Goddess of Anarchy Page 6

  In fact, by early 1873, the Democrats, now in control of the state legislature, aimed to roll back a whole host of Republican policies and quash the unholy Republican alliance among the freedmen, German Americans, and southern-born white traitors to the neo-Confederate cause. With no more than 5,000 active members, the state Republican Party itself was wracked by internal divisions as well as by voter resentment over the police forces, tax increases, and the growing state debt. Richard Coke, a Waco native and unrepentant rebel, won the governorship in 1873 by a 2-to-1 margin in an election rife with fraud on both sides. One of his priorities was to do away with the various layers of law enforcement created by his predecessor. A Dallas paper bade farewell to the State Police, calling the force “as infernal an engine of oppression as ever crushed any people beneath God’s sunlight.” The Freedmen’s Bureau had ceased to exist, and the last federal troops were withdrawn from the state in 1870. Closer to home, Parsons had lost critical allies—Shep Mullins had died in 1871, and Judge Oliver had retired two years later. Albert’s brother William had moved to New York City in 1871 to represent the new Texas Bureau of Immigration (an agency established by the Republican legislature) and serve as a commissioner for the upcoming US centennial celebration.20

  Whatever hope Albert Parsons might have had for a new day in Waco must have been fleeting. Though they were legally married, he and Lucia could not count on living together openly and in peace. All of Waco knew his wife to be a former slave, and his prospects for lucrative state and federal patronage jobs were rapidly slipping away in the wake of the Democratic onslaught of 1872 and 1873. He had served as a secretary of the state legislature, promoted public-private partnerships to further economic development, charged into the town of Belton with his band of lawmen, and canvassed the state for Republican voters—all thrilling ventures that befitted his temperament and ambition. Yet a future in Waco or anywhere else in Texas promised only peril.

  Meanwhile, Lucia faced constraints of her own. In Waco she would have to remain in the shadows and sew and cook for whites. She had glimpsed a life beyond menial labor in her interactions with her schoolteacher, her employers, and Albert himself. And her light skin opened possibilities elsewhere that her dark-skinned mother could have never imagined. Although Oliver Benton had the means to indulge her, he could not offer her an entrée into a wider world that was overwhelmingly white. More to the point, perhaps, the attraction between Albert and Lucia was palpable. She was probably not the first, and she definitely would not be the last, woman to be captivated by Albert’s public speaking—his eloquence, exuberance, and composure in the face of hecklers and even armed men. For his part, Albert saw his wife as smart and headstrong, a contrast to the illiterate, desperately poor black fieldhands he had met stumping across the countryside. So, he might have asked, if Lucia was not downtrodden, was she truly “black”? Facing the choice of a life apart, a life together as perpetual outsiders in Central Texas, or a life together among people who did not know them, they chose the last course—to put hundreds of miles between themselves and the town of Waco.

  IN 1873, ALBERT PARSONS ACCEPTED A JOB AS AN EDITOR AND reporter for a new publication in Austin, the Texas Farmer and Stock Raiser. On September 10, 1873, he met with other newspapermen in the northern part of the state, in Sherman, and together they formed the seventy-member State Editorial Association. Simultaneously, the group received an invitation from the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad to accept an all-expenses-paid excursion to visit Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Indianapolis, and other cities along the railroad’s routes. By entertaining the Texas editors, the railroad men aimed to promote commercial trade throughout the greater Midwest. It would be Parsons’s first trip outside the South, and his first visit to the city where he would become infamous.21

  Around September 12, the group set out, a “precious cargo of Texas brains and influence,” according to the Dallas Weekly Herald. After stops in Memphis, Chattanooga, and Lookout Mountain, they arrived in St. Louis on the eighteenth, where they were feted in “grand style,” enjoying a boat ride on the Mississippi, a trip to the city’s fairgrounds, and an evening at the theater. They proceeded to Cincinnati and then on to Chicago on the twenty-seventh, where they set about “enjoying its magnificent sites and partaking of its hospitalities.” Their visit to Chicago, a city one hundred times larger than Waco, coincided with the opening of the Inter-State Industrial Exposition. Attracting 20,000 visitors to its formal opening on the twenty-fifth, the fair showcased the city’s triumphant rise from the ashes of the disastrous fire two years before.22

  The exposition was housed in an immense, domed building eight hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide, “the largest and best structure on the continent,” according to the Chicago Tribune. The paper listed for the edification of its readers the impressive statistics—the number of bricks, linear feet of oak piling, and tons of nuts, bolts, and plates that went into the hall. Here, then, was progress in its most solid, material form. Virtually every local manufacturer, wholesaler, and major retailer exhibited wares; on display were overalls, carriages and cradles, shutters and plows, floral arrangements, and sewing machines. Ordinary folk could admire housewares, wigs, and clothing, while building contractors marveled over new drilling, quarrying, and crushing machinery. Entrepreneurs found labor-saving innovations in mining, agriculture, dairying, and textile production—new machines powered by steam and water.23

