Chapter 9

The Blood of My Husband

IN EARLY 1887, CHICAGO POLICE BEGAN TO MONITOR VIRTUALLY ALL of Lucy Parsons’s public appearances, whether she was addressing a crowd of picnickers in Ogden’s Grove or selling her husband’s likeness and writings on a city street corner. The authorities faced a dilemma in dealing with the notorious publicity-seeker: they could either place her under arrest whenever she exhorted the laboring classes to defend themselves with dynamite, and in the process risk adding her name to the list of eight presumptive martyrs now holding court in Cook County jail; or they could ignore her and endure the wrath of those Chicagoans who demanded the silencing of all critics of capitalism and other basic American institutions. For the time being, at least, the police left the fiery orator free to speechify, on the theory that either she would soon tire and burn herself out, or that the labor leaders, mortified to be associated with her, would extinguish her flame. Meanwhile, in the journalistic equivalent of police surveillance, the city’s dailies were sending out reporters to follow Parsons in hopes of recording her next outrageous statement or sensational outburst. Indeed, the ambitions of reporters and police converged when both groups disguised themselves to gain access to anarchist meetings; a Chicago Tribune reporter covering one of her speeches lost his fake beard when he was forced to flee from an officer who thought he looked like a rabble-rouser.¹

Parsons loved the heightened notoriety and, honing her flair for the dramatic, declared that her enemies portrayed all anarchists as bloodthirsty fiends, who hatched their terrible plots and drank sour beer from the skulls of capitalists’ children in dank subterranean chambers. It is true that her critics indulged in hyperbolic attacks: one anonymous letter-writer called her a “disgrace to your Sex and Humanity,” a woman “born of wolfish proclivities, a frequenter of dens of thieves and murderers,” and said she should “be throttled at once and left above ground as warning to others of the same ills.” However, though she might revel in such hyperbolic personal attacks, Parsons was becoming increasingly anxious over the impending execution of her husband. Her distress now merged with public spectacle as she frantically sought to call attention to his incarceration by attracting publicity to herself.²

Lucy and Albert were not only famous anarchists but also husband and wife and the parents of Albert Junior and Lulu. Their family now came together on “murderers’ row,” where the condemned men were kept in adjacent cells. The jail remained a beehive of activity, with next-of-kin, reporters, celebrities, and curiosity-seekers crowding each other in the hallway outside the “cage,” an iron-mesh enclosure where the prisoners were held during visiting hours. From October 1886 through March 1887, Lucy spent most of her time on the road, returning to Chicago for two weeks at a time in early December and January and in late February and early March. She made a point of visiting Albert every day that she was in the city, though prison regulations at times interfered with her plans. Their reunions, recounted in detail by reporters, were invariably described as “most affectionate.” Hoping to meet with her husband upon her return from a particularly eventful trip to Columbus, Ohio, in late March, Lucy ran afoul of the rule that prohibited such visits on Sundays. Albert protested loudly, “They think they got us where they can jump on us, but they’ll be sorry for it one day. I’ll live to be Sheriff of Cook County, and mark me, I’ll make ’em dance to my music.”³

Reporters were eager for quotable quips such as this one, and so they hovered outside the “cage” throughout the day and into the evening, hoping to overhear conversations between prisoners and visitors. Lucy and Albert declaimed loudly and gestured broadly when they wanted their words to appear in the paper. If the couple preferred privacy, they drew their chairs together, bent their heads in close to the cage, and whispered to each other. The fervid atmosphere of the jail, with seven men (all the defendants but Neebe, who was facing fifteen years in prison) condemned to die and their loved ones alternately stoic and hysterical, provided much human-interest fodder for the dailies. (Again, though, press manipulation ran two ways: a Chicago Herald reporter named Maxwell E. Dickson would bring Albert poetry to read, and then “furnish first-page stuff for the Herald,” reporting that the prisoner “had been consoling himself with poetry,” without any evidence that he had even looked at it.)⁴

In the fall, a narrative emerged in the mainstream press that Lucy Parsons the defiant female dynamiter had been replaced by the sorrowful wife and mother, and that she had “completely broken down.” Yet this narrative might have been a product of either wishful thinking on the part of the police or an editor’s desire to keep readers engaged in an ongoing melodrama. Lucy had likely decided on her own that she must keep her name in the headlines, even if it meant presenting herself as a distraught widow-in-waiting. Perhaps Albert’s only chance of swaying the Illinois Supreme Court justices or gaining a pardon from the governor, Richard Oglesby, would come through her ability to rouse sympathy for herself and her children. Yet she failed to pursue this goal with her customary political savvy and self-awareness, instead seemingly going out of her way to baffle and repel supporters and to confound the public in general. Indeed, some observers saw in her behavior a self-destructive streak that endangered any chance for clemency that her husband and the other prisoners might have had.⁵

THE PARSONSES WERE NOT THE ONLY COUPLE ON WHOM THE PRESS fixated. The dashing August Spies, at times compared to Lord Byron, carried on a presumed romance, of necessity quite Victorian in its restraint, with a woman named Nina van Zandt, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of Vassar College possessed of intelligence and wealth. Van Zandt proved to be a favorite with the papers, which eagerly covered her proxy wedding to “the amorous editor” on January 20, 1887. Lucy found the titillating stories annoying and distracting; asked her opinion of the marriage during her speaking tour, she snapped, “I do not know or care. I am not travelling to discuss Miss Van Zandt.” Reporters compared the two women on their looks and fashion sense and discerned a distinct coolness in the women’s relations with each other. For his part, Chicago police captain Schaack said that van Zandt’s love for Spies “could only have been the product of a disordered mind.”⁶

