Goddess of Anarchy

Introduction

THE RADICAL LABOR AGITATOR LUCY PARSONS LIVED MUCH OF her long life in the public eye, but she has nevertheless remained shrouded in mystery. Skilled in the art of rhetorical provocation in the service of justice for the laboring classes, she also offered up a fiction about her origins and denied key elements of her own past. She was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851, and twenty-one years later married a white man, Albert R. Parsons, in Waco, Texas. Together the couple forged a tempestuous dual career, first as socialists and then as anarchists, urging workers to use all means at their disposal, including physical force, to combat the depredations of industrial capitalism. Their raw rhetoric of class struggle led to Albert’s conviction on charges of murder and conspiracy related to the 1886 bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, and he died on the gallows in November 1887. Among workers then and successive generations of historians since, Lucy Parsons has achieved secular sainthood by virtue of her widowhood. Yet her career transcended the fate of her famous husband.

By the time Albert was executed, Lucy had gained a national reputation as an orator of considerable strength and power and as a fighter for free speech and free assembly. This reputation would remain intact from 1886 until her death in 1942. More than anyone else in her time (or since), she tended the flame of Haymarket, reminding the public of the miscarriage of justice that resulted from an unfair trial. Her story provides a window into the history of industrial and urban workers through a series of transformative eras that took place from the 1880s through the 1930s. Nevertheless, information about her personal life is as meager as her public persona was fulsome. To adoring audiences no less than curious reporters, she refused to reveal more than the most basic facts about her family, including her husband, Albert, and her two children, Albert Jr. and Lulu. During a six-month speaking tour from the fall of 1886 through the spring of 1887, she traveled to seventeen states and addressed (by her reckoning) forty-three audiences ranging in size from a couple of hundred to several thousand. At her first stop, in Cincinnati, a reporter asked about her background. The thirty-five-year-old Parsons demurred: “I am not a candidate for office, and the public have no right to my past. I amount to nothing to the world and people care nothing for me. I am simply battling for a principle.” However, Parsons was mistaken in her claim that the public had no interest in her apart from her message of a looming revolution that would overthrow capitalism.¹

Public speaker, editor, free-speech activist, essayist, fiction writer, publisher, and political commentator, Parsons was one of only a handful of women of her day, and virtually the only person of African descent, apart from Frederick Douglass, to speak regularly to large audiences. She addressed enthusiastic crowds up and down the East Coast, across the Midwest, and into the Far West for well over five decades. She was a courageous advocate of First Amendment rights, notable for her confrontational tactics and what many considered her shocking language in pursuit of those rights. She had a never-wavering commitment to a free press, and the alternative periodicals that she edited or that published her writings served as a bracing corrective to the contemporary mainstream news outlets that furthered the interests of the powerful. Her stamina over the decades (she was born in a year when the average life expectancy was forty years) speaks to her deep drive: she loved the spotlight, whether that meant center-stage in a hall or a front-page, above-the-fold headline.

Lucy Parsons lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction and engaged directly with the monumental issues shaping the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Red Scare during and after World War I (a political movement with its origins in efforts to silence her during the late 1880s), the reactionary 1920s, and the Great Depression and New Deal. She demonstrated a remarkable prescience about the vicissitudes of modern capitalism, including the effects of technology on the workplace and the structure of the labor force; the role of labor unions as a countervailing force to corporations; the corrupting influence of money on politics; the inadequacy of the two-party system to address fundamental economic and social inequalities in American life; the cyclical depressions and recessions that hit hardworking people; the lengths to which local police forces and private security companies would go to suppress strikers and violently intimidate their leaders; and the everyday struggles of ordinary people, men and women, to make a decent life for themselves and their families. On countless occasions she defied the attempts of the authorities to silence her, and she remained uncompromising in her denunciations of an economic system that ravaged the unemployed and the white industrial laboring classes. From the early 1880s onward, Parsons held fast to the ideal of a nonhierarchical society emerging from trade unions, a society without wages and without coercive government of any kind.

