image Chapter 11 image

Variety in Life, and Its Critics

IF LUCY PARSONS SEEMED TO LIVE IN THE PAST, FOR MUCH OF HER life she believed that, from the vantage point of the laboring classes, at least, the present did not seem all that different from recent history. In fact, at times she remained defiantly oblivious to or dismissive of the great historical forces sweeping over the city of Chicago and the United States, forces that were prompting new strategies for addressing economic inequality and social injustice. The economic and political dislocations of the 1890s and the early twentieth century gave rise to rural and urban reformers who believed that more local, state, and national government was the answer to the chronic disaster of industrial America. Now ideas promoting state socialism, though diametrically at odds with Parsons’s anarchism, gained not just radical but also mainstream, moderate cachet.

Parsons’s overall orientation toward small cooperative groups, such as trade unions, served to estrange her from socialists and even from a substantial number of anarchists. In addition, at least two other issues exacerbated her disagreements with radicals of various persuasions. In the 1890s, a new generation of anarchists was injecting the issue of human sexuality into political discourse, a development she found repugnant. At the same time, small numbers of terrorists at home and abroad were engaging in assassination and murder, crimes she denounced with disingenuous indignation. Some adjustments were called for: gradually she retreated from her public approval of violence against the established order, preferring a relatively tame life of writing and speaking. She hoped to avoid what was becoming the increasingly likely alternative—not just a night in the Cook County jail, but a years-long stint in prison.

These crosscurrents of change and continuity were on full display in Parsons’s activities during the summer of 1893. That August, at the beginning of what would become a five-year depression, she was back at the lakefront, holding forth during daylong mass meetings of the jobless: “By force we were robbed by the people who coin your sweat into Gatling guns to kill you,” she declared, “and by force must they be dispossessed.” The economic “panic” that began earlier that year marked the beginning of the nation’s deepest depression to date; soon hundreds of banks would close their doors and thousands of businesses would fail. In major US cities, as many as four out of ten workers found themselves unemployed. For Parsons, the crisis of the early 1890s evoked the unrest of two decades earlier, when she and her husband had arrived in Chicago and begun their lifelong careers of agitation. Now, she wrote, “How long can this condition of affairs last? How much longer must the schoolhouse be robbed that the robbers’ factory may be filled with the fair roses that bloom at the firesides of poverty and fade in these hells?” Parsons saw in the careworn faces of her listeners the eternal verities of capitalist depredations—the bloody clashes between wage slaves and government militia backed by employers’ private security forces, the wretched living and working conditions of the poor. The country seemed caught in an endless cycle of boom for the Marshall Fields and the George Pullmans and bust for the laboring classes. How much longer, indeed?1

Proving that she still possessed the power to provoke, that summer Parsons reprised the raw anger of “To Tramps,” promising listeners (and newspaper readers) that “men with that unsatiated gnawing at their vitals can be made to understand the tenets of anarchy…. I say to hell with the gang of thieves, robbers, murderers, destroyers of our homes.” Chicago authorities as well as editors around the country derided her “lunacy”; she was a “she devil” bent on painting “lurid pictures of famine and want” calculated to incite “murder and other forms of lawlessness.” The Chicago Tribune urged the police to restrain her as they would “an enraged tigress.”2

The wounds wrought by the Haymarket bombing still festered for many. On June 25 in Waldheim Cemetery, several thousand people watched as fifteen-year-old Albert Junior pulled a string on a red curtain and unveiled a monument to the martyrs. His part in the program offered a fitting piece of symmetry to Memorial Day in 1889, when the son of the fallen Major Mathias Degan played a similar role in commemorating the policemen who had died as a result of that fateful night of May 4, 1886. Both monuments became objects of scorn from their foes—in Haymarket Square, the statue of a policeman, arm raised as if in a gesture of peace and goodwill; in Waldheim Cemetery, a hooded, bronze figure of justice standing atop a base inscribed with (again, a variation of) the last words of August Spies: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”3

And then, the day after the Haymarket statue dedication, to the great surprise of everyone, Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden, and Michael Schwab. In ordering that they be released from prison, Altgeld (who had taken office only six months earlier) affirmed the critique of the trial offered by the convicted men—that Cook County officials had packed the jury with men who had prejudged the case, that the prosecutor had never linked the defendants to the bomb-thrower, and that Judge Gary had been too biased to preside over a fair proceeding. Parsons published the full text of Altgeld’s pardon under the title “His Masterly Review of the Haymarket Riot.”4

In an ironic twist, the release of the three men signaled the end of their association with Albert Parsons’s widow. Thereafter, they ostentatiously boycotted her speeches and repudiated anarchism, which would forever be associated in the public mind with domestic terrorism. Interviewed by a reporter the year after he gained his freedom, Neebe responded to a question about Lucy Parsons by saying that he had not seen her recently, “and I don’t want to see her either.” His comrades agreed with him: “They do not like to talk of her at all, but it is understood that there is general dissatisfaction with her personal conduct.” By this time rumors were circulating that Johann Most and Lucy Parsons enjoyed a close relationship that went well beyond their shared devotion to anarchist ideology. Her feud with the Pioneer Aid and Support Association over money, combined with what was perceived as her unfaithfulness to Albert’s memory due to her affairs with Lacher and possibly Most, diminished her in the sight of some former comrades.5

Parsons’s old circle was receding from her life. Dyer Lum committed suicide in April 1893. Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband, William, had moved to Colorado, but not before Lizzie had joined the middle-class New Century Club and rehabilitated her reputation as a pioneering reformer and advocate of sewing women. Tommy Morgan, George Schilling, and other Chicago labor leaders were pursuing the kind of moderate, ballot-driven socialism that Parsons deplored. Governor Altgeld appointed Schilling secretary of the Illinois Board of Labor Statistics, signaling the growing respectability of some socialist leaders within the state’s political establishment.6

Around this time there appeared a new cohort of radical editors, labor organizers, and orators, men and women toward whom Lucy Parsons felt great ambivalence. In Chicago in June 1893, Eugene V. Debs founded the American Railway Union, an industrial union of railroad employees. Debs, a thirty-eight-year-old native of Indiana, had been a longtime member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, more a fraternal order than a labor union. The following year, the bitter strike of Pullman railroad-car workers just outside Chicago would spread throughout the nation and claim the lives of thirty-four men (the US 7th Cavalry suppressed the strikers); Debs defied an injunction and went to jail. The Russian Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman, who first met Lucy Parsons in Philadelphia in 1887, was rapidly gaining notoriety for her advocacy of sexual freedom; she began to make periodic stops in Chicago under the sponsorship of the journal Free Society, which praised “variety” in love. Honoré Jaxon was a newcomer on the Chicago scene. Well educated, he had been born in 1861, in Toronto. Jaxon claimed (falsely) to be a Métis Indian, and he reveled in his role as one of the despised and persecuted. He became known as “the father of labor slugging” for his efforts during a carpenters’ strike in 1886, when he organized squads of workers into an “invading army” to strong-arm reluctant employees into joining the strike. Meanwhile, Chicago’s German immigrant community was becoming more assimilated, and Parsons was instead finding a new receptive audience in Russian Jewish garment workers, who appreciated her anticlericalism and her steady focus on unionization.7

Throughout the 1890s, true to her principles, Parsons remained warily on the sidelines of Progressive reform. She had no monopoly on the litany of execrations unleashed upon arrogant police and robber barons; but she bristled at radical Christians, socialists, and Progressive reformers, who in turn routinely lambasted anarchism as an inherently violent ideology. And though she maintained an active schedule of writing and public speaking, she found no intellectual home among the Progressives or in anarchist circles, the latter riven by deep divisions over the meaning of virtually anything and everything, whether the attentat (a burst of violence that would ignite a revolution), labor unions, or the act of sexual intercourse.

IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, CHICAGO’S population continued to grow rapidly, adding 700,000 in the course of the decade, for a total of 1,698,575 in 1900. The city was now world-famous as a commercial crossroads between East and West, notable for its new, fireproofed, metal-framed skyscrapers and for its prosperity. (An anarchist dictionary defined “prosperity” as “a condition of affairs said to exist in the U.S., and which manifests itself chiefly in strikes, riots, business depression and financial flurries.”) Meanwhile, people had discovered new ways to spend their money and time. The so-called retail wars of the decade allowed the big department stores, such as Marshall Field and Carson Pirie Scott, to build upon the ruins of their smaller, bankrupt competitors. Clustered on and around State Street, these giant stores beckoned to buyers with revolving doors, colorful window displays, and tastefully arranged merchandise on low-lying shelves. In the middle of the shopping district could be found Kinetoscope parlors and penny arcades that gave viewers glimpses of startling scenes, such as exotic animals on the run. Baseball games drew crowds of spectators, as did boxing and wrestling matches.8

Most thrilling of all were the new amusement parks, affordable even for the working poor, where the universal appeal of rides and “freak shows” broke down social hierarchies (except those that subordinated African Americans). White men and women, boys and girls, rich and poor rubbed shoulders in line and on rides. Insular ethnic entertainments—the Sunday-afternoon picnics in Ogden’s Grove, the political meetings in Turner Hall, the family gatherings in private homes—now seemed old-fashioned compared to attractions that lured people out of their neighborhoods. For many Chicagoans, commercialized leisure beckoned in the form of a grand, fantastical democracy, with all people sharing in the pleasures of watching spectacles and buying brand-name goods. For skeptics on the left, such amusements amounted merely to unwelcome distractions, where spending money superseded waging class warfare.9

However, this emerging consumer culture could not forestall larger economic developments with international reverberations—a crash in wheat prices, the overproduction of goods, and the overbuilding of railroads. The ensuing nationwide depression, compounded by decades of hardship among ordinary families, gave rise to the defining political movement of the 1890s—the People’s, or Populist, Party, which aimed to unite hard-pressed farmers with the urban laboring classes. The Populists favored popular referenda, government ownership of railroads, and relief for debtors, offering an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, which both seemed to be in thrall to industrial and landed interests. Some Illinois socialists initially found the new group promising. Lucy Parsons was among the few women delegates to Chicago’s local Populist convention held in late July 1892 (after the national meeting in Omaha earlier that month), and she attended at least one subsequent meeting. However, she believed that the Populists’ proposed reforms, such as the currency-expanding coinage of silver, would only serve to prop up the capitalist system and forestall the revolution, and her disdain for political parties of any kind meant that her flirtation with the Populists would be brief and half-hearted. At the same time, conservative commentators compared some of the Populist women firebrands to Parsons, dismissing Mary Ellen Lease, who was famous for her call to farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” as “principally of the Lucy Parsons style.” Soon most Chicago socialists too would abandon the Populists, whom they associated with farmers and other groups outside the boundaries of the urban proletariat.10

Chicago was no longer the place Albert Parsons had first visited when he had marveled at the exhibits in the Exposition Hall two decades before. The city was much larger, and its achievements much grander. Between May 1 and October 30, 1893, the city hosted a World’s Columbian Exposition, meant to showcase its complete and dynamic recovery from the Great Fire of 1871. Situated on the shores of Lake Michigan, the fair sprawled over seven hundred acres and featured a total of two hundred buildings, fourteen of them magnificent structures (though of flimsy wood construction) in the Beaux Arts style, all painted a glistening white. Avid city boosters applauded the exposition as a rebuttal to critics from both the radical Right and the radical Left, foreign and domestic, and groups in between. The British author Rudyard Kipling had visited the city in the summer of 1889, and after describing the “collection of miserables” who lived there, declared, of the “grotesque ferocity” of Chicago, “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.” He unfavorably compared the place, with its waterways “black as ink, and filled with untold abominations,” to far-off sinkholes: its ignorant inhabitants were “money-mad,” he wrote, “and its air is dirt.”11

Reformers contrasted Chicago’s claim to hard-earned greatness with its shameful sweatshops and tenements. In “The New Slavery,” Elizabeth Morgan asked “liberty-loving and patriotic Americans” whether they wanted visitors from around the world to see evidence that “the ‘sweater’ is king” over subjects toiling in hundreds of squalid dens scattered throughout the “Garden City of the Great West.” The British journalist William T. Stead timed his scathing indictment of the Chicago establishment to coincide with the exposition. In his book If Christ Came to Chicago! he lambasted the city’s famously corrupt politicians; the churches “at ease in Zion,” ignoring the poor; the lawless police; and the smug businessmen who lorded over it all.12

The fair attracted an estimated 27 million visitors from the United States and abroad and boasted exhibit halls sponsored by forty-six foreign governments. Newness and innovation were the watchwords: in technology—phosphorescent lamps, the forerunner of the zipper, and a moving walkway along the Lake Michigan shoreline; in commercial products—Quaker Oats and Juicy Fruit gum; and in the science of racism—“civilized” Americans juxtaposed to “savage” dark-skinned peoples. Not surprisingly, the fair was a flashpoint for controversy; the clergy and middle-class arbiters of morality feared that keeping it open on Sundays (the only day working-class families could attend) would degrade the Sabbath and attract “an element which is a constant menace to law and order, and even to human life.”13

The so-called White City lived up to its name in a literal sense. Organizers intentionally left African Americans out of the planning, excluded black male applicants from the fair’s elite police corps, and banned black patrons from the fairgrounds except for “Colored People’s Day,” August 25—“Darkies Day at the Fair.” Attendees on that day were given free watermelon. Exhibits sponsored by the various US states portrayed black workers as servants and menials. The fair’s practices mirrored the exclusion of blacks from many Chicago theaters and amusements. More broadly, though, the White City promoted the idea that African Americans belonged to a “race” inherently inferior to whites.14