Junior and Lulu likely did not return to Lucy’s care until after she returned from her tour for good at the end of March. Predictably, the family suffered from Albert’s imprisonment. On December 23, 1886, when Lucy was somewhere between Omaha and Saint Joseph, Missouri, Albert heard from Lizzie Swank Holmes that Lulu was ill. Of the five-year-old Lulu, Swank Holmes wrote, “She is with the kindest of people, indeed she could not be taken better care of any where as they have the means and ability and willingness to do anything in the world for her.” Lizzie had visited Lulu and reported that they had a warm meeting, but that the girl barely spoke to her. Concerned, Albert telegraphed his friend Dyer Lum to check on Lulu. Lum, a frequent contributor to The Alarm (he would become Albert’s successor as editor of a resurrected version of the paper in 1888), had been living in Lucy’s apartment while she was away. He went to see Lulu and assured Albert that she was recovering as well as could be expected from scarlet fever.⁷

Albert entertained a stream of guests, some of them bearing fruit and other gifts—Lucy brought him cigars and grapes—and for the most part he welcomed the attention of the reporters always milling around outside the cage. When he was in town, General William Parsons accompanied Lucy to see his brother. Other visitors included a young lawyer named Clarence Darrow, who had just moved to Chicago looking for work. He found Parsons to be a “bright, talkative fellow,” the author of “brainless” speeches that were nonetheless deserving of First Amendment protection. Joseph Buchanan, editor of Denver’s Labor Enquirer, had moved both himself and his paper to Chicago in February 1887, and he frequently went to the jail to talk with Parsons. One unexpected visitor was the newspaper editor James P. Newcomb, Parsons’s Republican mentor from his Texas Reconstruction days. Newcomb, the brother-in-law of State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell, who had prosecuted the case, remembered Parsons as “a very impulsive man.” He told the prisoner to his face that he considered the verdict a just one. For the benefit of reporters standing nearby, pencil and notebook in hand, Newcomb also ridiculed Lucy’s story of her Native American origins, saying that Waco had many black people, but “no Indians with whom she could claim relation.”⁸

Of all the prisoners, Parsons seemed to adjust to life in prison best, bearing up under intense public scrutiny with calm courage, according to observers. His amiable demeanor, clear eyes, firm handshake, and love of animated conversation betrayed no trace of depression or existential angst, in contrast to some of the other men, and he did not seem to be losing weight. Buchanan later wrote that Parsons exhibited a “cheery manner that never once left him.” Allowed to greet his family outside his cell on occasion, he gave the children piggyback rides up and down the corridor. He took advantage of the twice-a-day exercise periods and kept up a disciplined writing schedule, firing off angry letters to the major Chicago papers and to the Knights’ Grand Master Workman Powderly. Parsons reminded Powderly that he had spoken before an estimated half-million laboring men over his career, and disputed the idea that anarchism “is destructive of civil liberty.” He also wrote a brief autobiography, which would be published in the October 16, 1886, issue of Chicago’s Knights of Labor; he assured his readers that “anarchists do not advocate—or advise—the use of force,” making no note of the glaring contradiction between this assertion and his past statements. With only a penknife he whittled two small wooden vessels, a tugboat and a steamer, extraordinary for their detail; at least one of them was later raffled off at 10 cents a ticket and brought in $147.47 for the defense fund. He read the morning papers regularly and kept up a scrapbook of clippings from Lucy’s speaking tour and other articles about Haymarket. He tidied his cell, and he tried to curry favor with his keepers and with the deputy sheriff, Canute R. Matson.⁹

The guards developed a grudging respect for Parsons and granted him small privileges, such as allowing him to keep an easy chair in his cell, and allowing Lucy and the children to visit him outside the cage. Grateful for access to him, reporters wrote favorably of his self-discipline and love for his wife. The Chicago News provided a breathless account of one of the couple’s meetings: “His anarchist arms were thrown open, and into them glided the sylph-like form…, her head rested on his bosom for an instant, then their lips met in conjugal salute,” adding, “a more affectionate couple the turnkeys hadn’t seen for a long time.” In an interview with a reporter for the same paper, Parsons went out of his way to say that he and the other prisoners had received courteous treatment, “and have every comfort and attention that one can reasonably expect when under sentence of death, etc. We realize the fact that we are in jail, and not stopping at a hotel, and therefore do not expect to have things quite our way.” For the time being, at least, he would make peace with these agents of a corrupt capitalist state—and perhaps pass along to them a cash token of his appreciation for their seemingly solicitous behavior.¹⁰

Parsons relished his new role as the resident oracle of Chicago labor politics. Soon after the first convention of the United Labor Party in September 1886, the Chicago Times ran a story under the headline “What Parsons Thinks,” quoting him at length. From his cell, though, he could only watch as striking workers suffered a series of setbacks. In the fall of 1886, the meatpackers were forced to return to a ten-hour day, though they had won shorter hours the spring before, and the following May the building trades suffered a crushing lockout. Still, he felt vindicated when several of his former socialist comrades took the Knights in a direction that contrasted mightily with the policies of the parent body as shaped by the conservative Powderly. For Tommy Morgan and other socialists, the Haymarket trial amounted to an attack on free speech: the police might deprive workers of guns, “but they can’t keep us from shooting off our mouths,” Morgan said. In the early fall of 1886, the Illinois legislature had passed anti-conspiracy and anti-boycott legislation in reaction to the bombing. These extreme measures gave the ULP a boost as embattled workers rallied behind the party in opposition to mainstream politics. During the November county and state elections, the party won 25,000 out of 92,000 votes cast, sending seven men to the lower house of the legislature and one to the state senate. Of the six judges the ULP endorsed, five were elected. A substantial amount of support for these candidates came from Chicago’s northwest, the immigrant community that incubated the Parsonses’ radicalism. Even some anarchists there were voting for the ULP.¹¹

Despite the strenuous exertions of Morgan, Schilling, and others, the ULP soon foundered. In the city, as in the rest of the country, the ULP appealed by and large to currency reformers and German and English socialists, failing to dislodge most native-born workers from their traditional loyalties to either the Republicans or the Democrats. Irish American Democrats, for instance, felt sympathy for the police killed in the Haymarket blast, most of whom were their compatriots.¹²

