Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

492 Pages·2017·16.36 MB·English

by  Jacqueline Jones

Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Jacqueline Jones
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First Edition: December 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jones, Jacqueline,
1948– author.
Title: Goddess of anarchy : the life and times of Lucy Parsons, American radical
Title: Goddess of anarchy : the life and times of Lucy Parsons, American radical
/ Jacqueline Jones.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017021023| ISBN 9780465078998 (hardback) | ISBN
9781541697263 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Parsons, Lucy E. (Lucy Eldine),
1853–1942. | Anarchists—United States—Biography. | Working class—United
States—History. | Labor movement—United States—History. | BISAC:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | BIOGRAPHY &
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Historical. | HISTORY United States 20th Century. |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Political. | HISTORY Modern 20th
Century.
Classification: LCC HX843.7.P37 J66 2017 | DDC 355/.83092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021023
ISBNs: 978-0-46507899-8 (hardcover), 978-1-54169726-3 (ebook) LSC-C
E3-20171103-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
PART 1: AN ENDURING CIVIL WAR
Chapter 1 Wide-Open Waco
Chapter 2 Republican Heyday
PART 2: GILDED AGE DYNAMITE
Chapter 3 A Local War
Chapter 4 Farewell to the Ballot Box
Chapter 5 A False Alarm?
Chapter 6 Haymarket
Chapter 7 Bitter Fruit of Braggadocio
Chapter 8 “The Dusky Goddess of Anarchy Speaks Her Mind”
Chapter 9 The Blood of My Husband
PART 3: BLATHERKITE-GODDESS OF FREE SPEECH
Chapter 10 The Widow Parsons Sets Her Course
Chapter 11 Variety in Life, and Its Critics
Chapter 12 Tending the Sacred Flame of Haymarket
Chapter 13 Wars at Home and Abroad
PART 4: THE FALLING CURTAIN OF MYSTERY
Chapter 14 Facts and Fine-Spun Theories
Epilogue
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jacqueline Jones
More Praise for GODDESS OF ANARCHY
Abbreviations in Notes
Notes
Index
To Steve and Henry
Introduction
T
HE 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