image Chapter 12 image

Tending the Sacred Flame of Haymarket

IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, LUCY PARSONS was in danger of being rendered superfluous—relegated to a ceremonial role at annual Haymarket commemorations. For many Chicagoans, she had become an enduring, if increasingly irrelevant, presence on the political scene. Although she might still excite—and incite—crowds of white laboring men, she had little to say about the brutal turf wars among various labor unions, and in her writings she focused more on national and international issues than on working conditions in her own city. She continued to delight in tormenting the local police; but it was during this time that she found a new mission in life—keeping alive the memory of her husband, relentless in her denunciation of the miscarriage of justice that was the Haymarket trial. Lessons from the past could help to inform organizing strategies for the present, she argued. In promoting this message, she sought out new audiences and new customers for her books on the West Coast, an effort that revitalized her. And she retained staying power among ordinary working men and women who saw her as a symbol of ongoing resistance to bosses, capitalists, and the state.

In seeking to revive memories of Haymarket and at the same time agitate for a new approach to labor organizing, Parsons found a vehicle in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in Chicago in 1905. Members of the group, including socialists, anarchists, and other labor radicals—Wobblies, as they were sometimes called—aimed to position themselves in opposition to the conservative, exclusionary, craft-based American Federation of Labor. Coming together in Brand’s Hall on June 27 was an eclectic, ideologically diverse lot aiming to form “one big union” that would inspire the masses and destroy capitalism. The preamble of the IWW’s constitution featured the uncompromising rhetoric favored by the anarchists: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”1

Yet from the very beginning, the IWW amounted to an imperfect vehicle for Parsons’s message. She remained a solo activist-entrepreneur, unwilling to bow to the demands of the group over her own interests in selling her husband’s writings, starting her own newspaper, and advancing her name as principled contrarian. Her role in the founding of the IWW was an inauspicious one: it was not a triumphant resurgence of her career, but rather a troubling encounter with men who regarded her as more icon than leader. Eugene Debs was one of the founders of the group, and other native-born socialists like him predominated. On the first day of the proceedings, two of the twelve women in attendance, Lucy Parsons (now age fifty-four) and the venerable Mary “Mother” Jones (sixty-eight), sat on the platform flanking William D. “Big Bill” Haywood (thirty-six), secretary of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and chair of the convention. It was Haywood who famously remarked, “Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class”—a comment interpreted by some anarchists, at least, as evoking the American Revolution and legitimizing the violent overthrow of the current government. Later, chroniclers of the event would describe Parsons’s role primarily as that of an “honored guest,” a kind of “platform decoration” providing “dramatic visual continuity” between past and present.2

Predictably, Parsons chafed at this dismissive view of her role. On the afternoon of June 28 she made an angry speech protesting the rule that only official delegates representing specific labor organizations could vote during the proceedings. Such a rule, she charged, stifled the free exchange of ideas and encouraged power-plays based on the number of votes that delegates “carry around in their pockets.” For herself, she wanted the official status of delegate, though not the ballot that came with it. Always principled in her opposition to voting anytime, anywhere, for any person or cause, Parsons now decried “the force of numbers,” the notion that ultimately “Might makes Right.” As an informal “individual delegate,” she spoke on behalf of factory children, weary mothers, and even “that great mass of outraged humanity,” the prostitutes of Chicago. Sarcastically, she noted, “Had I simply come here to represent myself, I might as well have remained at home and not taken up the time of your deliberative body.” Her inferior status seemed to mock the core principle of the new organization, for supposedly “we are here as one brotherhood and one sisterhood,” and not as men and women invested with varying degrees of electoral privilege.3

The following day, responding to an invitation to address the convention, Parsons seemed mollified, but began her speech with false humility: “I tell you that I stand before you and feel much like a pigmy before intellectual giants.” She went on to lecture her listeners on the “solid work” that lay before them, arrayed as they all were against a common enemy fortified with money and legislative power, with guns and the hangman’s noose at the ready. She warned against making the IWW a creature of the ballot box and urged the new group to leave “no room for politics at all.” The vote had never freed a single man from the wage system, nor had it prevented man from tyrannizing woman, “the slave of a slave.” The general strike was labor’s most formidable weapon: if the landless would only seize the land, and the toilers their tools, “then there is no army large enough to overcome you, for you yourself constitute the army.”4

Calling for unity in the midst of “such differences as nationality, religion, [and] politics,” Parsons urged the delegates to rally under the banner of “revolutionary socialism,” and reminded them of that fateful day eighteen years ago, when, just two blocks away, courageous men had met their death. After the executions, the doubters had crowed, “Anarchy is dead, and these miscreants have been put out of the way.” Pausing, Parsons noted slyly, “Oh friends, I am sorry that I even had to use that word, ‘anarchy,’ just now in your presence, which was not in my mind at the outset.” She must have enjoyed the sight of the socialists squirming in their seats.5

Parsons took note of the turmoil now engulfing Russia. An attack on peaceful protesters at the St. Petersburg imperial palace six months earlier, on “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, had unleashed a torrent of strikes and demonstrations, which had been countered by brutal repression. She alluded to a headline on the front page of the June 27 issue of the Chicago Tribune—“Red Flag Raised All Over Russia”—as peasant revolts and urban insurrections shook the continent from Poland to the Caucasus. She saw the crimson banner as “the greatest terror to the capitalist class throughout the world—the emblem that has been the terror of all tyrants through all the ages.” Just as the czar and his murderous minions, the Cossacks, were awed by the sight of the flag, so, too, were the cruel robber barons of America, who understood that “the red current that flows through the veins of all humanity is identical, that the ideas of all humanity are identical.”6

At the same time, Parsons made only oblique reference to the upheaval taking place that day on the streets of Chicago. Indeed, while she was extolling the latent power of the laboring classes, a “Great Labor War” was raging there outside Brand’s Hall. In December 1904, nineteen cloth-cutters had struck against the Montgomery Ward department store for its use of nonunion subcontractors. Before long, the city was reeling from sympathy strikes, not only among other garment workers, but also, by early April, among the teamsters and the various unions of the building trades. Merchants belonging to the Employers’ Association hastily formed an Employers’ Teaming Association, which began to bring in hundreds of black strikebreakers from St. Louis and other points south. Pitched battles broke out between union sluggers and strikebreakers, between strikers and the police, and between blacks and whites. On April 29, the police fought hundreds of strikers, bringing business to a halt; a week later, a riot erupted involving 5,000 people. On May 21, two people were killed and twelve injured as a result of clashes between black scabs and white strikers. By midsummer, 21 people lay dead and 416 had been wounded.7