The exposition provided the intellectual rationale for the constraints under which Chicago’s blacks residents lived and labored every day. Within this expanding city, most were forced to “loiter around the edges of industry,” in the words of a black activist and public intellectual at the time, Kelly Miller. The women served as domestics, the men as unskilled laborers who were periodically enlisted as strikebreakers whenever white teamsters, stockyard workers, wagon and carriage makers, and coal miners walked off the job. Prominent white Chicago reformers, including the proprietors of Hull House, remained indifferent to the plight of blacks, or went public with their bigotry: Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, approved the lynching of southern black men as a means to ensure “the safety of woman, of childhood, of the home.” Socialists remained preoccupied with factory and craft workers; Tommy Morgan showed interest in blacks only when they discussed joining a third party—which they did periodically, the Republicans and Democrats having failed them completely. Debs excluded blacks from the founding American Railway Union convention and tolerated a discriminatory division of labor favored by white workers. His decision contributed to the failure of the Pullman strike in 1894, when black men served as scabs. For her part, Lucy Parsons made a single, passing reference to the problem of lynching in the South in an issue of Freedom, but ignored the plight of black wage slaves. Her views were in keeping with the attitudes of those radicals in whose circles she moved.15

Although Chicago’s black community represented less than 2 percent of the city’s population, by the 1890s it boasted a vibrant, if tiny, middle class of physicians, lawyers, and editors; its own newspaper, the weekly Conservator (edited by a lawyer, Ferdinand Lee Barnett); four churches; small businesses, such as saloons and barbershops; and a number of charitable, fraternal, and mutual-aid societies. Outspoken leaders pressed for legislation to end lynching and disfranchisement in the South and institutional bias in the North. Women activists took the lead in these efforts. Alarmed at the mean-spiritedness animating the World’s Columbian Exposition, Fannie Barrier Williams, the wife of Barnett’s law partner, told the exposition’s Board of Lady Managers, “We ask to be known and recognized for what we are worth. If it be the high purpose of these deliberations to lessen the resistance to woman’s progress, you cannot fail to be interested in our struggles against the many oppositions that harass us.”16

Lucy Parsons had no affinity for the high-minded protests of Barrier Williams, a national leader in the black women’s club movement and a proponent of the politics of respectability and “uplift.” Yet it is intriguing to speculate about the way Parsons might have reacted to another black woman of Chicago, newcomer Ida B. Wells, who in 1895 married the Conservator’s Barnett. Born in Memphis in 1862, Wells-Barnett had taught school and edited that city’s black paper Free Speech and Headlight. In 1889, whites lynched three of her friends, grocers who had competed with a white store in town. She condemned the atrocity in no uncertain terms, indicting not only the killers and the Memphis authorities but also the larger white South for its complicity in state-sponsored terrorism. In response, while she was away from the city, a white mob burned her office. She never returned to Memphis. Recognized as the nation’s most fearless anti-lynching agitator, she arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1893, fresh from a speaking tour in England. She quickly began to raise funds to publish a pamphlet, “The Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Wells-Barnett wrote two of its four essays, including one on “Lynch Law,” consisting of graphic written and visual accounts of actual murders. As in her other writings, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), Wells-Barnett blamed “the better class of citizens” in the South for tolerating lynching, and she exposed the myth of the black rapist as a mere pretext for the mutilation, hanging, and burning alive of black men.17

Wells-Barnett resembled Parsons in certain striking respects. Born a slave, she, too, attained only a basic common education but proved to be a gifted writer, newspaper editor, and speaker who was sought after by sympathetic audiences in the United States and Europe. She urged black households to keep loaded rifles in their homes and to use them if necessary. Observers contrasted her ladylike demeanor with her bold forays into taboo subjects, such as sadistic torture and the political use of threats or false claims of sexual relations between black men and white women. However, even some who admired her courage considered her writings and lectures to be reckless and self-defeating, and certain to offend potential supporters. She and Parsons both opposed the United States’ new imperialist ventures in the 1890s, with Wells-Barnett making explicit links between the oppression of blacks at home and the exploitation of dark-skinned peoples abroad. Yet it is doubtful that Parsons and Wells-Barnett ever met, and neither referred to the other in her writings.18

At the end of August 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition organizers convened what they called a Congress on Labor. The meeting took place against a backdrop of workers’ daily demonstrations at the lakefront; on August 21, 400 unemployed packinghouse workers chanting “We want work” had fought with police. Speakers at the labor conference included not only Samuel Gompers, Terence V. Powderly, Eugene V. Debs, and Henry George, but also Jane Addams, Mary Ellen Lease, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. On August 30, delegates responded to the tumult out-of-doors and adjourned to the lakefront, where Debs and Morgan mounted wagons to address a crowd of 25,000. Social reformers and conservative labor leaders acknowledged the plight of the masses, but they were moving toward strategies for change—such as government intervention, and conservative unions—that took them in the opposite direction from where Lucy Parsons and her comrades were heading.19

THE FEW BELEAGUERED CHICAGO ANARCHISTS MIGHT HAVE considered Lucy Parsons’s absence from the Congress of Labor to be a major lapse on the part of the conveners, but only the most naïve observers would have expected her to receive such official sanction. The police were still looking for discreet ways to silence her—ways that would not cause alarming headlines about angry protests to be splashed across the front pages of the city’s newspapers. Gone were the days when undercover agents and mainstream journalists sought a cozy, mutually beneficial relationship with the anarchists. Authorities now feared that attention from the press could give the mistaken impression that anarchism as a movement was gaining ground in the city. Increasingly common were meetings where Parsons would begin to speak, only to have a police officer, or in some cases the chief himself, step forward, lay hands on her, and warn her “to mention no names and to preserve order” (as at Turner Hall in November 1895). In some instances an officer actually pulled her off the stage as she struggled to resist; she would call out “Liberty is dead in Chicago.”20

Parsons, however, remained a favorite at mass meetings among unemployed and striking workers, fundraisers for radical newspapers, and assemblies of diehard anarchists. She maintained her reputation as Chicago’s “leading anarchistress” and an agitator of “intemperate gall.” On April 27, 1894, she addressed the members of (Jacob) Coxey’s Army, a protest started by an Ohio businessman of the same name to demand public works jobs for the poor. Together with Lizzie Swank Holmes, she joined the Women’s Commonweal Society. This female auxiliary was supposed to offer good cheer to the army’s 1,028 members streaming in from all over the Midwest, a new and rather demure role for the unpredictable Mrs. Parsons. On April 28, the men clamored for her to speak, but march organizers stopped her, fearing that she would discredit the movement if her listeners did not comport themselves in an orderly way. Nevertheless, one day she spontaneously joined the program of speakers and told the army “that they were belched up from the hearts of the people… and they deserved the good things of the earth.” The rumor that Parsons was the mysterious veiled lady who traveled with the army proved to be unfounded, but it did nothing to dispel her mystique in the mainstream press as an anarchist femme fatale.21

