image Chapter 4 image

Farewell to the Ballot Box

IN THE LATE 1870S, LUCY TOOK ON MULTIPLE ROLES THAT, combined, would test her physical and emotional stamina and also thrust her into the public sphere. She became a regular writer for the radical press and a labor agitator deemed by mainstream newspaper editors to be worthy of coverage, all the while contending with the new demands of motherhood and providing the family’s main source of income. After five years in Chicago, she emerged out of Albert’s shadow and took her place next to him in the columns of newspapers and at labor-organizing meetings. And she began to see herself as a leader in her own right, prepared to do battle against misguided comrades no less than against the lackeys of capitalism. Eventually, the couple would chart a dangerous new path together away from electoral politics and toward the idea that the laboring classes were incapable of voting—or, for that matter, reading or reasoning—their way to a better world.

After the summer of 1877, now that no newspaper would hire Albert as a typesetter, Lucy faced greater responsibilities as breadwinner. She expanded her sewing shop into “Parsons & Co., Manufacturers of Ladies’ and Children’s Clothing,” with her husband as business partner and agent, and the two opened a “factory” at 306 Mohawk Street. While she oversaw production, he spent some of his time soliciting orders for uniforms from hotels, restaurants, and laundries, and for a few years, at least, he noted later, “[I] sold suits for a living.” In fact, although Albert might have earned what little money he did make from selling suits, he was spending most of his energies promoting socialism, running for office, and speaking wherever and to whomever he could. Of his ability to reach all kinds of listeners, whether in an elegant parlor with Methodist clergy or in a crowded union hall with carpenters, one friend remarked, “No audience or circle of people ever in any way disconcerted him.”1

In losing his livelihood as a printer, Albert had become not only “a martyr for the cause,” according to his comrades, but also an object of intense interest on the part of Detective Michael Schaak, Police Chief Michael Hickey, newspaper reporters on the beat and their powerful editors, and even Allan Pinkerton, head of the notoriously lethal private security force. Pinkerton saw the massive strikes of the summer of 1877 as only an expression of workers’ “greed, avarice and fiendishness,” and he singled out as responsible for the bloodshed “a young American communist named Albert Parsons,” a man of great “viciousness and desperation.” According to Pinkerton, Parsons seemed “to possess a strange nature in every respect”—he lived openly with a “colored woman, whom he has at least called his wife,” and he possessed “a devilish ingenuity in the use of words which has permitted himself to escape punishment.”2

Parsons worked mightily to put his “devilish ingenuity in the use of words” to good use. Believing that workingmen must express their grievances forcefully at the ballot box, he regularly ran for local office between 1877 and 1880 (never successfully). He also helped to found the Chicago Council of Trade and Labor Unions, a confederation of a dozen (all-male) socialist unions. Around this time the WPUS changed its name to the Socialistic Labor Party (SLP). Parsons became assistant editor of the group’s paper, The Socialist, and, in 1879, its editor. This lively weekly of news, editorials, poetry, serialized fiction, letters to the editor, and a column of quotations from “enemy capitalists” chronicled the daily struggles of ordinary Chicagoans—for example, those in the meatpacking industry, where men did jobs impervious to mechanization, including the stickers, who thrust razor-sharp knives into animals’ throats; the scrapers, who rubbed their fingers raw cleaning the hair off hides; and the scalders, who toiled over cauldrons of boiling liquid. It was on the pages of this periodical that Lucy Parsons made her debut as a purveyor of biting social commentary.3

In April 1878, Albert lost his bid for county clerk, although he garnered 8,000 votes and the socialists managed to elect one of their own to the Common Council. Some workingmen eschewed radicalism but cast their ballots for SLP candidates as a protest vote, a statement against the Republicans and Democrats who promised so much before an election but inevitably failed to deliver on their promises afterward. The SLP adopted the slogan, “Go to the polls and slaughter them with ballots instead of bullets, O!” Before long, however, it became clear that the socialists could not ride to victory on the backs of protesters. In the late 1870s, Albert and Lucy changed course: they condemned the ballot box, and in a bid to shock the masses out of their torpor, resorted to more extreme rhetoric. Several years of frustrating engagement with the local election system convinced them that workers must use means other than the vote to advance their own interests. Turning on many of their colleagues, the Parsonses rejected partisan politicking and governmental authority and became anarchists.4

CHICAGO TRIBUNE REPORTERS FOUND ALBERT PARSONS FASCINATING; he made good copy. One who approached him for an interview at his office at No. 7 Clark Street “had no difficulty getting him to talk.” The result was a series of high-profile newspaper stories in 1878 about the small cadre of Chicago socialists, including an article titled “They Are Arming to Resist Illegal Interference with their Meetings.” As usual, Parsons was eminently quotable: “Force, as represented in strikes or armed mobs, we denominate gut revolutions, to use a strong word—a revolution of the belly.” He denied that socialists aimed for the redistribution of private property, and indicated that he and his fellow workers would use violence only for defensive purposes: “We intend to carry our arms with us, and if the armed assassins and paid murderers employed by the capitalist class undertake to disperse and break up our meetings, as they did in such an outrageous manner last summer, they will meet foes worthy of their steel.” To the Tribune, the ideas of this slight young man, with what Pinkerton called such a “strange nature,” demanded a rebuttal in the form of a lengthy editorial, “What Communism Really Means.”5

As Albert began to devote his full energies to the SLP, Lucy was making her first foray into labor organizing. In the summer of 1878 she joined with like-minded women, who were, like her, in their mid- to late twenties, to found Chicago’s Working Women’s Union (WWU) No. 1, a group that aimed to bring all women, but especially servants, department store clerks, and seamstresses, into the socialist fold; together these groups represented about 15 percent of all Chicago workers. Now twenty-six, Lucy was forging a public persona of her own, although the WWU was a creature of the Council of Trade and Labor Unions, and Albert often attended its meetings. In her early work with the WWU, Lucy defied convention merely by appearing in public, for by this time she was in her last trimester of pregnancy, and this was an age when pregnant women, regardless of class, were usually confined to the home.6

