Goddess of Anarchy Page 9
All summer, industrialists and newspaper editors had goaded lynch mobs and the police, calling for workers to be poisoned with arsenic or strychnine, hanged from telegraph poles, blown apart by hand grenades, dragged before firing squads, or force-fed a “rifle diet.” (In 1875, the Tribune had urged authorities to dispense with due process for communists, who were, apparently, criminals by definition: “Judge Lynch is an American by birth and character. Every lamp-post in Chicago will be decorated with a Communist carcass if necessary.”) Reporters used military metaphors to chronicle the efforts of police and military in pursuit of “this formidable army,” a “tramp army” in “rebellion.” On July 27, Mayor Heath reported that calm had been restored. Though the campaign was won, however, the war was far from over.37
The Citizens’ Association reacted to the summer uprising by creating a committee devoted to domestic “military” affairs and pressing the city to create a volunteer militia, which the association would support. The militia was now as essential as firefighters and police in protecting the property of the business community. In 1878, the CA presented the city with a Gatling gun, a newly developed continuous firing machine; 600 breech-loading Springfield rifles; 4 twelve-pounder Napoleon cannons; and enough ammunition and rounds of canister and case shot to equip a small army. The group paid the expenses that had been incurred by two regiments of the Illinois State Militia during the recent fighting. Authorities also began to keep an eye on the small immigrant-sponsored volunteer militias, most of which had begun as fraternal associations but now took on a sinister cast. Chief among these was the German Lehr und Wehr Verein (Education and Defense Society), founded in 1875 with thirty men. Albert Parsons would admit that indeed he and other workers “had entered upon a warfare” during the July 1877 demonstrations—but, he said, it was a war “against starvation wages and overwork,” and not against any particular elected official or employer.38
Parsons invoked the Civil War, saying, “My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the North are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers.” Indeed, the strikes of that summer brought to the fore critical questions that the Civil War had failed to address in any meaningful way. If workers were indeed constrained by the iron law of wages, then wherein lay their freedom, their independence as citizens? Condemning “wage slavery” as a labor system equivalent to the one supposedly abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, Parsons held that workers were staging a revolt against industrial masters, and chafing at chains that thwarted their desires and denied their basic rights as Americans. In contrast, Joseph Medill and other Chicago leaders believed that workers and employers shared fundamental interests—they were “Partners in business”: employees freely offered their labor, and they received the market-based compensation due them.39
Parsons and his comrades considered the events of the summer “the First Declaration of War” on peaceable civilians, a time when the full weight of the US military was brought to bear on unarmed men and women exercising their constitutional rights of freedom of assembly. Certainly the strikes radicalized not only large numbers of ordinary Chicago laborers but also men and women who would gain fame in the annals of American labor history as leaders, including the seamstress-turned-organizer “Mother” Jones and the socialist Eugene V. Debs. Samuel Gompers, who would go on to found the American Federation of Labor, later claimed that the upheaval “was the tocsin that sounded a ringing message of hope to us all.”40
Looking back on the events later, Lucy Parsons wrote that “it was during the great railroad strike of 1877 that I became interested in what is known as the ‘Labor question.’” She became convinced of the worthlessness of the two major parties; the Republicans and Democrats, she believed, would continue to lie and prevaricate in order “to remain in power at all hazards… [and] build up a powerful machine; one strong enough to crush all opposition and silence all vigorous murmurs of discontent.” Her future writings and speeches echoed the themes that her husband had stressed during the uprising of 1877—the call to “manliness” among white workers; the plight of wage slaves who were no better off than chattel slaves; the conviction that the historical conflict between capital and labor had evolved into all-out war.41
The fact that nearly three dozen workers lost their lives during the Great Strike forced Albert and Lucy Parsons to contemplate the meaning of violence in forestalling or furthering the class struggle. Must the toilers languish in their misery and wretchedness and expect to be slaughtered by agents of the capitalists? Should men refrain from protecting themselves and their families against the forces of tyranny? Did not heavily armed city police, state militia, federal troops, and private security forces pose a dire threat to workers’ collective action in general? One imperative seemed certain: the laboring classes must somehow defend themselves in a way that would not only repel but also forever discourage further deadly attacks from capitalist aggressors. Albert and Lucy Parsons both stood at the ready to command a grand army of laboring foot soldiers, sluggish though the masses might prove themselves to be in anticipation of the coming revolution.
