Goddess of Anarchy Read online

  Together these socialists expressed faith in the ballot box as a redemptive force in bringing about a peaceful, more democratic society. To outsiders, though, they seemed to welcome widespread poverty and suffering as engines of radical change, on the theory that, as Schilling put it, “wholesale hunger and destitution… would furnish the surplus steam—discontent—that would blow the capitalistic system to ‘kingdom come’” by rousing the sluggish masses to act. Indeed, socialists walked a fine line by, on the one hand, exposing the intense suffering of the poor, and, on the other, pronouncing economic hardship and even starvation as necessary and inevitable stages on the road to revolution.22

  Lucy had not yet become a public figure in her own right, but hints of her personality emerged in two lawsuits she initiated around the same time that Albert was gravitating toward the SDP, one in June 1875 and the other a year later. In the first, she hired a young, up-and-coming white attorney, Alfred S. Trude, and sued Henry M. Taylor in circuit court, presumably for money he owed her for sewing services. (Whether she won or lost the case is unknown.) The following summer she hired another lawyer, George W. Know, and took her downstairs neighbor to court. The suit alleged that Mrs. Putnam “keeps a house of ill-repute, that she cuts off the former’s [Parsons’s] water supply, and when expostulated with makes threats to do bodily injury.” In the court record, Lucy is identified as “a colored woman, who is married to a white man of that name, a compositor in the Times office.” (The court reporter probably knew Albert, hence the editorializing about Lucy’s race and her marital status.) The judge apparently sided with Lucy and told Mrs. Putnam that if anyone else made a complaint against her, “she would be summarily dealt with.” These cases indicate that Lucy had the nerve, and the discretionary income, to haul two white people into court with the aid of lawyers.23

  By late 1876, the Social Democratic Party had merged with the Workingmen’s Party of Illinois to form the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS). Albert Parsons had represented Chicago at its founding convention in New Jersey earlier that year. The first corresponding secretary of the Chicago branch was a twenty-four-year-old architectural draftsman named Philip Van Patten from Washington, DC. Van Patten later claimed that he owed his leadership position in the WPUS to the fact that the Chicago socialists had “difficulty in getting anyone who could write correct English.” Not only were most labor radicals German, but German thinkers such as Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Ferdinand Lassalle set the agenda for the group. (Lassalle advocated ballot-box socialism, which called upon all citizens to exercise their right to vote.) Van Patten was no rhetorician, however, and so for a long time, Albert Parsons was “practically the only public English speaker we had,” as Parsons himself later wrote; it was Parsons who spoke first at any socialist meeting or rally, usually followed by August Spies in German.24

  Early on, Lucy assumed a prominent role in debates over strategy and theory during the weekly meetings of the WPUS, which stretched from Monday night into the early hours of Tuesday. And she read widely—local newspapers, popular magazines, and books of history and dense political theory. The fruits of her study would become abundantly clear in a couple of years, when she would burst onto the Chicago scene as not only a debater and a lecturer but also a writer of poetry, prose, and social commentary. By that time she had developed a distinctive voice and the vocabulary of a well-educated, highly sophisticated observer of life and interpreter of texts.

  Albert soon became a regular on the speaking circuit, traveling throughout the Midwest to promote socialistic principles. On one of his trips, to Indianapolis in 1876, he delivered a July 4 oration marking the country’s centennial celebration. It began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and detailed the inalienable rights of men, including “Life, Liberty, and the full proceeds of their Labor.” The crimes of “the Bearers of the Ruling System, the Aristocrats of Capital,” were enumerated, including this one: “They brought the last civil war on our country to abolish black slavery, but left wage slavery as it was, while augmenting its ever-increasing cruelty.”25

  During that visit to Indianapolis, Albert joined the Knights of Labor, and, with Schilling, he founded Chicago’s first local Knights assembly upon his return. Organized by workers as a secret society, the Knights hearkened back to a time when yeoman farmers and small producers beholden to no one—not bankers, employers, or railroad men—had formulated the founding principles of American citizenship. On the surface, at least, the Knights’ romance with the past would seem to be at odds with the socialists’ focus on the future and on the relentless forward march of history, from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, from slavery to wage slavery to freedom, variously defined. However, neither Albert nor Lucy hewed to an ideologically pure socialist party line, and they cared little for doctrinal consistency. They saw no contradiction in simultaneous membership in a WPUS branch and a Knights assembly.