Almost every November 11, Parsons addressed the annual Haymarket observance, although from 1895 onward Waldheim Cemetery refused to allow mourners to gather there, forcing them to regroup in Turner Hall or Greif’s Hall. She objected to the call for the Pioneer Aid and Support Association to disinter the corpse of her husband and the others and relocate them to a more hospitable burial ground, arguing that the thousands of dollars such a move would cost might be better spent elsewhere. The editors of the Arbeiter Zeitung refused to publish her objections to the plan, suspecting that she feared that her own stipend would be reduced if funds were earmarked to move the bodies.22

Some years on November 11 she observed the day in Milwaukee, on at least two occasions (in 1893 and 1895) in the company of Johann Most. In Chicago in 1896, a police captain interrupted her speech in Turner Hall, just as she was denouncing “You hideous murderers!” and refused to let her continue, prompting an “uproar” and a near-riot among the crowd. The Reverend Graham Taylor, a Presbyterian minister who founded the Chicago Commons settlement house in 1894, later vividly remembered the event. Describing his first impressions of Lucy Parsons, he wrote: “Her appearance on the platform was impressive. Tall, well built and poised, self-possessed and commanding attention by her serious manner and resonant voice, she began to speak thus: ‘I am the widow of Albert R. Parsons and the mother of his son. I charge the police and the court with murdering my husband. I live to bring up his son to take up the work which was stricken from his father’s hands.’” At that point the police officer mounted the stage, “touched her lightly,” and arrested her for disorderly conduct.23

The politics of the commemoration were on display each year with the choice of speakers. Parsons attended but did not speak in 1893, when the ceremony honored the freed prisoners Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab, and she did not appear at all in 1899. The featured speaker that year was someone whom Parsons might have immediately recognized as a rival—the thirty-three-year-old Philadelphia anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre. Named for the French philosopher, de Cleyre had grown up in a poor household in Michigan. Of her formative years in a Catholic convent, she later said: “It had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days.” De Cleyre wrote and spoke extensively, especially on what she considered the baneful influence of organized religion on the individual’s freedom of sexual expression.24

During these years Chicago anarchists hardly constituted a movement, but they did seek a wider audience, and they basked in the attention flowing from periodic visits of well-known activists based elsewhere, including de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and one of anarchy’s best-known theoreticians, Peter Kropotkin. Parsons also belonged to a wider radical community forged in the pages of papers published around the country. She read Lucifer the Lightbearer (edited in 1883–1907 by Moses Harman), Demonstrator (1903–1904, various editors), Firebrand (1895–1897, Henry Addis), and Free Society (1897–1904, Abe Isaak), among others. She found no ideological home in Benjamin Tucker’s Boston paper Liberty (1881–1908), with its focus on radical individualism as the basis of a new society, in opposition to her emphasis on trade unions. Writing for another Boston anarchist paper, Rebel: A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Exposition of Anarchist Communism, in 1895, she sought to contextualize the anxieties of the age, bringing Marx into conversation with the “frontier thesis” that historian Frederick Jackson Turner first explained at the 1893 Chicago exposition. Now that the East Coast cities were coming to resemble the crowded factory towns of England, it would not be long before “the billows of discontent will roll up from the masses, the ruling class will attempt to drive them back in a sea of blood, but the pages of history show how futile has ever been this attempt, when those billows were along the lines of evolution.”25

IN THE LATE 1890S PARSONS RECOILED FROM WHAT SHE CONSIDERED a shocking new trend in anarchist ideology—radical libertarianism in the form of sexual freedom for men and women, called “varietism” in sexual relations. Lucifer ran essays with titles such as “Nudity” (“Why should nudity be considered immodest?”), and Firebrand discussed “Sex Ethics” (against “false modesty”) and “The Sexual Organs” (men and women should succumb to each other’s “magnetism”). Parsons lost little time in distancing herself in print from the idea that “it is not greater restriction that is needed in sexual relations, but greater freedom,” as one writer in the Firebrand put it. The September 27, 1896, issue of the paper published a letter she wrote to the editor under the title “Objections to Variety.” Parsons ridiculed the idea of free sex as wishful thinking among people past reproductive age; but she also expressed apprehension about how such a “damnable doctrine” might corrupt younger people and ultimately poison the parent-child relationship, since presumably the mother could never be sure of the identity of the father of her offspring. To Parsons, “family life, child life” were the “sweetest words.” She held that women’s subordinate status stemmed not from a sexual double-standard that denied them “variety” in life, but from their dependence on men that made them perpetual drudges at home.26

Parsons wrote that women would never freely choose “variety” in sex: “We love the names of father, home and children too well for that.” If “varietism” had anything to do with anarchism, she said, “then I am not an Anarchist.” In subsequent issues, writers chided her for allowing “old prejudices and time-worn theories to overpower her,” when what was needed was “a candid and scientific discussion of the question she has essayed to denounce.” By September 1897, the articles in response to her letter, plus other explicit writings, had attracted the attention of Portland, Oregon, authorities, where Firebrand was published, and they shut down the newspaper and jailed three of its editors—A. J. Pope, Abe Isaak, and Henry Addis—under the provisions of the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibited the use of the United States Postal Service for transmitting obscene material.27

The way that Parsons upheld the traditional double sexual standard in public was, of course, at odds with the way she lived her life in private, including the affair with Martin Lacher, at least; but here, when it came to matters of sex, as with blackness, she protested too much. The false narrative she offered of herself as a Mexican Indian maiden mirrored the false narrative she presented of the respectable widow with morals beyond reproach. Parsons seemed to believe that certain sorts of suspect behavior, such as sexual promiscuity, along with her birth as a slave, would likely discredit her in the eyes of her supporters, while other kinds of behavior, such as her shocking language in the service of anarchy, would invariably please them. At any rate, she was convinced that neither the circumstances of her birth nor her personal life-choices had any relevance to her broader political message. Thus she would pick and choose among ways of being in the world, always calculating, at times dissembling: just being Lucy Parsons must have been exhausting.

