February 16, 2022 • 40 mins
Parsons was an activist focused on improving the lives of workers, poor people, immigrants, and people who were unemployed or homeless. The Chicago Police Department described her as more dangerous than a thousand rioters.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. In June
of last year, we did an episode on the Haymarket Riot,
which is also called the Haymarket massacre and the Haymarket incident,
(00:25):
a lot of names for it. The briefest of all
recaps this is one sentence. A rally that was held
to support a strike for an eight hour work day
ended in violence after police ordered the remaining crowd to
disperse and somebody threw a bomb into their ranks. In
that episode, we mentioned Lucy Parsons. Her husband, Albert, was
(00:48):
one of the speakers at this rally, and he wasn't
involved in planning the rally. He could not have thrown
the bomb, but he was convicted on charges of conspiracy
and he was hanged. So that early there episode was
not really about Lucy Parsons. We didn't talk about her
much at all, but as all of this was happening,
she was an activist in her own right, and her
(01:10):
work evolved and continued for decades after her husband's execution.
She became one of the most notorious anarchists in the
United States in the twentieth century. The Chicago Police Department
called her more dangerous than a thousand rioters, but her activism,
in spite of the fact she was so reviled in
(01:30):
that way, it was consistently focused on improving the lives
of workers and poor people, and immigrants and people who
were unemployed or homeless. Her name has come up in
a bunch of random asidnes and researched for multiple other
episodes since then, so I have moved her up to
the top of the list. Some aspects of Lucy Parson's
(01:51):
life are tricky to pin down. We have a wealth
of detail about her as an adult, lots of names
and dates and places she traveled and the work she did,
and a lot of her writing has also survived, but
we often don't know her thoughts or motivations on some
of the choices she made. She died in a fire
at her home in nine which destroyed some of her
(02:12):
books and some of her personal papers. Afterward, police and
the FBI seized what was left. It's not clear what
happened to those materials, but it's possible that some of
it could have shed light on some unanswered questions and
beyond the loss of her personal papers, parsons racial and
ethnic background was the subject of a lot of discussion
(02:35):
and rumored during her lifetime. After she and Albert moved
from Waco, Texas to Chicago, Illinois. Both of them were
really only consistent about one thing in this regard, and
that was that she did not have African ancestry. At
various points she said that her family was Spanish or Mexican,
(02:56):
or indigenous, or some combination of those, and there were
also times when she just said that it was nobody's business.
After her husband's conviction, she went on a speaking and
fundraising tour to support a clemency campaign. A reporter during
that tour asked her about her background at her first stop,
and she said, quote, I am not a candidate for office,
(03:18):
and the public have no right to my past. I
am out to nothing to the world and people care
nothing of me. I am battling for a principle. But
historian Jacqueline Jones published a biography in seventeen called Goddess
of Anarchy, The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical,
and in this biography she documented some details of parsons
(03:41):
life before moving to Chicago. These details, a lot of them,
contradict what Parsons said herself, and by all appearances, they
are things that she intentionally tried to hide. But again,
while this biography clarified some specifics, we don't have documentation
of parsons thought process or her motivations after moving to Chicago.
(04:05):
Lucy Parsons publicly maintained that she had been born in Waco, Texas,
but Jones traced her birth to Virginia in eighteen fifty one.
Parsons mother was an enslaved woman named Charlotte, and her
father was white, probably Charlotte's enslaver, Thomas J. Tolliver. In
eighteen sixty three, Tolliver moved to McLennan County, Texas, taking
(04:27):
at least part of his enslaved workforce with him. This
included Charlotte, her twelve year old daughter, Lucia, and her
seven year old son, Tanner. Lucia would grow up to
be known as Lucy Parsons. To be clear, these people
had been declared free under the Emancipation Proclamation, but it
would have been even harder for the federal government to
(04:48):
enforce this in Texas, which may well have been one
of the reasons Tolliver took them there. About three years
after arriving in Texas, Tolliver went back east to get married.
This Civil War was over at this point, but news
of the war's end and the abolition of slavery had
been really slow to reach Texas. That's usually noted as
(05:09):
happening on June nine, eighteen sixty five, when federal troops
arrived in Galveston, Texas. Today, that is what's observed as
the Juneteenth Holiday. Life for black people in Texas was
still extraordinarily dangerous. The Texas legislature had implemented racist black
codes that restricted black people's behavior and enacted harsh punishments
(05:33):
for things like owning weapons or insulting a white person.
Former enslavers essentially treated their free workers as though they
were still enslaved, and there were gangs of white vigilantes
who terrorized the state's black population. It appears that Charlotte
took Tolliver's absence when he went back to east to
get married, as an opportunity to flee from rural mcglennan
(05:56):
County to Waco, which was the county's largest city. Along
with her children. Waco shared the same dangers as other
parts of Texas that were home to freed people, but
it was also home to a growing community of black
people who were establishing their own churches, schools, and businesses
and working to protect themselves from violence. There were also
(06:18):
white people in Waco who were working to try to
protect the black community and work towards equal rights. One
of them was Albert Parsons, who had served in the
Confederate Army during the war but had become a radical
Republican after it was over. After her family arrived in
Waco in eighteen sixty six, Lucia found work where she could,
including working as a seamstress and a cook, and she
(06:41):
also went to school. She started a romantic relationship with
a man named Oliver Benton, and he paid for her
tuition in her books at the school. Some sources give
Oliver's last name as gay Things, that was the last
name of his former enslaver. A year or two after
arriving in Waco, Lucia's mother married a man named Charlie Carter,
(07:03):
and she gave her children, including Lucia, his last name.