  In 1877 and for the next four years, Albert began to run regularly for public office as a socialist—once for county clerk, twice for state assemblyman, and three times for alderman from the 15th Ward. As early as May 1876, the Chicago press took note of him; the Tribune would thereafter routinely refer to him as a communist demagogue—again, a term that for many conjured up violent European revolutionaries. His notoriety in the mainstream press was a boon to his political career, but it also put him squarely in the crosshairs of law enforcement officers who were becoming anxious about socialists attracting huge crowds.26

  The police detective Michael J. Schaak, for one, was convinced that the December 1873 demonstrations marking the onset of the depression had served as a mere “pretext for many a diatribe against capital.” Before long, undercover police became a fixture at the meetings held at Turner Hall, which were believed by Schaak and his colleagues to be a vipers’ nest of communists, drunkards, and thieves. In the winter of 1876, the detective began to single out Albert Parsons, Van Patten, Schilling, and Morgan as socialists gaining prominence “at large gatherings” regardless of the type of those get-togethers. Schaak understood, if imperfectly, that picnics, New Year’s Eve celebrations, dances, and musical entertainments were, as much as demonstrations, the underpinnings of a radical German political culture that gave expression to a way of life as well as a way of thinking about the world. Indeed, German-immigrant socialism boasted its own festivals, schools and nurseries, volunteer militias, and charity leagues—providing for a veritable Deutschtum (Germany-away-from-home). Because the English-section socialists could claim nothing comparable in the way of a community that fused activism and ethnic culture, Lucy and Albert looked to their German-speaking comrades for sociability and a sense of belonging. The Parsonses would remain native-born, non-German anomalies within the socialist community, even as they became more active in it.27

  THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877 COST THIRTY-FIVE CHICAGO workers their lives and wounded an estimated two hundred. Lucy would later write that the strike proved to be a turning point in her life, opening her eyes to multiple forms of injustice and to the realities of structures of power. She also took to heart the attention (both admiring and disparaging) that Albert received during the strike by virtue of his speaking abilities. She saw the potential of the masses to cripple the city’s economy, and the potential of the women protesters to unnerve the respectable classes. Assuming a leadership role in the uprising, Albert was eager to rally union members and the unemployed alike; but although he escaped with his life, he lost his job, and from that point onward found himself the constant target of suspicious authorities. Neither the city of Chicago nor his household would ever be the same.

  The summer of 1877 marked the first time a US president mobilized federal troops to quash a strike. In Chicago, with its throngs of demonstrators and cadre of WPUS provocateurs, a six-day mass protest that was held a week into the strike convinced elites that the city had entered a period of civil rebellion; this development struck them as more threatening to their businesses and bu
ildings than even the Civil War or the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The prospect of armed conflict and evocations of Civil War militarization led workers as well as law enforcement authorities to believe that the resolution of bitter class conflict could come about only through bloodshed. Chicago police were determined to preempt challenges to their authority, a tactic that turned peaceful assemblies into riots, minor street skirmishes into pitched battles, and generalized labor unrest into a wider, years-long war of words, bullets, and the hangman’s noose. Mayor Monroe Heath exhorted the forces under his command to dig in for the long haul.