For Albert and Lucy Parsons, the moribund labor party served to illustrate the futility of political action, though the Knights of Labor retained a strong presence in Chicago through 1887, and its leaders cast a favorable light on the Haymarket prisoners and their families. Bert Stewart, the editor of the organization’s vibrant weekly, Knights of Labor, promoted socialist ideas and provided favorable and extensive coverage of the cellmates. The paper also gave over considerable space to Lucy, with enthusiastic feature stories highlighting her supposed life-story (“Mrs. Lucy Parsons: The Spanish Wife of A. R. Parsons”), her speeches, and her triumphant speaking tour. The paper included a drawing of her, and reprinted her letters to Albert. In them, she gleefully quoted a New York newspaper urging that “Parsons be let out as a compromise to get Mrs. Parsons to stop talking.”¹³

LUCY PARSONS ENDED HER SPEAKING TOUR IN MARCH 1887 WITH trips to Cincinnati and Columbus. She was, by her own admission, suffering from physical and emotional exhaustion from all the travel. Her decision to return home for good after visits to Michigan, New York State, Wisconsin, and Ohio from January to March of that year might have been her plan from the beginning. Or perhaps she missed her husband and children, and felt she could do more good in Chicago in any case. It is also possible that her experience in Columbus, where she was briefly jailed for disorderly conduct, convinced her that each day on the road she risked incarceration at the whim of a mayor or local police chief.

Arriving in Columbus on March 8, she learned that her hosts had rented the armory for her for the next day. When the hall’s agent realized that it was she who was to speak, he rescinded the agreement. Outraged, Parsons quickly made her way to the office of Mayor Charles C. Walcutt, where she found him “much the worse for drink,” and surrounded by twenty-five police officers. When she tried to argue with the mayor, he stopped her in mid-sentence and said, “I don’t want to hear anything from you. There will be no meeting in that hall tonight.” He then ordered his “sleuth-hounds” to “take her down.” An officer ripped off her shawl, the better to grasp her arm, and dragged her downstairs to the “ranch,” a narrow corridor leading to “small, dark, filthy, ill-smelling dungeonlike cells.” Shoved into the passageway, she found sympathy among the prostitutes; they tried to cheer her up, saying that as a first-time offender charged with disorderly conduct, she was bound to get off easily, with bail at $10, a fine of $5 (or, in lieu of cash, a watch). She spent the night in an “insufferably hot hole” with leering guards posted outside her cell.¹⁴

The next day, in anticipation of a courthouse hearing, reporters, police, and her supporters packed the building’s lobby. Accompanied by two lawyers, Parsons paid her $100 bail with money that had been telegraphed to her by friends in Cincinnati and Chicago, on the understanding that she would return on April 13 to stand trial for “obscene language,” among other charges (she would fail to keep the court date). At some point she exclaimed to the crowd gathered outside, “Your liberty is ended, American citizens. The right of free speech is refused.” In print she berated the “petty tyrant of a Mayor” who abrogated a hall rental contract and trumped up charges to throw her in jail. She professed shock that the police had treated her so disrespectfully, and disgust that she had been made to sleep on a stone floor and suffer other indignities that offended her womanly sensibilities. “As for the vile libel about my using ‘obscene language,’” she wrote primly, “the thousands of my friends who know me in this and other cities, can bear witness that no language is ever used by me unbecoming to a lady.” The indictment claimed she had used “hot and angry words” against the officer who arrested her.¹⁵

The arrest made the front page of the New York Times and major Chicago dailies (the Tribune reported that she “acted more like a wild beast at bay than a human being”). A guard at the Cook County jail in Chicago took it upon himself to give a reporter a telegram she had sent to Albert. It read, “Arrested to prevent my speaking. Am all right. Notify press. Lucy,” an indication that she considered her troubles in Columbus something of a publicity coup. And indeed, Lucy made good use of her short stint in jail; afterward, she wrote a lengthy account in the form of a letter to the city’s Sunday Capital, a piece that was reprinted in labor periodicals and other papers. The editors of the Capital signaled their sympathy toward her when they condemned her “unnecessary arrest” as judicial overreach; although they abhorred communism and anarchism (and “Mormonism and Mahomedanism,” for that matter), they believed she had a right to speak. Still, despite some positive publicity, in the end the incident offered a cautionary tale: if hall rental contracts could be broken with impunity, and if the authorities could arrest her for disorderly conduct, by continuing the tour she was gambling that the mayor in the next city would show more forbearance. And for the rest of her life, she showed a determination to avoid overnight stints in jail at all costs; presumably, the physical discomforts that came with incarceration were too great for her to bear willingly.¹⁶

The fallout from Lucy’s Columbus appearance and jail time angered the Knights’ leader, Powderly, who represented the many workers and union leaders reluctant to express their misgivings about the peripatetic Mrs. Parsons in public. Powderly was queried by Albert’s Denver supporters: “Have you not sworn to protect his life, reputation, and family?” More specifically, “Why did you not step to the front to defend his helpless wife when she was in jail for the cause of labor and she was denied the right of free speech and jailed for opening her mouth by the drunken mayor of Columbus, Ohio?” Powderly replied (in comments published in a “secret circular”), “My answer is because she is not his wife; because they only live together, and are not married, and because it is not my business to look after any woman of bad reputation, white or negro who tramps around the country as she does.” Powderly also claimed that Albert’s brother William had provided him with proof-positive evidence that “the Chicago men are assassins.”¹⁷

Back home, Lucy encountered a “press of admirers” who wanted to shake her hand and congratulate her for raising so much money for the defense of the prisoners and enduring jail time in Columbus. An unannounced appearance at a socialist lecture, or a Knights district assembly meeting, concert, or benefit (such as “Dance for the Doomed”), could elicit cheers and calls for her to speak; few of her supporters ever tired of hearing her proclaim, “I will bow down to the Stars and Stripes when there is no unemployment,” or “I am an anarchist! Let them strangle me if they dare!” Indeed, she showed no interest in tempering her language, instead exhorting listeners to throw bombs and dynamite to right the wrongs they suffered at the hands of the ruling class—this even in the presence of pistol-packing detectives. Meanwhile, Chicago authorities looked on warily, worried that what they considered her “bloodthirsty harangue” could trigger more deadly assaults. She was, in the words of one policeman, “a dangerous woman,” especially now that adoring crowds in the East “had the effect of convincing her that she is the biggest Anarchist out of jail, and she will not hesitate to do everything in her power to convince others of this fact.”¹⁸

