Throughout the 1890s, true to her principles, Parsons remained warily on the sidelines of Progressive reform. She had no monopoly on the litany of execrations unleashed upon arrogant police and robber barons; but she bristled at radical Christians, socialists, and Progressive reformers, who in turn routinely lambasted anarchism as an inherently violent ideology. And though she maintained an active schedule of writing and public speaking, she found no intellectual home among the Progressives or in anarchist circles, the latter riven by deep divisions over the meaning of virtually anything and everything, whether the attentat (a burst of violence that would ignite a revolution), labor unions, or the act of sexual intercourse.
IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, CHICAGO’S population continued to grow rapidly, adding 700,000 in the course of the decade, for a total of 1,698,575 in 1900. The city was now world-famous as a commercial crossroads between East and West, notable for its new, fireproofed, metal-framed skyscrapers and for its prosperity. (An anarchist dictionary defined “prosperity” as “a condition of affairs said to exist in the U.S., and which manifests itself chiefly in strikes, riots, business depression and financial flurries.”) Meanwhile, people had discovered new ways to spend their money and time. The so-called retail wars of the decade allowed the big department stores, such as Marshall Field and Carson Pirie Scott, to build upon the ruins of their smaller, bankrupt competitors. Clustered on and around State Street, these giant stores beckoned to buyers with revolving doors, colorful window displays, and tastefully arranged merchandise on low-lying shelves. In the middle of the shopping district could be found Kinetoscope parlors and penny arcades that gave viewers glimpses of startling scenes, such as exotic animals on the run. Baseball games drew crowds of spectators, as did boxing and wrestling matches.8
Most thrilling of all were the new amusement parks, affordable even for the working poor, where the universal appeal of rides and “freak shows” broke down social hierarchies (except those that subordinated African Americans). White men and women, boys and girls, rich and poor rubbed shoulders in line and on rides. Insular ethnic entertainments—the Sunday-afternoon picnics in Ogden’s Grove, the political meetings in Turner Hall, the family gatherings in private homes—now seemed old-fashioned compared to attractions that lured people out of their neighborhoods. For many Chicagoans, commercialized leisure beckoned in the form of a grand, fantastical democracy, with all people sharing in the pleasures of watching spectacles and buying brand-name goods. For skeptics on the left, such amusements amounted merely to unwelcome distractions, where spending money superseded waging class warfare.9
However, this emerging consumer culture could not forestall larger economic developments with international reverberations—a crash in wheat prices, the overproduction of goods, and the overbuilding of railroads. The ensuing nationwide depression, compounded by decades of hardship among ordinary families, gave rise to the defining political movement of the 1890s—the People’s, or Populist, Party, which aimed to unite hard-pressed farmers with the urban laboring classes. The Populists favored popular referenda, government ownership of railroads, and relief for debtors, offering an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, which both seemed to be in thrall to industrial and landed interests. Some Illinois socialists initially found the new group promising. Lucy Parsons was among the few women delegates to Chicago’s local Populist convention held in late July 1892 (after the national meeting in Omaha earlier that month), and she attended at least one subsequent meeting. However, she believed that the Populists’ proposed reforms, such as the currency-expanding coinage of silver, would only serve to prop up the capitalist system and forestall the revolution, and her disdain for political parties of any kind meant that her flirtation with the Populists would be brief and half-hearted. At the same time, conservative commentators compared some of the Populist women firebrands to Parsons, dismissing Mary Ellen Lease, who was famous for her call to farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” as “principally of the Lucy Parsons style.” Soon most Chicago socialists too would abandon the Populists, whom they associated with farmers and other groups outside the boundaries of the urban proletariat.10