  The truly awe-inspiring nature of the exposition—the size and grandeur of the building that housed it, the seemingly infinite number of products on display—could not completely overshadow the dramatic events that had transpired the week before. On September 23, a banking crisis had rocked New York City when the investment house Jay Cooke collapsed. While the Chicago Exposition highlighted the splendid interconnectedness of the postbellum national economy, the crisis revealed the darker side of the same trend. A decline in demand from eastern railroads reverberated in Chicago, where orders for ties and other timber products fell dramatically. By September 26, the largest Chicago banks had suspended operations because they feared a run on deposits. The city’s boosters sought to minimize the damage; they could hardly have known that the country had started on a steep, downward trajectory into a five-year depression. Back in McLennan County, the price of cotton plummeted.24

  In December, soon after Albert returned from his trip, came the day of reckoning for the newlyweds, the day they realized they had no future anywhere in Texas. Governor Davis and almost all other Republicans, including those in Waco, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Democrats. Within a few weeks the couple decided to move to Chicago.25

  Albert Parsons went north that winter fully formed, as it were. He possessed the useful skills of typesetting, editing, and writing, and he had thrived off rough politicking and courting controversy with his audacious advocacy for the dispossessed. Self-promotion was his strong suit, and his oratorical gifts gave him an overweening self-confidence that could serve him well or disastrously, depending upon the circumstances. In Texas he had familiarized himself with a political economy that enriched an arrogant few at the expense of the disenfranchised, landless many—a political economy from which, truth be told, he aspired to profit via public office. Chicago beckoned as a new field of labor for him, but it was a field whose outlines he recognized and understood.

  En route to Chicago, Lucia relinquished her first name and assumed a new one—Lucy. She seemed to want to erase her past altogether, for she left behind her close kin, Oliver Benton, and the Waco townspeople who knew her to be a former slave. There is no record of how or when, but by this time baby Champ had died; whether this left her grief-stricken or relieved (or both) is unknown. Life in Waco had taught her that a woman’s sexual attractiveness could play a critical part in shaping her life’s chances. At some point she had also developed a toughness of character that would allow her not only to serve as her own best advocate but also to survive devastating
personal crises. She would remain guarded, and circumspect about her true self and her background, especially compared to her garrulous, outgoing husband. In the grand American tradition of self-reinvention, for a while, at least, she became a person without a past.

  Lucy’s Waco years gave her reason to appreciate the value of a name change. Her mother had shed Taliaferro in favor of the name of her new husband, Charlie Carter, who himself had discarded his slave name. Oliver Gathings considered himself a free, or at least freer, man after he assumed the name Oliver Benton. Jane Tallavan chose a variation on her owner’s name—“Taliaferro” was pronounced “Tolliver.” In the immediate postwar period, identities remained fluid, especially in a town full of recent arrivals such as Waco, and new names could signal a person’s whole new way of being in the world. For his part, Albert Parsons had chosen to shed his identity as a Confederate veteran and become a Republican. Both he and Lucy were learning that a carefully crafted persona, “authentic” or not, could prove useful when either one of them wanted to be heard over the commotion of a hostile world.

  Throughout her long life, Lucy would make the most of the fact that no one could tell for certain by looking at her who her parents were or what she had endured in Virginia, or on the coffle en route to Texas, or in wartime McLennan County, or in Waco during the turbulent years of Reconstruction. Albert and Lucy Parsons would never return to Texas, and they never looked back—except when those who wished them harm forced them to do so.

  PART 2

  GILDED AGE DYNAMITE

  Chapter 3

  A Local War

  WHEN ALBERT AND LUCY PARSONS ARRIVED IN CHICAGO IN late 1873, they found a city reeling from depression and a workers’ rebellion. The couple immediately became caught up in a crisis-driven, nationwide debate about the viability of fundamental American institutions, including industrial capitalism and the two-party political system.

  The path they traveled over the next few years was an extraordinary one, even for these uncertain times—Albert transforming himself from an aspiring Republican operative in Texas to a leader of Chicago socialists, the freedwoman Lucy running a small business in an immigrant German community and launching her own career of political agitation. She read voraciously and continued to imbibe lessons from her husband about the power of political oratory as a weapon of class warfare—a weapon useful not only in genteel debates over ideology, but also in pitched battles fought in the streets by men and women throwing stones against police armed with rifles and cannon.

  How to explain Albert’s quick embrace of his very public role as a proponent of socialism? Being a socialist in Chicago was much like being a Republican in Waco. His foray into Chicago activism called upon his love of politicking, and he relished the role of outsider in relation to the powers-that-be. Both Waco and Chicago allowed him to use his gifts as a speaker and journalist and to attempt to manipulate the editors and reporters who controlled the mainstream media. He and Lucy were united in their contrarian natures. In Texas, the radicals were Republican black men and a handful of white voters; in Chicago, they were socialists who challenged the capitalist system as the chief source of the immiseration of the poor. For the Parsonses, it was not a great leap from denunciations of chattel slavery and the planter class in the rural South to denunciations of “wage slavery” and the capitalist class in the urban North.