Other women in her circle chose differently. While Parsons fell back on Victorian platitudes extolling family life, Lizzie Swank Holmes grappled in the open with complicated issues of female sexuality and independence. In 1893, Moses Harman’s free-love paper Lucifer serialized Swank Holmes’s novel Hagar Lyndon, which portrayed a young woman struggling to maintain her integrity in the midst of a disapproving world. The novel includes several elements that appear to be at least semiautobiographical: Hagar has two children but yearns for the carefree days of her youth. She leaves her hot-tempered husband and works as a seamstress, eventually choosing to become a single mother; but even in the big city she faces stern disapproval from neighbors and acquaintances. She throws herself into organizing impoverished sewing women, only to have them resent her meddlesome ways. To save her son from disgrace, she finally agrees to marry a friend, who offers her the refuge of respectability as well as a measure of freedom. Thus Hagar compromises her principles against marriage to live in a world that seemingly has no room for a woman truly free.28

Lucy Parsons eschewed that kind of public soul-searching, but it was not often that she endured the scorn of other anarchists, who now took her to task for her narrow-mindedness, citing her defense of “slavery”—in this case the “bondage” that was monogamy. As if that were not insult enough, she also probably resented the emerging fame of the most famous free-love proponent, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who made Chicago a regular stop on her tours around the country. Goldman expressed little faith in labor unions—indeed, one of her favorite themes was “the cancer of trade unionism and the corruption of its leaders.” Instead, she stressed the destructive effects of laws that promoted marriage and punished adultery in an effort to regulate the sex lives of men and women. Although both anarchists were prone to fiery pronouncements, Parsons and Goldman preached different gospels to the faithful.29

Much to Parsons’s aggravation, the popular press in Chicago and around the country often yoked her to Goldman—both were called “red-mouthed anarchists”—although the two women were not shy about acknowledging their differences. In October 1897, Goldman arrived in Chicago to raise money for the defense of the three jailed Firebrand editors, finding a dirty, smoky city overwhelmed by the stench of slaughterhouses and full of “tattered creatures, crippled, gaunt faces.” She observed, “Chicago is undoubtedly London on a reduced scale; in no other city in America does gray misery stare you so glaringly in the face as here.” She spoke to a large group at a fundraiser on October 13, and later expressed dismay about the event:

The success of the meeting was unfortunately weakened by Lucy Parsons who, instead of condemning the unjustified, vile arrest of the three comrades in Portland and the ever increasing censorship by Comstock and associates, took a stand against the editor of the Firebrand, H. Addis, because he tolerated articles about free love in the columns of the Firebrand. Apart from the fact that anarchism not only teaches freedom in economic and political areas, but also in social and sexual life, L. Parsons has the least cause to object to treatises on free love…. I spoke after Parsons and had a hard time changing the unpleasant mood that her remarks elicited.

Goldman considered Parsons a hypocrite who followed free-love principles in her own life, but spoke openly only of her desire for conventional respectability. More generally, Goldman would become convinced that Parsons’s fame depended wholly on her widow-martyrdom, rather than on any original contributions she made to the cause of anarchism. In spreading this view, Goldman failed to appreciate Parsons’s courage as an orator-agitator and as a source of inspiration to a segment of the laboring classes.30

Goldman and Parsons had appeared together on a Chicago stage several months earlier, in June, when they were among the delegates to the founding convention of the Social Democracy of America (SDA), a group launched by Eugene Debs. Emerging from prison after the Pullman strike a committed socialist, Debs favored a cooperative commonwealth that hearkened back to agitation in the 1870s and 1880s. Lucy Parsons admired Debs’s commitment to industrial unionism, and, for a while, together with Honoré Jaxon, she played a leadership role in the SDA, serving on its board of directors. She also headed its Branch 2. Yet within a matter of weeks Debs sought to censor her and the branch. On September 10, 1897, police had killed nineteen striking miners in Pennsylvania, prompting Branch 2 to issue a statement in which its leaders “not only denounced the Hazleton shooting as a well-planned murder, but endorsed the eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth policy of killing millionaires in retaliation and of burning the homes of the rich.” Debs quickly suspended the charter of the branch, declaring, “We believe in the ballot, not in bullets.” By this time authorities were condemning the SDA as a plot instigated by “Herr Most, Mrs. Lucy Parsons and others of that ilk”—in other words, it was treason under the guise of free speech. Debs had hoped that his faith in political action would inoculate him from criticism, but his association with what the press called “the anarchist negress” and her “bloodthirsty followers” threatened to cripple his efforts. Speaking to a rowdy meeting of Branch 2 members, Parsons had denounced Debs—“there is not a fool in all the world with a bigger heart and a smaller brain”—and the “toads” who were his followers. In feuding with Goldman and Debs, Parsons set herself apart from the most prominent anarchist and the most prominent socialist of that generation.31

AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, REPORTERS BEGAN TO take note of Parsons’s relative inactivity, what they called her “fretful silence,” as defined by her absence from the columns of the daily newspaper. Meanwhile, her life had settled into a largely predictable routine. She still lived with her son in the same two-and-a-half-story frame dwelling in Avondale (the street name and number would change to 1777 North Troy Street). She enjoyed tending her front-yard flower garden. For income she depended on her stipend from Pioneer Aid, the proceeds from Life of Albert R. Parsons, and the boarders who occupied part of the house. She also made small sums teaching anarchist Sunday school and selling eggs and chickens. In April 1898, she went on a speaking tour of the East Coast, addressing audiences in Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.32

Around this time she became a peddler, traveling around her neighborhood selling tea, coffee, soap, and spices from a horse-drawn wagon. She thus joined several thousand other Chicagoans who took up this livelihood because of its low capitalization costs (she did not need to keep her wares hot like the pieman or cold like the iceman), the flexibility it offered in terms of working hours, and the sociability inherent in going door-to-door among neighbors. The 15th Ward was still home to sturdy German immigrant householders, mainly small entrepreneurs and skilled craftsmen and women. Although it is hard to reconcile the image of the plodding peddler of teas with the famous labor agitator, Parsons needed to make money, and she could probably count on the patronage of those who knew her best.33

Perhaps mistakenly believing that the legendary Mrs. Parsons had entered into genteel retirement, reporters would come to her door periodically and ask for an interview. On a Friday in December 1894, M. I. Dexter found her at home; it was her day off from peddling. Once he assured her he was not a bill collector, she received him, dressed (he wrote) in “blood-red garments,” her long, dark hair straight, “comely for one in whose veins flows a considerable infusion of negro blood, and of much more than average intelligence.” “Altogether she presents a striking appearance,” he wrote, more taken with her looks than with her views.34

Parsons continued to suffer her share of personal crises, some of her own making. In February 1895, she took a nasty fall, hurting her arm, and employed a neighbor, a Mrs. Witherspoon, to help her around the house. Later that month Parsons sued the woman’s husband, John Witherspoon, for breaking down her front door. He explained to the judge that “Mrs. Parsons was trying to pour socialistic teachings into the mind” of his wife, but the court did not consider this a sufficient defense, and fined him $25. And then early one morning in August 1896, Parsons left a gas stove on while she went to the basement, and came back upstairs to find the house engulfed in flames. Lost were mementos of Haymarket, including the easy chair that Albert had used in jail, and one of the toy boats he carved, as well as part of her extensive library, painstakingly assembled over many years. Her son managed to escape, as did her boarders—John McIntosh and his mother, and Charles M. Secondo, a thirty-six-year-old Swiss-born marble-cutter. She tried to sell the hundreds of copies of Life of Albert R. Parsons damaged by smoke and water for 30 cents each, a literal fire sale.35