Chapter 4
Farewell to the Ballot Box
IN THE LATE 1870S, LUCY TOOK ON MULTIPLE ROLES THAT, combined, would test her physical and emotional stamina and also thrust her into the public sphere. She became a regular writer for the radical press and a labor agitator deemed by mainstream newspaper editors to be worthy of coverage, all the while contending with the new demands of motherhood and providing the family’s main source of income. After five years in Chicago, she emerged out of Albert’s shadow and took her place next to him in the columns of newspapers and at labor-organizing meetings. And she began to see herself as a leader in her own right, prepared to do battle against misguided comrades no less than against the lackeys of capitalism. Eventually, the couple would chart a dangerous new path together away from electoral politics and toward the idea that the laboring classes were incapable of voting—or, for that matter, reading or reasoning—their way to a better world.
After the summer of 1877, now that no newspaper would hire Albert as a typesetter, Lucy faced greater responsibilities as breadwinner. She expanded her sewing shop into “Parsons & Co., Manufacturers of Ladies’ and Children’s Clothing,” with her husband as business partner and agent, and the two opened a “factory” at 306 Mohawk Street. While she oversaw production, he spent some of his time soliciting orders for uniforms from hotels, restaurants, and laundries, and for a few years, at least, he noted later, “[I] sold suits for a living.” In fact, although Albert might have earned what little money he did make from selling suits, he was spending most of his energies promoting socialism, running for office, and speaking wherever and to whomever he could. Of his ability to reach all kinds of listeners, whether in an elegant parlor with Methodist clergy or in a crowded union hall with carpenters, one friend remarked, “No audience or circle of people ever in any way disconcerted him.”1
In losing his livelihood as a printer, Albert had become not only “a martyr for the cause,” according to his comrades, but also an object of intense interest on the part of Detective Michael Schaak, Police Chief Michael Hickey, newspaper reporters on the beat and their powerful editors, and even Allan Pinkerton, head of the notoriously lethal private security force. Pinkerton saw the massive strikes of the summer of 1877 as only an expression of workers’ “greed, avarice and fiendishness,” and he singled out as responsible for the bloodshed “a young American communist named Albert Parsons,” a man of great “viciousness and desperation.” According to Pinkerton, Parsons seemed “to possess a strange nature in every respect”—he lived openly with a “colored woman, whom he has at least called his wife,” and he possessed “a devilish ingenuity in the use of words which has permitted himself to escape punishment.”2
Parsons worked mightily to put his “devilish ingenuity in the use of words” to good use. Believing that workingmen must e
xpress their grievances forcefully at the ballot box, he regularly ran for local office between 1877 and 1880 (never successfully). He also helped to found the Chicago Council of Trade and Labor Unions, a confederation of a dozen (all-male) socialist unions. Around this time the WPUS changed its name to the Socialistic Labor Party (SLP). Parsons became assistant editor of the group’s paper, The Socialist, and, in 1879, its editor. This lively weekly of news, editorials, poetry, serialized fiction, letters to the editor, and a column of quotations from “enemy capitalists” chronicled the daily struggles of ordinary Chicagoans—for example, those in the meatpacking industry, where men did jobs impervious to mechanization, including the stickers, who thrust razor-sharp knives into animals’ throats; the scrapers, who rubbed their fingers raw cleaning the hair off hides; and the scalders, who toiled over cauldrons of boiling liquid. It was on the pages of this periodical that Lucy Parsons made her debut as a purveyor of biting social commentary.3
In April 1878, Albert lost his bid for county clerk, although he garnered 8,000 votes and the socialists managed to elect one of their own to the Common Council. Some workingmen eschewed radicalism but cast their ballots for SLP candidates as a protest vote, a statement against the Republicans and Democrats who promised so much before an election but inevitably failed to deliver on their promises afterward. The SLP adopted the slogan, “Go to the polls and slaughter them with ballots instead of bullets, O!” Before long, however, it became clear that the socialists could not ride to victory on the backs of protesters. In the late 1870s, Albert and Lucy changed course: they condemned the ballot box, and in a bid to shock the masses out of their torpor, resorted to more extreme rhetoric. Several years of frustrating engagement with the local election system convinced them that workers must use means other than the vote to advance their own interests. Turning on many of their colleagues, the Parsonses rejected partisan politicking and governmental authority and became anarchists.4
