image Chapter 10 image

The Widow Parsons Sets Her Course

THE COLLAPSE OF THE TRAP DOOR ON THE COOK COUNTY JAIL’S scaffold generated depths of emotion that words can scarcely convey. The self-proclaimed “respectable classes” rejoiced, hopeful that the pernicious doctrine of anarchism had been eradicated and its murderous preacher-practitioners silenced forever. At the other end of the political spectrum, beginning at noon on November 11, 1887, radicals of various political persuasions vowed a new, or renewed, commitment to the cause. Many years later, the socialist Eugene V. Debs, who still felt overwhelmed by his sense of outrage, described the executions in terms that would not have sounded out of place in an address by Lucy Parsons herself: “The sordid capitalism which preys upon the life-blood of labor, whose ethics are expressed in beastly gluttony and insatiable greed, and whose track of conquest is strewn with the bones of countless victims, pounced upon these men with the cruel malignity of fiends and strangled them to death.” The anarchist Emma Goldman, eighteen years old in 1887, considered the deaths of the martyrs “the most decisive influence in my existence.” Throughout her life, their spirits “seemed to hover over me and give deeper meaning to the events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth.” In Latin America, images of the four men on the gallows entered the pantheon of radical iconography. In Europe, portraits of the eight anarchists who had originally been sentenced to die adorned the wall of labor halls so that none would forget, in George Schilling’s words, “the chief tragedy of the closing years of the nineteenth century.”1

Lucy suffered deeply and in her own way. She rarely spoke about her marriage, but in 1886, before Albert’s execution, she said, to a crowd in Cincinnati: “Look at me. Fourteen years ago in September I was married to Albert Parsons. Seven years after that a boy was born to us, and twenty-one months later a girl. My husband seldom spoke an unkind word and never a vulgar word, and each night when he came home the children ran into his arms, and each morning at his departure each one of us received a parting kiss. Where is that happy home now?” Still, the mantle of revered Haymarket widow did not rest lightly on her shoulders. Within six months of Albert’s execution she scandalized the radical and respectable classes alike by taking a young lover, a married man. And she seemed all too eager to exploit—in a literal sense—the goodwill and sympathy extended to her by the German community in Chicago in the wake of Albert’s death. She brushed off the public censure; the combined effects of her hunger for companionship, sexual and otherwise, and her need to support herself, were just too great.2

At the same time, she tried to stake out a new purpose for her life. She continued to speak about anarchism, but she also seemed intent on pushing the boundaries of the First Amendment, and in the process became a leading proponent of free speech—this in an age when, as she knew all too well, advocating anarchy could lead to a death sentence. Her battles with the Chicago police over what she could and could not say, and which flag she must or must not display, became legend. Indeed, the more the anarchist movement diminished in numbers and influence, the more the city’s authorities—aided and abetted by the mainstream press—hounded its adherents. To carry on the fight, then, Lucy began to groom her son as a worthy namesake of his famous father. In this particular role, though, she would fail in a notably newsworthy and ultimately tragic way.

LUCY’S PERIOD OF PUBLIC MOURNING WAS BRIEF: ON DECEMBER 30, less than two weeks after the formal interment at Waldheim, she appeared in court to demand the $5,000 worth of newly bound copies of Albert’s book Anarchism that had been seized by the police—they had been taken not because of Albert’s activities, but because the printer with whom Lucy had contracted had failed to pay his rent. By January it was clear that she would have her hands full protecting her husband’s legacy from the many purported friends who in her eyes would seek to despoil it. In The Alarm she attacked J. William Lloyd, an anarchist and author of an essay titled “Vengeance: An Open Letter to the Communist-Anarchists of Chicago.” Lloyd had admitted that Albert and his comrades had done much to advance the cause, but he had warned that those gains would vanish at the first instance of violence against “innocent women and babes.” In response, Lucy denounced Lloyd’s apparent “quaker policy” of pacifism and chided him for his patronizing tone, saying he was “like a good mother who… endeavors to impress upon her naughty children the importance of her advice.” As a final retort she wrote that it was a waste of her time trying to convert “one bourgeois professor.”3

By the late 1880s, the infighting among self-proclaimed anarchists in the United States had grown bitter. Lucy identified herself as an anarchist-communist, arguing that trade unions and other small, self-governing, voluntary groups should take the place of a central government. In general, anarchist-communists supported the abolition of the state as well as the abolition of money, private property, and capitalism; in this new society, workers would own the means of production and participate in a direct form of democracy that made political parties superfluous. In contrast, Lloyd represented anarchist-individualists, extreme libertarians who were hostile toward state-sponsored institutions of any kind and for the most part indifferent toward trade unions. The views of a third group overlapped with those of socialists, who favored a strong workers’ state to redistribute property; many German immigrants, including Johann Most, embraced this kind of heavy-handed anarchism. In general, anarchists rejected the ballot box, though they disagreed among themselves about the role of violence in bringing about a new society, with Most quite uniquely explicit on that score. Unlike many of her comrades, Lucy did not shrink from a close association with the reviled Most despite his call for what was essentially domestic terrorism.4

Around the globe, anarchists doing battle with repressive nation-states and colonial bureaucracies—in places such as Spain and the Philippines and Cuba—faced the constant threat of the firing squad. Some embraced assassination, bombings, and other forms of militant resistance as a matter of course. Citing the recent Haymarket executions, Lucy Parsons argued that her own politics amounted to a life-and-death ideology, and that violence was a necessary ingredient of the coming upheaval. Her call for revolution (crowd-pleasing to many brow-beaten workers, to be sure) was consistent to the point of rigidity.5