Socialists claimed to welcome all wage earners, but in fact many tradesmen considered women and children the mere pawns of cost-cutting employers. German American radicals dismissed calls for women’s suffrage and other forms of gender equality, which they associated with native-born Americans and thought, in any case, to be irrelevant to the class struggle. The WWU, meanwhile, ignored the plight of black working women, although in 1878 the SLP finally admitted two “swarthy sons of Africa” into its ranks.7

The leaders of WWU No. 1 were an illustrious lot, and within a few years several would become prominent members of the Knights of Labor. The group’s first president, Alzina Parsons Stevens, born in Maine, had worked as a youngster in a Lowell textile mill, where she lost part of a finger to a machine. Later she followed the trade of printer; as a member of NTU Local No. 16, she had probably met Albert Parsons at union meetings. Elizabeth Rodgers, a native of Ireland, was the wife of George Rodgers, an iron molder. A mother (eventually of eleven), she advanced the novel idea that housekeeping was a form of productive, albeit unwaged, labor. The Sovereigns of Industry member Elizabeth Morgan, a native of England, had as a child toiled for up to sixteen hours a day in a mill in Birmingham, England. Her husband, Tommy, had joined the Chicago socialists in 1873, four years after he and his wife had moved to the city. By 1877, the Sovereigns had disbanded, and Elizabeth turned to labor organizing alongside her husband.8

Lizzie May (or Mary) Hunt Swank, another WWU leader, would become a lifelong friend of both Albert and Lucy, and she was one of the very few women—perhaps the only woman—with whom Lucy developed a deep relationship. Swank did little to dispel the popular image of herself as the petite piano teacher from Ohio who, incongruously, promoted an angry, militant brand of labor radicalism. One reporter marveled, “From her meek appearance one would never guess she was a fire eater and a blood drinker,… a blatherkite [i.e., spouter of foolishness] orator and a writer of inflammatory slush for anarchic publications.” However, if Lucy and Lizzie ever shared late-night confidences, they no doubt discovered some surprising parallels in their lives, secrets that both sought to suppress.9

Born in Linn County, Iowa, in 1851, Lizzie May Hunt began teaching school and giving piano lessons at the age of fifteen. Within two years she had married a Union veteran and grocery store owner, Hiram J. Swank of Bolivar, Ohio. In July 1869, the couple had a son, born around the time of Lucy’s first child, Champ. They named him Raphael Ashford Swank. A second child, Gladys, followed in 1873.10

Within five or six years, however, Lizzie and her mother, Hannah Hunt, had both left their husbands and were living together in Chicago. Although Lizzie eventually remarried (as did her father and her first husband), it is possible that neither her first marriage nor her parents’ had been formally dissolved. At some point (probably in the early 1860s), Hannah had joined a small Ohio free-love community called Berlin Heights, founded on the principle of “a woman’s absolute right to self-ownership.” Perched four hundred feet above Lake Erie in Erie County, Berlin Heights had thirty dwellings that housed two hundred residents who rejected conventional notions of monogamy, marriage, and divorce. Neighboring churchgoers were uncertain whether to laugh at the women in bloomers, the men by their side, up to their elbows in the washtub, or to condemn this shocking, if short-lived, den of iniquity and lust.11

Sometime before 1880, Lizzie moved to Chicago with Gladys and joined the household of her mother and siblings. In the mid-1870s, Hiram had taken Raphael west with him to a Colorado mining camp, but the boy died soon thereafter. Although Lizzie told an interviewer in the early twentieth century that her first husband and her children had long since died, in fact Gladys was still alive; she married in 1892 and lived in Chicago until her death in 1924. Lizzie was never a widow; Hiram had married again.12

Lizzie Swank would go on to write critiques of marriage, an institution she considered the tomb of happiness. She expressed her ambivalence toward romantic love, motherhood, children (and grandchildren), and male-female relations in general, leaving the details of her own life out of her nonfiction work and referring only indirectly to her own tribulations in a novel. In losing a firstborn, abandoning the father of a first child (and, in Swank’s case, two children), and building new lives for themselves in Chicago, Swank and the famously reserved Lucy Parsons had more in common than was immediately apparent.13

Within the space of a few years of moving to Chicago, Swank had labored as a seamstress in a factory, in a sweatshop, and at home. The grueling conditions she endured prompted her and her sister to lead one of the first strikes among Chicago needlewomen (around 1880), when they protested the owner’s fraudulent pay practices. The owner changed his practices—but only after firing the two of them. Swank continued to write long exposés about the abuses young women suffered at the hands of their bosses. Making little more than $5 or $6 per week despite putting in ten-hour days, these workers were barely able to support themselves. The growth of large shops subjected ever more of them to the tyranny of the clock. In 1870, nine factories employed 491 workers, but ten years later, nineteen factories were employing 1,600. Fashionable women took advantage of desperate seamstresses who, in Swank’s words, “can frill and flounce and hem and stitch in marvelous fashion, who can set stitches in a gown which would drive the most captious feminine critic wild with delight and admiration.” In 1881, Swank joined the SLP.14

THE WORKING WOMEN’S UNION GATHERED EVERY OTHER SUNDAY afternoon in “open meetings”—more like a high-minded salon—to come up with ways to attract young women to the group. The leaders spent much time debating and discussing labor economics. At one meeting, in response to the question, “Can Women Live on their Present Wages?” an elderly servant stood to say, “The worst feature of the question was that girls working at the present wages could not keep up appearances, go about dressed neatly, and live comfortably and be honest and virtuous.” Still, there were other, more heated discussions, about the eight-hour-day movement, for example, with some arguing that shorter hours would provide women with more time at home, and others claiming that such an effort would further depress wages.15

Official SLP policy discouraged women from taking “men’s” jobs (that is, any job in which men predominated) on the theory that the work would harm mothers and their capacity to rear children, and also that the women’s low wages would undercut those of men. Plank number 7 of the SLP platform called for the “prohibition of the employment of female labor in occupations detrimental to health or morality.” The Socialist engaged in decidedly un-revolutionary rhetoric when it called for women to withdraw voluntarily from wage-earning drudgery so they could assume “their rightful position as the sovereign queen of a good man’s household and at the same time ensure that ‘good man’ has a chance to work and the right to the fruits of his labor.” Presumably, then, women could continue to labor in their own homes as seamstresses, though not in shops as tailors or machine operatives; or in other women’s homes, as domestic servants and cooks, though not in hotels as waiters or chefs.16

