CHAPTER THREE
LUCY PARSONS ON THE LIVES OF THE POOR: AN ALTERNATIVE DEMOCRACY
Lucy E. Parsons is believed to have been born in North Texas in 1853, possibly in Johnson County or approximately a hundred miles away in Waco, but the details of her early life are far from clear. As Ahrens (2004, 12) remarks, “[i]n the fragmentary records about Lucy Parsons, much is uncertain.” Similarly, Avrich (1984, 11) writes that “[l]ittle is known of Lucy Parsons’s ancestry or early life,” and Ashbaugh (1976, 14) says also that “[l]ittle is known of Lucy’s origins.” Cravey and Cravey (2008, 26) com- ment that “Lucy’s origins in Waco, Texas remain poorly documented. Many of the biographical details of her life are in conflict even as Lucy herself reported them.” The missing historical information has perhaps encouraged interest in fictional portrayals. Robert Benedetti’s recent nar- rative, Dynamite and Roses (Benedetti 2010), attempts to fill in the story’s many gaps. Howard Fast’s novel, The American, about Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, also portrays “the strength, character and determina- tion of Lucy Parsons” (Ashbaugh 1976, 7). Fast (1946, 119) writes that “Lucy Parsons, after her husband’s death, became as much a part of Chicago as the dirty streets.” In the social scientific world, many commentators lament the absence of references to Lucy Parsons’ life and ideas in scholarly works. For exam- ple, Horwitz, Kowal, and Palczewski (2008, 687–688) state that, with a single exception, “the academic community has totally ignored her.” Cochran (2006, 150) calls her “an often neglected figure in the history of the American left.” For Lucy’s admirers, this absence of intellectual inter- est has been hard to fathom. Rosemont (2000, 20), for example, identifies her as “one of the most extraordinary and influential figures in the history of the U.S. labor movement: No one who met her ever forgot her.” But many people have no knowledge of her existence. There is also an inap- propriate dearth of curiosity about the life and works of Lucy’s husband, Albert. Writing in 1968, Johnson bewailed the fact that, while current attention to the programs of Students for a Democratic Society and other New Left factions had spawned no less than four significant general accounts of anarchism and its history (each of which is still in use today), “[a]ll of these studies neglect Albert R. Parsons, perhaps the most notorious
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anarchist yet most revered labor martyr of nineteenth-century America” (Johnson 1968, 195). Most of Lucy Parsons’ life was spent on Chicago’s North Side, where the couple arrived in 1873, and Lucy would become a participant in the radical Hobohemia counter-cultural community. In 1879, she helped to set up the Working Women’s Union, a group that, in addition to promoting collec- tive bargaining, also campaigned loudly for the institution of an eight- hour workday (Ashbaugh 1976, 33–34; Cravey and Cravey 2008, 27; Cochran 2006, 148; Davis 1983, 152; Tax 2001, 45). As Ashbaugh points out, additional information about the activities of the union, like other details relating to the life of Lucy Parsons, has been difficult to find (33–34). Lucy and Albert Parsons then became involved with the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), a group of loosely federated pro- gressive, labor union, radical, and anarchist groups and, in 1884, when the Chicago association, which was the strongest affiliate, started publishing a weekly paper called the Alarm, Albert Parsons became its editor (Avrich 1984, 73–77, 85, 99). In the initial years, Ashbaugh (1998, 582) says that Lucy Parsons was “a frequent contributor,” terminology that is repeated by Boyer and Morais (1973, 87), although David (1936, 113–114) describes the position differently, writing that “Parsons’ wife, Lucy, offered an occa- sional article.” Nelson (1988, 94) says only that “Lucy Parsons contributed articles to it.” Lucy’s notorious piece, “To Tramps” (L. Parsons [1884] 1976), which at least rhetorically advocated the use of violence against the ruling class, appeared in the Alarm. On May 4, 1886, at a meeting at the Haymarket in Chicago to protest the earlier killing of several strikers outside the McCormick Reaper Works, a bomb was hurled. Police, who had already been trying to close down the gathering, blamed local anarchists, seven of whom were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. At the start of their trial, Albert Parsons, who had no longer been in attendance at the meeting at the time of the explosion, announced his presence in the court and was immediately added to the list of accused. Following the famously flawed proceedings, all eight were found guilty, and seven, including Parsons, were sentenced to death. Eventually four of them, including Lucy Parsons’ husband, were hanged. Another of those convicted committed suicide, and the remaining three were later pardoned in 1893 by Governor Altgeld, who easily recognized the unfairness of the process (Avrich 1980, i-ii, 1984; DeLamotte 2004, 4–5). While the convictions of her husband and the other anarchists were being appealed, Lucy Parsons traveled around the United States on a
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