Chicago was undergoing rapid, dramatic transformations, but Lucy’s speeches and writings, though prescient about the depredations of big business at the time and in decades to come, echoed old themes and ignored new realities. Between 1880 and 1890, the city doubled its population, to 1,099,850, and also doubled its area in square miles and its manufacturing capacity. The number of bookkeepers and store clerks increased twenty-fold. Almost half a million of the city’s residents had been born in a foreign country, increasing numbers of them from Eastern Europe, and they constituted two-thirds of all factory workers. In the midst of widely heralded “progress,” workers faced the same brutal conditions: limited housing stock that forced thousands to subsist in cramped, fetid tenements, and stagnant wages for men, women, and children, who often labored six days a week for up to sixteen hours a day. However, the growth of the white-collar labor force suggested that industrial capitalism was better able than Lucy had anticipated to absorb at least native-born white surplus labor.6

The collapse of the United Labor Party signaled the end of independent labor politics in Chicago. The Knights of Labor, decimated by employers’ aggressive use of lockouts and private security forces, began to disintegrate. It was wracked by internal conflicts between local leaders and the head of the organization, Terence V. Powderly, and between “mixed” district assemblies and those that advocated strict autonomy among the various trades. A new, relatively conservative international group of unions for skilled craftspeople, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), benefited from the Knights’ decline. Employers took advantage of a swollen, hungry labor force, replacing strikers with scabs, and skilled workers with machines or with women and children. These lords of industry exulted in the new steel mills, skyscrapers, and department stores that showcased Chicago’s prosperity for a few.7

At the same time, the city was emerging as a giant social laboratory for groups that were determined to smooth the rough edges of industrial capitalism without overturning the system itself. These groups included clergymen, wealthy clubwomen, members of the college-educated middle class, and sociologists and political scientists employed by the new University of Chicago. The reformers compared society to a living organism, with all parts interdependent for the health and well-being of the whole. “Social” served as the universal watchword as state-socialists became respectable, reformers founded social settlements, clergy preached the Social Gospel, and supporters of unfettered “free” enterprise took up the banner of social Darwinism. In 1888, both the Chicago Times and the Inter-Ocean ran stories on the 13,000 men, women, and children toiling in the city’s 800 squalid garment sweatshops. The title of the Times article of February 12, “Chicago’s White Slaves,” echoed the anarchists’ denunciations of wage slavery. Parsons admitted that the piece might prove “a revelation to those who live upon the wealthy avenues,” but, she added sarcastically, “My lords and ladies, I reveal to you a novelty—the human race exists!”8

As an articulate woman proposing solutions to the ills of society, Lucy was no lone figure on the city’s political landscape. Still, within a public arena of competing ideas and legislative initiatives, she occupied a prominent niche—a revolutionary cadre of one—and fought to stay in the headlines and on the front page. Many in the white laboring classes applauded her fiery speeches as a bracing antidote to the voices of moderation and compromise that were the hallmarks of social reform. For these workers, Lucy’s message of dynamite-driven resistance represented a catharsis of sorts, since she was virtually the only person bold or foolish enough to persist in speaking the Haymarket anarchists’ language of force. In an effort to distinguish herself from a growing multiplicity of debaters and investigators, many of whom agreed with her basic premise about economic inequality, she began appearing at forums to which she had not been invited, emerging from the back of the hall and striding to the podium where she would hold forth, an ingenious new form of public performance.

Lucy’s activities of 1888 blurred the line between agitating and money-making. In March she spoke before audiences in Boston and New York, and in December, on her first trip outside the United States, she attracted enthusiastic crowds in England and Scotland. In all these places she sold pictures of herself and copies of Albert’s Anarchism, and her hosts took up collections for her. By this time she was also receiving regular support from the Pioneer Aid and Support Association (PASA), a Chicago group founded in December 1887. PASA, composed mostly of German immigrant women who raised money for the widows and children of the Haymarket martyrs, received liberal support, in turn, from the Central Labor Union. In the summer of 1888, she began work on a biography of Albert, and solicited subscriptions to the new volume. She also founded Labor Assembly #1, which she called the Albert R. Parsons Assembly, establishing a library and a fund to publish books, newspapers, and tracts and “to encourage and promote public speaking among our members.” This group replaced Albert’s Knights assembly 1307, which Powderly had recently dissolved.9

On June 20, 1888, she was driving around the city in a buggy decorated with banners that featured her husband’s last words—“Let the voice of the people be heard!”—and a variation of August Spies’s proclamation on the gallows—“My silence is more terrible than my speech.” (His actual words were “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”) Stopped by a police officer for distributing ads for Anarchism, she attracted a crowd by yelling: “You blue-coated murderer, the souls of my husband and his companions will creep from their graves to haunt you, your children, and your children’s children.” Hauled before Chief Inspector John Bonfield, she pleaded that her son and daughter were home alone, to which he replied, “You should have thought of that before.” Two days later she was back distributing handbills for the book, this time in the lobby of the elegant Grand Pacific Hotel, with Albert Junior in tow. Again people stopped to stare, “anxious to catch a glimpse of the notorious woman,” in the words of the Tribune.10

In August Lucy took the children to Waukesha to visit with Daniel Hoan and his family, who had sheltered Albert during his flight. She received a warm welcome from those who remembered her husband fondly and who had come to know her son from his previous extended stay, while she was on her national speaking tour. Accompanying the Parsons family, Lizzie Swank Holmes found herself sympathetic to these simple Waukesha folk, but she believed that their dislike of capitalism was emotional and intuitive rather than the result of the necessarily difficult, extensive reading that anarchism required. For her part, Lucy Parsons resisted succumbing to any Wisconsin reverie; while there, she wrote an article for The Alarm reminding her readers that the Haymarket bomb had proved “that a powerful weapon could be placed in the hands of the people at small expense.”11