Lucy knew firsthand the tribulations of those who engaged in women’s work, paid or unpaid, and she was a prominent member of the WWU, at times presiding over meetings. Yet competing claims on her energies suggest that her devotion to the organization was not wholehearted, and in fact, she lacked the patience to go into individual small workplaces and convince the women there that their best interests lay with the WWU, as other members did. She was also busy helping Albert with his political campaigns each spring and fall. In all likelihood, it was she and Lizzie Swank who sewed the colorful slogan-banners that adorned every large socialist event—“Our Civilization: The Bullet and the Policeman’s Club” and “No Masters, No Slaves.”17

Lucy was also active in planning and publicizing the “monster picnics” that had become a significant part of her family life. These large gatherings struck her as more satisfying and more useful to the cause than the tedium of small-bore outreach to workers, one person at a time, often in the presence of a hostile boss and panicked coworkers. A celebration of Whitsunday (Pentecost) on June 16, 1878, showed how socialists tried, with mixed success, to harness large pleasure outings to their own purposes. At the “great demonstration,” Albert interrupted the afternoon entertainment to lecture the crowd and defend socialism as a genuinely American movement. Still, his listeners consisted of only a small knot of the sympathetic, or the curious. Most young people barely paused from dancing and flirting, while others visited with friends or enjoyed the merry-go-round. He competed with popcorn vendors for the attention of the crowd.18

Late 1878 marked the beginning of Lucy’s lifelong career as essayist, editorialist, and investigative journalist when The Socialist published a series of her letters to the editor. These pieces obliquely evoked her own ordeal in bondage. They also suggested her eclectic taste in reading, including poetry, fiction, and current news, and revealed a rhetorical style and substantive focus all her own, yielding florid indictments of capital and melodramatic descriptions of suffering women. In one letter, she dismissed the notion of “harmony of employer and employed (master and slave),” arguing that it was as unlikely as harmony between the “robber and the robbed.” She asked, “Oh, when will ignorance be dethroned, and reason and justice reign supreme? When will the masses learn that property is his and his only who has produced it—earned it?” She also denounced the unjust treatment of impoverished Union veterans, out of work and out of luck, condemned to the poorhouse and scorned by a new “slavocracy”—city officials and employers: “But alas! What must be their heartfelt humiliation and burning indignation when they are denied by a bloated aristocracy, a cruel money-ocracy, the commonest right that should be accorded the yellow cur that runs the streets—the right to live!—and [instead] find themselves alluded to in the columns of a hireling, venal press as ‘mendicants,’ ‘relics from the late carnage,’ ‘unfortunates,’ etc. But then, what else can they expect from A speculating, thievish clan, / who rob alike on sea and strand.” The heroic liberators of the slaves were now either enslaved themselves, bound by the wage system, or cast out on the street to scrounge for scraps like animals.19

Unlike Albert, who wrote in grand terms about socialist theory and the shifting structure of the labor force, Lucy engaged with popular magazines. In one Socialist piece she responded indignantly to a recent Scribner’s article, “Hints to Young Housekeepers,” with its condescending proscriptions for the duties, clothing, and even food allowance appropriate for cooks and servants. Her days as a domestic in a slaveholder’s household, and later for employers in Waco, surely informed her critique of cruel mistresses who would keep young women in “the bondage of aristocracy.” In another piece, she took the same magazine to task for fawning over British lords and ladies, admonishing its readers: “Hear, ye who love republican institutions, with what a gush of sophistry the aristocracy greets the ‘royalty’ of old monarchy-ridden Europe, whose history has floated down to the present generation in the blood of the work-people—and the end is not yet!” No doubt she was the only contributor to The Socialist who had been born a slave, and one among the few who possessed only the bare bones of a formal education.20

On September 29, 1879, Lucy gained the attention of Chicagoans outside radical labor circles when a Tribune reporter offered an account of a speech she had given the day before at the socialists’ weekly meeting in Uhlich’s Hall. It is possible that this short notice, “The Regular Weekly Meeting of the Socialists,” marked the first time any newspaper had quoted her: “Mrs. A. R. Parsons spoke at some length, and held the attention of her auditors closely to the end.” She called for legislation “which should wipe out the private and exclusive ownership of the land.” Impressed by her confident demeanor, the reporter noted, “She avowed herself as being very ultra in her views, and expressed the belief that, should she give expression to her extreme views, she would be annihilated,” a characteristic bit of hyperbole on her part.21

The fact that Lucy was speaking at all indicated she was a woman possessed of considerable determination and physical strength, for just two weeks earlier, on September 14, she had given birth (at home, under the care of a neighborhood midwife) to a baby, Albert Parsons Jr. The birth certificate, which gives the child’s race as “Negro,” is notable because it is possibly the only public document for which Lucy provided accurate information about her background: she listed her maiden name as Carter, and her place of birth as Virginia. Perhaps she felt she could not risk falsifying an official state form. She also gave her full married name as Lucy E. Parsons, with the “E” in subsequent years standing for either Ella or Eldine.22

Clearly, the birth of the baby added to Lucy’s responsibilities. Meanwhile, Albert traveled, solicited subscriptions to The Socialist, and campaigned for a new group, the Eight-Hour League. He appeared before a congressional hearing held in Chicago by a select committee of the House of Representatives in late 1879. The committee was looking into the “cause of the general depression on labor and business.” It was perhaps there that he first met forty-year-old Dyer Lum, a bookbinder by trade and a Union veteran as well as secretary to the committee that sponsored the hearing. Lum, a descendant of the illustrious abolitionist Tappan family, was given to an idiosyncratic brand of individualistic socialism that could veer toward spiritualism. Beginning in 1880, he and Albert worked together to promote the eight-hour day.23