For labor leaders determined to stake a claim to respectability, associating with Lucy Parsons proved problematic. In July, at the annual picnic of the conservative International Brewers and Maltsters Union in Ogden’s Grove, Parsons caused a stir when she appropriated the refreshment stand for her own purposes to sell books, pamphlets, and other materials. Turning to a policeman who was menacing her, she taunted, “Mind what you’re doing. There’s dynamite between the leaves and you’ll get blown up.” She continued, “It’s a pity that Bonfield and a couple hundred more of them had not been killed by the bomb.” The president of the union asked her to leave, which she refused to do, saying, “I am here exercising my rights as an American citizen in free speech. If you Russians and Bohemians haven’t courage to do likewise you had best go back where you came from.” A row broke out between those who wanted her to stay and those who wanted her to go, with the dispute finally settled by a downpour that scattered the picnickers.¹⁹

On August 28, an intensely hot day, she and Tommy Morgan shared the stage at a socialists’ picnic in Sheffield, Indiana, an affair that netted an estimated $2,000 for the prisoners’ defense fund. When the crowd called for her, Parsons mounted the platform, and began by admitting that the strain of constant speaking had affected her health. The chivalrous Morgan held an umbrella to shield her from the sun as she launched into a stock address, “I stand before you as an anarchist.” One reporter wrote that Morgan seemed “very ill at ease during her speech,” and relieved when she finished.²⁰

During the late summer and early fall of 1887, Lucy showed signs of increasing desperation as she came to realize that time was running out for her husband. Albert was in a reflective mood: “Am I tired of my life? Ah, no. I am still a young man (thirty-eight years).” His upcoming death would be, he thought, “both a pleasure and an honor,” though he admitted that “I worship my family and they idolize papa.” Ever since the jury had rendered its decision in August the year before, the couple had held out hope that the verdict would be reversed. Judge Gary had declared on October 9 of that year that he was unwilling to overrule the jury, but the following month the Illinois Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and issued a temporary stay of execution. In March 1887, in an appeal to that court, defense lawyers argued that the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to convict the men. On September 14 the court announced that it had rejected the prisoners’ appeal and set the execution date for November 11. Now the only available avenues for the prisoners were the US Supreme Court and Governor Oglesby, who had the power to issue pardons and grant amnesty. Lucy knew full well that her husband’s life and the well-being of her family hinged on the governor and on the judicial system that she had so openly and often derided. Meanwhile, she ramped up her public appearances in a way that left observers confused about her motives and state of mind.²¹

At 2 p.m. on September 23, Chicago police took Lucy into custody for standing on a street corner handing out copies of a two-page letter written by Albert—the first time in her career as an agitator that the police in her home city had arrested her. She was charged with violating an ordinance that prohibited people from distributing handbills advertising their businesses or commercial services, a law clearly irrelevant in this instance. As the police prepared to lead her away, she managed to thrust the copies she had left into the hands of startled bystanders and passers-by. Albert’s letter “To the American People” refuted the state’s case point by point. Disingenuously, he denied that he had ever written or spoken in an inflammatory way, and once more recounted his actions on the night of May 4. He disputed the judgment of the Illinois Supreme Court and scorned the idea of a pardon or clemency: “I appeal not for mercy, but for justice!” Finally, he declared, “No, I am not guilty. I have not been proved guilty.” He ended with “I know not what course others may pursue, but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”²²

From jail Lucy hastily made arrangements for Lizzie Swank Holmes to care for the children, then contacted the editors of the Arbeiter Zeitung to bail her out for $25. Three days later she entered the courtroom, alone, for a hearing about her case. She took a seat on a bench by a window and quietly read a newspaper. Soon the matron of the jail came in and sat beside her and asked about Lulu, who had been diagnosed with a relapse of scarlet fever the week before. According to the Chicago Mail, Parsons had lost much of her usual fire: “Sorrow and care were graven in deep lines on her swarthy face.” Allowed to address the court, she pointed out that people were always passing out circulars and handbills on the street without fear of arrest, and then made an uncharacteristic plea for sympathy: “Your honor, I am here alone, and while I wish to take no advantage of that fact, I do ask this: that you would treat me as you would have your wife treated were she in my place and you were situated as my husband is.” The judge, acknowledging her “unprotected situation,” pronounced her violation a “technical” one. He added, “There is not the slightest desire on my part to deal harshly with you as I know the depth of your sorrow.” (One report quoted him as also saying, “I am the last man in the world to add one feather’s weight to the burdens you bear.”) Suspending the fine of $5, he told her she was free to go, and Parsons meekly left the courtroom.²³

Around this time she also set about enlisting her brother-in-law in her campaign to separate Albert from his cellmates. On September 24, General William Parsons (now working for the federal customs service) gave a lengthy interview to the New York World from his home in Norfolk, Virginia, reminding readers that his grandfather had served as a general in the American Revolution and that his grand-uncle had lost an arm in the Battle of Bunker Hill; he was suggesting that his younger brother, though led astray by anarchists, was part of a long line of American patriots. William thought it should be noted that Albert, who had married a “talented and beautiful Mexican lady,… has never counseled revolution, but has prophesied it.” The general kept his own name in the news by suggesting that a mysterious New Yorker had passed through Indianapolis the day before the bombing and bragged that news emanating from Chicago in the next few days would reveal what he had been carrying in his carpet-bag. William also attacked the Chicago press for knowingly suppressing the truth about the bombing.²⁴