In late October Parsons traveled to New York City, and on the thirtieth she set sail for London. She made the trip at the invitation of the British Social Democrats, chiefly William Morris and other well-known socialists who had vociferously denounced the Haymarket trial and pressed for the prisoners’ release. The eight-day voyage on the passenger ship Arizona proved a delightful diversion for her, as she found herself in the company of pleasant, non-steerage strangers. The officers and staff were polite and attentive. The passengers took their meals together, and on deck they played games, drank ale, discussed socialism, and applauded Parsons’s rendering of John Greenleaf Whittier’s eighty-eight-line poem “The Reformer.” By the middle of the journey they had come to think of themselves as a unit, all bound together by the pitching of the seas and the onslaught of seasickness, a malady that respected neither social class nor age nor gender. Free of the usual cant, her article in The Alarm detailing this voyage is one of the very few pieces she wrote in her life in which she admitted that she had actually enjoyed herself somewhere.12

Disembarking in Liverpool, Parsons traveled by train to London, marveling at the lovely English countryside. Jane Burden, the glamourous wife of William Morris, took her sightseeing to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. During her stay in the city, she met the Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, a famous theorist of anarchism. In Trafalgar Square, a fog-bound Hyde Park, and other venues she regaled crowds with her claim to American authenticity: “When Columbus first came in sight of the Western continent, my father’s ancestors were there to give them a native greeting. When the conquering hosts of Cortez moved into Mexico, my mother’s ancestors were there to repel the invader.” The Trafalgar rally of November 13 carried special meaning: it was the site of “Bloody Sunday,” November 13, 1887, when, at a mass meeting protesting the Haymarket executions, the police had shot and killed three men. Now, though, memories of that clash and fears of violence had depressed the attendance at Parsons’s talk. The secretary of the Social Democratic Federation assured a reporter that, although the group remained outraged over Haymarket, “we wish it to be distinctly understood, on the other hand, that as Social Democrats we are necessarily in direct opposition to anarchism.”13

With three lectures prepared—on anarchism, the Haymarket trial, and the evils of child labor—Parsons spoke to crowds in Norwich and Ipswich and to intimate gatherings of socialists and anarchists in London. William Morris told a correspondent that “she is a curious looking woman: No signs of European blood in her, Indian with a touch of negro; but she speaks pure Yankee.” The Alarm saw fit to republish a description offered by a London paper: “She has the full lips, the black hair, the gleaming black eyes, and the rich warm complexion that tell of the mingling of the blood. She is handsome with a strange beauty. But it is not until she speaks that the full power of her personality strikes you, for she has a perfect speaking voice. Rich, sweet, clear, and low it carries itself without any effort on her part with ten times the effect of ten times greater lung power. It is a voice mobile to every changing sentiment it expresses.” Parsons considered the trip a great success, marred only by the words and deeds of a few, small-minded people: an English labor organizer named Annie Besant, who had just led a successful strike of female matchstick makers, caused a stir by condemning Parsons’s “wicked and foolish advice” about the necessity of force. And then, on the return voyage, an “insolent” crew and captain went out of their way to insult her.14

Upon arriving back in New York City, Parsons happily acquiesced in a reporter’s request for an interview, and, according to the reporter, made a startling announcement—that she was to be married to thirty-eight-year-old Eduard Bernstein, a resident of London and the editor of The German Social Democrat, a newspaper based there. A Jewish anarchist, the married Bernstein had been hounded out of Switzerland and now published his paper in Kentish Town. Informed of the engagement that same day, Justus Schwab, a New York City acolyte of Johann Most, denounced it as “an infernal lie,” maintaining that Mrs. Parsons would never tarnish the memory of her dead husband. By the next morning Parsons was denying the whole shocking story, this “chain of unmitigated falsehoods,” claiming it was “merely gotten up for sensational effect and to kill whatever little influence my return might have on our movement.” She was the first to admit that “it would be a strange kind of conglomeration for me to go to London to speak at memorial meetings and return betrothed to another man.” Fabricated or not, the story served as a cautionary tale about the kind of behavior the radical community deemed appropriate for Albert Parsons’s widow.15

Lucy Parsons had told her friends that she would return to Chicago on December 17, and so that morning, George Schilling and other comrades gathered at Union Depot, planning to welcome her home. Also there were Junior and Lulu, who had been staying with separate German immigrant families during their mother’s six-week absence; a Mrs. Cordts had escorted them to the station. Without notifying anyone, however, Parsons got off the train at an earlier stop and took a cab home. Later that day, Mrs. Cordts appeared at the Milwaukee Avenue apartment with the children, who were both suffering from the cold, having waited at the train station all day. Perhaps Parsons knew that a week earlier the new chief of police, George W. Hubbard, had vowed that anarchists would no longer be permitted to hold “revolutionary gatherings,” including any demonstration in honor of her return; or perhaps she wanted to avoid questions about her alleged attachment to Bernstein; or perhaps she was eager to see the man who had been staying in her flat while she was abroad—twenty-eight-year-old Martin Robert Lacher, her “boarder.”16

Born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1860, Lacher had come to the United States as a twenty-year-old and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1883, still in St. Paul, he had become a naturalized citizen and married the eighteen-year-old Helen Engelsipen, also German-born. The following year they had a daughter, Olga, and shortly thereafter they had moved to Milwaukee, where Lacher had worked as a printer for the Evening Wisconsin. He soon became active in socialist politics, earning the nickname “Anarchist” for his vocal support of the Haymarket defendants. He was in Chicago the day before the execution, and had been arrested “on account of his injudicious talk.” In January 1888, he and his wife and daughter were living at 413 North Paulina Street, where his second child was born on the twenty-eighth of that month. That he quickly became infatuated—or obsessed—with Parsons is suggested by the fact that this daughter was named Lulu Lucy. A Chicago Tribune reporter described him as “an exceptionally nice-looking and intelligent young man. He has a finely shaped head, expressive brown eyes, a small black mustache, and wears rimless glasses.”17