Sometime between the late summer of eighteen sixty eight and
July of eighteen sixty nine, Lucia gave birth to a baby,
who she named Champ. According to Oliver Benton, he and
Lucia were married and he was the baby's father, although
there is no record of this marriage. Marriages between enslaved
(07:26):
people had not been legally recognized, and after slavery was abolished,
it was common for free people to commit to their
own marriages without going through legal paperwork, so the details
aren't clear, but Champ seems to have died in infancy.
Then on September eighteen seventy two, twenty two year old
Lucia Carter married twenty eight year old Albert Parsons. Although
(07:49):
the name she gave the officiant was Ella Hall, the
many variations of her name that she gave to people
in subsequent years sometimes included some variation on Ella as
a middle name and Hall as her maiden name. Albert
Parsons had been working extensively with the radical faction of
the Republican Party in Texas. He had stridently advocated for
(08:12):
black people in Texas to have full and unrestricted access
to the rights they were guaranteed under the Constitution. He
had helped black people register to vote, and he had
been made a lieutenant colonel in the state Militia, where
he was tasked with protecting the black community in several
counties where they were being targeted with racist violence. He had, also,
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in addition to all of this, worked for the Office
of Public Instruction. Although at least some radical Republican leaders
endorsed interracial relationships, it would have been really unusual for
a white man in parsons position to marry a black woman,
and this marriage took place during a very narrow window
in which interracial marriages were legal in Texas at all. Earlier,
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in eighteen seventy two, the state Supreme Court had issued
a ruling in Honey ver As Clark that affirmed that
interracial marriage was legal, but just weeks after their marriage,
the Texas legislature passed a new law that banned it.
The Republican Party also lost control of the Texas government
in eighteen seventy three, and the newly installed legislature started
(09:17):
repealing the laws that had been passed to try to
protect the state's black population and their rights. During the
post war reconstruction, the Parsons Is started facing increasingly over
racism and threats of violence. Ku Klux Klan activity started
to increase all through Texas, and this same pattern was
playing out all over, especially the southern US. In the
(09:41):
face of all of this, the couple decided to leave,
and it appears that as they traveled north, Lucia decided
to put her past behind her, changing her first name
to Lucy and claiming Texas as her birthplace. At various
points from here on out, she would say that her
maiden name had been Gonzalez, Diaz or Hall. You will
often see her full name written out as Lucy Eldne
(10:04):
Gonzalez Parsons. We'll talk about what happened when they got
to Chicago after a quick sponsor break. At the start
of the show, we mentioned that we don't have documentation
of Lucy parsons thoughts or feelings or motivations about a
(10:27):
lot of the decisions that she made in her life,
but we can draw some pretty likely conclusions about why
she took on a new identity and tried to leave
her past behind her when she moved away from Waco
to Chicago, Illinois. She had already lived through so much
trauma and she was acutely aware of the limits that
(10:50):
white society tried to impose on black people's lives. Her
appearance would have prevented her from passing as white, but
presenting herself instead at as Mexican and Indigenous rather than black,
meant that she might have access to spaces that she
would have been shut out of otherwise. Also, today, Chicago
(11:10):
has one of the largest populations of Indigenous people of
any city in the US, but that was not the
case in the late nineteenth century. The vast majority of
Indigenous people living in the Great Lakes area had been
forced out or killed. In the eighteen thirties, there also
would have been very few Hispanic people in the city,
and although Chicago's Black population was growing rapidly, it's still
(11:33):
measured less than one percent of Chicago's total population. And
this meant that there wasn't a large community of color
that Lucy could have assimilated with, if that was what
she had wanted to do. But it also meant that
she wasn't likely to run into someone who either knew
her from before or knew enough about the identities she
was claiming to question those claims. Instead, the community where
(11:58):
Lucy and Albert Parsons found home was one that was
made up primarily of immigrants from Central Europe. The proportion
varies a little bit over the last half of the
nineteenth century, but immigrants made up between forty and fifty
percent of Chicago's population at the time. The easiest place
for them to find work was in Chicago's factories, and
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at some point during these years, as many as seventy
percent of Chicago's factory workers had been born outside the US.
Albert got a job as a printer, and he started
doing the same kind of activism that he had been
doing back in Texas, but instead of working through the
Republican Party to try to improve the lives of black people,
he was working with socialists to improve the lives of workers,
(12:42):
particularly immigrants. In addition to all the typical issues that
were common in rapidly growing industrial cities, unemployment was an
enormous issue in Chicago. With Lucy and Elbert got there
in the wake of the Panic of eighteen seventy three,
huge numbers of people were out of work. People who
could find jobs were often working long hours in just
(13:04):
grueling conditions for very low pay with no job security.
Albert and Lucy became active in Chicago's Social Democratic Party
and First International, but both of these organizations were short lived.
After those organizations were disbanded, Albert joined the Workingman's Party
of the United States, or the w p USA, and
(13:26):
started hosting meetings of that organization in the Parsons home.
Like First International, this had been started by followers of
Karl Marx. Albert also started running for local office as
a socialist. He ran for lots of different offices over
the years. He did not win any of his elections, though.
A series of railroad strikes took place around the US
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in eighteen seventy seven, collectively known as the Great Railroad Strike.
The economic depression that had followed the Panic of eighteen
seventy three was still ongoing. In the first wave of
strikes started after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad announced that
it was cutting its workers pay by ten percent. Albert
gave a speech during all this that began quote, we
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are assembled here as the Grand Army of Starvation. Some
of the demonstrations surrounding these railroad strikes became quite violent.