Several street demonstrations took place throughout the night of June 26, the eve of the first day of the IWW convention. By this time, leaked grand jury testimony implicated merchants and strike leaders alike in systematic bribe-taking; at the convention, Debs would denounce the heads of both the AFL and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT, a union formed two years before), calling them “misleaders of the working class.” Yet in her speech Parsons mentioned the ongoing strife only in passing, when she blandly suggested that the strike might have been successful had women banded together to boycott State Street stores in solidarity with the workers. She also scolded women consumers for oppressing their toiling sisters “when we go down to the department store and look around so cheap.” As for the revolutionary potential of Chicago’s laboring classes, she had nothing specific to say.8

From a great distance, Parsons could see in the Russian revolutionaries a purity of motive that was absent in her own working-class neighbors. Certainly, to a degree, Chicago’s labor conflicts lacked moral clarity. (Around this time the journalist Hutchins Hapgood searched in vain for a “typical” worker in Chicago, “the place where labor is most riotous, most expressive,” but he found that diverse, “vigorous personalities” and “the richness of human material” made generalizations about labor impossible.) Within the wagoners’ retail, construction, and service industries, craft-union labor leaders and small-business employers were in the process of developing systems of self-governance enforced with threats, fists, and guns. These trade systems remained apart from the large companies that dominated meatpacking, steel, retail sales, and banking—businesses for which Chicago’s corporate elite was world-famous. The craft economy depended on clusters of laborers, some skilled, some not, who provided fuel, food, and shelter to the city’s swelling population (it had grown by more than 800,000 in the last decade and a half). Within this subeconomy, union leaders colluded with small businessmen and bribed public officials to enforce territorial imperatives—neighborhood boundaries fixed by one group or another—that remained outside the reach of lawmakers and reformers.9

This state of affairs contradicted Parsons’s narrative of a monumental clash between good worker and evil employer. During a 1902 teamsters’ strike, members of that union attacked meatpackers trying to make deliveries. Restaurants and commercial laundries were firing black workers and hiring white women, and even the tentatively egalitarian Culinary Alliance was forcing black members from its ranks. Slaughterhouse workers contended with deskilling, not only as a result of new machinery, but also because bosses reduced their jobs to many small tasks and replaced skilled butchers (the “aristocrats” of their craft) with unskilled immigrants. Unrest in the spring of 1905 seemed a grim reprise of the stockyard and packinghouse workers’ actions the summer before, when employers imported 2,000 black scabs, and then fired them after the defeat of the strike. Had Parsons faced up to facts such as these, she would not have expressed bafflement that the “ordinary, everyday wealth producers” remained dispirited and passive even “as the aggressions of capital become more and more acute.” Despite the city’s many violent strikes, she saw no sign of a radicalized working class, no sign that anarchism was gaining broad-based favor.10

Not surprisingly, given the political heterogeneity of its supporters, the IWW soon dissolved into factionalism and infighting. Delegates to the founding convention disagreed about whether or not the new organization should endorse sabotage in the form of machine breaking, working slowly, or supporting guerrilla tactics over strikes. Debs and Jones opposed the IWW’s stance against partisan politicking, Debs because he hoped the group would become an arm of the Socialist Party, Jones because she believed that two million AFL members represented a formidable potential voting bloc, which, if weaned off retrograde leaders, might add to the Wobblies’ clout. In Detroit, IWW members disapproved of what they considered their Chicago counterparts’ fixation on free speech. And though the founders agreed that organizing all industrial workers would help to bring about the revolution, the efficacy of the AFL remained in question—were craft unions obsolete, or were they useful tools for the eventual dismantling of capitalism? These ongoing disputes, combined with Chicago’s chaotic labor scene, meant that the “one big union” would not make much headway in the city of its birth.11

Nevertheless, Lucy Parsons quickly began to build on the excitement generated by the IWW among radicals of various persuasions; the new group offered up possibilities for her as editor, speaker, and purveyor of radical literature. On September 3, she launched The Liberator, a new publication named for the abolitionist paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The masthead of the weekly stated that it was “Issued under the label of the IWW” (though not as an official organ of the group) and “devoted to revolutionary propaganda along lines of anarchist thought.” Readers were assured that the new union was a product of “industrial evolution[;] hence it is bound to succeed.” Subscribers paid $1 a year, and single copies sold for 2 cents each. Parsons, the sole editor, worked out of an office at 466 Van Buren Street.12

This latest publishing venture represented an exhilarating challenge for Parsons. She controlled the content of each issue, and wrote many of the articles herself, demonstrating her reach and erudition. “Everyday Reflections” served up exhortations: “Workingmen, the landlords and bosses generally trust you to provide the army and the police to protect their right to plunder you. Let their ‘trust’ be in vain.” Her series “Labor’s Long Struggle with Capitalism” began with Greek and Roman slavery and progressed through feudalism and the dawn of industry up to the present day, with trade unions gradually passing into the mists of history. She included poetry and recycled speeches and writings by herself and her late husband. She also published material by the famous anarchist C. L. James; Andrew (Al) Klemencic, a tailor who had worked as a labor organizer in Hawaii; and Albert Ryan of the Western Federation of Miners. Issues of The Liberator carried ads for her books, the sales of which served as the bedrock of her livelihood—Life of Albert R. Parsons (available clothbound for $1.25, in half-morocco for $1.75), Altgeld’s Pardon of the Anarchists, and Famous Speeches, reproducing speeches of the Haymarket martyrs. The special issue of November 11, 1905, took the form of a commemorative pamphlet ($2 for one hundred copies, $1.50 for fifty).13

In the April 1906 Liberator, Parsons offered a succinct endorsement of a free press: “The press is the medium through which we exchange ideas, keep abreast of the times, take gauge of battle and see how far the class conflict has progressed. It is by the press we educate the public mind and link the people of most distant parts together in bonds of fraternity and comradeship. We can keep track of the work and accomplishments of our comrades in no other way, except by the medium of paper.” It was as an editor, as well as both writer and speaker, that Parsons earned distinction as a consistent fighter on the free-speech frontlines and found a way to associate herself with, and at the same time remain outside, the IWW, whose leaders saw her as merely decorative.14

The Liberator Group, a small band of devoted followers of the paper who raised money for it, also provided the kind of community that had been sorely lacking in Parsons’s life for several years. Reminiscent of the old days, the group met fortnightly and heard lectures (some in Yiddish); it also sponsored picnics, debates, and evening concerts. In what was perhaps an effort to compete with more modern entertainment fare, the group held an Easter “Necktie Party” in the spring of 1906. In the March 11, 1906, issue of the paper, wedged between the fourteenth installment of “Labor’s Long Struggle with Capital” (on the Great Railroad Strike of 1877) and Albert Parsons’s speech to the court of October 9, 1887, was a notice, “More about the Necktie Party”:

Girls, don’t bring a small tie

like you buy in the stores, but a

large one to match your apron,

and so you can make a

BEAUTIFUL, LARGE

BOW

When you tie it on the gentle-

man’s neck, and he will look just lovely!