  At the same time, Albert and Lucy were keenly aware of the dislocation they suffered in moving from small-town Texas to the colossus of the Midwest. Chicago was sprawling, noisy, squalid, its air befouled by smokestacks and its clogged streets littered with the excrement of horses—many hundreds of the beasts drawing vehicles that included everything from pie carriers to “Black Marias,” police patrol wagons clanging their warning bells. Yet the couple managed to accommodate themselves to a new language, new neighbors, even new kinds of foods at the market and green grocers. Meanwhile, the rent must be paid, so while Albert worked as a compositor for several major newspapers, Lucy sewed to supplement their income. They moved from apartment to apartment almost annually, but they remained on the north side of the city. And they remained together, making a new home for themselves in a German immigrant neighborhood, finding a niche in radical politics, and hosting Monday-night meetings of those who shared their beliefs. Somehow, then, the former slave and the former Confederate soldier adjusted to life in Chicago. And they became caught up in a conflict that seemed to all its combatants a thunderous new iteration of an ongoing civil war.1

  THE CITY THAT GREETED THE TEXAS COUPLE WAS IN AN UPROAR. By December 1873, the economic downturn that had begun three months earlier had caused severe distress among Chicago’s laboring classes; out of a working population of 112,000, an estimated 25,000 had recently lost their jobs, causing untold misery among some 125,000 family members in a city of 400,000. As winter set in and starvation and disease spread, a small group of socialists pressed for jobs and immediate relief from the Common (City) Council. On Sunday, December 21, the 400 members of the immigrant German Socio-Political Workingmen’s Union, and members of other immigrant groups, organized a mass meeting in Vorwaerts Turner Hall on Twelfth Street on the Near West Side of the city. Demanding “Work or Bread,” a series of speakers delivered the same message about the best way to address the deepening crisis: “It consists in the energetic union and concentration of the workingmen into one solid organization.” Furthermore, they declared, the city must provide jobs, food, and shelter for the afflicted, especially since the council had consistently acted “in the interest of a few capitalists, landholders, and professional politicians.”2

  The following evening, under a cloudy sky with the threat of snow in the air, 10,000 workers formed a procession and marched in mournful silence through the streets from Turner Hall east to City Hall, where the council was meeting. Meanwhile, large numbers of policemen, deployed strategically, watched nervously for the first hint of violence. The hushed crowd, in its immensity—with workers hailing from all over the United States and Europe, and representing a variety of trades—exuded a sense of menace to Chicago’s powerful propertied classes.

  Aldermen dismissed the marchers’ demands and suggested they appeal to the city’s Relief and Aid Society, a charity in possession of an estimated $600,000 in unspent money that had been raised on behalf of the victims of the Great Chicago Fire three years before. Under pressure, the society released some funds to the needy in early 1874, but leaders of the group were reluctant to help any able-bodied person: indeed, in their view, people so lacking in self-respect as to apply for aid automatically rendered themselves unworthy of it.3

  Later, Albert Parsons would write that he first took up the “labor question” when he heard critics charge that the Relief and Aid Society had, instead of aiding the poor, further enriched the wealthy. “I found that the complaints against the society were just and proper,” he reported, noting that he had seen similarities between the Chicago elites, who condemned the Workingmen’s Union as a motley mob of “communists, robbers, and loafers,” and former slaveholders in Texas, who had portrayed the freedpeople as dangerous subversives of the established order: “It satisfied me,” he wrote, that “there was a great fundamental wrong at work in society and in existing social and industrial arrangements.”4

  Of his move from Waco, Albert wrote only, “I decided to settle in Chicago.” Since there was no larger migration out of Texas and into Illinois during this time, he and Lucy apparently found their way north on their own. Still, they were hardly the only ones drawn to this fastest-growing of American cities: between 1870 and 1890, the Chicago population would swell from 112,000 to 1.1 million people. During his visit in September 1873, Albert had probably met a number of German immigrants—perhaps through contacts supplied by his brother William, who had represented the interests of Houston German social groups when he was a Texas state senator. In Chicago, much of the trade-union organizing revolved around the Turners, a German men’s athletic club with radical polit
ical leanings; it was the club’s three-story frame building on Twelfth Street that served as the headquarters and meeting place of Chicago socialists. Perhaps Albert relied during the move on the help of a Republican he had met in the course of politicking in the Hill Country, someone with a hospitable friend or cousin in Chicago who could ease the Parsonses’ way into the city’s North Side German-immigrant community, where they settled immediately upon arrival.5

  Or it is possible that during his initial trip to the city Albert had heard that the largest newspapers had a deficit of printers. In the aftermath of the 1871 fire, Local No. 16 of the National Typographical Union (NTU) had offered to find jobs for two hundred of its members in other Midwestern cities, and it was perhaps the departure of at least some of these who made room for him. In any event, on his arrival, he wasted little time applying for membership in Local No. 16, and he found work as a compositor for the Chicago Times, the Chicago Inter-Ocean, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Daily News. The NTU admitted him formally in April 1877.6