In some cases, striking workers destroyed bridges and rails and
railroad cars. It's estimated that more than a hundred thousand
workers took part in these strikes and then at least
(14:31):
a hundred people were killed. This was the first time
that federal troops were deployed to try to put an
end to a strike. Although the w p USA didn't
organize the railroad strikes themselves, it did organize demonstrations and
general strikes in support of the railroad workers, especially in
Chicago and St. Louis. Although the strikes didn't result in
(14:54):
many improvements for the workers, membership in the w p
USA grew in conjunction with the parties increased visibility. Lucy
Parsons described this as a turning point. It was definitely
a turning point for the Parsons family as well. Albert
lost his job because of his work during the strike,
(15:14):
and other employers refused to hire him. Lucy expanded her
sewing work into a bigger business to support them. It
went from being kind of her own sewing that she
was taking into Parsons and Company, manufacturer of ladies and
children's clothing. She also started hosting meetings of the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union with her friend, labor organizer Lizzie Swank.
(15:37):
The Socialist Labor Party was established in December of eighteen
seventy seven, and Lucy started writing articles and poems for
its publication, which was known as Socialist. In the summer
of eighteen seventy eight, she helped found the Chicago Working
Women's Union to organize women who worked as store clerks, servants,
and seamstresses. The union was under the umbrella of the
(16:00):
Council of Trade and Labor Unions, and Lucy attended the
Council's meetings as well. In addition to all of that,
she and Albert had a son, who they named Albert Jr.
In eighteen seventy nine. They also had a daughter, Lula,
who was born in eighteen eighty one. In the early
eighteen eighties, Lucy and Albert shifted their focus from socialism
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to anarchy, leaving the Socialist Labor Party for the International
Working People's Association. They had become frustrated with the socialist movement,
which they thought was focused on reforming a system that
really just needed to be totally dismantled. Albert was also
frustrated that many of the labor rights activists he had
been working with hadn't really supported him. When he was
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forced out of the printing industry following the Great Railroad Strike.
This included his leaving the National Typographical Union. Anarchist organizations
and publications frequently used violent rhetoric and their calls to
overthrow capitalism and other systems of oppression, and some of
them also advocated actual violence, including printing instructions for making bombs.
(17:08):
So anarchists, including Albert and Lucy Parsons, got a lot
of attention from newspapers and from law enforcement. Police officers,
Pinkerton agents, detectives and others infiltrated anarchist meetings and plain clothes,
and then sometimes the organizers of those meetings tried to
use this to their own advantage. Sometimes they would intentionally
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use more extreme language when they knew that they were
being watched. The idea here was stoking fear of what
their movement might do, and then trying to use that
fear as leverage to reach their goals. Lucy started writing
for the i w p as publication The Alarm, which
was one of seven anarchist publications in Chicago, but the
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only one that was printed in English. Her article two Tramps,
the Unemployed, the disinherited, and Miserable, published in October four
four became a widely distributed key document within the American
anarchist movement in the late nineteenth century. It began quote
a word to the thirty thousand, now tramping the streets
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of this great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly
about you at the evidences of wealth and pleasure of
which you own no part, not sufficient even to purchase
yourself a bit of food with which to appease the
pangs of hunger now gnawing at your vitals. It is
with you and the hundreds of thousands of others similarly
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situated in this great land of plenty, that I wish
to have a word. Parsons then meditated on the fact
that so many people had been toiling for decades but
had nothing to show for it, and she called for
a total change to the industrial system. This piece ended
with quote, each of you hungry tramps who read these lines,
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vail yourself of those little methods of warfare which science
has placed in the hands of the poor man, and
you will become a power in this or any other land.
Learn the use of explosives. In six Lucy published one
of her few pieces that directly referenced the idea of race.
(19:21):
In January of that year, Afro Indigenous brothers Ed and
Charlie Brown were delivering molasses and Carrollton, Mississippi, and accidentally
ran into a white man named Robert Moore. More than
a month later, More told lawyer James Liddell about it.
Liddell had an altercation with the Browns that ended in
a gunfight, and the Browns tried to press charges against him.
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White people were outraged at the idea of black people
pressing charges against a white man. An armed white mob
stormed the courthouse during an evidentiary hearing, opening fire and
killing both Ed and Charlie Brown, along with multiple other
black people who were in the courtroom. This happened on
March seventeenth, eight six, and it became known as the
(20:06):
Carroll County Courthouse massacre. A couple of weeks later, Lucy
published a piece called The Negro Let him leave politics
to the politician and prayer to the preacher. She published
that in the Alarm She condemned these killings stridently, but
also argued that it had not happened because the victims
were black. She wrote, quote, are there any so stupid
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as to believe these outrages have been, are being and
will be heaped upon the Negro because he is black,
not at all. It is because he is poor. It
is because he is dependent, because he is poorer as
a class than his white wage slave brother of the north.
On May one, six a general strike started in Chicago
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in support of an eight hour work day. The Haymarket
affair took place three days later. We're not going to
go back over the details of this incidents since we
covered it in another episode less than a year ago
in quite a bit of detail. But it was during
the aftermath that Lucy Parsons became one of the most
widely known anarchists in the United States, and we'll talk
more about that after a sponsor break. Prior to the
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Haymarket incident, Albert Parsons had been traveling and speaking extensively.