The evening included an auction and a “grand necktie march” followed by a “Necktie quadrille.” The fundraiser sought to appeal to the flirtatious inclinations of the younger set, who were increasingly drawn to dimly lighted dance halls that were home to the risqué tango and shimmy.15

The effort to sustain The Liberator was an ongoing struggle. Initially Parsons had faced opposition over her decision to start the paper and publish it in Chicago. Jay Fox, whom Parsons knew as a frequent writer for Free Society, was an aspiring editor himself. He wanted to launch the paper in the anarchist commune of Home, Washington, where production costs for such a weekly would be much lower than in Chicago. Apparently he also felt that Parsons’s Liberator was geared more toward immigrants (mainly Russian Jews), and that it focused too narrowly on labor conflict. He believed that the paper needed a strong native-born contingent to manage it—what he called an “American committee.” (Parsons was quick to remind her readers that Fox himself had been born in Ireland.) She would later accuse him of stealing money from Liberator fundraisers, and of dissuading her readers from supporting the paper in favor of his own Demonstrator. As usual, though, she seemed to relish the feud, which spawned indignant articles, editorials, and letters to the editor lamenting what she called “the split,” caused by “the dirty work of genuine political rascals.” Though she promised that in the paper “personalities will be rigidly excluded; we are working for the good of humanity at large,” her own personality was certainly an integral part of the content.16

Parsons found the paper useful when she wanted to defend herself from her critics across the ideological spectrum. In October, she attended a dance sponsored by The Liberator and Arbeiter Ring (a Russian workingmen’s circle) for Jews “who had recently participated in ghetto riots” against the czar in the old country. The event, held on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of fasting and atonement, had the apparent purpose of riling the Orthodox, for it featured a lavish spread of ice cream, pickles, cake, and cream puffs. A police contingent appeared in the hall just as Parsons rose to speak; they claimed that the affair had been billed as a dance (advertised in The Liberator in English and Hebrew as the “Grand Yom Kippur Concert and Ball”), and that Parsons had failed to secure permission to turn it into a political rally. She backed down, but proceeded to sell copies of the paper to the merry-makers. Afterward, a reporter from the Daily Inter-Ocean ridiculed Parsons in an article with the headline “Anarchists Have Degenerated into Eaters of Ice Cream Puffs Instead of Drinkers of Blood and Throwers of Bombs.” In the October 15 issue, a regular writer for The Liberator, “Rex” (probably Parsons herself) denounced the mainstream press as “liars and lickspittles,” and reminded readers that she was “a woman who has borne more sorrow and troubles for the good of humanity than these scurrilous little writers ever heard of.”17

The Liberator’s pages contained little mention of Chicago’s recent labor strife, but did follow the unrest in Russia (“Russia to Be Free” read one optimistic headline on October 29). It lauded the uprisings, which were, it said, winning the workers grudging respect from the czar and “other rich loafers.” In contrast, in America, home-grown “aristocrats” had nothing but contempt for “the whimpering lot of whipped curs who sneak back buttonless [i.e., because they had been forbidden by their bosses to wear their union buttons] and beg for work”—a not-so-veiled reference to Chicago workers’ capitulation in the wake of recently lost strikes.18

And, somewhat belatedly, a decade after the demise of the Populists, Parsons began to write about farmers’ rights to land and machinery, and their need to market their crops without the encumbrance of predatory middlemen. Apparently rural folk were only now “awakening” to their true interests. Or perhaps Parsons was moved by the recent book written by International Socialist Review editor Algie Simons, The American Farmer (1902); in it Simons observed that American family farmers (some over-mortgaged, the rest landless) were more akin to an industrial proletariat than Marx had realized. He argued convincingly that American farmers did not fit the traditional category of the “hereditary peasant, generally ignorant and reactionary, and looking to the ruling class for all new ideas even concerning his own industry.” At the same time, The Liberator ignored the struggles of African Americans, North or South, with the exception of an account of a recent meeting of a black civil rights group, the Georgia Equal Rights Association, in the April 1, 1906, issue. Not an article—or a paragraph, for that matter—covered the distressed Chicago black laboring classes, which were rapidly losing their jobs to immigrants and to white women, and widely reviled among whites for the strike-breaking activities of a desperate few.19

Parsons was no different from her anarchist comrades in consistently turning a blind eye toward black workers. Nevertheless, she proved a prescient observer of certain critical elements of the American political economy. In the pages of The Liberator, she continued to warn about the erosion of the middle class in the face of technological innovation. She decried the profit-making imperatives that made so many workplaces sites of soul-deadening boredom, repetition, and physical danger. In the new consumer economy, “everything now has a price”: but in the future, “when labor is no longer for sale, society will produce free men and women who will think free, act free, and be free.” She exposed the corrupting influence of corporate money on politics, and charged that authorities used prisons as a means of controlling their critics. She lamented the vulnerability of the elderly, “worn-out working people” reduced to penury after a long life of honest toil. She railed against the employers who one day professed horror at workers defending themselves and the next day paid thugs to beat strikers nigh unto death. She exposed the hypocritical arrogance of reformers who chided the working man for spending 5 cents for a beer on a Saturday afternoon. She excoriated a system that placed property rights over human rights. Even her Victorian-inflected defense of children—for example, comparing the little brother and sister on their way to a sweatshop with the vulgar, lavish wedding of a daughter of John Jacob Astor—had a universal, timeless quality. Still, she paid obeisance to gender conventions when she went on about woman’s “highest aim and ambition”—to find a husband, because “she wants a quiet place she can call home, a haven where she and he can sometimes retire from the storms of the world and be at rest.”20

The Liberator avoided discussion of “sexual varietism,” though Parsons did discuss the problem of woman’s persistent dependence on man, which she considered a throwback to ancient times, when physical strength determined one’s place in the world. She also penned a series titled “Famous Women of History” that included Florence Nightingale, Jenny Lind, and Louise Michel, among others. She alluded to birth control in a piece titled “The Woman Question Again,” which dealt with the tragic end of one Mary Markham of Kewanee, Illinois. Markham had killed her seven children, all under eleven years old, and then killed herself: “Poor, burden-bearing, poverty stricken, care worn, child-bearing to excess, Mary Markham, you are gone!… but you were a victim of our false society which makes it a crime to impart information that would have made your young life a mother’s joy with a few healthy children to caress you, but instead, you saw from day to day, a helpless burden of poverty and despair.”21