Parsons had spent her East Coast tour of 1898 denouncing the atrocities of the Spanish toward the Cuban people as well as the US imperialist ventures that she believed had been conducted under the pretext of ending those atrocities. Anarchists around the world played a prominent role in the anticolonial struggles of this period, although Parsons seems not to have engaged in her writings with these freedom fighters. In July 1899, however, the US-Spanish-Cuban-Filipino War assumed a personal dimension for her. On the blistering hot day of the sixteenth, she was standing on a State Street sidewalk, calling upon young men to shun military service. The United States was seeking to crush Filipino rebels, the heirs of freedom movements everywhere, including the American Revolution of 1776: “Every stripe of the American flag has become a whip for the monopolist to thrash your backs with. Every star in that flag represents the distilled tears of the children who work out their lives in the factories.” American troops would only do the bidding of American millionaires bent on subjugating the Filipino people.36

Parsons had placed an ad in the paper the night before announcing this sidewalk address, and so a large and expectant, if sweat-drenched, crowd gathered to hear her. Regardless of their reaction, her argument, directed to young men—suggesting that they “refuse to go to those far-off islands for the purpose of riveting the chains of a new slavery on the limbs of the Filipinos”—failed to resonate with her own son. Now twenty-one, Albert Junior was a high school graduate and employed as a clerk. Ignoring his mother’s agitation against the deployment of young male “fighting machines” to serve abroad, he announced that he intended to enlist in one of the new regiments and ship off to the Philippines. The news precipitated a physical altercation between the two of them, and on July 21 Lucy Parsons took her son to court, claiming he tried to stab her with a knife. A week later, she switched venues, moving the case from Cook County’s criminal court to the county insane court. At a hearing she made the startling charge that Albert Junior was “mentally unsound.” In response to the judge’s queries, according to a reporter, the youth answered “in a calm, well-balanced intelligent manner,” and then accused his mother of wanting to be rid of him so she could get hold of his property. Several of Albert’s friends told the judge they saw no signs of mental instability. Nevertheless, the judge pronounced him insane and ordered him sent to the Elgin Asylum, where he would spend the rest of his life in misery.37

It is impossible to account fully for what appears to be Parsons’s act of gratuitous cruelty toward her son (not to mention the willingness of the judge to comply with her spiteful wishes). Certainly Junior’s decision to join the army represented a dramatic repudiation of his own mother, and she was not one to suffer public humiliation in silence. It is possible that she genuinely feared that he posed a physical threat to her; perhaps the losses he had suffered in life had made him an angry, resentful young man. Certainly, Albert was not the dutiful son she had wanted; by this time he had turned to spiritualism, signaling he would not be following in his father’s footsteps. He might have considered his mother’s extramarital sexual activity unforgivably disrespectful toward the memory of his father. And he had run away before. Whether Parsons intended to teach her son a (temporary) lesson, or truly wanted him out of her life altogether, and whether she saw Elgin as the better alternative compared to the Cook County jail or the state prison in Joliet, cannot be known; regardless, mental institutions such as this one had a well-deserved reputation for the physical and emotional abuse of their inmates.38

On June 5, 1900, a federal census-taker recorded that Lucy Parsons was living in her mortgaged Troy Street house and that her business was “coffee.” She gave her birthdate as 1854 and reported that she and her father had been born in Texas, her mother in Mexico. Living with her since at least 1896 was Charles M. Secondo, the Swiss-born marble-cutter. Accurate or not, rumors persisted about Lucy Parsons’s proclivity for young immigrant men—her long-term “boarders.”39

Parsons was forty-nine years old, and more than a quarter century removed from Waco. She might have left behind small-town Texas, never to think of it again, but the citizens of Waco still reminisced about the Parsonses. In 1896, speaking to a reporter for The American Magazine of Civics, the president of Baylor University, the Reverend Rufus C. Burleson, talked about Albert Parsons and took the opportunity to muse upon the evils of drink. Burleson said that Parsons had become “a victim of the saloon, left college, lost caste, and joined his fortunes with the corrupt elements in local politics, and sunk so low that even white scalawags turned against him. An unusually intelligent mulatto woman, until then a respectable married woman, became infatuated with him, and the pair fled together to Chicago, where the subsequent record of both is well known.” It is doubtful that Albert Parsons ever overindulged in alcohol; indeed, he always showed remarkable self-discipline in his roles as editor and orator. Yet the portrait of the upstanding-young-man-gone-wrong offered a narrative that absolved Baylor (if not the good citizens of Waco, who licensed the saloon) of any responsibility for his later waywardness.40

Perhaps other Wacoites also pondered the fate of Lucy and Albert Parsons, wondering what might have been had she not fallen in love with the ambitious young Republican. Lucy’s former owner, T. J. Taliaferro, had died in 1886. Oliver Benton had married a woman named Della when she was just seventeen—about the same age as Lucy when he had first met her—and he would turn sixty-five in 1900. Living at home with Oliver and Della were eight children ranging in age from seven to twenty-five, with Effie, thirteen, and Mary, twelve, in school, a testament to Oliver’s reliability as a breadwinner and his abiding faith in schooling for girls. For all Lucy Parsons’s insistent evocations of those sweetest of words, “family life, child life,” she had chosen to sever, irrevocably, her connections to her son, Albert; her mother, Charlotte; her stepfather, Charlie; and Oliver Benton.41

IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF THE NEW CENTURY, LUCY PARSONS SEEMED unmoored. The police feared her, and social reformers regarded her with curiosity touched with pity. The immigrant laboring classes honored her as the widow of a Haymarket martyr, but their leaders marginalized her and tried to keep her off the platform at their meetings. She remained at war with the local anarchist press. In 1897, the anarchist periodical Free Society (the successor to the defunct Firebrand) moved to Chicago; its editors, the Russian Mennonites Abe Isaak and his wife, Maria, and their son, Abe Junior, published pieces by well-known radicals, including Goldman, de Cleyre, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joseph Labadie, and Jay Fox, a blacksmith and member of Debs’s American Railway Union who had been wounded at the Haymarket when he was sixteen. As for Lucy Parsons, she no longer had an outlet in the form of a periodical that she controlled.