Presumably Lucy was keeping everything going at home while also
writing for the Alarm a lot and working with local
labor and anarchist groups in Chicago. We really don't have
the specifics of how this was all working. It's possible
that she was taking the children with her, and the
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idea that she had her children with her was a
key part of Albert's defense during his conspiracy trial, the
whole idea being we never would have brought our children
with us if we had thought it was going to
be dangerous. But after the Haymarket incident, Lucy often had
to leave her children in other people's care. Lizzie Swank
was often the person who was keeping her up to
(22:08):
date on how they were doing. Albert Parsons and seven
other men were tried together after the Haymarket bombing. Lucy
attended every day of the trial, along with jury selection.
The proceedings stretched from June twenty one to August even
all eight men were found guilty and all but one
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of them were sentenced to death. That included Albert Parsons.
Lucy did a lot of work to raise money for
a clemency campaign and to raise awareness of what had happened.
She also edited and published a book called The Famous
Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists. She went on a
speaking tour, traveling to seventeen states and making more than
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forty speeches. She earned as much as a hundred dollars
a day through these talks and other activities, and she
sent the vast majority of it back to Chicago. For
the men's defense. She walked her audiences through her account
of what had happened at Haymarket, including, as I said earlier,
how she would not have taken her own children with
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her if she thought it was going to be dangerous,
and she talked about all the ways she thought the
trial had been unfair. We noted at the beginning of
the show that at the very first stop on this
tour a reporter asked about parsons background and that she
refused to answer, But news coverage of her speaking tour
didn't drop this issue. There was a lot of focus
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on her appearance and a lot of speculation that she
had some combination of African, indigenous and Mexican ancestry, and
a lot of reporters just described her appearance as they
would describe the appearance of a black person, focusing on
the color of her skin and the color and texture
of her hair and the structure of her facial bones.
(23:54):
A lot of reporters seemed to assume that she was black,
and they wrote about her in a way that drew
from areeo types of black people. But at the same time,
Lucy Parsons was defying stereotypes of anarchists, who were usually
imagined as white and male, with unkempt beards and kind
of an unhinged rhetoric. Parsons was always very neatly dressed
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in dark colored dresses and elegant but usually simple accessories.
At all together just projected this sense of respectability, but
she combined that with radical rhetoric. She often started speeches
by declaring, quote, I am an anarchist. On December, she
gave a speech at Kansas City's Clump Hall in which
(24:41):
she said, quote, I suppose some of you expected to
see me with a bomb in one hand and a
flaming torch in the other, but are disappointed in seeing neither.
If such has been your ideas regarding an anarchist, you
deserve to be disappointed. Anarchists are peaceable, law abiding people.
What do anarchists mean when they speak of anarchy? Webster
(25:03):
gives the term two definitions, chaos and the state of
being without political rule. We cling to the latter definition,
our enemies hold that we believe only in the former.
Lucy Parsons faced arrest at various points on this tour,
and in Columbus, Ohio, she was jailed and told she
would have to return to stand trial for what was
(25:26):
deemed obscene language. She did not go back for that
court date, but the arrests continued after she got back home.
Two of Albert's co defendants asked for mercy and their
sentences were reduced to life in prison, but Parsons and
the rest refused to do the same, and by the
fall of seven it was clear that they were going
(25:47):
to be hanged. The days leading up to his execution
seemed to have been really tumultuous for Lucy. First, she
released a statement that she would never enter the jail
again until she could do so without being humiliated and degraded.
But a few days later she went to see her
husband and she fainted while she was there. A final
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visit was arranged for the men's wives, but Lucy was
not there. Instead, she arrived at the jail with their
children the morning of the execution, insisting that they'd be
allowed to see their father one last time. Instead of that,
Lucy was arrested, and, according to a statement by Lizzie Swink,
she was stroop searched and all of them were detained
(26:28):
until the execution was over. Aside from this period, just
before the execution. Lucy Parsons had been described as just
relentlessly defiant through all of this, but afterward, at least
at first, she was described as distraught. She and her
children were living mostly on assistance from the Pioneer Aid
and Support Association, which had been set up to support
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the surviving families of the Haymarket eight, but soon she
was back at work, and about six months after Albert's execution,
she all So became romantically involved with a married man.
This was the first of a series of relationships for
her that played out over the rest of her life.
In October of eight eight, less than a year after
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Albert's execution, their daughter Lula died at the age of eight.
She had contracted scarlet fever during Lucy's speaking tour, and
the cause of her death was listed as lymphedema, possibly
connected to that earlier illness. Shortly after that, her son,
Albert Junior vanished. It turned out that he was with friends,
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but this was not the only time that he disappeared.
In April of eighteen ninety one, he disappeared for about
six weeks. This seems to have been the start of
a growing estrangement between Albert Jr. And his mother, brought
on by the deaths of his father and sister, Lucy
moving on with other men, and her pressing her son
to be a part of her activism work. He does
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not seem to have wanted to hand out pamphlets and
go to rallies with her. Lucy Parsons became increasingly radical
after her husband's death during the Homestead Steel Strike. She
wrote that she admired anarchist Alexander Berkman, who had tried
to assassinate the factories manager Henry clay Frick. Her increasing
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calls for violence led some of the organizations that she
had been involved in to stop asking her to speak.
She was frequently arrested or police would try to stop
her from entering the places where she was supposed to speak.
All of this just made her more and more defiant.
In June of Albert Jr. Unveiled a Haymarket memorial statue
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at Chicago's Waltime Cemetery, and the next day, the three
convicted men who were still living were all pardoned. All
three of those men cut ties with Lucy Parsons. Other
riffs emerged in the eighteen nineties, as well as what
example Parsons butted heads with anarchist Emma Goldman, largely over
(29:01):
the idea of free love. A lot of anarchists in
the late nineteenth century criticized the institution of marriage, since
it was essentially managed by the state. That wasn't the
only reason, but that was a big part of it.