In the summer of 1888, Lacher left his family and moved in with Parsons. He had apparently offered to help her with the new volume she was editing, Life of Albert R. Parsons. Soon after Parsons returned from her trip abroad, she and Lacher began to appear in public together, and over the next two and a half years his name would frequently be linked to hers—he was probably the “black haired young man” who was described by the press in June 1889 as “usually accompany[ing] her” to anarchist meetings.18

Parsons had been back in Chicago for barely two weeks when she and Lacher tangled with Police Chief Hubbard. To the joy of Chicago radicals, in April 1889 Bonfield had been caught up in a corruption scandal and dismissed from the force. Hubbard, however, matched Bonfield in his animosity toward radicals. The new chief declared in late December that henceforth Parsons would be prohibited from delivering any “violent anarchistic harangue.” If there were any doubts about his intentions, he made them clear: “She simply can’t speak in Chicago.” Within a few days, a local judge would rescind this gag order against Parsons and other labor radicals, pronouncing it a violation of free speech. In the meantime, though, Hubbard ordered the proprietor of a hall where Parsons was to appear on December 26 to refuse her entrance. That day found her and Lacher defiant, standing on a sidewalk outside the hall. She cried, “O, men of America, degenerate Yankees, is this your boasted liberty? Is this your free speech? Is this your right to assemble? O, the glorious stars and stripes!” Agitated, Lacher began to yell at the police, and he was promptly arrested for disorderly conduct. In the coming months, this scene repeated itself, with Parsons trying to address a crowd, and Lacher joining in the fray and skirmishing with police in an effort to defend her. The Tribune interviewed Lacher at length and found him conversant about First Amendment issues, if inclined to stretch the meaning of “speech”: “The truth is that the right of free speech—if it be a positive right at all—carries with it the right of free action,” he said.19

By 1890, the couple was socializing in public; at one point, they accompanied Lizzie and William Holmes to hear a lecture by Judge John Peter Altgeld on the injustice of incarcerating men and women who could not pay fines. It is not difficult to understand why the young German immigrant would become enamored with the beautiful and famously demonstrative Mrs. Parsons. And she had found a soul mate in the temperamental printer (the profession of her former husband), who relished a good fight with words and fists. No doubt she enjoyed his devotion and, presumably, the sexual gratification that he later said was an integral part of their relationship. Perhaps she thought of her early days in Waco, where she had never paid much mind to the sanctimonious gossips. And now, must the widow of a martyr take a vow of chastity?20

In mid-October, Parsons suffered another major loss in her life when eight-year-old Lulu Eda Parsons died of lymphedema (blockage of the lymph glands). It is possible that the little girl had never fully recovered from her bout with scarlet fever. Characteristically, Parsons refused to betray any sorrow in public. Delivering a lecture at the Arbeiter Bund (a German workers’ group) in mid-November, she made only brief reference to her dead daughter and to any presumed heavenly reunion between Lulu and Albert: “Do you suppose they kissed each other in the beautifully described hereafter?” she asked the audience. “Bah. Don’t be deceived. So-called Christians will tell you such things.” She added, “The principles of anarchy will prevail, even though it takes blood to make them supreme.”21

A week after Lulu died, Albert Junior disappeared. Parsons looked for him herself, refusing to enlist the police in the search. After a few days, he returned home on his own; apparently, he had gone off to visit friends. He and Lulu had endured much together; because of their parents’ demanding travel and speaking schedules, they had been cared for by non-family members for weeks and even months at a time. They had lived through their father’s execution and witnessed their mother’s romantic entanglement with another man. While Parsons was abroad in November 1888, the two children had stood together at the annual memorial ceremony at Waldheim as Schilling had read them the letter their father had written two days before his death: “O, my children, how deeply, dearly your papa loves you. We show our love by living for our loved ones. We also prove our love by dying when necessary for them.” Albert Parsons’s ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter no doubt derived little comfort from the idea that he had died for them.22

Around this time, Lucy Parsons began to clash with the officers of Pioneer Aid. Predictably, some comrades, especially those who were appalled at her relationship with Lacher, came to resent her insistent claims on the association. In 1890 she secured a loan from the group and with it paid off the mortgage on what a reporter called a “queer little cottage” she had built the year before in the northwest corner of the predominately German 15th Ward, at 999 Hammond Avenue (later North Troy Avenue) in the Avondale neighborhood. It was “a curious domicile” that she had designed herself: “It is unsymmetrically tall, almost perfectly square, built of pine and stands solitary in the midst of a clay waste,” the reporter wrote. Even the roughhewn furniture revealed “a woman at war with society.” This same reporter, who visited her there in December 1889, met Junior, whom he described as “a manly, healthy and apparently intelligent boy.”23

In the summer of 1890, Louis Zeller, a member of the Central Labor Union, initiated an effort to withhold PASA funds from Parsons. The Central Labor Union taxed its members for her support, and some of them had grown weary of what they considered Parsons’s disingenuous complaints about straitened circumstances. At a meeting where she was accused of uttering half-truths and prevarications, she became so angry that she seized a book and tried to hit Zeller over the head with it; she would have used a chair for the same ends had someone not restrained her. Lacher, who happened to be the treasurer of PASA, was called to account for abandoning his wife and daughters for Parsons. He replied, “I do not want to conceal that my domestic relations are unhappy. My wife and I have separated, but I have supported her all the time. There is nothing out of the way in Mrs. Parsons keeping a boarder.” He believed Zeller and Schilling had a vendetta against him and Parsons.24