When Lucy was arrested for distributing Albert’s “Appeal,” she was not selling it, but giving it away. In fact, the Tribune had already printed a verbatim copy of it the day before. Some accounts had her welcoming the attention of police officers and even her two-hour stay in jail. As soon as she was released, she took new piles of the circulars and dropped them off at stores and saloons, and then went to see Albert, giving away more copies to prison guards and visitors. At the time, Nina van Zandt saw the arrest as a ploy, a cynical bid for publicity. Of Lucy’s latest foray into the public eye, van Zandt exclaimed, “O, my God! One trouble follows another. Why can’t she keep her mouth shut?”²⁵

Van Zandt was not alone. On September 25, Lucy attended a meeting of the Socialistic Labor Party and tried to interrupt Tommy Morgan while he was speaking. As she stood in the hall she was surrounded by half a dozen policemen in uniform. Getting no satisfaction from Morgan—he told her that interruptions “throw me off—make me forget my line of argument”—she exited the building without having her say. Morgan was no doubt asking himself whether associating with one of the “most implacable furies of the socialistic party” truly advanced his own cause.²⁶

A few days later, a telling encounter between Lucy and a Tribune reporter took place in the Cook County jail. Making her way past a throng of visitors, and clutching pieces of paper, Lucy approached the reporter and demanded that he look at them and see they were advertisements for a real estate firm; she had been handed them that morning as she walked down Milwaukee Avenue. She said she intended to go to police headquarters and find out if they were really interested in enforcing the ordinance that had landed her in jail the previous week. As he recorded the conversation, “the reporter hinted that unobtrusiveness would be the better policy for Mrs. Parsons at this time,” but she responded angrily, declaring that all of the men would rather die than confess to a crime that they did not commit, and that “death is nobler than a long imprisonment resulting from a so-called act of mercy.” To the suggestion that she would perhaps feel differently about the situation if she were soon to be hanged herself, she said indignantly, “Never. I would die, and die willingly, if I were with them or in their place.” At that point, Michael Schwab’s wife, Maria Ann, who was there with her children, pulled Lucy aside in an effort to end the conversation. Lucy’s attempt at attention-grabbing while Governor Oglesby was considering the fate of all eight men seemed wildly inappropriate, and, according to friends and foes alike, “only served to reawaken the dread of the community.”²⁷

By the end of October, both Albert and Lucy seemed resigned to his fate. He admitted to a reporter that “hope and fear had almost worn themselves out, and I have become quite callous,” with Lucy by his side, nodding in agreement, saying, “So have I.” Albert could do little but take solace in the certainty that the laboring classes would avenge his death: “Workingmen and their friends will demand blood for blood, and they will, no doubt, have it afterward.” Perhaps he felt his labors were almost complete; he was in the process of finishing his book, titled Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis. Quoting liberally from Karl Marx, he predicted the inevitable downfall of capitalism: the drive for efficiency, he said in the book, would eventually eliminate middle-class jobs, and the collapse of a consumer market would lead to “the catastrophe of production” and the demise of the system. All members of the laboring classes would find themselves pitted against each other, forced to accept starvation wages, and the most impoverished among them would not have the means they needed to survive. Indeed, according to Albert Parsons, the American worker resembled the former slave of the South: “He was free to compete with his fellow wage-worker for an opportunity to serve capital.”²⁸

In promoting this extended essay to reporters and jailhouse visitors, Albert went out of his way to give credit to Lucy, not only for “the idea of authorship, but for the plan of the work, and for some of its most interesting chapters.” He said she had helped with much of the research: “She ransacked every labor headquarters and socialistic library in the city for facts and figures on the rise and growth of anarchy in the world. The book, therefore, is largely the work of Mrs. Lucy Parsons.” Through the late spring and summer of 1887 and into the fall, Lucy had maintained a desk in an office of a local paper, the Western Newsman, on Third Avenue, where she had worked on the book.²⁹

As the execution loomed, guards and reporters began to take careful note of the way each prisoner faced his awful fate. Reporters highlighted the plight of the wives and children who were cast into misery by the upcoming deaths of their spouses and fathers. Lulu was described to newspaper audiences as “a very bright girl,” and Albert Junior as showing a “fondness for investigation and constructive talent rare in one so young”; both were said to be “of unusual intelligence.” Readers were left to ponder the fate of all the “pretty children” who would soon be left fatherless.³⁰

ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, THE COOK COUNTY SHERIFF BEGAN TO issue tickets to the execution, to be held nine days hence. The two hundred tickets were reserved for members of the jury, the reporters and editors of Chicago, and the attorneys involved in the case—none were given to family members. An Amnesty Association was aiming to present the governor with a stack of petitions no later than the ninth. General Parsons sent his own plea for his brother’s life, a letter in which he claimed to have more information about the bombing, which had been perpetrated, he said, by “enemies of labor” in order to frame innocent men. Meanwhile, anticipating trouble, the authorities were making elaborate preparations for security. They sent wagonloads of arms and ammunition to the jail and posted twenty-four officers there on three rotating eight-hour shifts.³¹

On Thursday, November 3, Lucy Parsons attracted a large crowd on Clark Street as she tried to sell copies of a pamphlet titled “Was It a Fair Trial?,” in the process snarling wagon traffic and attracting crowds. The police ordered her to move on, and so she walked a short way to a nearby building and stood on the steps, proceeding to sell within a couple of hours (she said) 5,000 copies at 5 cents each.