When the WWU collapsed in late 1880, the local press gleefully chronicled its internal contradictions and unfulfilled promise. Like other SLP-sponsored gatherings, WWU meetings attracted curious reporters bent on describing for their readers the pronouncements of those with “communistic proclivities,” as well as any trouble within the group (for example, attempts to recover the modest funds from a treasurer who had allegedly embezzled them). Exposed as interlopers and asked to leave, reporters would then denounce the proceedings as “secret,” implying a conspiracy afoot.24

At its demise, the group had little to show for its efforts. A special meeting called in November 1879 on behalf of sewing women, “who are invited to attend,” and presided over by Lucy, had attracted twenty people, fifteen women and five men. Of those, only one or two were needlewomen. Lucy dispensed with the planned program and suggested the group instead address the well-worn adage “Union is strength.” Several months later, the group was still discussing “the feasibility of organizing a sewing girls’ union,” and leaders were still reading aloud essays designed to rally “the slaves of Chicago.” One member delivered a paper “in which [she] recited some of the cruelties practiced upon the working women at the present day, whose condition, she claimed, to be no better than negro slavery.” Invited to stand and tell their own stories, the handful of working women in attendance chose instead to remain in their seats. Mid-Sunday afternoon meetings held no appeal for the WWU’s target audience. Exhausted after toiling six days a week for pennies, most young women were not inclined to listen to well-meaning ladies engaging in political debate. Later, Lizzie Swank described the challenges of organizing young women, who typically hoped to marry and quit the workforce as soon as possible, and native-born workers, who often shied away from collective action. Pride played a role in their hesitancy: “They preferred to bear their privation alone, and allow others to think they were comfortably situated, quite well off, and needed no one’s sympathy,” Swank wrote. She encouraged the founders of a similar group in Denver but also offered advice: “A great deal of tact and genuine sympathy is necessary to deal with all the cases you meet. ‘Patronage’ will not do—I have seen too much of that tried in this city.”25

By 1880 Albert Parsons had won the deep admiration of his socialist comrades, both German- and English-speaking. In 1879, they had sent him to an SLP convention in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, where the delegates nominated him as their candidate for president of the United States. Parsons declined the honor, pointing out that he was too young to serve (though throughout his life he would shave three years off his age, claiming a birthdate of 1848). The Illinois state legislature had created a bureau of labor statistics, a key demand of the socialists, and its research would bolster his argument about the effects of a transformed industrial economy on the state’s most vulnerable workers. In January 1880, he represented Chicago at a Greenback Labor Party (GLP) conference in Washington, DC, and that June he and Lucy served as delegates to the national GLP convention held in Chicago. (The Parsonses eventually broke with the party because it refrained from condemning “those lordly pirates called capitalists.”) In May, the Knights of Labor and socialist unions founded the Trade and Labor Assembly (TLA), with Albert taking the helm. The TLA was dominated by German immigrants; the SLP still lacked meaningful support among English-speaking workers.26

Furthermore, the SLP’s principled stance against cheap labor often spilled over into a deep animus for the most exploited workers. A Socialist piece, probably written by Albert, detailed the plight of black sharecroppers, who were forced to subsist on “stinking lard, mouldy flour, spoiled meat, and other refuse,” but it also denounced the exodus of blacks out of the South and into the north as an implicit threat to wage-earning white Chicagoans. The writer argued that blacks should remain where they were and “secure to themselves the whole fruit of their toil by utilizing their political liberty in the right direction.” Of course, by this time, among southern blacks “political liberty” was in short supply, as Albert well knew. Even more striking was a strident rallying cry among Chicago socialists, “The Chinese must go!” At a “monster meeting” in May 1879, members of the TLA resolved, in support of their West Coast counterparts, “that in answer to the California war-cry of ‘The Chinese must go,’ we echo the universal watchword of American workingmen: ‘Not only the Chinese, but Chinese institutions [i.e., indentured servitude] must go.’”27

Despite pandering to the prejudices and fears of Chicago’s white workers, the socialists saw their organizing efforts sputter and stall. The depression that began in 1873 and lasted for six years took a tremendous toll on organized labor nationwide. Membership in trade unions throughout the country declined from 300,000 to 50,000 in the course of the downturn. In Chicago, recent strikes by coopers, cigar makers, and shoemakers had failed, with the last group intimidated by employers who threatened to import Chinese workers from the western states. In August 1879, The Socialist ceased publication after just eleven months, depriving Albert of his modest weekly income and both him and Lucy of a platform for their ideas and observations.

It was in this context that, after three years of mounting regular campaigns for elective office, Albert began to reconsider the ballot box as a means of socialist revolution. He had come to believe that workers’ long hours and pitiably low wages effectively disfranchised them; they had no time to devote to the political process, or even to cast their votes on election day. His string of failed campaigns meant that the electoral process was inherently corrupt, he thought, depriving him and other socialists of the support they clearly deserved: “My experience in the Labor party had also taught me that bribery, intimidation, duplicity, corruption, and bulldozing grew out of the conditions which made the working people poor and the idlers rich, and that consequently the ballot box could not be made an index to record the popular will until the existing debasing, impoverishing, and enslaving industrial conditions were first altered.” The spring 1880 municipal and state elections further convinced him that officials had “counted him out,” not even bothering to record the votes cast for him. He and Lucy began to argue that all forms of government, propped up by the façade of a democratic process, were illegitimate and inherently coercive—“that every law and every Government in the last analysis was force, and that force was despotism, an invasion of man’s natural right to liberty.”28

Stuffed ballot boxes were not the only source of frustration for the Parsonses. Many workingmen seemed resigned to hardship, caring nothing about politics. And yet certain vital constituencies, such as Irish immigrants and native-born whites, had become convinced that the voting booth was a more effective vehicle for change than the weak and fragmented unions were. They favored throwing their support behind one of the two major parties’ political machines. Some socialists, seduced by partisan patronage, endorsed mainstream candidates; too many, according to Albert, “doggedly, the most of them, hugged their idols of Democracy or Republicanism, and fired their ballots against each other on election days.”29