  At the national level, the six-week strike grew out of the attempt (predictable, according to the WPUS) on the part of industrialists to consolidate their holdings and shore up flagging profits by reducing labor costs. After 1867, railroad owners over-expanded and over-speculated, and the depression of 1873 left them scrambling to cut operating expenses. On June 1, 1877, Pennsylvania Railroad officials told their employees that their wages would be cut by 15 cents an hour (down to 13.5 cents), a total reduction of a substantial $8 a week. The news prompted the Tribune (under the editorship of the business apologist and former abolitionist and Unionist Joseph Medill) to offer a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders, opining that “there is no help for it,” as wages would rise when times got better and not before. Meanwhile, employers deserved the sympathy of the public, for they “are suffering as well as employees.” Certainly the owners’ “suffering” was of a different order compared to that of their workers, however. The behemoth railroad industry, capitalized at $5 billion, employed 200,000 people and maintained 79,000 miles of track, arteries carrying the lifeblood of American commerce. On July 21, in response to the wage cuts, West Virginia railroad workers walked off the job. That same day, Pittsburgh strikers torched 39 buildings and destroyed 104 locomotives and 1,245 passenger cars. Three regiments of the local militia, 1,000 federal troops, and a battery of artillery from Philadelphia were deployed to quell the strike, and 20 people were killed. The whole nation seemed to be on edge; people were eager for news by the hour in a way that had not been seen since 1861.28

  In Chicago, what began as a job action among rail switchmen swelled to a general strike among the skilled and unskilled. Over a week, the WPUS tried to harness the tremendous collective outrage among railroad workers into a massive labor-organizing drive. On the evening of Saturday, July 21, an estimated 1,000 men and women gathered in a vacant lot on the corner of Twelfth and Halsted Streets, chanting “We want work, not charity.” A Tribune reporter covering the event noted with astonishment that “the printer Parsons” made a speech “which would have done credit, for force and eloquence, to a man of much greater pretensions.” Albert Parsons held forth, questioning the manhood of those in the crowd who watched their wives being reduced to prostitution and their children to starvation. In response, “many a tattered coatsleeve came up to its owner’s eyes, many a fist was clenched, and teeth were shut hard together,” although Parsons seemed conciliatory, and “did not allude to carnage and incendiarism as a means to that end.”29

  On Monday the twenty-third, in front of a packed crowd at Sack’s Hall at the corner of Brown and Twentieth Streets, Parsons again took the podium, to the cheers of the crowd. This time he excoriated the city’s newspapers, singling out his employers at the Tribune and the Sunday Times by name as the mouthpieces of the great industrialists. As he had the day before, he tried to shame his listeners, now saying, “If the proprietor has a right to fix the wages and say what labor is worth, then we are bound hand and foot—slaves, and we should be perfectly happy, content with a bowl of rice and a rat a week.” With these words, he compared his audience to the freedpeople of the South and the exploited Chinese on the West Coast, both insults to white men’s sense of their own manliness. Ironically, this racist appeal echoed his speeches to crowds of Texas freedmen—the demand that they seize their rights by reclaiming their manhood and defying their “masters.”30

  That evening, at a mass meeting on Market Square, Parsons addressed an estimated 30,000 listeners. Calling upon the “Grand Army of Starvation” (a phrase that evoked the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal order of Union veterans), he urged them to join the WPUS: “Enroll your names in the Grand Army of Labor, and if the capitalist engages in warfare against our rights, then we shall resist him with all the means that God has given us.” Parsons pledged that in opposition to armed capital, “his thought, his voice, and his arm should be raised for bloody war.” According to a reporter, “his speech bordered on the inflammatory, but he left the crowd to fill in gaps.” And so it did, responding to the names of railroad men with “We’ll hang them.”31

  On Tuesday Parsons reported for work at the Times only to find that he had been “discharged and blacklisted by this paper for the meeting that night.” Of his coworker printers, he said (probably wrongly), they “admired secretly what they termed ‘my pluck,’ but they were afraid to have much to say to me.” At noon, he was with Van Patten in the Market Street office of the Arbeiter Zeitung when two policemen came in and seized them and took them to the local police station. There, according to Parsons, the chief of police, Michael Hickey, “in a brow-beating, officious, and insulting manner,” grilled him about where he came from and whether he had a family. Hickey warned him, “Parsons, your life is in danger. I advise you to leave the city at once. Beware. Everything you say or do is made known to me. I have men on your track who shadow you. Do you know you are liable to be assassinated any moment on the street?”32

