassination. In the summer of 1892, at his Homestead steel plant near Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie locked out members of a union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, in an effort to destroy it. His manager, Henry Clay Frick, ordered three hundred members of Pinkerton’s security forces to break the picket lines thrown up by the strikers. Alexander Berkman, a twenty-two-year-old Russian immigrant, anarchist, and self-professed follower of Johann Most, traveled from New York to Homestead, where (according to a plan he had devised with his lover Emma Goldman) he confronted Frick in his office and shot and stabbed him. Frick survived the attack, and Berkman spent fourteen years in prison for his “propaganda of the deed.” In the August 1892 issue of Freedom, Lucy Parsons titled an article “A Just Blow at a Tyrant,” and wrote, of the botched assassination, “We have only the greatest admiration for men like Berkman.” Yet she failed to anticipate how similar anarchists’ attacks and assassinations in France and Spain between 1892 and 1894 could reverberate in Chicago and affect her own prospects as provocateur.45
By the early 1890s, Parsons had successfully defied attempts to silence her completely, but she was still fighting a wider war for the free expression of radical views. Both the mayor and the chief of police, emboldened by the unconditional support of leading industrialists, felt justified in not only banning the red flag from workers’ meetings and parades, but also insisting that the American flag be flown. Parsons framed such efforts as the violations of the First Amendment that they were, and, in addition to issuing the familiar calls for revolution, focused her speeches on the constitutional right to peaceful assembly. Later, she would trace the beginnings of her career as a free-speech proponent from these Chicago battles over flags and words.46
The ban on the red flag prompted a cat-and-mouse game that the police could not hope to win, even though Mayor John Roche declared, “I will not tolerate this red flag business.” In 1891, for the annual Haymarket commemoration, hundreds braved a cold, drizzling rain at Waldheim Cemetery; they left their red flags at home, but brought red floral arrangements and displayed red streamers. At a meeting in Turner Hall the evening of November 12, Hubbard and his officers burst in and stormed the stage, demanding that an American flag be displayed. According to a reporter present, the chief’s order unleashed pandemonium: “Hiss after hiss and yell after yell frantically rose until the audience seemed a thousand demons instead of human beings.” Parsons exclaimed, “Hang the murderers of my husband!” and then declared, “That flag is an infamous lie.” She proceeded to refine her indictment: “Every star in that flag is but the concentrated tear drop of outraged American womanhood.” The police arrested twenty-three people that night. Hall proprietors began telling anarchists that they must not display any red flags, banners, or bunting, producing some “severely plain” backdrops for meetings, even on momentous occasions, such as the Haymarket commemoration of 1892.47
IN RECOGNITION OF HER SINGULAR ROLE IN CHICAGO’S POLITICAL discourse in general—and her constant talk of dynamite, in particular—Parsons earned epithets from the press that implicitly linked her to the massive destruction wrought by the great fire two decades before. This dusky devotee of dynamite engaged in “verbal pyrotechnics”; her speeches were “fiery,” “inflammatory,” “incendiary.” A “fire-eating,” “red-mouthed” anarchist, she served up doctrine “red hot.” Certainly she did her best to avoid the taint of middle-class social reform: “I don’t want to be respectable,” she declared at one meeting. “I want to be wholly disreputable and die so, and so do we all, I hope.” The thunderous applause that greeted these particular comments served as a rebuke to all those at various points on the political spectrum who had tried to discredit, undermine, or dismiss her.48
George Schilling, for one, took this rebuke personally. He had contributed to the Life of Albert R. Parsons a respectful, even reverent, appreciation of Albert’s work. In his piece Schilling acknowledged that they were “living in an age of universal unrest,” and he couched his critique of the Chicago political economy in terms that Lucy Parsons could applaud: “The justice of grinding little children’s bones and blood and life into gold in our modern bastiles [sic]of labor, so that a few might riot in midnight orgies, is being questioned by some.” Yet he could not now refrain from writing directly to Lucy Parsons and scolding her for keeping the police and the politicians in a constant state of war
against the workers through her rhetoric. Acknowledging that she possessed “more than ordinary intellectual power,” he nevertheless believed that her unrelenting calls for violence had been a “wasted force as far as any permanent results for good are concerned.” Indeed, in her determination to “terrorize the public mind and threaten the stability of society with violence,” he wrote, she accomplished little more than allowing the police to justify harsh measures against labor leaders and strikers. Schilling thought she should temper her language in an effort to appeal to a broader American constituency: “Those seeking economic progress must shape their conduct in accordance with the traditions and environment of the country in which they live.”49
By urging Parsons to modify her conduct (and not just her words), Schilling was perhaps betraying the deep disappointment that he must have felt over her scandalous affair with Martin Lacher, behavior that he and many others believed defiled the memory of her husband and compromised all radicals’ claim to the moral high ground. He ended by reminding her of the fate of the five men who lay entombed at Waldheim Cemetery, including her husband of beloved memory: “They worshipped at the shrine of force; wrote it and preached it; until finally they were overpowered by their own Gods and slain in their own temple.”50
Whether or not Parsons read Schilling’s letter, she failed to heed it. Even now, a new, drastic economic downturn in Chicago and throughout the country was evoking the dire conditions that had inspired her to write “Tramps,” her first, but far from last, paean to dynamite.