In the spring of 1879, Carter Harrison, a Democrat, had won the mayoralty in an upset vote that reflected his aggressive appeal to German socialists, including at least a portion of those living in the Parsonses’ 15th Ward. In the prior fall’s state elections, the SLP had elected a state senator and three state representatives, with their supporters casting 12,000 votes out of a total of 57,000, suggesting a substantial bloc of votes that no serious candidate could afford to ignore. Once in office, Harrison instructed the police to temper their approach to strikers and to tolerate public appearances by militia groups, such as the Lehr und Wehr and the Bohemian Sharpshooters. His successful appeal to white workers, even radicals, ushered in a period of Democratic dominance in Chicago politics that lasted until the end of the century. Predictably, however, the mayor’s concessions to labor failed to impress Albert Parsons, whose own political fortunes had suffered proportionately.30

Parsons would run for office one last time, in November 1880; after that, the Parsonses’ decision to renounce the party system altogether meant that for the rest of their lives both would refrain from voting—not only in local, state, or national elections, but, as a matter of principle, even in meetings of comrades. They remained wary of yielding decision-making to a majority and believed instead that the ideal way for any group to resolve any question was to talk its way to consensus. As editors and orators, Albert and Lucy shared the conviction that well-read, well-informed leaders must prod the masses, and not wait for at least half of them to act.

In the December 7, 1878, issue of The Socialist, Lucy expressed the generalized disgust for electoral politics that both of them felt with a poem titled “A Parody,” modeled after Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (1816). In his poem Byron had described an apocalyptic landscape, scorched and smoking: “The world was void / The populous and the powerful was a lump / Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—/ A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.” Lucy began her poem with Byron’s words—“I had a dream, which was not all a dream”—and told of men wandering “aimless, homeless, hopeless,” weeping, lying prostrate on the ground while the “the cries of their hungry children / And the prayers of their despairing wives fell like curses upon them.” In this dystopia, a dream and not at all a dream, each man suffered alone, “And each sat sullenly apart, gorging himself in gloom.” People were starving on this “cheerless earth,” watered by the blood of tramps and the tears of children.31

As they calculated their support among the masses, Albert, Lucy, and other SLP members played a numbers game that alternately buoyed and deflated them. Socialists could organize picnics that attracted many thousands of men, women, and children. Trade unionists could summon 7,000 workmen to march in their parades. In 1879, a three-day July 4 celebration sponsored by the Eight-Hour League brought an estimated 50,000 men, women, and children into the streets to watch a grand procession, with onlookers appearing in every window and door along the way. The Socialist noted that “a new and striking feature” of the event was the presence “of a large body of ladies—the wives and daughters of workingmen,” who also marched through the streets. A WWU float was festooned with white and pink fabric and ribbons and banners that read, “No rights without duties, and no duties without rights,” and, “When woman is admitted into the council of nations war will come to an end, for woman more than man, knows the value of life.” At the head of the mile-long procession flew the Star-Spangled Banner alongside the “gory-red banner of the Socialists,” according to the Daily Inter-Ocean. Lively spectacles such as this one over and over again renewed the Parsonses’ faith that the revolution was at hand, while convincing the authorities that a general strike was just a parade away from shutting down the entire city.32

Yet at its height in 1879, the Chicago SLP could claim only 870 members, and the English-speaking section a mere 150. And these small numbers produced not a tightknit band of fearsome stalwarts, but a querulous group rent by personality conflicts and disagreements over ideology and strategy. Weekly meetings devolved into rancor as the English-speakers clashed with the Germans. Albert objected to Morgan’s support for fusion with the Greenback Labor Party and to Morgan’s argument that the eight-hour movement was a piecemeal, largely meaningless reform. Philip Van Patten had by this time moved to Detroit, the national headquarters of the SLP, but from afar he took to denouncing the increased visibility of Chicago’s Lehr und Wehr, which he considered unnecessarily provocative. Van Patten also persisted in supporting electoral action in direct opposition to Parsons. The SLP English section was dissolving even as an infusion of energetic young refugees from Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law of 1878 galvanized the Germans. Feuds took on a bitter, highly personal tone. Van Patten wrote darkly of coming expulsions of party apostates, telling George Schilling, in August 1880, “Experience has taught me that if you do not crush a sworn enemy he will assassinate you. I have had too many lessons in these difficulties to underestimate an enemy’s power.” Other socialists, not capitalists, were the “enemy.”33

Points of contention among SLP members seemed infinite in their permutations, as disagreements over various issues metastasized and ultimately tore the group apart—members argued about the viability of the Knights of Labor (which some said moved too slowly to support striking workers), the distinction between economic organization and political action (trade unionism versus partisan political activity), and the divergent goals of state socialism and a cooperative commonwealth. In November 1880, Albert decided to venture once more into the political arena and run for state representative from the 6th District, despite the fact that Schilling and Morgan and others were backing a different socialist candidate named Christian Meier. Both Meier and Parsons lost, garnering 3,418 and 495 votes, respectively. In a letter to Van Patten, Elizabeth Morgan excoriated Albert Parsons for his betrayal: “We all feel like doing anything to beat that D[evil]. of Parsons. We are all death on that man and he knows it.” If Albert was having second thoughts about his role in Chicago politics, this election put those doubts to rest. As a means to a workers’ revolution, the ballot box was a sham.34

During these years the media thirsted for evidence of violence-prone schemers, finding threats to the social order in German parades and picnics, and making it nearly impossible for socialists to convey their ideas to a wider audience beyond their immediate ethnic neighborhoods. Although Albert remained a much-sought-after interviewee among reporters and their editors, he was at the same time dismissed as “The Communist Parsons,” his ideas reflexively labeled “foreign”—associated with the city’s Germans, Bohemians, Poles, and Scandinavians, and outside the bounds of American tradition and culture. Socialists hailed their red flag as a symbol of equality—“the blood flowing in the veins of every human body, rich or poor, white or black”—while the media pointed to the same banner and conjured the blood of innocents flowing in the streets after a radical takeover. In March 1879, immigrant workers gathered in large numbers to raise money for the Arbeiter Zeitung and celebrate the Paris Commune of 1871; the event garnered the headline “The Reds.” Held at the cavernous Exposition Building, the event drew, according to the Tribune, thousands of thieves from the dives and slums of the immigrant wards and “the worst specimens of female depravity.” A speech delivered by Parsons, “but a small man,” received short shrift. Featured in the lengthy descriptions of the event were pointed references to various ethnic military companies composed of men who “strutted about in their uniforms with belts, cartridge boxes, bayonet scabbards and breech-loading Remingtons.”35