  Meanwhile, workers were shutting down the Baltimore & Ohio and the Illinois Central Railroads. Parsons stayed away from the crowds, but that night he ventured out to the Tribune compositors’ room “to be near the men of my own craft, whom I instinctively felt sympathized with me.” Suddenly he was accosted by the head of Local No. 16’s executive board and three other men who proceeded to drag him out of the office and down the stairs. Before depositing him on the sidewalk, one drew a gun and put it to his head, saying, “I’ve a mind to blow your brains out.” Parsons recalled that his fellow workers “expressed great excitement and threatened to strike” to show their solidarity with him, though they seemed mollified when Tribune owner Medill personally assured them that he had had nothing to do with the assault on the outspoken orator. Within a few weeks Parsons would sue the Tribune for the libelous charge that he was responsible for “originating and perpetuating the disturbance”—the recent unrest among Chicago workers. The paper’s fabrications had left him jobless and “liable to be wounded and even killed, by the people of Chicago, for being a rioter and a conspirator.”33

  On Wednesday immense numbers of men and women continued to rove the streets, with smaller groups coming together at specific workplaces to liberate the “wage slaves,” only to scatter when police arrived. The air was filled with a Babel of languages and the strains of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” It was no wonder authorities were convinced that the republic was under siege. That morning without warning the police had burst into Turner Hall and broken up a meeting of furniture workers who had been discussing the strike. One cabinetmaker had been shot to death, and others suffered beatings and cracked skulls at the hands of club-wielding police; the walls of the hall were splattered with blood. Seen within the broader context of the strike, this clash was relatively minor, but the unprovoked nature of the attack had a lasting impression upon Chicago’s workers, especially the German Americans. They were now convinced that, no matter how peaceable their meetings, they would remain vulnerable to ambushes from authorities.34

  That afternoon, in the “Battle of the Viaduct” four blocks away, heavily armed police and National Guardsmen fought with as many as 10,000 demonstrators. One reporter described what he considered to be a most “disgusting” scene—an “unsexed mob of female incendiaries,” hundreds of them, their hair loose and their dresses tucked up to their waists, doing battle with the police. He wrote, “Some were young, scarcely women
in age, and not all in appearance.” With their “knotty hands” and their “brawny, sunburnt arms,” these “Amazons” hurled rocks, sticks, wooden blocks, and obscenities at officers. By the end of this bloody day, at least eighteen victims, all of them workers, had died. One socialist noted, “Chicago’s workers never viewed the police in the same light as they had prior to this hour.”35

  That week saw an unprecedented mobilization of armed city, state, and federal forces as well as of private interests. In the words of one observer, “The city was alive with warlike preparations.” Police, organized in “platoons,” joined forces with the 9th and 22nd United States Infantry, regiments of the Illinois National Guard and Illinois State Militia, several companies of cavalry, and the Ellsworth Zouaves and other veterans groups. The mayor deputized 5,000 civilians as law enforcement agents, and leading businessmen and other “respected members” of the Chicago Board of Trade hastily formed a “Law and Order League.” Individual employers paid private security forces and armed their clerks and bookkeepers to take to the streets in the service of public order. The US secretary of war called up six companies from Omaha and four from St. Paul and sent them to Chicago. Chicago editors hoped that prominent Civil War officers, including three generals (Philip Sheridan, George R. Crook, and John Pope), would be diverted from fighting Snake, Sioux, and Apache Indians and sent to this newest “seat of local war.” Meanwhile, the streets echoed with the crack of gunfire and a barrage of artillery.36