That day, Albert issued a farewell in The Alarm, which had been temporarily revived by Dyer Lum. Parsons urged his supporters to continue the battle against “the greed, cruelty, and abominations of the privileged class who riot and revel on the labor of their wage slaves.” He refuted rumors that he had asked for clemency. Two of his cellmates, Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab, had in fact signed such a petition. They had renounced the use of force and expressed regret if their work had caused others to believe that violence “was a proper instrument of reform.” (Conventional wisdom held that Fielden had become “intoxicated with his own verbosity,” an assessment that could have applied equally to Parsons.) Melville Stone, the editor of the Chicago Daily News, later wrote that he had responded to a request from Parsons on Sunday for a box of “good (Medium) Havana’s” (cigars). Sitting on Parsons’s prison cot, Stone had listened as Parsons begged him to intercede with the governor for a commutation of his sentence. Stone later recounted that Parsons had “cried out that he could never leave his children a legacy of dishonor; that at least he was not a coward,” and that Stone and the other editors were “responsible for his fate.” Stone cited his own duty to uphold the law, and Parsons suddenly lunged at him. A bailiff intervened, and Stone, shaken, quickly departed.³²

On the evening of Monday, November 7, Lucy issued a statement:

My husband is dead to me, and I return home to my children to mourn for him. I spoke good-bye to him for the last time this afternoon, for I will never cross the threshold of the jail again, to be insulted and humiliated. The other women can go there and grieve before the men who turned us out this afternoon, but I will never go until I can sit at the side of my husband and talk with him without an infamous guard at my side. I want to live with the picture of my husband in a dungeon ever before my eyes. That will give me strength to bring up two revolutionists. The four men who will not belie their manhood are kept in dark dungeons because they will not sign the petition. Mr. Parsons will never sign any begging appeal. He will die, and I hope they will make a clean sweep of it and hang the whole seven. Let them hang them all, and let the men who cry for blood have all they want of it. The blood of my husband be upon them.

Although Lucy declared herself done with the effort to save Albert, others did not: the next day, the defense attorneys Captain William Black and Sigmund Zeisler, and even the jailer, appealed to the hold-outs, Parsons, Lingg, Fischer, Spies, and Engel, to petition for clemency.³³

Black urged Parsons to petition for the sake of “his wife and babes,” if not for his own sake, and believed he was a good candidate for clemency, yet Parsons refused. Parsons thought if he held out from making such a request, somehow he and the others might be saved together, since he was so obviously innocent; but in his “perverseness,” in Black’s words, he sealed his fate. Still, Parsons seemed to be in a good mood: “I am innocent,” he said. “There is no proof connecting me with throwing the bomb…. I will say nothing more, and I stand by my innocence.” He wrote farewell letters—one to his “Darling, Precious Little Children,” telling them “how deeply, dearly your Papa loves you,” and that “your Father is a self-offered Sacrifice upon the Altar of Liberty and Happiness.” He urged them to “be industrious, sober and cheerful,” and concluded, “Your mother! Ah! she is the grandest, noblest of women. Love, honor, and obey her.”³⁴

Thursday evening, the night before the scheduled hangings, Captain Black, Labor Enquirer editor Joseph Buchanan, and several other interested parties secured an audience with Governor Oglesby, who had decided to spare Fielden and Schwab from the hangman’s noose; the two would serve life sentences at the state penitentiary at Joliet. Black argued that Parsons should be included with them, “on the ground that [he] is insane, and has been for many months, and is not responsible for his acts.” A short, shocking letter written by Albert Parsons and sent via Black to Oglesby seemed to confirm this assessment; Buchanan read it aloud to the governor, but whatever chance there was for a stay of execution evaporated soon thereafter. Buchanan summarized the letter in this way: “If he [Parsons] was guilty, and must be hanged because of his presence at the Haymarket meeting, then he hoped a reprieve would be granted in his case until his wife and two children who were also at the meeting could be convicted and hanged with him.” Oglesby replied, “My God, this is terrible.” Parsons’s claim that his children Junior and Lulu had been at Haymarket Square that night was always a frayed lifeline (because it was untrue), and now he seemed to take that claim to a bizarre, callous conclusion—if he was guilty, so, too, were his loved ones, who must also die.³⁵

Why did Parsons not follow the lead of Schwab and Fielden, and confess to error in writing about dynamite as a means of resolving the sufferings of the laboring classes? First, he clearly did not throw the bomb that night at the Haymarket, and so always knew himself to be innocent of the deaths that occurred there. Second, perhaps he wanted to die, and there is evidence that some of his acquaintances—William Holmes and Dyer Lum among them—had encouraged him to aim (in the words of a reporter) “for the pearly gates by the rope route.” Holmes urged Parsons not “to beg for mercy,” believing his enemies had concocted a “trick” not only to kill him but disgrace him in the process by making him seem weak. Parsons reportedly asked Lum what he should do, and Lum had answered, “Die, Parsons.”³⁶

Finally, none of the original defendants had a realistic expectation of being set at liberty; the lives of Neebe, Schwab, and Fielden were spared, but Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years and the other two to life in prison. In all likelihood, Parsons made a terrible calculation—weighing his options—and decided that the power of his death as a rallying cry for the masses was preferable to spending the rest of his life in a tiny cell. In her introduction to his book Anarchism, Lucy hinted at this: ever since he had surrendered himself, she wrote, “he had never breathed a breath of pure, fresh air, never looked upon a growing sprig of grass, never beheld earth or sky; that nothing met his eye, but the frowning, bare stone walls relieved only by bolts, bars, and chains; that in his 6×8 inner tomb he was confined twenty-one hours, six days in the week, and forty hours on ‘the Lord’s day’ from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning.” Or perhaps in contemplating his future, he considered the fact that one of his greatest pleasures—declaiming in front of large numbers of people—would forever be denied him. He would never again thrill to the sound of his own voice cheered by the multitudes.³⁷

On Thursday morning Lucy had again created a “scene.” She arrived at the jail (despite her promise on Monday that she would never do so again), and, denied admission, “threw up her hands and fell to the floor in a dead faint.” Efforts to revive her took twenty minutes, after which guards escorted her out of the building. When, that afternoon, one by one the other wives were granted a final meeting with their loved ones, Lucy was not among them. That day, Louis Lingg cheated the hangman by taking his own life, biting off the top of a dynamite cap that had been smuggled into his cell; the blast blew off part of his face, and he lingered for six hours before dying.³⁸

Albert spent a restless night into Friday morning, and his mournful rendition of the Scottish ballad “Annie Laurie” before daybreak became legendary. In the song, the singer praises his lover for her brow as gentle as a snowdrift, her throat as graceful as a swan’s, and her dark blue eyes: “And for bonnie Annie Laurie / I’ll lay me down and die.” Widely regarded at the time as a hymn to erotic self-sacrifice, the song did not seem to impress Lucy, who left it out of her accounts of Albert’s last hours.