Four months into the publication of The Liberator, Parsons was reporting that the paper, which cost $50 a week to produce, was in dire straits, and that subscribers should send her postage stamps as an economy measure. Announcing she would be going east to drum up subscriptions, she blamed The Liberator’s troubles on “a small clique of so-called Anarchists [who] did everything to prevent the paper from coming out” by traveling around the country to discourage radicals from subscribing or contributing (no doubt a reference to Fox and his allies). She predicted “the little ‘bunch’ of soreheads will soon be left alone to nurse their own little boils.”22

In the spring of 1906, Parsons set out on an “agitation tour” of the East. New York City anarchists had started a Liberator group, and she hoped to lecture and sell subscriptions and copies of her books. In offering an account of her trip, she once again proved herself a gifted writer of travelogues. She enjoyed the long train ride, speeding along at fifty miles per hour through the open countryside, eavesdropping on conversations of the other passengers (no doubt embellished in the telling), and contemplating the resources buried in the earth: “It was the Lehigh Valley that proved most interesting to us… the heart of the great anthracite coal region. Think of it, beneath those frowning hills nature stored up her forests, floods, and sunbeams; then by her eruptions she covered them deep down, far out of sight, until long ages should elapse, when her children could delve for them and bring them to the surface for light and cheer and comfort. But man, because of his stupidity, is not utilizing these free gifts to all for all.” Arriving in New York City, she was struck by the sad faces of hungry children on the Lower East Side. There, while on a “‘slumming’ expedition,” she found “thousands of human beings living in heaps, piled upon one another, packed like sardines in tenement houses, poor, ignorant and dejected, helplessness and despair deep furrowed upon their blank faces.” She described the early evening, when “the tall factories belch forth their quota of human beings” who must find their way to their “stuffy little rooms” and fall into a fitful slumber to prepare themselves for yet another day of misery. She recounted being set upon by gang members, who made off with her handbag and $20: “New York, nevertheless, is a great and wonderful city.”23

On April 1, Parsons addressed a memorial service at New York’s Grand Central Palace for Johann Most, who had died on March 17. The crowded hall was awash in color, with red banners, hats, and badges set against the blue uniforms of the dozens of police present, and she delivered a characteristically stirring speech to the overflow audience. The New York Times titled its story “Woman Anarchist Calls Our Flag a Sham,” a reference to her mention of the Stars and Stripes as a mere rag for luring immigrants, “a brazen lie.” She had called the officers standing near her “vile hirelings of the capitalistic spirit personified in a club and a few brass buttons.” She ended, however, on an optimistic note, saying that “there never has been a time when there was so much unrest in the world, and from this unrest will be born the sturdy child of liberty.”24

The Liberator could not survive without money, nor could it survive without Parsons. Soon after she returned from the East, she set off on another trip, this one to Cleveland and Cincinnati. At that point she was forced to abandon the paper for good. She thought that anarchism was “too far away from the mental level of the masses; hence they have not been attached to us.” Many “young, inexperienced people” lacked the mental discipline to pursue “the realization of the anarchistic ideal.” Meanwhile, Emma Goldman, in April, had announced the first issue of her own paper, Mother Earth; the publication, which included reviews, criticism, poetry, fiction, and cartoons, reflected its editor’s view that art was a critical weapon in the arsenal of class struggle. Compared to The Liberator, Mother Earth was more creative, more in tune with modern literary trends, and more appealing to a wide range of radicals—cultural as well as political—and not just anarchists. By this time Parsons had become disillusioned with the inaction of the IWW, writing, in one of the last issues of The Liberator, that the group, with its official organ, Industrial Worker, proposing “no line of action,” appeared “to be floundering around like a ship lost at sea without a rudder.”25

With The Liberator no longer publishing and the IWW no longer holding her interest, Parsons now began to agitate on behalf of a series of labor leaders whose persecution or death at the hands of mobs or judicial authorities made Haymarket’s legacy still meaningful and instructive. In December 1905, three members of the Western Federation of Miners were accused of murdering the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, by planting a bomb at the entrance to his home. Grilled for three days by the police, WFM member Harry Orchard claimed that Charles Moyer, the president of the WFM; Bill Haywood, the group’s secretary; and George A. Pettibone, a labor activist, had hired him to kill more than two dozen mining bosses throughout the West. Rather than go through the extradition process, in February Idaho officials enlisted a Pinkerton agent to engineer the kidnapping of the three accused men, who were in Denver at the time, and spirit them to Boise to stand trial. Their defense quickly became a cause célèbre among the white laboring classes.26

On February 17, 1907, Lucy Parsons helped to lead a tumultuous protest demonstration sponsored by the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL); later that day, though, CFL leaders signaled their disapproval as they listened to her “anarchistic doctrine, served hot,” in the words of the Tribune. In March the year before, she had written about the WFM defendants in an article for The Liberator called “The Proposed Slaughter.” She had drawn parallels between their treatment and that of the Haymarket martyrs—the pursuit by the police, charges of a mysterious conspiracy, the lack of evidence tying the accused to the crime, perjured testimony, the ensuing hysteria among the general public, which was kept “in breathless expectancy.” In the sensationalistic warning of the current Idaho governor—“a conspiracy that is going to shock civilization”—she heard distinct echoes of the hyperbolic police chief John Bonfield, Detective Michael J. Schaak, and State’s Attorney Julius S. Grinnell. In May and June, Parsons again took to the podium at mass meetings, but she clashed with organizers who counseled “moderation and education.” The display of red flags and banners proclaiming “To hell with the Constitution” embarrassed the Women’s Trade Union League, the CFL, and other sponsoring groups.27

After hearing an eleven-hour summation by lead defense attorney Clarence Darrow, on July 29 a jury acquitted Haywood and the other two defendants, prompting a celebration in Chicago on August 1. Darrow had focused on the defendants’ advocacy of miners, urging a not-guilty verdict regardless of the evidence because “I know their cause is just.” At least some saw the trial’s outcome as a sign that Americans were becoming increasingly receptive to radical ideals and more skeptical of state-power overreach. Parsons proposed starting a national defense fund for labor leaders who might face crushing legal fees in the future. A few days later, she wrote an article for Fox’s Demonstrator comparing the Haywood and Haymarket trials. She claimed that although “the Pinkerton plague is still at large in society,” the recent acquittal of the men signaled a new era: “For the first time in American history the working class was united and stood shoulder to shoulder. They became ‘class conscious’ in recognizing the fact that it was not Haywood the mineowners were really after, but the labor organization he represented.”28