CHICAGO TRIBUNE REPORTERS FOUND ALBERT PARSONS FASCINATING; he made good copy. One who approached him for an interview at his office at No. 7 Clark Street “had no difficulty getting him to talk.” The result was a series of high-profile newspaper stories in 1878 about the small cadre of Chicago socialists, including an article titled “They Are Arming to Resist Illegal Interference with their Meetings.” As usual, Parsons was eminently quotable: “Force, as represented in strikes or armed mobs, we denominate gut revolutions, to use a strong word—a revolution of the belly.” He denied that socialists aimed for the redistribution of private property, and indicated that he and his fellow workers would use violence only for defensive purposes: “We intend to carry our arms with us, and if the armed assassins and paid murderers employed by the capitalist class undertake to disperse and break up our meetings, as they did in such an outrageous manner last summer, they will meet foes worthy of their steel.” To the Tribune, the ideas of this slight young man, with what Pinkerton called such a “strange nature,” demanded a rebuttal in the form of a lengthy editorial, “What Communism Really Means.”5
As Albert began to devote his full energies to the SLP, Lucy was making her first foray into labor organizing. In the summer of 1878 she joined with like-minded women, who were, like her, in their mid- to late twenties, to found Chicago’s Working Women’s Union (WWU) No. 1, a group that aimed to bring all women, but especially servants, department store clerks, and seamstresses, into the socialist fold; together these groups represented about 15 percent of all Chicago workers. Now twenty-six, Lucy was forging a public persona of her own, although the WWU was a creature of the Council of Trade and Labor Unions, and Albert often attended its meetings. In her early work with the WWU, Lucy defied convention merely by appearing in public, for by this time she was in her last trimester of pregnancy, and this was an age when pregnant women, regardless of class, were usually confined to the home.6
Socialists claimed to welcome all wage earners, but in fact many tradesmen considered women and children the mere pawns of cost-cutting employers. German American radicals dismissed calls for women’s suffrage and other forms of gender equality, which they associated with native-born Americans and thought, in any case, to be irrelevant to the class struggle. The WWU, meanwhile, ignored the plight of black working women, although in 1878 the SLP finally admitted two “swarthy sons of Africa” into its ranks.7
The leaders of WWU No. 1 were an illustrious lot, and within a few years several would become prominent members of the Knights of Labor. The group’s first president, Alzina Parsons Stevens, born in Maine, had worked as a youngster in a Lowell textile mill, where she lost part of a finger to a machine. Later she followed the trade of printer; as a member of NTU Local No. 16, she had probably met Albert Parsons at union meetings. Elizabeth Rodgers, a native of Ireland, was the wife of George Rodgers, an iron molder. A mother (eventually of eleven), she advanced the novel idea that housekeeping was a form of productive, albeit unwaged, labor. The Sovereigns of Industry member Elizabeth Morgan, a native of England, had as a child toiled for up to sixteen hours a day in a mill in Birmingham, England. Her husband, Tommy, had joined the Chicago socialists in 1873, four years after he and his wife had moved to the city. By 1877, the Sovereigns had disbanded, and Elizabeth turned to labor organizing alongside her husband.8
Lizzie May (or Mary) Hunt Swank, another WWU leader, would become a lifelong friend of both Albert and Lucy, and she was one of the very few women—perhaps the only woman—with whom Lucy developed a deep relationship. Swank did little to dispel the popular image of herself as the petite piano teacher from Ohio who, incongruously, promoted an angry, militant brand of labor radicalism. One reporter marveled, “From her meek appearance one would never guess she was a fire eater and a blood drinker,… a blatherkite [i.e., spouter of foolishness] orator and a writer of inflammatory slush for anarchic publications.” However, if Lucy and Lizzie ever shared late-night confidences, they no doubt discovered some surprising parallels in their lives, secrets that both sought to suppress.9