In September, the CLU enumerated several charges against Parsons: She had raised money for herself in Europe and New York all the while neglecting to inform supporters in those places that she was receiving assistance in Chicago. She had insisted on stipends for two children even after Lulu’s death (PASA had paid for Lulu’s funeral). She had “a couple of houses and lots in this city,” and presumably made a decent living from renting these out, as well as from accepting lecture fees and the proceeds from sales of publications. She had failed to repay the construction loan for her cottage on Hammond Avenue. She kept a “boarder, Mr. Lacher, who has a sickly wife and two children, who are certain to be neglected by the absence of the husband and father, for nobody can serve two masters at once.” In response to Parsons’s supporters, who felt it “was the sacred duty of the association” to keep her on the payroll in perpetuity, her critics charged that “her conduct is not such as to meet the approval of her acquaintances.” Within a few months, her request from the association for $300 in cash to offset expenses incurred in the publication of Life of Albert R. Parsons met with another round of protests from a group of benefactors. PASA leaders called her machinations “eine erste Klasse Schwindel” (a first-class swindle). The Tribune wrote about a “Row Among the Reds.”25

Parsons’s personal life with Lacher had attracted notice and censure. At the same time, she betrayed no doubts about thrusting her children into the public spotlight. She considered Junior “the picture of his father,” her dead husband’s heir apparent in the struggle against capitalism, saying, “Let the children take up the work where the fathers left off.” She told reporters that she was raising her son to avenge the injustice visited upon his father, a comment that prompted some angry editorializing about her determination that he become (in the words of the Tribune) “a kind of human blood hound whose sole purpose in life shall be to spill the blood of his fellow beings.” Apparently she had decided soon after Albert’s death that, positioned carefully next to their grief-stricken mother at certain events, the children could provide a compelling tableau vivant. In New York, before Lulu’s death, she had provoked the ire of Johann Most, who had refused to appear with Parsons on stage when she had announced that she was planning to bring her son and daughter along “for dramatic effect”; he said he would not be part of her “baby show.”26

Increasingly, Parsons pressed her son into helping her sell tracts and his father’s writings. Still, she confounded her critics with her domestic life in her “humble home.” In late December 1888, she welcomed a reporter, who described the scene—a picture of Albert on an easel, a Christmas tree, and the children’s toys strewn about the floor. Noting that the “babies” had just gone off to school, Parsons proceeded to give her stock speech, prompting the headline writer to title the piece, “Lucy Wanted Blood.” She presented herself as a weary, widowed mother, at the same time declaring that “her life would be devoted to agitation, organization, and revolution, the latter of which was sure to come.” Responding to questions from another reporter, this time with Junior present, she told of running into Judge Joseph Gary on the sidewalk a few days earlier and berating him: “You bloody old murderer, if I had a knife I’d stab you where you stand, you miserable old villain.” For the reporter, she then pulled out a red scarf and put it around Junior’s collar, saying, “He is my brave little anarchist,” while “affectionately hugging the little fellow.”27

Perhaps for Albert Junior all of this seemed too much; one morning in the middle of April 1891, instead of going off to school as usual, he disappeared again. This time Parsons contacted the police for help. Six weeks later, the thirteen-year-old was finally located in Waukesha, presumably with the Hoans, though why no one there contacted Parsons to tell her that he was safe is a mystery. Perhaps he missed his sister and went off to grieve, or craved the attention of the Hoans and the peace of Waukesha, or resented his mother’s efforts to offer him up as his father’s successor.28

Or Albert Junior might have been reacting to an escalation of tensions between Parsons and her lover. In early July, she swore out a warrant for Lacher’s arrest, charging him with “malicious trespass,” and the police took him into custody on July 15. By this time the couple’s relationship had devolved into mutual, bitter recrimination. Apparently Parsons had given an “entertainment” at her house and, when one of her invited guests met with Lacher’s disfavor, they had quarreled, and he had hit her in the face. She had fought back, flinging a flatiron at him. On the sixteenth she told a judge that she had locked Lacher out of the house, only to have him return with an axe, which he had used to smash in the front door and reduce much of her furniture to splinters.29

In his defense Lacher said that it was he who had written most of Life of Albert R. Parsons, and that he had also paid many of Parsons’s bills while the two were living together. The furniture that he chopped to pieces was his, he said. He told the court that “for the past three years this woman and I have lived together as man and wife. During that time I learned to love her devotedly, notwithstanding that I was cognizant of the fact that she was continually intimate with other men. It was at her continued solicitations that I abandoned my wife and two children, and when my wife threatened to have her arrested I myself bribed her with a folding bed to drop the case. Our intimacy continued up till two weeks ago.” As proof that they cared deeply for each other, he showed the judge a pin in his possession, a miniature gallows and noose, “a love token” that she had given him. According to a reporter present, Lacher added that he had recently lost his job, “and that Mrs. Parsons had seen fit to transfer her favors to some one better able to pay for them.” Parsons was standing nearby in the courtroom and listening; enraged, she shook her parasol at him and cried, “If you say that again I’ll kill you.” The judge fined Lacher $25 and court costs; but the drama would continue.30

The year of her fortieth birthday, Lucy Parsons was bereft of her husband and daughter, rid of a lover, and apparently estranged from her son. Her iconic status as Haymarket widow had suffered among even some former allies from her tempestuous affair with Lacher and her suspect claims to financial assistance. Yet the attention paid her by adoring crowds, solicitous reporters, resentful comrades, and paranoid police and politicians gave her life purpose and meaning.