Despite these hopeful signs, Parsons feared that anarchism had dissolved into a collection of individuals without a movement: “The anarchist cause has lacked concentration of effort, and a vivifying force to lend energy and direction toward a common aim.” She therefore conceived her newfound life’s work as highlighting every case of “judicial” or mob murder, and every trial of a major labor leader, as the kind of injustice that Haymarket had anticipated. She introduced Life of Albert R. Parsons, Famous Speeches, and Anarchism to a new generation of activists and would-be revolutionaries. She drew lessons about the need for direct action, and the danger in letting enemies “put their own interpretation upon our ideas,” as she saw more and more people “turning from the past to the future.” Younger activists hailed her as an honored forebear. Years later, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalled meeting Parsons for the first time at the 1907 IWW convention in Chicago: “I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons…. I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: ‘Clear our names!’ and she now made this her mission.”29

Gradually, tending the sacred flame of Haymarket became a full-time preoccupation—and occupation—for Lucy Parsons. By this time, Albert Parsons had reached legendary status among anarchists, who called him “a pioneer in the American revolutionary labor movement and the first Anarchist-Communist agitator in America in the English language.” Lucy took it upon herself to correct anyone who had the temerity to lecture on “Lessons of the Haymarket Episode” (as one Terence Carlin did before the Chicago Social Science League) without also preaching “active resistance.” She disputed the label “Haymarket Riot,” reminding her listeners that “there was no riot at the Haymarket except a police riot.” She also defended her late husband in response to the fictional accounts of the Haymarket events that began to claim the public’s attention. In 1909, the Chicago-born journalist and novelist Frank Harris published a novel titled The Bomb, which made Louis Lingg the hero and Rudolph Schnaubelt the bomb-thrower. The book portrays Albert as a gifted orator and an honorable comrade, but also as “a little florid,” noting “it’s the shallow water [that] has the lace foam on it.” August Spies was “far better read than Parsons and a clearer thinker.” Lucy Parsons was incensed by the book; she thought “it was a lie from cover to cover,” and she also ridiculed Emma Goldman’s endorsement of the novel as of “more importance to the anarchist movement than the monument in Waldheim Cemetery.” Goldman later admitted that Parsons’s ire was to some extent justified, since “Harris had not kept to the actual facts, and also because Albert emerged from the pages of the book a rather colourless person.”30

In the process of guarding the memory of her husband against those who would sully it, Parsons set herself apart from Goldman, her chief rival for publicity and resources. In May 1906, Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had recently been released from prison, set up housekeeping together in Chicago. Goldman used Mother Earth to needle American-born anarchists, whom she considered too attached to parlor-room theory while Russian Jews were carrying the weight of transforming the workplace. Yet Goldman herself made a comfortable living by traveling around the country and speaking, as she charged substantial admission fees for her lectures on modern drama (and later Russian literature). In her speeches and in Mother Earth she spoke directly to reformers and the intelligentsia, rather than to the unlettered working classes, and saw no need to apologize for doing so. Voltairine de Cleyre disapproved of Goldman’s financial acumen, telling Berkman, “To lecture for money for comrades I neither could nor would; to lecture to the general public on topics they would pay for I am not ‘business woman’ enough to undertake.” In 1910, de Cleyre despaired that radicalism had become a “kid glove thing,” appealing to well-heeled clubwomen. In contrast, Parsons stuck mainly to trade union and IWW venues, eking out a living selling her publications.31

A steep economic downturn in November 1907 sent tens of thousands of unemployed men and women into the Chicago streets, and Lucy Parsons noted the predictable consequences: “The free coffee wagons and soup kitchens are in full operation, and cheap lodging houses are filled to suffocation.” The city’s established relief organizations, including the Bureau of Charities, could not keep up with the demand. Once again Parsons prepared to take her place at the head of marches and at the front of halls filled with those who were out of work or worried they soon would be. Yet now Goldman and her entourage seemed bent on dominating the scene and crowding Parsons off center-stage, if not the entire stage.32

On the evening of January 17, 1908, five hundred people who had gathered in Brand’s Hall for a meeting hissed at the mention of President Theodore Roosevelt and loudly demanded the overthrow of the US government. Mother Jones was there, calling the presence of uniformed police in the hall an “insult to honest workingmen.” Presiding over the meeting was Dr. Ben Reitman, an eccentric twenty-nine-year-old physician who dressed like a hobo; a gifted self-promoter, he had transformed communing with the dispossessed into a fashionable pastime. (He and Goldman would soon become lovers.) Reitman tried to ignore Parsons’s attempt to speak, but the repeated cries of “Mrs. Parsons! Mrs. Parsons!” forced him to relent. She mounted the stage, and, according to a reporter, “offered to lead an army to city hall next Thursday afternoon”; the demonstration would mark the third anniversary of St. Petersburg’s “Bloody Sunday” and force the city’s authorities to address the crisis of poor relief. She told the restless crowd that “she was ready to die on the scaffold as her husband had done if it would further the cause of human liberty.” The meeting resolved “to unite to overthrow the capitalist system.” Then Reitman stepped up and told Parsons, “I am sorry to refuse the lady, but this is strictly a men’s meeting and we don’t want women speakers.” He called for a motion to adjourn, but Parsons stood up once again, this time reminding him that she represented the many women who were out of work.33

The chief of police, George Shippy, was determined to prevent the “Bloody Sunday” march from taking place; he did not worry that the socialists would cause trouble—they only talked about revolution—but he feared that the anarchists, led by Parsons, might incite a riot. Shippy, warning that a renewed “Red peril” was menacing Chicago, claimed that “the Reds” were mimicking workers’ angry cries in the days before the Haymarket bombing. Lucy Parsons, he told reporters, had proved a chief instigator of the present disorder: “Never in the history of Chicago have anarchists and other enemies of law and order been more dangerous than at present.” He defended efforts to prevent radicals from speaking and boasted that the city’s current undercover “anarchist [or Red] squad” included ten veterans who had served the night of the Haymarket riot. (One of them, called to quell disorder at a mass meeting, exclaimed, “There’s Lucy Parsons…. I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, and she doesn’t look a day older.”)34

On March 2, a twenty-year-old Russian immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, made his way to Shippy’s home and, under circumstances that remain unclear, stabbed the chief and shot and wounded his son Harry, who had come to his father’s rescue. Shippy then mortally wounded Averbuch. Described as an acolyte of Emma Goldman, “Queen of the Reds,” Averbuch had reportedly become enraged when he had learned that Shippy had ordered the hall’s proprietors to deny Goldman a place to speak.35