Still, Parsons remained one of Chicago’s best-known radicals. In October 1900, she seemed pleased to talk to a reporter, and he returned the favor by writing that she was “the dominating figure in the anarchist circles of Chicago.” The story ran in several newspapers with the headline, “An Anarchist Queen: Lucy Parsons, the Head of the Chicago Reds.” Like many of his profession before him, the reporter was struck by her appearance: “Her face is brown, oval, and well shaped, although her ears are rather badly turned.” He wrote that Parsons had been born “on the brown barrens of a Texas ranch” of a Creek mother and a “pure Mexican father.” Relatively little space in the piece was given over to her ideas, which in any case received lighthearted treatment: “Her creed is education, agitation, evolution, with an occasional revolution thrown in to make things lively.” In subsequent months Parsons would be featured in other articles on “Noted Women Anarchists.” The Cleveland Leader ran a story suggesting that her career “goes far to justify a theory lately pronounced, namely, that anarchy is most virulent in races of African and Oriental admixture.” Anarchism’s appeal for Albert Parsons could be found most clearly in his marriage to a woman who “claims Mexican descent, but is unmistakenly a mulatto.” According to this new pseudoscientific racism, Lucy was a radical because it came to her “naturally,” via her genes.42

Over the next few years, dramatic developments at home and abroad convinced Chicago’s authorities that Parsons still represented a real threat to national and local security. Robert Pinkerton, the brother of Allan Pinkerton and now the head of the eponymous private security force, recommended that the United States establish “an anarchist colony, a place where every person who wants anarchy can have it”—preferably on some island in the Philippines. There, Parsons, Goldman, and Most might rant and rave, but they would be forced to support themselves by tilling the soil as peasants of old.43

The authorities’ renewed apprehension over Parsons and other radicals stemmed from instances of political violence abroad, fears of crime and other sources of disorder in Chicago, and the growing—to some observers insidious—respectability of socialists in the United States. US journalists’ accounts of the assassination of King Umberto I in Italy by an anarchist in July 1900 often mentioned Parsons as either a possible influence on the killer or one of his backers, connections she did not seek to discourage. In early August, at a boisterous meeting called to express approval of the recent “removal” of the Italian king, Parsons announced to the press that she was helping to plan a conference of like-minded radicals in Paris the following month (if it took place, she did not attend). On August 5, she was on her way to a daytime meeting to discuss “the Execution of the King of Italy” when she found the door to the hall locked. Seeking shade from the sun on the steps of a nearby building, she was taken aback when several police officers rushed her. One seized her by the arm and ordered her to move along, which she refused to do. He charged her (and four others) with disorderly conduct, obstructing the street, distributing incendiary literature, and resisting arrest. In dispersing the crowd that had gathered, forty-five policemen beat and wounded twenty-five protesters. They hesitated to detain Parsons, but her “defiant manner” left them no choice. She was subsequently fined $50, which she refused to pay, and the newly formed Chicago Free Speech League offered to defend her. Gradually, violent events abroad were putting Parsons on the defensive; anarchy, she now maintained, stemmed not from the desire to create chaos, but from the need to recapture “the democracy of 70 years ago.”44

When Parsons predicted that the assassination in Italy would spark “a renaissance of anarchy,” she did little to calm the nerves of anxious Chicagoans, who saw mayhem everywhere. In the city, peaceful demonstrations by striking workers often turned bloody, thanks to the brutal tactics of police and private security forces. An 1890s uptick in violent crime (especially domestic abuse, murder, and armed robbery) reflected not only a growing population in the city but also the proliferation of street gangs and chronic underemployment among young men. Armed now with service revolvers and not just batons, and instructed to “shoot to kill,” police on the beat shot innocent bystanders as well as suspected criminals. As a result, the police homicide rate increased fivefold between 1870 and 1920, and Chicago became the most violent city in the nation. Muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffens summed up Chicago this way: “First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nations.”45

So disgusted were middle-class reformers at the rot that lay at the heart of the city’s political economy that they were willing to listen to almost anyone who had a plan to restore democracy and take government out of the hands of what Steffens called “the enemies of the republic.” In April 1901, the anarchist Kropotkin visited Chicago as a guest of Jane Addams, and received a respectful hearing at, among other places, the Hull House–based Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, the High School Teachers Club, the Twentieth Century Club, the Industrial Art League, and the University of Illinois. Lucy Parsons believed that Kropotkin would surely enhance the credibility of local anarchists among the do-gooding, chattering classes who were seeking a way out of pervasive municipal corruption. On April 18, the prince and Parsons, who had met twelve years earlier in London, reunited at Hull House. She proposed starting a school of “elementary studies in anarchy” and naming it after him, but he declined the honor.46

Addressing a large audience at Central Music Hall on the evening of April 21, Kropotkin spoke at length about the Haymarket martyrs—presiding over the event, attorney Clarence Darrow had noted that at least Russia exiled its anarchists, while America hanged them. The prince made a point to acknowledge the presence of Parsons, who was seated on the platform next to him. Of her dead husband and his comrades, he said, “Their names are not forgotten in Europe, nor in any place where the fight is being carried on in the cause for which they bravely died.” At the same time, Kropotkin disavowed the use of violence, which, he said, is “not characteristic of anarchists or the Anarchist party.” He told his listeners that true anarchists accepted “the principle that no man nor no society has the right to take another man’s life.”47

On September 6 of that year, in Buffalo, New York, an attack on President William McKinley by a self-proclaimed anarchist led to renewed scrutiny of Parsons. McKinley died nine days later. Parsons was under a cloud of suspicion in any case because the editors of Free Society, the Isaaks, had moved to Chicago earlier that year. Going out of their way to applaud the killing of King Umberto, they tainted everyone who was a Free Society subscriber or personal acquaintance, including Parsons. When questioned about the attack on McKinley, she condemned it, averring that the assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was “undeniably a lunatic,” despite his claim at the time: “I am an anarchist. I did my duty.” She told a reporter, “No person of sound intellect would assail the head of this republic.” When the president dies, she noted, his place is immediately filled by his successor. Lest the interviewer think that she had mellowed, she added, “The trusts and those persons who control the necessaries of life are the ones against whom the energies of all classes must be focused.” Moreover, she said, “anarchism is crankism nowadays,” with ignorant, violent characters eager to wrap themselves in its mantle.48

After the McKinley assassination, Chicago authorities immediately rounded up a number of anarchists as accessories to the crime, including the Isaak family and Emma Goldman, who described the assassin as a man with the “beautiful soul of a child and the energy of a giant.” Johann Most and Carl Nold, a Detroit anarchist whom Parsons knew, were imprisoned for their alleged encouragement of the deed. McKinley’s death stoked fears of anarchy nationwide. Chicago’s Jane Addams automatically linked the assassination to anarchism and the fear it inspired: “It is impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the unfathomable sense of horror with which the community regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation as a crime against government itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens.”49