The press and the police expressed trepidation over the designs of immigrant rifle companies—the Lehr und Wehr, in particular. Founded in Chicago in 1875, the group of volunteers grew out of the conviction of recent immigrants that defense of the republic—the new fatherland, the United States—necessitated an armed citizenry. Chicago had spawned a host of ethnic military companies during the Civil War, so this development was not entirely alien. The Lehr und Wehr carried new Springfield and Remington rifles, and its members drilled every week in parades followed by music and drinking—more merry-making than menacing. In 1878, however, the cautious Van Patten was worried about a growing public perception that the group was drilling for revolution and not for pure enjoyment; he urged its members “to avoid any military display and instead ridicule the authorities by appearing in a manner as innocent as that of a religious procession,” advice the members rejected. Some of these militias dispensed with weapons altogether and drilled exclusively in the spirit of camaraderie. John F. Waldo, a printer who belonged to a group of native-born radicals called the International Rifles, described it as “the International Rifles without the rifles.” In 1879, the state legislature moved to outlaw such militias altogether.36

At the end of 1880, the Parsonses faced a troubling reality. Since arriving in Chicago, Albert had joined Typographical Union No. 16, lectured huge crowds of restless strikers, and helped cobble together the Trade and Labor Assembly. Yet he had received no support from his No. 16 comrades during that fateful week in July 1877. He was a much-sought-after speaker at rallies and picnics, and had received endorsements from the powerful Arbeiter Zeitung, such as: “A. R. Parsons has suffered hunger and want for his convictions and is an independent character, who will not be taken in tow by other persons to be guided to other goals.” Yet he consistently lost his election campaigns in the 15th Ward, presumably a hotbed of socialist fellow-feeling. Chicago’s laboring classes remained fragmented, with employers and even union leaders pitting native-born against foreign-born, skilled against unskilled, women and children against men, wage-earners against “tramps.” For her part, Lucy had helped to launch the Working Women’s Union, with high ideals, only to see it languish, thwarted by the indifference of the women who could most benefit from its message.37

Even the socialists’ modest reformist platform seemed utopian. At an August 30, 1880, meeting (dubbed the “Chicago Commune” by the Daily Inter-Ocean), the delegates nominated Albert as their candidate for Congress (he declined to run) and also put forth a platform that must have struck newspaper readers as so much wishful thinking—maximum-hour labor legislation, “the inspection of food, to the end that all impurities therein might be detected,” the creation of a national bureau of labor statistics, the abolition of child labor in factories, compulsory schooling for all children under the age of fourteen, and redistricting of political wards on the basis of population growth. These demands, which within a generation would gain a favorable hearing from Progressive reformers and politicians, remained associated in Gilded Age Chicago with communists, the “tumultuous mob.”38

Still, at the end of the decade, the depression had begun to lift, and for a few years, at least, workers saw reason to hope that the upturn would bring a more generous hourly wage, or the chance for them to open their own small shops. Albert continued to preach to the socialist choir via the Arbeiter Zeitung, using an urgent tone: “Who would not employ force, if all peaceable ways have failed to get one’s right? It is only power, which sustains the throne of the despot. Only power can maintain the existing systems and forms of Government…. Everybody should join the glorified red flag of liberty and equality as a lifelong fighter and make a determined stand for the rights of humanity.” Taking stock of their frustrated ambitions, their electoral and organizing disappointments, fueled by what they believed were stolen elections, and the dismal outlook for socialist reform, the Parsonses now shifted course to address more directly what they considered the grand hoax of the American voting system.39

EVEN AS THE PARSONSES BEGAN TO CULTIVATE A MORE RADICAL outlook, they were settling into their immigrant neighborhood. Striding through her Larrabee Street neighborhood on the way to her workshop, Lucy Parsons cut a striking figure—tall, with an erect carriage, and with brown skin and black hair, she seemed out of place in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly German, with a few Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Hungarian, and Irish families. Almost all of the native-born residents of the North Side were children, the offspring of immigrant machinists, house painters, carpenters, tinsmiths, white washers, tailors, bookkeepers, firemen, and wagon makers. By the early 1880s, Lucy and Albert had probably achieved a high level of fluency in the German language, not only to communicate with core socialist activists, but also to survive in a largely self-contained community where most of the storekeepers hailed from German-speaking states. They no doubt gathered regularly with their comrades in one of the nearby Biergarten, family-friendly eating and meeting places.40

Larrabee Street consisted mostly of two-story frame tenements, two or three families in each dwelling, interspersed with saloons, grocers, and workshops. The Parsonses’ neighborhood was one of solid, working-class, two-parent families, with almost all of the wives keeping house and a few taking in laundry or sewing. Residents could hardly keep from whispering about the peculiar couple—a slight, well-dressed white man and his attractive wife of indeterminate origin—who had settled among them. Later, according to an 1887 article in Knights of Labor, a weekly publication put out by the organization, a neighbor recalled them as “a very queer-looking couple.” They lived on the second floor of a dwelling with a sign that read “Mrs. A. R. Parsons, fashionable dressmaking,” though it was clear that more than sewing transpired there. After 9 in the evening men and women would arrive and take their places on the wooden benches at the back of the neat, well-furnished apartment; Lucy told her curious neighbors that Albert was teaching English to immigrants. Still, the article said, “the demeanor of the lady was so well-bred and dignified that she commanded the respect of all with whom she came into contact, so that gradually even the horrified gossips became used to the queerly matched pair and ceased to pay any particular attention to their actions.”41

The neighbor remembered Lucy as “a thorough lady in her manners and… much respected despite her dark complexion,” and the couple “seemed devotedly attached to each other.” In the process of moving from Texas to Chicago, Albert and Lucy had forged a relationship of mutual dependence and affection. Lizzie Swank, who saw them frequently and knew them both as well as anyone did, described it as “a long period of uninterrupted and happy companionship.”42