The Averbuch attack on Shippy sent reporters rushing to Lucy Parsons’s home for her comments. Playing upon the fears of the police and the general public, she stated, menacingly, that “steadily the anarchist spirit has been growing.” She boasted that Chicago had forty such groups—which clearly was not the case—and that a number of University of Chicago professors were joining with sweatshop workers to advance the anarchist cause. Reporters speculated that the boardinghouse she operated was actually a school for anarchy. In her home, while standing in the kitchen cooking dinner, presumably she was instructing the young Jewish men living there in the principles of social disorder. As usual, Parsons gladly accepted credit for what the police claimed she was doing—presiding over a vast cabal of anarchists in Chicago and beyond.36

Goldman managed to evade the prohibition on her speaking when she accepted an invitation from the Anthropological Society to appear on March 15, and Parsons was present to hear her and Ben Reitman lecture on “The Use of Vaccination and Anti-Toxin.” Despite the heavy police presence, the event proceeded without incident. The Shippy shooting, and Goldman’s defiance in the face of efforts to silence her, prompted President Roosevelt to deliver a special message to Congress in April declaring that while the country must be free, “it must also be safe.” He added, “If the anarchist cares nothing for human life, then the government should not be particular about his,” and called for laws that would outlaw anarchists and deport them. Still, the Anthropological Society and other groups regularly invited socialist academics and Progressive reformers, as well as anarchists like Goldman, to speak: critiques of capitalism were a la mode. In November 1908, Eugene Debs ran for president on the socialist ticket and received more than 400,000 votes.37

Parsons was happy to claim credit as Chicago’s leading anarchist in the coverage of Averbuch’s attack on Shippy, but she wanted nothing to do with Averbuch specifically and began to distance herself from him, just as she had distanced herself from Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, seven years before. Indeed, her readers and listeners would not have been able to tell from her writings and speeches that, beginning in 1899, political assassination and dynamite explosions had become the favorite strategies of disaffected groups and individuals. And these strategies would remain popular for two decades thereafter. In 1899 in Idaho, the Western Federation of Miners had used 4,000 pounds of dynamite to blow up a huge piece of mining equipment, retaliating against an employer who refused to raise wages or recognize the union. Strikers in a number of cities dynamited the machinery they operated (such as streetcars), or structures that nonunion labor had built (dams, bridges). The brothers James and John McNamara confessed to the October 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, a blast that killed twenty-two workmen; they were not anarchists, but members of the AFL-affiliated International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. Between 1906 and 1911, the same union dynamited one hundred worksites financed by antiunion employers.38

On the East Coast, a new cadre of anarchists, mainly Italian immigrants under the leadership of Luigi Galleani, pursued Johann Most’s propaganda-by-deed strategy, openly advocating spontaneous insurrection. In his paper Cronaca Sovversiva (“Subversive Chronicle,” published from 1903 to 1918), Galleani refused to offer his vision of the good society; the future would reveal itself after the revolution, he said. The Galleanist terrorists seemed to constitute a tangible upwelling of The Alarm’s rhetorical threats two decades before, but Lucy Parsons was now retreating, haltingly, from her own earlier bluster.39

Beginning in the spring of 1909 and continuing for another nine years, she spent less time in Chicago and more time on the West Coast and in the Northwest. The repressive conditions in her home city meant that she could not even distribute handbills there without facing arrest—as she tried in October 1908 to publicize an upcoming meeting to raise money for the estimated 15,000 children who went to school hungry every day. Too, the Chicago-based IWW continued to disappoint her, its leadership verging on the desultory. Ralph Chaplin, a fearless Wobbly agitator in his own right and a gifted poet, artist, and songwriter, believed that even the newest hero of the Left had become too self-involved to accomplish anything, writing, years later, “Bill Haywood was swivel-chair king of an almost uninhabited revolutionary domain”—presumably, Haywood was content to hold forth in his Chicago office, unwilling to venture into the fray of IWW-led strikes around the country. The titular head of the IWW, Vincent Saint John, had arrived in Chicago in 1907, but as long as he held that post—until 1915—he dismissed Lucy Parsons and her ilk as “anarchist freaks.” And Emma Goldman’s frequent appearances in lecture halls throughout the city, combined with Mother Earth’s promotion of free love, birth control, and au courant literary sensibilities, seemed to distract the public from Parsons and her unwavering message of class struggle.40

It was no wonder then that Parsons was drawn to the IWW’s bloody free-speech campaigns in the West. In an effort to organize migratory laborers, the Wobblies targeted local prohibitions on radicals’ outdoor meetings. These efforts began in September 1909 in Missoula, Montana, and then in Spokane, Washington, later that year, lasting through 1916 in a total of twenty-six cities. Parsons appreciated the organizers’ emphasis on declaiming freely from sidewalk soapboxes and park benches. The protests had a strong performative component: in concerted acts of civil disobedience, activists encouraged their listeners to resist arrest and pack the jails. Jury trials became show trials and in many cases elicited sympathy from middle-class Americans and not just the laboring classes, with activists testifying to the beatings they suffered at the hands of police and prison guards. In Spokane, jailers used brutal, life-threatening tactics, including switching prisoners from the sweatbox to a frigid room, in an effort to discourage other protesters from trying to get arrested. “But still they came,” Chaplin later noted. “Never, since the early Christian martyrs, were men more fanatically willing to sacrifice for a cause they believed in.” Here was exemplary evidence of the “direct action” necessary to organize harvest-time wage hands, lumberjacks, miners, and marine transport workers. As transients, these men were ineligible to vote in any case. “To hell with politics!” was their motto. One of the original “jawsmiths,” Lucy Parsons approved.41

However, at least during her initial visits to the Northwest, Parsons did not partake of any of the city-specific free-speech campaigns. Working adjacent to the Wobblies rather than within the group, she sought to capitalize on the enthusiasm they generated for radical ideas by selling more copies of her books—in the spring of 1909, and then again in the spring of 1910, in the fall of 1913, and for most of 1914. Indeed, with the exception of her visit to Los Angeles in 1910, she missed the months-long free-speech brawls in other places—Spokane, Missoula, and Denver—though she made stops in all those cities in quieter times. She boasted of selling many thousands of copies of Famous Speeches and Life of Albert R. Parsons, great pieces of “propaganda literature” that, she believed, “when circulated among organized labor are bound to bear fruit.”42