Chicago was no longer the place Albert Parsons had first visited when he had marveled at the exhibits in the Exposition Hall two decades before. The city was much larger, and its achievements much grander. Between May 1 and October 30, 1893, the city hosted a World’s Columbian Exposition, meant to showcase its complete and dynamic recovery from the Great Fire of 1871. Situated on the shores of Lake Michigan, the fair sprawled over seven hundred acres and featured a total of two hundred buildings, fourteen of them magnificent structures (though of flimsy wood construction) in the Beaux Arts style, all painted a glistening white. Avid city boosters applauded the exposition as a rebuttal to critics from both the radical Right and the radical Left, foreign and domestic, and groups in between. The British author Rudyard Kipling had visited the city in the summer of 1889, and after describing the “collection of miserables” who lived there, declared, of the “grotesque ferocity” of Chicago, “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.” He unfavorably compared the place, with its waterways “black as ink, and filled with untold abominations,” to far-off sinkholes: its ignorant inhabitants were “money-mad,” he wrote, “and its air is dirt.”11
Reformers contrasted Chicago’s claim to hard-earned greatness with its shameful sweatshops and tenements. In “The New Slavery,” Elizabeth Morgan asked “liberty-loving and patriotic Americans” whether they wanted visitors from around the world to see evidence that “the ‘sweater’ is king” over subjects toiling in hundreds of squalid dens scattered throughout the “Garden City of the Great West.” The British journalist William T. Stead timed his scathing indictment of the Chicago establishment to coincide with the exposition. In his book If Christ Came to Chicago! he lambasted the city’s famously corrupt politicians; the churches “at ease in Zion,” ignoring the poor; the lawless police; and the smug businessmen who lorded over it all.12
The fair attracted an estimated 27 million visitors from the United States and abroad and boasted exhibit halls sponsored by forty-six foreign governments. Newness and innovation were the watchwords: in technology—phosphorescent lamps, the forerunner of the zipper, and a moving walkway along the Lake Michigan shoreline; in commercial products—Quaker Oats and Juicy Fruit gum; and in the science of racism—“civilized” Americans juxtaposed to “savage” dark-skinned peoples. Not surprisingly, the fair was a flashpoint for controversy; the clergy and middle-class arbiters of morality feared that keeping it open on Sundays (the only day working-class families could attend) would degrade the Sabbath and attract “an element which is a constant menace to law and order, and even to human life.”13
The so-called White City lived up to its name in a literal sense. Organizers intentionally left African Americans out of the planning, excluded black male applicants from the fair’s elite police corps, and banned black patrons from the fairgrounds except for “Colored People’s Day,” August 25—“Darkies Day at the Fair.” Attendees on that day were given free watermelon. Exhibits sponsored by the various US states portrayed black workers as servants and menials. The fair’s practices mirrored the exclusion of blacks from many Chicago theaters and amusements. More broadly, though, the White City promoted the idea that African Americans belonged to a “race” inherently inferior to whites.14
The exposition provided the intellectual rationale for the constraints under which Chicago’s blacks residents lived and labored every day. Within this expanding city, most were forced to “loiter around the edges of industry,” in the words of a black activist and public intellectual at the time, Kelly Miller. The women served as domestics, the men as unskilled laborers who were periodically enlisted as strikebreakers whenever white teamsters, stockyard workers, wagon and carriage makers, and coal miners walked off the job. Prominent white Chicago reformers, including the proprietors of Hull House, rema
ined indifferent to the plight of blacks, or went public with their bigotry: Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, approved the lynching of southern black men as a means to ensure “the safety of woman, of childhood, of the home.” Socialists remained preoccupied with factory and craft workers; Tommy Morgan showed interest in blacks only when they discussed joining a third party—which they did periodically, the Republicans and Democrats having failed them completely. Debs excluded blacks from the founding American Railway Union convention and tolerated a discriminatory division of labor favored by white workers. His decision contributed to the failure of the Pullman strike in 1894, when black men served as scabs. For her part, Lucy Parsons made a single, passing reference to the problem of lynching in the South in an issue of Freedom, but ignored the plight of black wage slaves. Her views were in keeping with the attitudes of those radicals in whose circles she moved.15