People who advocated free love argued that existing social conventions
around love and marriage and sex were violating people's autonomy,
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especially women's autonomy. So Emma Goldman argued for freedom and
all things, including love and sex. But Lucy Parsons argued
that the power imbalances that came from patriarchy extended to
women's sexuality as well, and that if women practiced free love,
it would reinforce the idea that women owed men's sex.
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She also just generally advocated kind of a Victorian esque
idea of respectability, even though in her own life she
pursued relationships with men under her own terms, outside of
the framework of marriage, which was what a lot of
the free love advocates were advocating in the first place.
(30:09):
Parsons continued to speak at Chicago's annual Haymarket commemorations in
the eighteen nineties, and she established a journal called Freedom,
a Revolutionary anarchist communist monthly with Lizzie Swink, but later
Lizzie married a man named William Holmes and they moved away.
Lizzie had been one of Lucy's longest and most steadfast
(30:30):
friends and colleagues. Lucy Parsons was somewhat less active as
an activist and a radical in the eighteen nineties, and
she started supporting herself as a peddler. In February of
eve she was injured in a fall, and then she
had an altercation with the husband of the woman who
she hired to help her while she was injured. This
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man said that Parsons was filling his wife's head with
quote socialistic teachings. In the summer of eighteen, her home
was badly damaged in a fire that destroyed a lot
of her mementos of her late husband. In eighty nine,
Albert Parsons Jr. Tried to join the army, something that
Lucy vehemently objected to, and in response, she had him
(31:14):
involuntarily committed. He was held in the Illinois Northern Hospital
for the Insane until his death from tuberculosis in nineteen nineteen.
He was reportedly bullied and harassed by the other patients
because of his mother's reputation and her activities as an anarchist.
We have absolutely nothing to document how Lucy felt about
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this or justified it to herself, or whether she felt
like it was something that needed justification at all. Yeah,
Jacqueline Jones and her biography just describes this as cruel
and and kind of unimaginably and inexplicably cruel. Mainstream US
culture had always viewed anarchists as deeply suspicious at best,
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and that became even more of the case in the
early twentieth century. In nine hundred, anarchist guy Tinobreski assassinated
King Umberto, the First of Italy, and in nineteen o one,
anarchist Leon Chol ghost shot President William McKinley, who then
died as a result of his injuries eight days later.
(32:20):
These and other events sparked a backlash against anarchists that
would eventually grow into the First Red Scare towards the
end of World War One. There were other factors involved
in that too. We've covered this on a show before,
but the United States also saw a new wave of
anarchism during these years, but this time it was largely
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focused on Italian immigrants to the Eastern US. Parsons wasn't
as directly connected to this evolution in the anarchist movement,
but she was one of the founders of the Industrial
Workers of the World a k. The Wobblys in nineteen
o five. This was envisioned as a general union that
could bring together workers across industries, and it became known
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for its radical and sometimes violent tactics. It was the
probably most reviled and distrusted union of this era, and
Parsons attended its founding convention. She was an unaffiliated delegate there.
She was the only woman to speak at the convention.
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She advocated for women and racial and ethnic minorities, and
migrant workers from Central America and unemployed people to be
accepted as full members of the IWW. While she wasn't
heavily involved in many of the IWW's activities after this,
she did edit its publication, The Liberator in nineteen o
(33:42):
five and nineteen o six. This publication was named after
William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper that ran from the eighteen
thirties to the eighteen sixties. In the nineteen teens, Parsons
focused on trying to organize and advocate for people who
were hungry, unemployed, and homeless. She again faced arrests repeatedly,
including in Los Angeles for selling literature without a license.
(34:08):
In nineteen fourteen, she was charged with inciting a riot
when she was arrested while speaking and the crowd followed
her to the jail, although those charges were dropped. Parsons
demonstrations during these years included one that started at Jane
adams Hull House. It's involved hundreds of people marching against
hunger and unemployment, and hundreds of people were arrested. Jane
(34:31):
Adams paid Parsons bail and criticized these arrests, noting that
the only thing anybody was guilty of doing was parading
without a permit. She also praised parsons advocacy for the unemployed.
And this is such an interesting moment to me because
these two women were opposite in a lot of ways.
(34:52):
By this point, Chicago's black population was significantly larger than
it had been when Parsons first arrived, up from less
than one percent of the population to about four percent,
and that community had also become more visible in terms
of the struggle for equal rights. For example, Pullman porters
had been trying to unionize since nineteen o nine. That's
(35:13):
something we covered on the show back in fourteen, but
parsons activism still did not really involve or address the
black community. During those years. She was more focused on
immigrants from Mexico who had fled the Mexican Revolution between
nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, and on raising money for
Americans and Mexican immigrants who tried to cross the border
(35:34):
to fight in the revolution that violated neutrality laws. By
the nineteen twenties, Parsons had become involved with the Communist Party,
although she didn't formally join the party until nineteen thirty nine.
She also started working with the Party's International Labor Defense,
which was formed in response to the trials of anarchist
(35:54):
Nicolas Aacko and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In ninety seven, Parsons was
elect did to serve on the International Defense Funds National Committee.
Later on, this defense fund helps defend nine black teenagers
who were falsely accused of raping two white women in
nineteen thirty one. They had become known as the Scottsboro Boys,
(36:16):
and they were convicted. This is a much bigger story.