By the time Parsons began her western tours she was well known not only as a Haymarket widow but also as the editor of the short-lived Liberator and a frequent contributor to Firebrand, Agitator, and Demonstrator, all of which ran ads for her books and featured the anniversary of Haymarket prominently every November. When seeking lodging and speaking venues, she drew upon a dense network of comrades as hosts, primarily men who were agents and writers for these papers, members of anarchist groups, and owners of bookstores. (This last group included Cassius V. Cook and his wife, Sadie, of Vancouver; Cassius had served as a bail bondsman for Goldman when she was arrested in 1909 in San Francisco, where he was active in the city’s Libertarian League and Free Speech League.) Parsons must have been pleased by the attentiveness of local reporters, such as the one in Seattle who wrote, “Mrs. Parsons is still a fine-looking woman, despite her years and what she has gone through.” Even editors of the Intermountain Catholic, published in Salt Lake City, accorded her a respectful hearing, though her lecture in that city “pleads for the abolition of marriage and the Catholic church.”43

Parsons’s two-month trip in the spring of 1909 took her to Kansas City, Seattle, Butte, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Salt Lake City. She focused on AFL unions, describing the topic as a “new field” for her—“that of conservative organized labor, and indeed it is a field from which an Anarchist speaker is nearly always excluded.” She took pleasure in traveling as much as speaking, providing, for example, a vivid description of the Rocky Mountains that she saw from her train, which, “like a giant serpent, winds its way in and out among the cliffs that tower three thousand feet above”; its whistles echoed through the canyons more shrilly than the roars of a “deep-lunged” giant in a fairy tale. She also visited with the writer Jack London and his wife at their home in Glen Ellen, California, where she spent a lovely few days in their tiny guest house—“No paint, no varnish, no veneering for covering up dirt of any kind, but just a sweet, clean cottage. I fear I shall never sleep so soundly or dream such pleasant dreams again!” The fifty-nine-year-old traveler arrived home in Chicago feeling “worn out” but pleased with herself.44

Upon her return, Parsons soon learned of the renewed police crackdown on radicals in her hometown, and so, during the summer and fall of 1909, she conducted a virtual one-person free-speech campaign. She believed she could find a way around the new prohibitions by presenting herself as “the apostle of a new religion,” one of her own devising. In the process she would expose the double standard that allowed foot soldiers of the Salvation Army free access to city parks and street corners while radicals were routinely harassed. Denied a speaking permit by the acting police chief, Herman Schuettler (present at Haymarket, and an early member of the Chicago anti-anarchist Red Squad), she decided to go forth mockingly clutching a Bible: “Religions seem to be the style, and I do not see why I should not start one. I have some decided opinions on the matter of religion and I do not think the police have any right to interfere with me so long as I am not infringing on the rights of others.” On August 29, the police arrested her while she was speaking in Washington Square Park (nicknamed Bughouse), across from the Newberry Library. According to one account, “Mrs. Parsons was considered the real brains of the Anarchist gang, and the police take no chances with her.” In trying to elude the authorities, her ingenuity knew no bounds—but rarely worked for long.45

In 1910 she spent April, May, and most of June visiting Los Angeles, Vancouver, Anaconda (Montana), and Salt Lake City. The following year she made at least two trips to New York City, appearing with Haywood and pitching her appeal specifically to the “young bloods” among the radicals she met. She still had the ability to inspire, as she did on a final visit to Philadelphia, when she impressed a little girl named Emma Gilbert, named after Goldman (little Emma’s brother, Voltaire, was named after de Cleyre). In an interview, Gilbert later said: “My first recollection of a black person was Lucy Parsons, who came through Philadelphia several times to lecture and would stay with us at the Radical Library, where we lived, at 424 Pine Street.” Parsons also traveled to Milwaukee in the company of her friend Carl Nold from Detroit, who noted, to a correspondent, “If a white [man] is in her company in public, he is naturally subjected to the gawking of the public, but of course I made nothing of it, and we merrily drank.”46

It is possible that Parsons was out of town in mid-May 1911, when Voltairine de Cleyre came to Chicago and met with a number of comrades to found the Chicago Mexican Liberal Defense League. For several years a small group of American radicals had followed events in Mexico, where an uprising against the dictator Porfirio Díaz had led to brutal reprisals against his critics, some of whom had fled to the United States. Working out of Los Angeles, they published a bilingual (Spanish and English) newspaper, Regeneración, and formed a “junta” on behalf of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM—Mexican Liberal Party), which had been founded in 1905. In 1911, four of these junta leaders, including Cipriano Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother Enrique Flores Magón, were serving twenty-one-month sentences in the McNeil Island penitentiary on Puget Sound in Washington State on charges of conspiracy. (They would be in and out of jail for years.) De Cleyre’s group rejected the conventional wisdom that only the urban proletariat could spark a revolution, writing, “The longer we studied developments, the clearer it became that this was a social phenomenon offering the greatest field for genuine anarchist propaganda that has ever been presented on this continent.” By seizing the lands of the elites (with the approval of the PLM), Mexico’s peasants were engaging in the kind of “direct expropriation” that anarchists had been advocating for years. De Cleyre urged uncompromising support for Regeneración, and, alluding to Goldman, shamed those who would “squander their money in cafes while they discuss ‘Chanticleer’” and preferred to live in “clouds of theory.” Now that the opportunity for action presented itself, de Cleyre said, “we are so theory-rotted that we are hopeless to face it.” In Chicago, she had a staunch ally in Ralph Chaplin, who had spent two years, 1907 to 1909, in Mexico. Regeneración’s records in 1911 and 1912 listed both Parsons and de Cleyre as subscribers.47

Parsons would later write and speak in more detail about the Mexican revolutionaries, but for now she could not help but notice the loss of several comrades. De Cleyre’s work on behalf of the PLM rebels was one of her last radical acts. Always in poor health, she died of meningitis on June 20, 1912, at the age of forty-six, and was buried near Albert Parsons and his comrades in Waldheim Cemetery. A few months later, Tommy Morgan, Parsons’s former friend and recent nemesis, was killed in a train wreck en route to California, where he had planned to retire. General William H. Parsons, Albert’s brother, had also passed from the scene, dying at the home of his son, in Chicago, in October 1907. Parsons was losing touch with Lizzie Swank Holmes and her husband, William, who for a while lived in Colorado, not far from where pardoned Haymarket defendant Sam Fielden was leading a reclusive life on a modest ranch.48