Born in Linn County, Iowa, in 1851, Lizzie May Hunt began teaching school and giving piano lessons at the age of fifteen. Within two years she had married a Union veteran and grocery store owner, Hiram J. Swank of Bolivar, Ohio. In July 1869, the couple had a son, born around the time of Lucy’s first child, Champ. They named him Raphael Ashford Swank. A second child, Gladys, followed in 1873.10
Within five or six years, however, Lizzie and her mother, Hannah Hunt, had both left their husbands and were living together in Chicago. Although Lizzie eventually remarried (as did her father and her first husband), it is possible that neither her first marriage nor her parents’ had been formally dissolved. At some point (probably in the early 1860s), Hannah had joined a small Ohio free-love community called Berlin Heights, founded on the principle of “a woman’s absolute right to self-ownership.” Perched four hundred feet above Lake Erie in Erie County, Berlin Heights had thirty dwellings that housed two hundred residents who rejected conventional notions of monogamy, marriage, and divorce. Neighboring churchgoers were uncertain whether to laugh at the women in bloomers, the men by their side, up to their elbows in the washtub, or to condemn this shocking, if short-lived, den of iniquity and lust.11
Sometime before 1880, Lizzie moved to Chicago with Gladys and joined the household of her mother and siblings. In the mid-1870s, Hiram had taken Raphael west with him to a Colorado mining camp, but the boy died soon thereafter. Although Lizzie told an interviewer in the early twentieth century that her first husband and her children had long since died, in fact Gladys was still alive; she married in 1892 and lived in Chicago until her death in 1924. Lizzie was never a widow; Hiram had married again.12
Lizzie Swank would go on to write critiques of marriage, an institution she considered the tomb of happiness. She expressed her ambivalence toward romantic love, motherhood, children (and grandchildren), and male-female relations in general, leaving the details of her own life out of her nonfiction work and referring only indirectly to her
own tribulations in a novel. In losing a firstborn, abandoning the father of a first child (and, in Swank’s case, two children), and building new lives for themselves in Chicago, Swank and the famously reserved Lucy Parsons had more in common than was immediately apparent.13
Within the space of a few years of moving to Chicago, Swank had labored as a seamstress in a factory, in a sweatshop, and at home. The grueling conditions she endured prompted her and her sister to lead one of the first strikes among Chicago needlewomen (around 1880), when they protested the owner’s fraudulent pay practices. The owner changed his practices—but only after firing the two of them. Swank continued to write long exposés about the abuses young women suffered at the hands of their bosses. Making little more than $5 or $6 per week despite putting in ten-hour days, these workers were barely able to support themselves. The growth of large shops subjected ever more of them to the tyranny of the clock. In 1870, nine factories employed 491 workers, but ten years later, nineteen factories were employing 1,600. Fashionable women took advantage of desperate seamstresses who, in Swank’s words, “can frill and flounce and hem and stitch in marvelous fashion, who can set stitches in a gown which would drive the most captious feminine critic wild with delight and admiration.” In 1881, Swank joined the SLP.14
THE WORKING WOMEN’S UNION GATHERED EVERY OTHER SUNDAY afternoon in “open meetings”—more like a high-minded salon—to come up with ways to attract young women to the group. The leaders spent much time debating and discussing labor economics. At one meeting, in response to the question, “Can Women Live on their Present Wages?” an elderly servant stood to say, “The worst feature of the question was that girls working at the present wages could not keep up appearances, go about dressed neatly, and live comfortably and be honest and virtuous.” Still, there were other, more heated discussions, about the eight-hour-day movement, for example, with some arguing that shorter hours would provide women with more time at home, and others claiming that such an effort would further depress wages.15