Friday morning dawned on a city girded for war. Awaiting orders, military companies were stationed at various armories, the soldiers armed with Springfield and Remington breech-loaders outfitted with bayonets. Some carried the brand new Winchester “repeating riot gun.” Two Gatling guns and four Howitzers stood ready for quick deployment wherever they might be needed. Government officials issued rifles to their clerks to fend off any invasion of federal buildings by enraged “Reds.” Albert Parsons complained that he had not been able to sleep because of the buzz of conversation between reporters and deputies, and, as he put it in a letter to Dyer Lum: “Caesar kept me awake till late at night with the noise (music), of hammer and saw, erecting my throne, his scaffold.” He passed up the offer of a big breakfast (including alcohol) in favor of fried oysters and coffee. Taking care to dress neatly and brush his hair, he objected loudly when he was denied use of a wash basin. Beginning at 8 a.m., the Reverend Dr. H. W. Bolton of the First Methodist Church made his rounds to minister to the men, but apparently “his efforts to get Parsons to consider spiritual matters were of no avail.”³⁹

While Albert was fending off the insistent Dr. Bolton, Lucy and her two children, together with Lizzie and three other women kin of the condemned, were trying to gain admission to the jail to say goodbye to Albert one last time. At the Dearborn Avenue entrance they encountered a gauntlet of three hundred police officers, who, awkwardly carrying their heavy arms, were standing shoulder to shoulder to cordon off the perimeter at least two blocks from the jail. Lucy wore a black mourning dress. The children, according to an Inter-Ocean reporter, “were poorly dressed with dark clothes, well-worn shoes and hats; with real woolen stockings and blue scarfs around their necks, and they clung to their mother, without any apparent idea of what was going on.” (This reporter mistook Lulu for a boy.) Lucy informed one officer, “I must go. I am Lucy Parsons. These are my children. We must go to jail. They must see their father.” Lucy, Lizzie, and the children ran from one checkpoint to the next, trying to get in, and finally, holding a child by each hand, Lucy tried to crawl under a rope and push her way through. When she was told that she must obey the law, she exclaimed, “The law! What do I care for the law, and my husband being murdered? Shoot me, kill me if you will.” To a passerby who expressed concern, Lucy screamed, “I don’t want your help, nor your sympathy; I don’t know who you are.” The efforts of “Parsons’ mulatto wife” to force her way through police lines constituted the only notable “violence” of the day.⁴⁰

Later, Lizzie Swank Holmes would provide a heartrending account of the morning—the children, their lips blue from the cold, shaking with fear, and Lucy frantic to the point of collapse. At 9:15, the two women and two children were loaded into a patrol wagon and taken to the police station on East Chicago Avenue. In separate cells, the women were strip-searched by a matron and then booked on the charge of obstructing the streets. Lizzie wrote, “Instead of being surrounded by loving friends, [Lucy] was caged in a cell, insulted and degraded until her heart was broken.” For their part, the police expressed grim satisfaction that the notorious Mrs. Parsons was nowhere near the jail at noon. But had she been there, she would have been proud of her husband for his composure during this most dreadful moment.⁴¹

With great ceremony, the condemned were retrieved from their cells, read the death warrant, and marched to the courtyard gallows. Along the way, Parsons said to one of the bailiffs, “I really feel sorry for Schwab and Fielden” (for refusing to embrace a noble death with the rest). Clad in white shrouds against the background of the jail’s dark walls, the doomed prisoners appeared as ghostly apparitions. A Dallas reporter compared Parsons on the scaffold to a great actor in a magnificent tableau, someone who had “wrought himself to an ecstasy of self-glorification” and intended to die “in a manner to impress, if possible, on all future generations that he was a martyr.” He continued: “No tragedian that has paced the stage in America ever made a more marvelous presentation of a self-chosen part, perfect in every detail. The upward turn of his eyes, his distant, far-away look, and above all, the attitude of complete resignation that every fold of the awkward shroud only seemed to make more distinct, was by far the most striking feature of the gallows picture.” After the death cap had been placed over his head, Parsons demanded, in a loud, firm voice, “Will I be allowed to speak, O men of America? Let me speak, Sheriff Matson.” A New York Times reporter said that he raised his voice, “as if beginning an emphatic speech,” and cried out, “Let the voice of the people be heard, O…” when suddenly the trap door fell and all four bodies dangled at once. The telegraph operators who were present immediately sent the news out across the wires. A physician pronounced Parsons dead seven minutes later, at 12:04 p.m. Witnesses differed over whether he had “died hard”—from strangulation—or “easy”—from a broken neck. When they heard the door fall, soldiers on the roof of the jail threw down their weapons and clapped and cheered. The prison guards mused aloud about the boredom that lay ahead of them: “No proxy wives, no fruit-baskets, no good-looking reporters, no nothing.” Front-page headlines trumpeted, “Justice Is Done.”⁴²

At 2:15 in the afternoon the police released Lucy, Lizzie, and the children; the two women were ordered to appear in court Saturday morning. As they left the station they were met by a reporter (at least one would remain near “the dark skinned, lustrous eyed widow of Albert R. Parsons” for the next three days), who answered in the affirmative when Lucy asked him, “Is the bloody business over?” Prodded for a reaction, she exclaimed, “My God! I can’t talk to you now.” But then, tears streaming down her face, she proceeded to give a lengthy account of her travails that morning, and to interrupt Lizzie, who tried to say a few words. In the boisterous crowd outside the jail, no one noticed Lucy, and already the newsboys were yelling, “Full account of execution!” and trying to shove a paper in her hands. Dispatching the children to a friend’s house, the two women went directly to the undertaker a few blocks from the Parsons home on Milwaukee Avenue. There, holding Albert’s certificate of death and a permit for internment, Lucy stood by the coffin as the undertaker unscrewed the lid. She bent down and carefully removed the white death cap from the corpse, and stood stony-faced as Lizzie began to weep uncontrollably.⁴³