Chapter 11
Variety in Life, and Its Critics
IF LUCY PARSONS SEEMED TO LIVE IN THE PAST, FOR MUCH OF HER life she believed that, from the vantage point of the laboring classes, at least, the present did not seem all that different from recent history. In fact, at times she remained defiantly oblivious to or dismissive of the great historical forces sweeping over the city of Chicago and the United States, forces that were prompting new strategies for addressing economic inequality and social injustice. The economic and political dislocations of the 1890s and the early twentieth century gave rise to rural and urban reformers who believed that more local, state, and national government was the answer to the chronic disaster of industrial America. Now ideas promoting state socialism, though diametrically at odds with Parsons’s anarchism, gained not just radical but also mainstream, moderate cachet.
Parsons’s overall orientation toward small cooperative groups, such as trade unions, served to estrange her from socialists and even from a substantial number of anarchists. In addition, at least two other issues exacerbated her disagreements with radicals of various persuasions. In the 1890s, a new generation of anarchists was injecting the issue of human sexuality into political discourse, a development she found repugnant. At the same time, small numbers of terrorists at home and abroad were engaging in assassination and murder, crimes she denounced with disingenuous indignation. Some adjustments were called for: gradually she retreated from her public approval of violence against the established order, preferring a relatively tame life of writing and speaking. She hoped to avoid what was becoming the increasingly likely alternative—not just a night in the Cook County jail, but a years-long stint in prison.
These crosscurrents of change and continuity were on full display in Parsons’s activities during the summer of 1893. That August, at the beginning of what would become a five-year depression, she was back at the lakefront, holding forth during daylong mass meetings of the jobless: “By force we were robbed by the people who coin your sweat into Gatling guns to kill you,” she declared, “and by force must they be dispossessed.” The economic “panic” that began earlier that year marked the beginning of the nation’s deepest depression to date; soon hundreds of banks would close their doors and thousands of businesses would fail. In major US cities, as many as four out of ten workers found themselves unemployed. For Parsons, the crisis of the early 1890s evoked the unrest of two decades earlier, when she and her husband had arrived in Chicago and begun their lifelong careers of agitation. Now, she wrote, “How long can this condition of affairs last? How much longer must the schoolhouse be robbed that the robbers’ factory may be filled with the fair roses that bloom at the firesides of poverty and fade in these hells?” Parsons saw in the careworn faces of her listeners the eternal verities of capitalist depredations—the bloody clashes between wage slaves and government militia backed by employers’ private security forces, the wretched living and working conditions of the poor. The country seemed caught in an endless cycle of boom for the Marshall Fields and the George Pullmans and bust for the laboring classes. How much longer, indeed?1
Proving that she still possessed the power to provoke, that summer Parsons reprised the raw anger of “To Tramps,” promising listeners (and newspaper readers) that “men with that unsatiated gnawing at their vitals can be made to understand the tenets of anarchy…. I say to hell with the gang of thieves, robbers, murderers, destroyers of our homes.” Chicago authorities as well as editors around the country derided her “lunacy”; she was a “she devil” bent on painting “lurid pictures of famine and want” calculated to incite “murder and other forms of lawlessness.” The Chicago Tribune urged the police to restrain her as they would “an enraged tigress.”2
The wounds wrought by the Haymarket bombing still festered for many. On June 25 in Waldheim Cemetery, several thousand people watched as fifteen-year-old Albert Junior pulled a string on a red curtain and unveiled a monument to the martyrs. His part in the program offered a fitting piece of symmetry to Memorial Day in 1889, when the son of the fallen Major Mathias Degan played a similar role in commemorating the policemen who had died as a result of that fateful night of May 4, 1886. Both monuments became objects of scorn from their foes—in Haymarket Square, the statue of a policeman, arm raised as if in a gesture of peace and goodwill; in Waldheim Cemetery, a hooded, bronze figure of justice standing atop a base inscribed with (again, a variation of) the last words of August Spies: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”3