Neither she nor her anarchist comrades, though, appreciated the larger political significance of many Americans’ fierce ethnic and religious loyalties. And she ignored the unique vulnerability of African Americans, whose history was not merely a variation on the exploitation of the working class, but a product of the myth of race in all its hideous iterations. She and Albert lost faith in the power of words to persuade and educate, turning instead to using words to threaten and intimidate, a fatal decision that sent him and his comrades to their deaths. On her own, she favored lurid predictions about the fate that the robber barons, judges, and police would meet should she have her way, a mode of speaking that tarred all anarchists with the brush of violent revolt and alienated reformers working for incremental legislative and regulatory measures. In the Gilded Age, the collective labor actions that she and her allies championed could bring whole cities, or the national rail system, to a grinding halt, but the power of those actions obscured the fact that most American workers rejected radicalism in favor of the chimera of a humane capitalism.²

A saint, secular or otherwise, Lucy Parsons was not. Her life was full of ironies and contradictions: She was born to an enslaved woman but maintained a pronounced indifference to the plight of African American laborers, not only those in the South but also in her adopted home of Chicago. She was a frankly sexual being who presented herself publicly as a traditional wife and mother. She extolled the bonds of family, but left behind in Waco a mother and siblings whom she ignored for the rest of her life. She used her children as political props, and rid herself of her son when he threatened to embarrass her in public. She was a labor agitator who had neither the patience for nor an interest in organizing workers, an anarchist who took a long historical view but remained stubbornly oblivious to major political and economic developments that transformed post–Civil War America. She expressed a deep commitment to informed debate and disquisition, on the one hand, and, on the other, an unthinking invocation of the virtues of explosive devices.

A vehement critic of government in all its forms, Parsons used the courts and police to settle personal disputes with creditors, neighbors, lovers, and even blood relations. She preached the need for a united front among the laboring classes and their allies against predatory capitalists, but she famously feuded with many fellow radicals, even those who shared her basic views on power and justice. She glorified the masses as agents of an impending revolution, but believed that in order to launch the revolution, ordinary people needed to master complex texts in the fields of history and political theory. She never grasped that the European tactics and cultural symbols she favored would fail as effective organizing devices among native-born Americans. Her story is a cautionary tale about the challenges of promoting a radical message that would appeal to laborers divided by craft, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, gender, and ideologies of race.

Newspaper coverage of Parsons chronicles her public performances but tells us little or nothing about her internal doubts and resentments. Editors and reporters from New York to San Francisco, from Georgia to Seattle, from Texas to Wisconsin, followed her obsessively. In what was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Internet, telegraph operators relayed her speeches, as recorded by journalist-stenographers, across the country, ensuring that readers in remote villages no less than in major cities could partake of what today would be called sound bites—especially her most famous injunction to her followers, “Learn the use of explosives!” To her critics, she evoked the destructive power of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871: she was labeled a red-hot firebrand, her words inflammatory, her stubborn resistance to the established order incendiary.

The fact that her ethnic “identity” was indeterminate—she looked neither black nor white—made her all the more intriguing to Americans regardless of political ideology. In searching for an answer to the question, Who is Lucy Parsons? the press described in meticulous (and often contradictory) detail her skin tone and hair texture, the timbre of her voice and the shape of her nose, her style of speaking, and the tragedy that had befallen her family. From Reconstruction through the 1930s, her often-remarked-upon exotic appearance confounded whites curious about her lineage and her “race.”

Significant parts of her life—those lived outside the public eye—are unknowable to us. In anticipation of her first national speaking tour, she created a false biography for herself—the story that she was the daughter of Mexican and Native American parents. At the same time, she did little to promote this fiction, and she often mixed up the details—where her parents were supposedly born, for example—when trying to remember them. Though she was of African descent, she did not consider herself black, and went to considerable lengths to deny the circumstances of her birth and her childhood in slavery. And yet she did not attempt to pass for white, either, and certainly a claim of that sort would have been problematic, given her physical appearance. In effect, she rejected a personal historical or ethnic identity in favor of presenting herself as the champion of the laboring classes; that, she thought, was all that people needed to know about her.