Although Chicago’s black community represented less than 2 percent of the city’s population, by the 1890s it boasted a vibrant, if tiny, middle class of physicians, lawyers, and editors; its own newspaper, the weekly Conservator (edited by a lawyer, Ferdinand Lee Barnett); four churches; small businesses, such as saloons and barbershops; and a number of charitable, fraternal, and mutual-aid societies. Outspoken leaders pressed for legislation to end lynching and disfranchisement in the South and institutional bias in the North. Women activists took the lead in these efforts. Alarmed at the mean-spiritedness animating the World’s Columbian Exposition, Fannie Barrier Williams, the wife of Barnett’s law partner, told the exposition’s Board of Lady Managers, “We ask to be known and recognized for what we are worth. If it be the high purpose of these deliberations to lessen the resistance to woman’s progress, you cannot fail to be interested in our struggles against the many oppositions that harass us.”16
Lucy Parsons had no affinity for the high-minded protests of Barrier Williams, a national leader in the black women’s club movement and a proponent of the politics of respectability and “uplift.” Yet it is intriguing to speculate about the way Parsons might have reacted to another black woman of Chicago, newcomer Ida B. Wells, who in 1895 married the Conservator’s Barnett. Born in Memphis in 1862, Wells-Barnett had taught school and edited that city’s black paper Free Speech and Headlight. In 1889, whites lynched three of her friends, grocers who had competed with a white store in town. She condemned the atrocity in no uncertain terms, indicting not only the killers and the Memphis authorities but also the larger white South for its complicity in state-sponsored terrorism. In response, while she was away from the city, a white mob burned her office. She never returned to Memphis. Recognized as the nation’s most fearless anti-lynching agitator, she arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1893, fresh from a speaking tour in England. She quickly began to raise funds to publish a pamphlet, “The Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Wells-Barnett wrote two of its four essays, including one on “Lynch Law,” consisting of graphic written and visual accounts of actual murders. As in her other writings, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), Wells-Barnett blamed “the better class of citizens” in the South for tolerating lynching, and she exposed the myth of the black rapist as a mere pretext for the mutilation, hanging, and burning alive of black men.17
Wells-Barnett resembled Parsons in certain striking respects. Born a slave, she, too, attained only a basic common education but proved to be a gifted writer, newspaper editor, and speaker who was sought after by sympathetic audiences in the United States and Europe. She urged black households to keep loaded rifles in their homes and to use them if necessary. Observers contrasted her ladylike demeanor with her bold forays into taboo subjects, such as sadistic torture and the political use of threats or false claims of sexual relations between black men and white women. However, even some who admired her courage considered her writings and lectures to be reckless and self-defeating, and certain to offend potential supporters. She and Parsons both opposed the United States’ new imperialist ventures in the 1890s, with Wells-Barnett making explicit links between the oppression of blacks at home and the exploitation of dark-skinned peoples abroad. Yet it is doubtful that Parsons and Wells-Barnett ever met, and neither referred to the other in her writings.18
At the end of August 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition organizers convened what they called a Congress on Labor. The meeting took place against a backdrop of workers’ daily demonstrations at the lakefront; on August 21, 400 unemployed packinghouse workers chanting “We want work” had fought with police. Speakers at the labor conference included not only Samuel Gompers, Terence V. Powderly, Eugene V. Debs, and Henry George, but also Jane Addams, Mary Ellen Lease, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. On August 30, delegates responded to the tumult out-of-doors and adjourned to the lakefront, where Debs and Morgan mounted wagons to address a crowd of 25,000. Social reformers and conservative labor leaders acknowledged the plight of the masses, but they were moving toward strategies for change—such as government intervention, and conservative unions—that took them in the opposite direction from where Lucy Parsons and her comrades were heading.19