It's been on my list for an episode of the
podcast for a long time, but it's a lot, which
is why we haven't done it yet. In the last
few years of Lucy Parson's life, she supported herself by
running a boarding house, and she continued to speak at
Haymarket commemorations and labor rights events. She lived with her
(36:39):
long term companion, George mark Stall. Some sources actually say
they were married. She eventually lost most of her sight
and was granted a pension from a fund to support
blind people. On March seventh, two, a fire started in
her home. She was killed in this fire, and George
marks All died of injuries that he incurred while he
(37:02):
was trying to save her. About three hundred people attended
a joint memorial that was held for the two of them.
As we mentioned at the top of the show, authorities
rated what was left of her home afterwards, seizing any papers,
writing books, and other materials that survived. Although Parsons had
not received a lot of formal education, she had been
(37:23):
a voracious reader and autodidact, and her personal library had
contained about three thousand volumes before the fire. Although Lucy
Parsons had been just notorious during her lifetime, after her death,
that notoriety faded, but interest in her life increased in
the middle of the twentieth century in tandem with the
(37:44):
Civil Rights movement, the Chicano movement, and just a growing
interest in black, Hispanic and Latino and indigenous history and people.
Historians and otherwise have really been all over the place
in terms of how they have characterized Lucy Parson's identity
and her ancestry based on her own contradictory descriptions of herself.
(38:07):
What's really undeniable, though, is that she was a woman
of color who carved a place for herself in a
movement that was just overwhelmingly white and male. Do you
have a listener mail? I have listener mail that comes
from Dylan, who wrote after our recent Saturday Classic on
the Right of Spring Riots, and Dylan says, Hello, Holly
(38:28):
and Tracy. This is Dylan, and I've been a fan
of the pod for a few years. I had never
listened to the episode about the Right of Spring until
you reposted it as a Saturday Classic. I found it
very interesting. I thought you might find it interesting to
hear about the piece. From a professional bassoonist perspective, the
opening solo of the right has become so standard that
(38:49):
I have never seen a principal bassoon audition list of
excerpts that didn't include it. I can't imagine what I
would have thought if I was the bassoonist playing the
premier year and walked into the first rehearsal and saw that.
He's rumored to have called it impossible to play, and
at the time it probably was nearly impossible. There have
(39:10):
been significant improvements to the high range of the bassoon
since then, so that our standard orchestral range actually goes
even higher. Now, it is still terribly difficult to play,
requiring special reads and vocals the part that you blow
into to make them possible to play consistently. Some bassoonist
Stephen wean themselves off of caffeine in the weeks leading
(39:31):
up to a performance because caffeine is a diuretic and
makes it slightly more difficult to breathe. Most people don't
even notice this effect, but when you're playing something that
challenging in such a high pressure situation, every little bit
makes a difference. Thank you for such a wonderful podcast.
Stay well, regards Dylan. Thank you so much Dylan for this,
since I am of the generation who has been listening
(39:54):
to the Right of Spring since watching Disney's Fantasia as
a child. Uh, that bassoon solo doesn't sound weird to me,
like it has just been a part of my existence
since childhood. So I did not really realize how difficult
it is to play as a bassoonists, So thank you
so much for giving us some insight into that. If
(40:18):
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at I heart
radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss
in History. That's where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
in Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app and up podcasts and wherever
you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(40:44):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. In June
of last year, we did an episode on the Haymarket Riot,
which is also called the Haymarket massacre and the Haymarket incident,
(00:25):
a lot of names for it. The briefest of all
recaps this is one sentence. A rally that was held
to support a strike for an eight hour work day
ended in violence after police ordered the remaining crowd to
disperse and somebody threw a bomb into their ranks. In
that episode, we mentioned Lucy Parsons. Her husband, Albert, was
(00:48):
one of the speakers at this rally, and he wasn't
involved in planning the rally. He could not have thrown
the bomb, but he was convicted on charges of conspiracy
and he was hanged. So that early there episode was
not really about Lucy Parsons. We didn't talk about her
much at all, but as all of this was happening,
she was an activist in her own right, and her
(01:10):
work evolved and continued for decades after her husband's execution.
She became one of the most notorious anarchists in the
United States in the twentieth century. The Chicago Police Department
called her more dangerous than a thousand rioters, but her activism,
in spite of the fact she was so reviled in
(01:30):
that way, it was consistently focused on improving the lives
of workers and poor people, and immigrants and people who
were unemployed or homeless. Her name has come up in
a bunch of random asidnes and researched for multiple other
episodes since then, so I have moved her up to
the top of the list. Some aspects of Lucy Parson's
(01:51):
life are tricky to pin down. We have a wealth
of detail about her as an adult, lots of names
and dates and places she traveled and the work she did,
and a lot of her writing has also survived, but
we often don't know her thoughts or motivations on some
of the choices she made. She died in a fire
at her home in nine which destroyed some of her
(02:12):
books and some of her personal papers. Afterward, police and
the FBI seized what was left. It's not clear what
happened to those materials, but it's possible that some of
it could have shed light on some unanswered questions and
beyond the loss of her personal papers, parsons racial and
ethnic background was the subject of a lot of discussion
(02:35):
and rumored during her lifetime. After she and Albert moved
from Waco, Texas to Chicago, Illinois. Both of them were
really only consistent about one thing in this regard, and
that was that she did not have African ancestry. At
various points she said that her family was Spanish or Mexican,
(02:56):
or indigenous, or some combination of those, and there were
also times when she just said that it was nobody's business.