And then, the day after the Haymarket statue dedication, to the great surprise of everyone, Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden, and Michael Schwab. In ordering that they be released from prison, Altgeld (who had taken office only six months earlier) affirmed the critique of the trial offered by the convicted men—that Cook County officials had packed the jury with men who had prejudged the case, that the prosecutor had never linked the defendants to the bomb-thrower, and that Judge Gary had been too biased to preside over a fair proceeding. Parsons published the full text of Altgeld’s pardon under the title “His Masterly Review of the Haymarket Riot.”4
In an ironic twist, the release of the three men signaled the end of their association with Albert Parsons’s widow. Thereafter, they ostentatiously boycotted her speeches and repudiated anarchism, which would forever be associated in the public mind with domestic terrorism. Interviewed by a reporter the year after he gained his freedom, Neebe responded to a question about Lucy Parsons by saying that he had not seen her recently, “and I don’t want to see her either.” His comrades agreed with him: “They do not like to talk of her at all, but it is understood that there is general dissatisfaction with her personal conduct.” By this time rumors were circulating that Johann Most and Lucy Parsons enjoyed a close relationship that went well beyond their shared devotion to anarchist ideology. Her feud with the Pioneer Aid and Support Association over money, combined with what was perceived as her unfaithfulness to Albert’s memory due to her affairs with Lacher and possibly Most, diminished her in the sight of some former comrades.5
Parsons’s old circle was receding from her life. Dyer Lum committed suicide in April 1893. Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband, William, had moved to Colorado, but not before Lizzie had joined the middle-class New Century Club and rehabilitated her reputation as a pioneering reformer and advocate of sewing women. Tommy Morgan, Georg
e Schilling, and other Chicago labor leaders were pursuing the kind of moderate, ballot-driven socialism that Parsons deplored. Governor Altgeld appointed Schilling secretary of the Illinois Board of Labor Statistics, signaling the growing respectability of some socialist leaders within the state’s political establishment.6
Around this time there appeared a new cohort of radical editors, labor organizers, and orators, men and women toward whom Lucy Parsons felt great ambivalence. In Chicago in June 1893, Eugene V. Debs founded the American Railway Union, an industrial union of railroad employees. Debs, a thirty-eight-year-old native of Indiana, had been a longtime member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, more a fraternal order than a labor union. The following year, the bitter strike of Pullman railroad-car workers just outside Chicago would spread throughout the nation and claim the lives of thirty-four men (the US 7th Cavalry suppressed the strikers); Debs defied an injunction and went to jail. The Russian Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman, who first met Lucy Parsons in Philadelphia in 1887, was rapidly gaining notoriety for her advocacy of sexual freedom; she began to make periodic stops in Chicago under the sponsorship of the journal Free Society, which praised “variety” in love. Honoré Jaxon was a newcomer on the Chicago scene. Well educated, he had been born in 1861, in Toronto. Jaxon claimed (falsely) to be a Métis Indian, and he reveled in his role as one of the despised and persecuted. He became known as “the father of labor slugging” for his efforts during a carpenters’ strike in 1886, when he organized squads of workers into an “invading army” to strong-arm reluctant employees into joining the strike. Meanwhile, Chicago’s German immigrant community was becoming more assimilated, and Parsons was instead finding a new receptive audience in Russian Jewish garment workers, who appreciated her anticlericalism and her steady focus on unionization.7
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