THE FEW BELEAGUERED CHICAGO ANARCHISTS MIGHT HAVE considered Lucy Parsons’s absence from the Congress of Labor to be a major lapse on the part of the conveners, but only the most naïve observers would have expected her to receive such official sanction. The police were still looking for discreet ways to silence her—ways that would not cause alarming headlines about angry protests to be splashed across the front pages of the city’s newspapers. Gone were the days when undercover agents and mainstream journalists sought a cozy, mutually beneficial relationship with the anarchists. Authorities now feared that attention from the press could give the mistaken impression that anarchism as a movement was gaining ground in the city. Increasingly common were meetings where Parsons would begin to speak, only to have a police officer, or in some cases the chief himself, step forward, lay hands on her, and warn her “to mention no names and to preserve order” (as at Turner Hall in November 1895). In some instances an officer actually pulled her off the stage as she struggled to resist; she would call out “Liberty is dead in Chicago.”20
Parsons, however, remained a favorite at mass meetings among unemployed and striking workers, fundraisers for radical newspapers, and assemblies of diehard anarchists. She maintained her reputation as Chicago’s “leading anarchistress” and an agitator of “intemperate gall.” On April 27, 1894, she addressed the members of (Jacob) Coxey’s Army, a protest started by an Ohio businessman of the same name to demand public works jobs for the poor. Together with Lizzie Swank Holmes, she joined the Women’s Commonweal Society. This female auxiliary was supposed to offer good cheer to the army’s 1,028 members streaming in from all over the Midwest, a new and rather demure role for the unpredictable Mrs. Parsons. On April 28, the men clamored for her to speak, but march organizers stopped her, fearing that she would discredit the movement if her listeners did not comport themselves in an orderly way. Nevertheless, one day she spontaneously joined the program of speakers and told the army “that they were belched up from the hearts of the people… and they deserved the good things of the earth.” The rumor that Parsons was the mysterious veiled lady who traveled with the army proved to be unfounded, but it did nothing to dispel her mystique in the mainstream press as an anarchist femme fatale.21
Almost every November 11, Parsons addressed the annual Haymarket observance, although from 1895 onward Waldheim Cemetery refused to allow mourners to gather there, forcing them to regroup in Turner Hall or Greif’s Hall. She objected to the call for the Pioneer Aid and Support Association to disinter the corpse of her husband and the others and relocate them to a more hospitable burial ground, arguing that the thousands of dollars such a move would cost might be better spent elsewhere. The editors of the Arbeiter Zeitung refused to publish her objections to the plan, suspe
cting that she feared that her own stipend would be reduced if funds were earmarked to move the bodies.22
Some years on November 11 she observed the day in Milwaukee, on at least two occasions (in 1893 and 1895) in the company of Johann Most. In Chicago in 1896, a police captain interrupted her speech in Turner Hall, just as she was denouncing “You hideous murderers!” and refused to let her continue, prompting an “uproar” and a near-riot among the crowd. The Reverend Graham Taylor, a Presbyterian minister who founded the Chicago Commons settlement house in 1894, later vividly remembered the event. Describing his first impressions of Lucy Parsons, he wrote: “Her appearance on the platform was impressive. Tall, well built and poised, self-possessed and commanding attention by her serious manner and resonant voice, she began to speak thus: ‘I am the widow of Albert R. Parsons and the mother of his son. I charge the police and the court with murdering my husband. I live to bring up his son to take up the work which was stricken from his father’s hands.’” At that point the police officer mounted the stage, “touched her lightly,” and arrested her for disorderly conduct.23
The politics of the commemoration were on display each year with the choice of speakers. Parsons attended but did not speak in 1893, when the ceremony honored the freed prisoners Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab, and she did not appear at all in 1899. The featured speaker that year was someone whom Parsons might have immediately recognized as a rival—the thirty-three-year-old Philadelphia anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre. Named for the French philosopher, de Cleyre had grown up in a poor household in Michigan. Of her formative years in a Catholic convent, she later said: “It had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days.” De Cleyre wrote and spoke extensively, especially on what she considered the baneful influence of organized religion on the individual’s freedom of sexual expression.24
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