After her husband's conviction, she went on a speaking and
fundraising tour to support a clemency campaign. A reporter during
that tour asked her about her background at her first stop,
and she said, quote, I am not a candidate for office,
(03:18):
and the public have no right to my past. I
am out to nothing to the world and people care
nothing of me. I am battling for a principle. But
historian Jacqueline Jones published a biography in seventeen called Goddess
of Anarchy, The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical,
and in this biography she documented some details of parsons
(03:41):
life before moving to Chicago. These details, a lot of them,
contradict what Parsons said herself, and by all appearances, they
are things that she intentionally tried to hide. But again,
while this biography clarified some specifics, we don't have documentation
of parsons thought process or her motivations after moving to Chicago.
(04:05):
Lucy Parsons publicly maintained that she had been born in Waco, Texas,
but Jones traced her birth to Virginia in eighteen fifty one.
Parsons mother was an enslaved woman named Charlotte, and her
father was white, probably Charlotte's enslaver, Thomas J. Tolliver. In
eighteen sixty three, Tolliver moved to McLennan County, Texas, taking
(04:27):
at least part of his enslaved workforce with him. This
included Charlotte, her twelve year old daughter, Lucia, and her
seven year old son, Tanner. Lucia would grow up to
be known as Lucy Parsons. To be clear, these people
had been declared free under the Emancipation Proclamation, but it
would have been even harder for the federal government to
(04:48):
enforce this in Texas, which may well have been one
of the reasons Tolliver took them there. About three years
after arriving in Texas, Tolliver went back east to get married.
This Civil War was over at this point, but news
of the war's end and the abolition of slavery had
been really slow to reach Texas. That's usually noted as
(05:09):
happening on June nine, eighteen sixty five, when federal troops
arrived in Galveston, Texas. Today, that is what's observed as
the Juneteenth Holiday. Life for black people in Texas was
still extraordinarily dangerous. The Texas legislature had implemented racist black
codes that restricted black people's behavior and enacted harsh punishments
(05:33):
for things like owning weapons or insulting a white person.
Former enslavers essentially treated their free workers as though they
were still enslaved, and there were gangs of white vigilantes
who terrorized the state's black population. It appears that Charlotte
took Tolliver's absence when he went back to east to
get married, as an opportunity to flee from rural mcglennan
(05:56):
County to Waco, which was the county's largest city. Along
with her children. Waco shared the same dangers as other
parts of Texas that were home to freed people, but
it was also home to a growing community of black
people who were establishing their own churches, schools, and businesses
and working to protect themselves from violence. There were also
(06:18):
white people in Waco who were working to try to
protect the black community and work towards equal rights. One
of them was Albert Parsons, who had served in the
Confederate Army during the war but had become a radical
Republican after it was over. After her family arrived in
Waco in eighteen sixty six, Lucia found work where she could,
including working as a seamstress and a cook, and she
(06:41):
also went to school. She started a romantic relationship with
a man named Oliver Benton, and he paid for her
tuition in her books at the school. Some sources give
Oliver's last name as gay Things, that was the last
name of his former enslaver. A year or two after
arriving in Waco, Lucia's mother married a man named Charlie Carter,
(07:03):
and she gave her children, including Lucia, his last name.
Sometime between the late summer of eighteen sixty eight and
July of eighteen sixty nine, Lucia gave birth to a baby,
who she named Champ. According to Oliver Benton, he and
Lucia were married and he was the baby's father, although
there is no record of this marriage. Marriages between enslaved
(07:26):
people had not been legally recognized, and after slavery was abolished,
it was common for free people to commit to their
own marriages without going through legal paperwork, so the details
aren't clear, but Champ seems to have died in infancy.
Then on September eighteen seventy two, twenty two year old
Lucia Carter married twenty eight year old Albert Parsons. Although
(07:49):
the name she gave the officiant was Ella Hall, the
many variations of her name that she gave to people
in subsequent years sometimes included some variation on Ella as
a middle name and Hall as her maiden name. Albert
Parsons had been working extensively with the radical faction of
the Republican Party in Texas. He had stridently advocated for
(08:12):
black people in Texas to have full and unrestricted access
to the rights they were guaranteed under the Constitution. He
had helped black people register to vote, and he had
been made a lieutenant colonel in the state Militia, where
he was tasked with protecting the black community in several
counties where they were being targeted with racist violence. He had, also,
(08:33):
in addition to all of this, worked for the Office
of Public Instruction. Although at least some radical Republican leaders
endorsed interracial relationships, it would have been really unusual for
a white man in parsons position to marry a black woman,
and this marriage took place during a very narrow window
in which interracial marriages were legal in Texas at all. Earlier,
(08:55):
in eighteen seventy two, the state Supreme Court had issued
a ruling in Honey ver As Clark that affirmed that
interracial marriage was legal, but just weeks after their marriage,
the Texas legislature passed a new law that banned it.