Surely Parsons’s temperament and her outlook on life were shaped by a series of personal traumas and crises. She and her mother and a younger brother had endured a brutal wartime “middle passage” from Virginia to Central Texas. Parsons was predeceased by her husband and three children, including an infant who died while she was living in Waco. The police in Chicago and elsewhere monitored her every movement, tried to keep her from speaking, and dragged her off the stage when she did. She sparred with some of the most famous radicals of the day, including Eugene V. Debs and Emma Goldman, and maintained fraught relations with her husband’s comrades after his death. She survived one devastating house fire only to lose her life in another four decades later.

It is difficult today to fathom some of Parsons’s choices, and many of them were troubling even to her friends at the time. What is clear, however, is that as a woman, a former slave, and a radical, she shouldered heavy burdens and faced formidable barriers as she sought to act as a free and independent person. Throughout her long life she would pursue her own interests—sexual, financial, or otherwise—with a certain ruthlessness, even if those interests were inimical to those of her loved ones. She faced public censure by taking lovers, a willful defiance of the prejudices and expectations of friend and foe alike. Although she is presented here as a flesh-and-blood wife, mother, lover, and public figure—and not as a caricature of a heroine of labor—she nonetheless retains an enduring aura of mystery. She deprived her contemporaries, even her most ardent supporters, of a true understanding of herself. We lack a clear written account that would reveal her innermost desires and as a result are left with only hints of the sources of her anger and bitterness, qualities that were on full display throughout her life.

From the time they moved from Waco to Chicago in 1873 until his death, Albert and Lucy Parsons formed a powerful although seemingly improbable partnership, their individual stories tightly intertwined. Together they developed a mutually advantageous, symbiotic relationship with the press, feeding insatiable editors and reporters with the public theatrics and sensationalistic comments newspaper readers craved. During their years together in Chicago, Lucy’s story was Albert’s story, and vice versa, for they taught and learned from each other, reared two children together, and lectured and strategized together.

However, the story that follows is Lucy’s. The first, and until now only, biography of her was Carolyn Ashbaugh’s Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary, published in 1976. Ashbaugh outlined in great detail the trajectory of Parsons’s public life, but provided a largely uncritical perspective of her activism. Ashbaugh also failed to locate her subject’s origins in Virginia and neglected her formative years in Waco. This book takes a more nuanced approach by integrating Parsons’s secret private life with her high-profile public persona in an effort to understand the struggles she faced as a radical and a woman of color. It also draws upon the nationwide press coverage of her in order to gauge her impact as a female agitator.

Although this book focuses on the life of one person born in the middle of the nineteenth century, it reveals much about our own time. Parsons and her comrades analyzed America’s political economy in ways that are recognizable and instructive to us now, illuminating the effects of technological innovation on the workplace, the erosion of the middle class, the corrosive effects of money and influence on public policy making, and the fecklessness of the two major parties in addressing extreme forms of inequality. At the same time, Lucy Parsons’s own career amounts to an indictment of sorts of the radical labor leaders who fell back on threats of violence, misread the fears and disdained the deeply held values of many laboring men and women, and alienated key constituencies as unworthy and irrelevant to the fight for justice. In certain respects, then, the story of Parsons’s times is the story of our own.

The pages that follow include several overlapping narratives—a love story between the former slave and the former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the fluidity of the idea of race as a political ideology and a social signifier, the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal, and shifting notions of the relationship between terrorism and the spoken and written word. Mostly, though, it is an account of one woman, remarkable for her resilience and for her ability to reinvent herself. In sum, this book aims to refute Lucy Parsons’s disingenuous claim that “I amount to nothing to the world and people care nothing for me”—a claim that was false in 1886 no less than it is, or should be, today.