IN EARLY DECEMBER 1888, WILLIAM HOLMES, LIZZIE SWANK HOLMES’S husband, addressed several hundred socialists at Waverly Hall on Lake Street. He felt compelled to answer a pointed question posed by the Chicago Tribune: During Thanksgiving week, the churches had fed the poor with turkey and soup, but what had the anarchists done? Holmes fumed, “We have done nothing to degrade the poor by making them recipients of charity,” and furthermore, “We are rousing that spirit of discontent that that is bound to bring its fruitage; above all we are arousing that feeling of independence characteristic of our forefathers.”31

What were anarchists actually doing for the poor? It was not a new question, but one that took on more resonance in an age of social reform. Lucy Parsons dismissed charity as “only hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers.” When she declaimed upon the “Gospel of Discontent,” she seemed to be ridiculing the pervasive “Social Gospel” movement, which called upon religious-minded, well-to-do folks to address human suffering in a tangible way.32

The reformer Jane Addams called the 1890s the “decade of discussion,” and indeed, all of Chicago seemed to be debating the proper roles of different entities—city and state government, employers, labor unions, intellectuals, politicians, the clergy, and clubwomen—in the grand project of reform. Though Addams came to represent the spirit of the Progressive Era in turn-of-the-century America generally, in fact her ideas about social change were very much the product of Chicago’s ferment. Addams saw herself and other people of goodwill as being wedged between two dangerous, opposing forces—arrogant industrialists, on the one hand, and the impoverished, angry laboring classes, on the other; both groups were similarly unreasonable in that they promoted “propaganda as over against constructive social effort.” The reformer’s task, Addams said, was to find a middle way that would ease the everyday suffering of the poor while allowing the wealthy the pleasure of their profits. Addams’s social settlement, Hull House, was, in her words, “quite as much under the suspicion of one side as the other.” To a street heckler doubtful of her motives, she later wrote, “I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either of them.” Still, neither the railroad-car magnate George Pullman nor Lucy Parsons could abide Addams’s well-meaning ways.33

Late 1880s Chicago was a showcase for women leaders determined to deploy moral suasion and secure passage of municipal or state legislation to counter a coldhearted capitalism. In June 1888, Elizabeth Morgan, wife of socialist leader Tommy Morgan, helped to found the AFL-affiliated Ladies Federal Labor Union (LFLU) no. 2703, a group that included women in a variety of crafts, including candy-making, as well as typists and clerks. The LFLU and the Chicago Trade and Labor Association (by 1888 part of the AFL) appointed Elizabeth to head a commission charged with investigating the sweatshop system and its spawn, the “sweater [boss], a human parasite.” Morgan visited workshops throughout the city, documenting the miserable lives of men, women, and children who toiled for pennies a day in windowless attics, cellars, and sheds for six and a half days a week. Released in September 1891 and titled “The New Slavery,” her report highlighted the malnourished, sleep-deprived children who ate and slept in tenements surrounded by garbage and horse manure, and the workrooms overwhelmed with the stench of human excrement. In such close, filthy conditions, diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid spread quickly.34

The report prompted passage of a new factory-inspection law by the Illinois legislature that limited the hours for women in manufacturing to eight a day and established a factory inspector with a staff of twelve. Not surprisingly, the sweaters resisted the new law, and careworn parents continued to order their children to work. A dozen inspectors could not possibly inspect the many hundreds of small shops tucked away in the city’s vast neighborhoods. However, the Factory Act did reveal a larger impulse among the middle-class women and men of the city, who, it seemed, were willing to mediate between rapacious employers, on the one hand, and vulnerable workers, on the other.35

Albert Parsons would have appreciated the faith of the Progressives in the compilation of statistics related to social, economic, and demographic trends, and Lucy Parsons must have felt some satisfaction now that both reformers and newspaper editors were rendering the plight of sewing women as a form of slavery. Yet Lucy Parsons was neither a labor organizer nor a social reformer. A prominent actor in Chicago’s “decade of propaganda,” she could expound on history, literature, and political theory, and she specialized in rousing the indignation of the laboring classes. Yet unlike many of her debating partners (real or imagined), Parsons resisted describing in much detail the new social order she envisioned in a future, anarchistic world. In early 1891, a New York World reporter, partly tongue-in-cheek, tried to pin her down on controversial issues of the day. Striking in her all-black dress adorned with only a “blood red badge,” and her gold necklace with the gallows charm, she said she believed that the laboring classes “should rise and overthrow aristocracy by means of dynamite.”

The wealth of this country should be equally distributed, she thinks. If one man through shrewdness should then amass more wealth than his neighbor, this surplus should be taken away from him. Every man should carry arms and have the right of self-defence. Shops and means of transit should be free. There would be no need of elections, police or a standing army to keep a handful of Indians in subjection. Give the Indians all the land they want, there is plenty of it. If they kill you let your friends kill them. Every man should bring his products to an immense clearinghouse in each city or town, and every family to receive an equal portion.

What to do with criminals? All of them “are more or less insane,” their misdeeds in most cases the result of greed for money. The mansions of the labor barons? “We will let them stand as monuments of shame for the elements to decay.” Coast and harbor defenses? No need for them: “We hope to conquer the world. This country is not our only field of conquest.” Free postage stamps and mail delivery; free beer, newspapers, and public schools. And her Chinese policy? “I really cannot say, said Mrs. Parsons after a moment’s meditation. These small details must be arranged afterwards.”36