That evening, members of the local IWPA Defense Association charged with visiting the wives of all the deceased found her lying on the floor of her apartment surrounded by women friends. Rousing herself, Lucy lifted her hands and cried, “Oh papa, papa! Come back to me! Just one word from those handsome lips! They have murdered him! They have murdered my noble, generous, loving husband, who never harmed a man in his life!” Clutching his picture, she paced up and down the room, wailing.⁴⁴

The following day, Saturday, Albert’s body was delivered to the apartment, where a piece of black cloth hung on the door together with the sign “Parsons & Co., Fashionable Dressmaking.” (The court case against Lucy and Lizzie scheduled for that morning had been dismissed in the absence of a prosecutor.) A distraught Lucy was there to receive the coffin, as were her children, who huddled together in a corner, crying. Outside, where a crowd had gathered, police jostled with pickpockets; all of them could hear Lucy inside, calling Albert’s name as her friends sought to keep her from looking at the corpse. Meanwhile, members of the Defense Association went to the apartments of all four deceased, collecting the clothes, shrouds, and other effects of the men to prevent them from being stolen and displayed for profit: “Every little memento and relic has been carefully preserved and placed in a secure place where it will be impossible for the enterprising showman to secure a grip on this desirable material.”⁴⁵

On Sunday at noon, a huge cortege started down Milwaukee Avenue, stopping at the homes of the dead anarchists to add their bodies to the procession of an estimated 6,000 marchers. At the Parsons residence, mourners had been coming through over the past twenty hours to pay their respects. Now a great throng assembled outside the building to watch as Albert Parsons’s coffin was loaded onto a wagon bearing an immense floral display that said, “From Knights of Labor Assembly No. 1307.” Accompanying Lucy and the children was Joseph Buchanan. The editor was struck by the widow’s appearance: “She was not the Mrs. Parsons of old. Grief had traced its handmarks upon the comely features; long hours, days, weeks, and months of fearful suspense had been ended by an awful tragedy. With a moan scarcely human in its thrilling intensity, she fell upon the body of him whom she loved so well in life and will worship in death.”⁴⁶

Mayor John A. Roche had banned flags, speeches, and public demonstrations, but the brass bands and muffled drums played dirges. As the procession moved forward, the crowd continued to swell, with flashes of red abounding—neckties, ribbons, badges on men’s coats, trimmings on women’s hats. Onlookers fell silent as the hearses passed in what was a reprise of Central Labor Union parades, with German singing societies and labor unions predominating. Halting at the Wisconsin Central depot, an estimated 3,000 mourners boarded thirty-five coaches to Waldheim Cemetery, a nondenominational German burying ground located in a nearby suburb. The train had to inch its way forward because of the crush of people lining the tracks. At the cemetery, the bodies would remain in a vault for five weeks until a proper burial could take place. Tommy Morgan began his brief eulogy with Albert’s last words, “Let the voice of the people be heard!” A bell tolling loudly, insistently, reminded some present of the inspiration for Albert’s paper The Alarm.⁴⁷

By Tuesday Lucy was back at her desk in the offices of the Western Newsman, editing Albert’s manuscript of Anarchism; the first copies (which she self-published) would appear on December 10 and include the speeches the eight defendants had made to the court in October the year before, essays by Lucy and Dyer Lum on anarchy, and testimonials by William Parsons on Albert’s life and by Lizzie Swank Holmes on his last hours. Lucy seemed surprisingly calm; she told a reporter that she was determined to honor the life’s work of her dead husband: “It is a duty I owe to him and to the world and shall be sacredly performed. I shall give my whole time to this work for months to come. Plans for the future? I have none. I am drifting along on the river of time, knowing little and caring less where it will take me.” Yet perhaps she consoled herself at the thought that, as of November 11, she, too, was enshrined in the pantheon of anarchist heroes, along with the dead, as already poems were being written to honor her: “Most bravely has thou faced the fight / And nobly battled for the right” (“To Mrs. Lucy Parsons”).⁴⁸

ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, LUCY PARSONS SEEMED IN AN EXPANSIVE mood, eager to talk to a Tribune reporter and remark upon the calm that had pervaded the day of the executions. Bonfield and his henchmen had badly misjudged things, she contended, when “they thought we would be fools enough to dynamite some of their buildings, which a drove of slaves could rebuild in a year.” The time was not right for revolution, she said. Yet among her anarchist comrades, she said cryptically, “the subject [of violence] was thoroughly discussed and a line of policy decided upon.” She recalled the awful morning when the sheriff had asked Albert her address, so officers would know where his body could be deposited after his death. Sheriff Matson, she said, “knew perfectly well where I lived, and so did every policeman and detective in the city.”⁴⁹

The following afternoon, several hundred mourners boarded a specially chartered train to Waldheim Cemetery for a ceremony to mark the internment of the five bodies—those of the four who had been executed plus Lingg. It was a cold, bleak day. Atop Parsons’s coffin was a large flower arrangement in the shape of a pillow that said, “Our Papa.” Captain Black spoke, among others, and soon after he began, someone called out, “Make way for Mrs. Parsons!” The estimated 2,000 mourners stood back as Lucy, supported on either side by Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband William Holmes, slowly approached the caskets positioned near the open graves. At Albert’s coffin, “she gave voice to a wail which startled the crowd,” according to a reporter who was present. Black stood transfixed, watching Lucy struggle to speak. Finally, he took control of the situation, saying, “Someone please take some fresh snow and rub the lady’s face.” Soft snowballs rubbed against her temples were apparently sufficient to revive her, and a group of friends carried her away. As the coffins were lowered into their graves, a German choral society sang “Am Grabe Unserer Freunde” (At the Grave of Our Friends). In covering the funeral, the Tribune announced, in a headline, “Mrs. Parsons Getting Back Some of Her Old-Time Spirit.” Indeed, she was—if she had ever lost it.⁵⁰