The family expanded on April 20, 1881, with the birth of Lulu Eda, perhaps named for a daughter of Albert’s brother William H. Parsons and his wife, Louisa, a child who died in 1868 at the age of six. Lulu Parsons was identified as “Niger” on her birth certificate, which gave her father’s occupation as “clothier.” Lucy listed Virginia as her place of birth, but reported her full maiden name as Lucy Ella Hull (partly echoing the name on her marriage license, Ella Hall). By this time, she was the mother of two children under the age of two, and questions remain about how she and Albert divided household tasks and child rearing. Did they leave their son and daughter in the care of one of their employees during the frequent nights they stayed out late at political meetings, or did they take the children with them? Did Lucy have to adapt her southern-style cooking to ingredients found in German-owned grocers? Could she count on any help lugging water from a nearby well or scrubbing floors and clothes? Did she, with her love of fine clothes, ever peruse the collection of French kid gloves at Marshall Field’s downtown department store? Did she miss her mother or mourn the infant Champ whom she had buried in Waco? Certainly, her persistent habit of reporting different maiden names and middle names for herself suggests that she wanted to obliterate any traces that would allow Chicagoans of any stripe to trace her back to Dr. T. J. Taliaferro and his other slaves.43

In 1881, Lucy’s intensified duties as mother and breadwinner did not prevent her from joining Knights of Labor Local Assembly 1789. Founded in September, the local was in fact a reconfigured Working Women’s Union, all female and “mixed”—that is, composed of workers in a variety of occupations as well as middle-class activists and intellectuals. However, she objected to Local 1789’s “mixed” nature and its emphasis on political action; she thought it a poor vehicle to further working-class solidarity. Before long, 1789 would founder on the same issues that had hindered the WWU—the predominance of middle-class reformers and the difficulty of organizing young sewing women.44

Around this time, Albert and Lucy worked to bring more members into the TLA. They planned periodic outings, each of which would begin with a procession wending its way through the city. The “grand demonstration” of Sunday, August 21, 1881, culminated in a picnic at Ogden’s Grove on the North Side. It drew an estimated 10,000 workingmen and their families and featured twenty unions affiliated with the TLA, including typographers, blacksmiths, seamen, tin and iron sheet workers, cigar makers, bricklayers and stone masons, plasterers, iron molders, and silver gilders. At the same time, the size of these events masked the organizational weaknesses of socialist unions. The Parsonses would remain disappointed by the large socialist-sponsored outdoor gatherings that yielded so few new converts to the cause.45

In early 1881, Philip Van Patten anticipated the impending breakup of the Socialistic Labor Party. He knew that an impatient group of SLP members, whom he labeled “anarchists” (they called themselves the “Socialist Revolutionary Club”), had decided to dispense with the idea that politics was the surest course of action to achieve a class revolution. Van Patten defended state socialism, maintaining that workers must invest the state with the protection of rights and the distribution of property. He charged that anarchists, in denying all governmental authority, also denied the authority of the people. Anarchists provided no mechanism, no structure, for social change, insisting on chaos as a matter of principle: “A single discontented, ignorant, spiteful or dyspeptic member could block all business!” Lobbing the harshest charge of all, he argued that the anarchist, in his extreme individualism, resembled no one so much as “the grasping capitalist” who defended “the barbarous plundering of one another that makes men all claws and stomach, like the crab or the devil fish.”46

In a significant departure from their previous brand of activism, Albert and Lucy Parsons eagerly accepted the label “anarchist”; it possessed a shock value that they craved. Yet they were hardly doctrinaire, and anarchism, like other political philosophies, encompassed a wide range of views. Later, Albert would write, “We are called by some Communists, or Socialists, or Anarchists. We accept all three of the terms.” For the time being, at least, the distinctions among these three ideologies mattered little to them (though soon enough those distinctions would incite self-destructive internecine warfare among radicals). Albert defined anarchism as “the elimination of all authority in social affairs; it is the denial of the right of domination of one man over another. It is the diffusion of rights, of power, of duties, equally and freely among all the people.” He and Lucy could simultaneously champion trade unions as the seeds of a new order and the Knights of Labor, the Eight-Hour League, the WWU, and anarchism. Others argued that these various associations all operated from wildly divergent assumptions, and offered contradictory strategies for economic transformation. To the Parsonses, though, anarchism primarily represented a renunciation of mainstream political parties; in their view, no true anarchist would ever cast a ballot for any kind of candidate.47

Founded in London in 1881, the anarchist International Working People’s Association (IWPA)—at times called the “Black International”—inspired Albert Parsons and the upholsterer August Spies to form a Chicago chapter of the group two years later. The association took as its guiding principle an idea developed by the German anarchist Johann Most—“propaganda by deed” (attentat), a burst of violence that would awaken the masses from their slumber and impel them to overthrow their masters. Most proposed that that jolt might conveniently come in the form of dynamite; the powder was easy enough to make, to carry, and to conceal, and it leveled the field of battle between employers and employees, police and street demonstrators. He said the mere mention of it should be enough to instill fear in the cold hearts of capitalists.48

By late 1883 the IWPA claimed 2,000 members in the United States, with a few hundred in Chicago divided into English, German, and French sections. Albert and Lucy Parsons joined the English (or American) group, consisting at first of just five other people (a number that would grow to ninety-five in early 1885). For the time being, at least, they cared little about the small numbers, believing that a handful of devoted members could serve as avant couriers, advance messengers, for the cause. Nationwide, Easterners dominated the IWPA, and in Chicago, German immigrant craftsmen predominated. Together the couple attended Sunday “mass meetings” of the IWPA, and they hosted discussions each Wednesday night in their apartment.49

For the Parsonses, the turn toward anarchism came at the expense of some old friendships (with Morgan and Schilling, for example) as they embraced a new circle of activists. Lizzie Swank remained a loyal friend, as did her soon-to-be husband William Holmes, an English-born teacher who lived in Geneva, Illinois, west of Chicago. August Spies became the editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung in 1884 and turned it into an anarchist publication. Spies and Albert Parsons would soon control, respectively, the city’s German and English-language anarchist press. Active in the English-speaking section of the IWPA was Samuel Fielden, a self-employed stonecutter and teamster. Born in England, he had started work as an eight-year-old in the cotton mills, which he termed the dwelling place of the devil, “his satanic majesty”; he arrived in Chicago in 1869 and became an itinerant Methodist minister and a lifelong champion of the working poor.50