In addition to continuing her hectic speaking schedule, Parsons remained a prolific writer and editor. In 1889 she published Life of Albert R. Parsons, with Brief History of the Labor Movement in America, a 255-page book that sold for $1.50 a copy. The volume included George Schilling’s lengthy testimonial for Albert in the form of a history of the Chicago labor movement; Albert’s autobiography as originally published in Knights of Labor; his letters to The Alarm and to Lucy recounting his agitation trips throughout the Midwest; accounts of the Haymarket trial; newspaper articles; reminiscences by Captain William Black (the attorney), Lizzie Swank Holmes, William Holmes, and others; and drawings of Albert, Lucy, and the children. (Lucy’s picture prompted a lively conversation in Waco in April 1889, when someone sent a copy of the book to the town newspaper, the Examiner. A leading Waco businessman, the insurance and real estate agent Captain John E. Elgin, took the book to a local polling place on April 2 and passed it around to the “election crowd.” Several of Lucy’s former employers recognized her, as did Oliver Benton, who confirmed it was his “truant wife,” saying, “Lucy was a good girl if she was smart and was too fond of fine clo’s[;] dat was her failing.”)37

From 1890 to 1892, Lucy Parsons edited Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly, described as “the only English organ in America advocating those principles for which our martyrs died and which we live to spread.” For her purposes, this publication superseded the second iteration of The Alarm, which had folded in February 1889, several months after its editor, Dyer Lum, had moved to New York City. As ever, in Freedom Lucy proved an eclectic writer, her essays and editorials including a learned survey of the history of communism from the pre-Christian era, as well as a sly explanation of “The Part Dynamite Plays”: in modern discourse, she said, “it is a mere trick on the part of capitalists to be always associating anarchists with dynamite.” Publishing the paper proved to be problematic, since apparently Martin Lacher was involved in it, at least through the summer of 1891. That autumn, after their falling out, Parsons used the editor’s column to charge him with embezzling from a local Arbeiter Bund. She also claimed that in collecting money for Freedom subscriptions, he issued “a guarantee that the comrade with whom he had trouble [that is, herself] should have nothing to do with the paper.” She warned of his “treachery” and his attempts to destroy the paper and injure the movement because of “personal spite.” By this time he had moved with his wife and two daughters to Denver, where he became active in socialist politics. Freedom ceased publication in August 1892.38

Parsons’s speaking schedule continued to be robust. She bolstered the flagging spirits of Jewish cloak-makers. She lectured on what she considered the misguided (though, among socialists, wildly popular) new novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, which promoted the state socialism she despised. She spoke on the merits of compulsory education. As always, she relished a good debate, at one point taking on a sparring partner who suggested that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was an exemplar of anarchism in its contempt for the law; she countered that, to the contrary, anarchism promoted liberty, Standard Oil only slavery.39

This new phase of Parsons’s career took place within a city where elites were loudly and insistently urging the police to crack down on the remnant of anarchists, “Law or no Law.” When he took office, Chief Hubbard announced that it would be “folly” for the city to tolerate “revolutionary gatherings,” and that he would no longer allow anarchists to meet on the lakefront or at Market Square. However, his main strategy consisted in forcing hall proprietors to refuse to rent out spaces to radicals; failing that, he sent in uniformed and plainclothes police to intimidate the speakers and their audiences. Like his predecessors, Hubbard had to choose between tolerating the free expression of Parsons’s unsettling ideas or arresting her and drawing even more attention to them.40

The same dilemma bedeviled police chiefs in other cities Parsons visited—for example, in November 1890, in Newark, New Jersey, where she was scheduled to speak on the third anniversary of the executions. At the last minute she found herself locked out of a hall. The local police had made it clear that they intended to target “the anarchistic element” and “crush it out.” Loudly protesting, she was arrested for “attempted riot” and jailed; that, plus subsequent developments, including a bail hearing and an appearance before a judge, kept her in the local newspapers, inspiring mass protests for several days in the greater New York area.41

Back in Chicago, a strong law-enforcement presence at meetings unnerved some labor leaders, who at times blamed Lucy Parsons for the scrutiny accorded the most innocuous of gatherings. The prospect of dozens of officers hovering over a picnic or rally could demoralize those who favored speechifying over confrontation; one Pioneer Aid fundraiser attracted one hundred policemen, half in uniform, half in plain clothes. (Captain Michael Schaak, taking note of Parsons’s persistent calls for workers to “buy yourselves good Winchester rifles,” observed that her appeals to violence had “made herself obnoxious to the more peaceable and conservative Socialists.”) In June 1891, the committee to raise money for a monument to the Haymarket martyrs refused to let her speak. Some supporters of PASA had predicted as much, believing that her money-grab within that organization had discouraged donors from contributing to the proposed statue. The following year during the annual May Day celebration, the Coal Unloaders bowed out of the parade because of what they called “too much red in the line”—including Parsons, who, together with Junior, seized the occasion to sell stacks of copies of Freedom.42

Tommy Morgan came to dread Parsons’s attempts to hijack socialist meetings. Once she stood to talk, it was difficult to get her to sit down, especially in gatherings where a vocal segment of the audience venerated her as a secular saint. A reporter for the Inter-Ocean described the beginning of a routine meeting of socialists at Waverly Hall, when Parsons “and about a dozen fellow anarchists filed in to the rear of the hall.” The mere sight of the intruder rattled Morgan and the others: “Apprehensive and knowing glances were exchanged by the leading socialists,” the reporter recounted. More often, however, Parsons entered the hall quietly and sat in the back, only to rise dramatically from her seat later in the proceedings, march to the front, and mount the podium, to the delight of the crowd. At one meeting of two hundred persons, Morgan was decrying the use of physical force, claiming that it “indicates a low degree of civilization” and undermines the morality of social reform, when, according to a reporter, “at this juncture Mrs. Lucy Parsons, haughty and arrogant, strutted down the center aisle to a seat in front of the platform.” Morgan paused, “and a deafening and prolonged cheer went up from the crowd.” For a while Parsons listened, becoming more and more agitated, but finally she interrupted subsequent speakers, agreeing wholeheartedly that the rallying cry among the Haymarket martyrs had always been “Prepare to use force.”43