In April 1912, a group of Chicago IWW members went public with their charge that the organization consistently denigrated traditional craft unions, including those affiliated with the AFL. They argued that the IWW should concentrate on cultivating radical factions within those unions, factions that would serve as revolutionary vanguards and gradually lead toward “direct action” and away from the timid policies espoused by the parent body. Perhaps because of her recent travels, where she had received a warm welcome from trade unionists on the West Coast, Parsons embraced this idea, and not only lent her name, but also her living room, to the founding of a new group that sought to pursue this goal—the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA). Others present at that initial meeting were Agitator editor Jay Fox (who had recently relocated from Washington State); William Z. Foster and his wife, Esther Abramowitz, who were boarding in Parsons’s home at the time; the Norwegian-born Samuel Hammersmark, who had been radicalized by Haymarket when he was a teenager; and the activist Earl Browder, based in Kansas City. Foster, born in Massachusetts in 1881, had joined the IWW in 1909, when he took part in the free-speech struggle in Spokane. He would soon become one of Chicago’s most effective union organizers.49

With the approval of Fox, the Chicago syndicalists took over The Agitator and renamed it The Syndicalist. In the first issue, published on New Year’s Day in 1913, Fox outlined the aims of the new organization with a series of negative statements, a less than promising beginning, to be sure: The SLNA, he wrote, was not a party, not a union, and not a “body of theorists.” It had “no new fangled ideas to propagate.” It did not urge workers to quit their jobs or join a new party or union, nor did it seek to “take them into new fields of effort, where they were unacquainted.” It would not confuse them with the idea “that they could be a member of the IWW and the AFL at the same time.” It was, in essence, a “modern” approach to labor organizing, requiring only that the workers appreciate their own power to “bore from within” and transform traditional craft unions into agents of anti-capitalist theory and action. The SLNA rejected arbitration but promoted sabotage, the “means whereby our working class enemies, the scabs, who support the capitalist system, as well as the capitalists themselves, can be defeated.” In sum, “the workers must realize that the ‘brotherhood of man’ of capitalism is a sham, and that the only way they will ever better their condition is by open warfare with their masters.”50

The Syndicalist maintained strong ties with and ran articles by the English-language editor of Regeneración, William C. Owen, a Los Angeles anarchist. Included in the pages of the SLNA paper were sporadic dispatches from the few other syndicalist leagues around the country along with reports on strikes with revolutionary potential. Yet in Chicago, pitched battles between and within unions held little promise for a new society; in the buildings trades, for example, the plumbers and the steamfitters vied for power with one another, rather than with the bosses, and relied on slugging and drive-by shootings (the “death car”) to maintain dominance.51

The Syndicalist paid special attention to developments from abroad, highlighting strategies there that American workers were exhorted to emulate. Foster had toured Europe in 1910 and 1911, and he made the time-honored mistake of believing that lessons learned there were easily transferable to the United States. In a lengthy pamphlet he wrote with Earl C. Ford, Foster drew upon the General Confederation of France as a model, denouncing America’s “barren” socialists and hailing the “militant minority, organized and conscious of its strength” in France as a transformative force in labor relations. As for the nature of the struggle, he wrote that “every forward pace humanity has taken has been gained at the cost of untold suffering and loss of life, and the accomplishment of the revolution will probably be no exception.” Foster would soon change the name of the SLNA to the International Trade Union Educational League, and become an officer in the Chicago local of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen.52

The high-water mark of political Progressivism came in November, with the election of Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson. Wilson defeated the incumbent, William Howard Taft, and former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was now running on the Progressive Party ticket. Debs ran again as well and won 900,000 votes. As usual, Lucy Parsons remained aloof from mainstream politics; indeed, not even the IWW or the SLNA could hold her attention or allegiance, even as she remained close to some of their leading members. Both groups illustrated a common characteristic of US radicalism—the seemingly endless splintering, reconfiguring, and renaming of organizations.

Instead of involving herself in the internecine fighting, Parsons continued on her own path. In Cleveland in February 1913 she lectured on “Syndicalism, Sabotage, and Direct Action,” and “Dynamite Conspiracies of the Capitalist Class.” The Plain Dealer printed what it claimed were excerpts from her speech; if rendered accurately, her comments indicated that authorities in that city were much more tolerant of her provocations than those in Chicago. Explaining syndicalism as a form of “French trade unionism,” she urged her listeners to disrupt production at its source: “If this cannot be done by peaceful methods, use force, tear machines apart, destroy property, and force capitalists to listen to the demands of their employees.” She reportedly ended by saying, “An anarchist is a man with a bomb in each hand and a knife between his teeth.”53

By April, she was back in Los Angeles, and on Sunday the eighteenth she was arrested for selling copies of the Famous Speeches without a license (the book would soon appear in its seventh edition). She was in town to speak at the local Labor Temple on “Direct Action, as Exhibited in Mexico and Throughout the Labor Movement.” Her arrest attracted attention because, once she was in the police station, a matron made her take off all her clothes, even though she was charged with only a misdemeanor. According to the Industrial Worker, when she refused to remove a ring, “two burly policemen pounced upon her and forcibly removed it from her finger.” Regeneración also covered the story, outraged that “Mrs. Parsons—naturally a woman most conservative in statements”—had to spend a night in jail, while various other purveyors of literature were allowed to sell their wares on streets throughout the city. It was not the last time that Parsons was roughly treated by the police. However, this incident marked the first time that the name George Markstall was linked to Parsons in newspaper articles. He had been arrested with her, and they were both arraigned and confined to the city jail overnight.54

The son of German immigrants, Markstall was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1871. He had led a nomadic life, spending most of his years before 1913 in Omaha (where he worked as a steamfitter), but also taking up residence briefly in Waukesha, Wisconsin, as well as Kansas City. (The possible Waukesha connection is intriguing; Parsons might have met Markstall during her visit there, or perhaps through mutual acquaintances who lived there.) In 1910 he was staying in an Omaha boardinghouse as a single lodger and working as a day laborer. He had been active in Socialist Party politics in Omaha and Kansas City, running for the local school board in the former, and the city council in the latter. He might have gravitated toward the West Coast and the free-speech fights there, or Parsons might have met him on her recent speaking tour. In any case, they apparently arrived together in Los Angeles in April, and they would remain inseparable for the rest of their lives. Markstall’s companionship did not tempt Parsons to return to housekeeping in Chicago, however; she continued to travel widely, to do battle with the police wherever she went, and to tend the flickering flame of Haymarket.55

The Wobblies’ first decade prompted Parsons to hold out hope that itinerant laborers, no less than factory workers, might be mobilized and brought into the anarchists’ fold, ready and willing to join the still-elusive revolution. Though she remained supportive of the IWW, Parsons nevertheless remained untethered from it, preferring to make a living from the Haymarket legacy, as interest in Albert’s trial waxed with each new instance of labor-related strife. Like most radicals, though, she could not foresee the fierce backlash soon to come.