In March 1883, the Parsonses met Johann Most himself when he visited Chicago for the first time. (The conversation was probably in German; Most was uncomfortable with English in its written or spoken form.) By now the thirty-seven-year-old writer and newspaper editor had achieved international notoriety; he had been in and out of jail in the course of his exile from Germany, at first living in France, and then moving from France to England and, in 1882, from England to the United States. He was lucky to have escaped with his life after calling for workers to massacre capitalists and assassinate heads of state throughout Europe. A medical procedure in his youth had left him with a misshapen jaw, and some saw in his physical disfigurement a reflection of his own disregard for human life.51

Most expressed contempt for all kinds of labor reform and all kinds of labor unions. Substantive differences separated him from the Parsonses, who, together with Spies, believed that unions and Knights assemblies were “the embryonic groups” of an ideal cooperative society. George Schilling wrote that he considered Most “so exceedingly authoritarian that I have never regarded him as a consistent opponent of the state.” The Parsonses appropriated Most’s heightened rhetoric, which was shocking in the extreme even to socialists, but neither Albert nor Lucy showed much concern for the finer points of the German theorist’s ideology.52

The IWPA’s defining manifesto, approved at a convention in Pittsburgh in October 1883, contained boilerplate SLP rhetoric and a call for “equal rights for all, without distinction to sex or race.” Written by Parsons and Most, among others, the document began with wording from the Declaration of Independence but went on to quote Thomas Jefferson’s justification for armed resistance to tyranny. And the rhetoric was raw: The dispossessed masses owed their fate to “a system that is unjust, insane, and murderous.” The IWPA called for a new American revolution: “By force our ancestors liberated themselves from political oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves from economic bondage. ‘It is therefore your right, it is your duty,’ says Jefferson, ‘to arm!’” Albert began writing for a radical San Francisco paper, Truth, which was running articles with headlines such as “Dynamite: Plain Directions for Making It,” and “Dynamite Will Be Used in America.”53

The Parsonses were convinced that anarchy emerged from conglomerates that strived for efficiency—anarchy was, then, the “inevitable end of the present drift and tendency of things,” Albert wrote. Ultimately, by eliminating workers, these businesses slowly destroyed themselves, for the jobless could no longer buy goods. The couple saw anarchy as a “science” because current trends could predict outcomes, and those trends could be proven by marshaling statistics related to output, unemployment, and company profits. (Albert titled a major 1887 essay Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis). The solution to the “labor question,” flowing from easily verifiable facts, was nothing more or less than “a scientific subject.”54

Nevertheless, the dearth of radical literature in English would continue to frustrate members of the American group. The IWPA sponsored a library, but its holdings were almost exclusively in German. Not surprisingly, then, the Parsonses, Lizzie Swank, and William Holmes took advantage of a new English-language paper published in Denver, The Labor Enquirer, which provided a suitable outlet for their essays, letters, and dispatches from Chicago. Joseph R. Buchanan, its socialist editor, supported the Knights of Labor, but remained critical of its leader, Terence V. Powderly, whom Buchanan considered too accommodationist. The Enquirer included Lucy’s denunciations of venal employers and retrograde two-party politics. Swank wrote exposés detailing the plight of starving needlewomen. Holmes defended the poor from charges that their “extravagance was the only thing preventing them from climbing out of the desperate straits they found themselves in.” Albert Parsons wrote a summary of the proceedings of the first Illinois State Labor Convention and criticized the delegates’ faith in useless reforms and the political system (the two parties, he said, were each only faintly veiled “agents of private capital”).55

Meanwhile, Lucy felt pressed to make money. In 1884, the Parsons family was living on the thin edge of distress, with Albert contributing only sporadically to the household income. The demand for clothing in Chicago was increasing exponentially, but so, too, were the numbers of garment workers—25,000 women and 5,000 men were now employed in the industry, which included wholesale clothing houses, some 500 small shops and factories, and custom dressmakers and tailors. A family of four needed $60 a month just to make ends meet, leaving nothing for small pleasures or modest savings accounts. And with two children to care for, Lucy had her hands full.56

The year 1884 was notable for a series of failed strikes nationwide, and another recession had followed the four-year economic recovery beginning in 1879. In April, Albert took the podium at Uhlich’s Hall and denounced the suppression of a recent strike in Cincinnati. Last on the program was “Mrs. A. R. Parsons,” who, according to the Tribune, “spoke in the same spirit as those who had preceded her,” but also maintained that the lesson from Cincinnati was “that the women should take an interest in the wage-workers’ cause.” The following month, Albert and Johann Most shared the stage at Turner Hall, where in “blood and thunder harangues” they applauded the collapse of several Wall Street firms.57

In June 1884, Albert withdrew from the TLA, taking twelve unions with him, because he felt the parent group lacked revolutionary fervor. He formed a new federation—the Chicago Central Labor Union (CLU), which consisted of an estimated 12,000 members, rivaling the TLA—and began to embark on lengthy “agitation trips” throughout the Midwest to proselytize for the IWPA. His oratorical abilities had only increased over the years; he could speak for two to three hours and for at least a portion of that time hold the attention of the uninitiated as well as true believers. Drawing from history, poetry, political theory, and the day’s headlines, he impressed listeners as erudite yet genial, down-to-earth and approachable. On the afternoon of July 4, 1884, he was standing before a crowd (of 3,000, he later claimed) in Ottawa, Kansas, declaring that “to be forewarned was to be forearmed,” and that the workers “must be prepared to meet force with force.”58

Within a few months he would begin to edit his own newspaper, a venture launched with contributions from respectful listeners like those in Ottawa. The only English-language IWPA periodical in Chicago, The Alarm would give both Albert and Lucy a broad forum for their ideas as they rejected traditional politics and followed a new, more radical path compared to that of even the socialists. Already widely appreciated for his fiery speeches, Albert would take his place among anarchist leaders admired for their journalistic flair; and Lucy, his writing partner and an increasingly public presence in her own right, would share equal responsibility for this new publication and the catastrophic whirlwind it wrought.