Despite the angst of leaders like Morgan, among the admirers of her heated rhetoric Parsons rarely failed to disappoint: “Before we can have peace in a society like ours, rivers of blood will have to run,” she would say. She condemned the ballot and vowed to see the heads of capitalists impaled on spikes. She taunted her enemies: “When the great revolution does come we will shake the upper classes like jelly.” And she defended the use of dynamite: “In years to come, those in America will bless the hand that threw the bomb in Haymarket square.”44

At times Parsons also gave her explicit approval of assassination. In the summer of 1892, at his Homestead steel plant near Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie locked out members of a union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, in an effort to destroy it. His manager, Henry Clay Frick, ordered three hundred members of Pinkerton’s security forces to break the picket lines thrown up by the strikers. Alexander Berkman, a twenty-two-year-old Russian immigrant, anarchist, and self-professed follower of Johann Most, traveled from New York to Homestead, where (according to a plan he had devised with his lover Emma Goldman) he confronted Frick in his office and shot and stabbed him. Frick survived the attack, and Berkman spent fourteen years in prison for his “propaganda of the deed.” In the August 1892 issue of Freedom, Lucy Parsons titled an article “A Just Blow at a Tyrant,” and wrote, of the botched assassination, “We have only the greatest admiration for men like Berkman.” Yet she failed to anticipate how similar anarchists’ attacks and assassinations in France and Spain between 1892 and 1894 could reverberate in Chicago and affect her own prospects as provocateur.45

By the early 1890s, Parsons had successfully defied attempts to silence her completely, but she was still fighting a wider war for the free expression of radical views. Both the mayor and the chief of police, emboldened by the unconditional support of leading industrialists, felt justified in not only banning the red flag from workers’ meetings and parades, but also insisting that the American flag be flown. Parsons framed such efforts as the violations of the First Amendment that they were, and, in addition to issuing the familiar calls for revolution, focused her speeches on the constitutional right to peaceful assembly. Later, she would trace the beginnings of her career as a free-speech proponent from these Chicago battles over flags and words.46

The ban on the red flag prompted a cat-and-mouse game that the police could not hope to win, even though Mayor John Roche declared, “I will not tolerate this red flag business.” In 1891, for the annual Haymarket commemoration, hundreds braved a cold, drizzling rain at Waldheim Cemetery; they left their red flags at home, but brought red floral arrangements and displayed red streamers. At a meeting in Turner Hall the evening of November 12, Hubbard and his officers burst in and stormed the stage, demanding that an American flag be displayed. According to a reporter present, the chief’s order unleashed pandemonium: “Hiss after hiss and yell after yell frantically rose until the audience seemed a thousand demons instead of human beings.” Parsons exclaimed, “Hang the murderers of my husband!” and then declared, “That flag is an infamous lie.” She proceeded to refine her indictment: “Every star in that flag is but the concentrated tear drop of outraged American womanhood.” The police arrested twenty-three people that night. Hall proprietors began telling anarchists that they must not display any red flags, banners, or bunting, producing some “severely plain” backdrops for meetings, even on momentous occasions, such as the Haymarket commemoration of 1892.47

IN RECOGNITION OF HER SINGULAR ROLE IN CHICAGO’S POLITICAL discourse in general—and her constant talk of dynamite, in particular—Parsons earned epithets from the press that implicitly linked her to the massive destruction wrought by the great fire two decades before. This dusky devotee of dynamite engaged in “verbal pyrotechnics”; her speeches were “fiery,” “inflammatory,” “incendiary.” A “fire-eating,” “red-mouthed” anarchist, she served up doctrine “red hot.” Certainly she did her best to avoid the taint of middle-class social reform: “I don’t want to be respectable,” she declared at one meeting. “I want to be wholly disreputable and die so, and so do we all, I hope.” The thunderous applause that greeted these particular comments served as a rebuke to all those at various points on the political spectrum who had tried to discredit, undermine, or dismiss her.48

George Schilling, for one, took this rebuke personally. He had contributed to the Life of Albert R. Parsons a respectful, even reverent, appreciation of Albert’s work. In his piece Schilling acknowledged that they were “living in an age of universal unrest,” and he couched his critique of the Chicago political economy in terms that Lucy Parsons could applaud: “The justice of grinding little children’s bones and blood and life into gold in our modern bastiles [sic]of labor, so that a few might riot in midnight orgies, is being questioned by some.” Yet he could not now refrain from writing directly to Lucy Parsons and scolding her for keeping the police and the politicians in a constant state of war against the workers through her rhetoric. Acknowledging that she possessed “more than ordinary intellectual power,” he nevertheless believed that her unrelenting calls for violence had been a “wasted force as far as any permanent results for good are concerned.” Indeed, in her determination to “terrorize the public mind and threaten the stability of society with violence,” he wrote, she accomplished little more than allowing the police to justify harsh measures against labor leaders and strikers. Schilling thought she should temper her language in an effort to appeal to a broader American constituency: “Those seeking economic progress must shape their conduct in accordance with the traditions and environment of the country in which they live.”49

By urging Parsons to modify her conduct (and not just her words), Schilling was perhaps betraying the deep disappointment that he must have felt over her scandalous affair with Martin Lacher, behavior that he and many others believed defiled the memory of her husband and compromised all radicals’ claim to the moral high ground. He ended by reminding her of the fate of the five men who lay entombed at Waldheim Cemetery, including her husband of beloved memory: “They worshipped at the shrine of force; wrote it and preached it; until finally they were overpowered by their own Gods and slain in their own temple.”50

Whether or not Parsons read Schilling’s letter, she failed to heed it. Even now, a new, drastic economic downturn in Chicago and throughout the country was evoking the dire conditions that had inspired her to write “Tramps,” her first, but far from last, paean to dynamite.