Even within this charged political atmosphere, on occasion Parsons did penetrate the walls of Chicago’s major middle-class reform institutions. She spoke before the Friendship Liberal League, the Chicago Philosophical Society, and the New Century Club. In January 1902, the Community Club of the Chicago Commons settlement house invited her to appear on the same stage with a Protestant minister, the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and a resident of the Commons, Raymond Robinson, to discuss anarchy.50

This appearance proved a challenge for both Parsons and her hosts. The head of the Commons, Graham Taylor, had heard her speak on November 11, 1896, and had been impressed by her dignified bearing then, but he expressed second thoughts once the invitation from the Commons had been tendered: “I offered no objection to the proposal, which I knew would be regarded as a supreme test of the freedom of the floor,” he said. Still, before her talk,

I suggested to her it might be an opportunity to disappoint her enemies by the calmness of her manner and the reasonableness of her speech, of which she was reputed to be incapable. Reminding her that she was not likely to be interrupted and silenced by arrest at such a privately conducted meeting, as she had been hitherto on public occasions, I expressed a hope that she could and would frankly and freely state the underlying motive which justified, to herself at least, her attitude toward the social order. The suspicioning look of one who was hunted faded from her face as she replied; “You will not be disappointed in having spoken kindly to me.”

During the presentations, she sat quietly as Robinson pointedly referred to her and said, “Progress does not come through noise and shrieks, and you cannot explode yourself into liberty.” She then delivered a prepared paper on the events and ideas that had radicalized her.51

Taylor summarized the talk this way: “Sympathetic with the poor, indignant at the harsh treatment of the unemployed, especially the foreign born when attempting public demonstrations to call attention to their plight, she traced her gradually increasing convictions until she became convinced that nothing short of the end of the existing capitalistic industrial order would bring either justice or peace.” These comments must have struck him and other leading Chicago reformers as neither particularly novel nor very threatening. It was her demeanor as much as the substance of her talk that astonished her listeners: “Then, calmly as unexpectedly, and with a reserve that was as dramatic as it was surprising to me and everyone else in the crowded room, she took her seat.” To shouts for her to continue, she replied, simply, “I have finished.”52

Parsons’s Commons speech represented no turning point in her life either in style or substance. She continued to parry with the Isaaks and other Chicago anarchists over the fate of their paper Free Society, which stressed sexual freedom and variety in life of all kinds (“We eat not one food, but many foods; health depends on judiciously varying our diet”). She tried to revive her publishing career by issuing a new edition of Life of Albert R. Parsons, telling potential buyers, “Friends, I am compelled to solicit your subscriptions in advance, because I am personally without means.” The 1903 edition featured an introduction by Clarence Darrow, who had become a noted labor lawyer and anti-imperialist; the October 1887 speeches of the convicted men; a testimonial from William H. Parsons; additional writings from Albert; and Governor Altgeld’s pardon. She replaced a drawing of herself with what she believed was a more flattering photograph—a three-quarter-length view showing her in a form-fitting striped dress. Left out of this edition were pictures of her children as well as the Pittsburgh Manifesto of the International Working People’s Association, which called for violent revolution.53

Through the 1890s and into the new century, Parsons wrote for several anarchist papers, but she avoided a new Chicago publication, International Socialist Review (ISR), founded in 1900 by Charles H. Kerr, the son of abolitionists. The ISR, a passionate advocate of the laboring classes, featured exposés and editorials with which Parsons no doubt agreed. Kerr’s company would go on to publish many works related to radical thought and action, including the history of Haymarket. However, Parsons began to lump socialists and reformers together, and even to include some anarchists in her critique, lamenting, to an audience at the Chicago Philosophical Society in 1903, that the current push for social change was “not revolutionary, but consisted of kid-glove anarchists and philosophers, who had, so to say, killed the revolutionary spirit.” For their part, “the revolutionary anarchists had crawled into their holes since 1887,” and the younger generation had been duped into debating extraneous issues such as sex.54

Parsons defined her own brand of anarchism in a speech she delivered around 1905 (probably to a well-educated, middle-class audience), and later distributed and sold in pamphlet form at 10 cents a copy. She began by reiterating her opposition to partisan politics: men running for office, she suggested, always engaged in bait-and-switch tactics, on the stump appealing for the support of the laboring classes, and then, once elected, serving the interests of the wealthy. In office, Republicans and Democrats alike pursued dictatorial policies limiting the freedom of all Americans. Anarchism, or the absence of government, was the safeguard of liberty: “Anarchism is the usher of science—the master of ceremonies of all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development.” Government relied on force, which was responsible for “nearly all the misery, poverty, crime, and confusion existing in society.” Capitalism was bound to collapse under its own weight as production became ever more efficient and increasing numbers of workers found themselves jobless. Hope lay in education and action. “Passivity while slavery is stealing over us is a crime,” and individuals had the responsibility to study and become “self-thinking” in the process. A violent revolution (if not the attentat to spark it) was inevitable because the powerful would not cede their power voluntarily.55

Since nature had existed before government, anarchism represented a pure existence uncorrupted by “thrones and scaffolds, mitres and guns.” People were naturally generous and eager to improve themselves and their families, and they gravitated toward voluntary associations, such as those organized around specific trades. Parsons hesitated to outline in any detail the ideal society because “the best thought of today may become the useless vagary of tomorrow, and to crystallize it into a creed is to make it unwieldy.” Still, she predicted that a plethora of self-regulating bodies would rely on the goodwill of their members and not the coercive powers of a state: “Every man will stand on an equal footing with his brother in the race of life, and neither chains of economic thralldom nor menial drags of superstition shall handicap the one to the advantage of the other.”56

People must free themselves from the shackles of money and labor for more noble aims: “Some higher incentive must, and will, supersede the greed for gold.” All people had “instinctive social inclinations,” as revealed in everyday family life: within a household, the members provided for themselves out of love, and protected and cared for the weakest among them. Indeed, the guiding emotion of fellow-feeling would unleash the potential of all humankind: “The Earth is so bountiful, so generous; man’s brain is so active; his hands so restless, that wealth will spring like magic, ready for the use of the world’s inhabitants. We will become as much ashamed to quarrel over its possession as we are now to squabble over the food spread before us on a loaded table.” Parsons ended with an exhortation befitting the times, as the American Federation of Labor continued to hawk its insipid reformism, despite the “manifestations of discontent now looming upon every side”: “I say to the wage class: Think clearly and act quickly, or you are lost. Strike not for a few more cents an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less.” It was no wonder that, of the countless lectures she gave, Parsons chose to reprint and sell this one, a succinct, forthright statement of her views. Copies were still available years later, and one ended up in the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (founded in 1908), the only one of Parsons’s works so recognized.57

Parsons could hardly have anticipated that the year 1905 would mark a new beginning for anti-capitalist activists, not only in the United States, but also abroad, where a real revolution was already taking hold. As the dramatic events began to unfold, she would find renewed purpose and embrace yet another generation of friends and foes.