The Republican Party also lost control of the Texas government
in eighteen seventy three, and the newly installed legislature started
(09:17):
repealing the laws that had been passed to try to
protect the state's black population and their rights. During the
post war reconstruction, the Parsons Is started facing increasingly over
racism and threats of violence. Ku Klux Klan activity started
to increase all through Texas, and this same pattern was
playing out all over, especially the southern US. In the
(09:41):
face of all of this, the couple decided to leave,
and it appears that as they traveled north, Lucia decided
to put her past behind her, changing her first name
to Lucy and claiming Texas as her birthplace. At various
points from here on out, she would say that her
maiden name had been Gonzalez, Diaz or Hall. You will
often see her full name written out as Lucy Eldne
(10:04):
Gonzalez Parsons. We'll talk about what happened when they got
to Chicago after a quick sponsor break. At the start
of the show, we mentioned that we don't have documentation
of Lucy parsons thoughts or feelings or motivations about a
(10:27):
lot of the decisions that she made in her life,
but we can draw some pretty likely conclusions about why
she took on a new identity and tried to leave
her past behind her when she moved away from Waco
to Chicago, Illinois. She had already lived through so much
trauma and she was acutely aware of the limits that
(10:50):
white society tried to impose on black people's lives. Her
appearance would have prevented her from passing as white, but
presenting herself instead at as Mexican and Indigenous rather than black,
meant that she might have access to spaces that she
would have been shut out of otherwise. Also, today, Chicago
(11:10):
has one of the largest populations of Indigenous people of
any city in the US, but that was not the
case in the late nineteenth century. The vast majority of
Indigenous people living in the Great Lakes area had been
forced out or killed. In the eighteen thirties, there also
would have been very few Hispanic people in the city,
and although Chicago's Black population was growing rapidly, it's still
(11:33):
measured less than one percent of Chicago's total population. And
this meant that there wasn't a large community of color
that Lucy could have assimilated with, if that was what
she had wanted to do. But it also meant that
she wasn't likely to run into someone who either knew
her from before or knew enough about the identities she
was claiming to question those claims. Instead, the community where
(11:58):
Lucy and Albert Parsons found home was one that was
made up primarily of immigrants from Central Europe. The proportion
varies a little bit over the last half of the
nineteenth century, but immigrants made up between forty and fifty
percent of Chicago's population at the time. The easiest place
for them to find work was in Chicago's factories, and
(12:19):
at some point during these years, as many as seventy
percent of Chicago's factory workers had been born outside the US.
Albert got a job as a printer, and he started
doing the same kind of activism that he had been
doing back in Texas, but instead of working through the
Republican Party to try to improve the lives of black people,
he was working with socialists to improve the lives of workers,
(12:42):
particularly immigrants. In addition to all the typical issues that
were common in rapidly growing industrial cities, unemployment was an
enormous issue in Chicago. With Lucy and Elbert got there
in the wake of the Panic of eighteen seventy three,
huge numbers of people were out of work. People who
could find jobs were often working long hours in just
(13:04):
grueling conditions for very low pay with no job security.
Albert and Lucy became active in Chicago's Social Democratic Party
and First International, but both of these organizations were short lived.
After those organizations were disbanded, Albert joined the Workingman's Party
of the United States, or the w p USA, and
(13:26):
started hosting meetings of that organization in the Parsons home.
Like First International, this had been started by followers of
Karl Marx. Albert also started running for local office as
a socialist. He ran for lots of different offices over
the years. He did not win any of his elections, though.
A series of railroad strikes took place around the US
(13:48):
in eighteen seventy seven, collectively known as the Great Railroad Strike.
The economic depression that had followed the Panic of eighteen
seventy three was still ongoing. In the first wave of
strikes started after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad announced that
it was cutting its workers pay by ten percent. Albert
gave a speech during all this that began quote, we
(14:11):
are assembled here as the Grand Army of Starvation. Some
of the demonstrations surrounding these railroad strikes became quite violent.
In some cases, striking workers destroyed bridges and rails and
railroad cars. It's estimated that more than a hundred thousand
workers took part in these strikes and then at least
(14:31):
a hundred people were killed. This was the first time
that federal troops were deployed to try to put an
end to a strike. Although the w p USA didn't
organize the railroad strikes themselves, it did organize demonstrations and
general strikes in support of the railroad workers, especially in
Chicago and St. Louis. Although the strikes didn't result in
(14:54):
many improvements for the workers, membership in the w p
USA grew in conjunction with the parties increased visibility. Lucy
Parsons described this as a turning point. It was definitely
a turning point for the Parsons family as well. Albert
lost his job because of his work during the strike,
(15:14):
and other employers refused to hire him. Lucy expanded her
sewing work into a bigger business to support them. It
went from being kind of her own sewing that she
was taking into Parsons and Company, manufacturer of ladies and
children's clothing. She also started hosting meetings of the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union with her friend, labor organizer Lizzie Swank.
(15:37):
The Socialist Labor Party was established in December of eighteen
seventy seven, and Lucy started writing articles and poems for
its publication, which was known as Socialist. In the summer
of eighteen seventy eight, she helped found the Chicago Working
Women's Union to organize women who worked as store clerks, servants,
and seamstresses. The union was under the umbrella of the
(16:00):
Council of Trade and Labor Unions, and Lucy attended the
Council's meetings as well. In addition to all of that,
she and Albert had a son, who they named Albert Jr.
In eighteen seventy nine. They also had a daughter, Lula,
who was born in eighteen eighty one. In the early
eighteen eighties, Lucy and Albert shifted their focus from socialism
(16:21):
to anarchy, leaving the Socialist Labor Party for the International
Working People's Association. They had become frustrated with the socialist movement,
which they thought was focused on reforming a system that
really just needed to be totally dismantled. Albert was also
frustrated that many of the labor rights activists he had
been working with hadn't really supported him. When he was
(16:44):
forced out of the printing industry following the Great Railroad Strike.
This included his leaving the National Typographical Union. Anarchist organizations
and publications frequently used violent rhetoric and their calls to
overthrow capitalism and other systems of oppression, and some of
them also advocated actual violence, including printing instructions for making bombs.
(17:08):
So anarchists, including Albert and Lucy Parsons, got a lot
of attention from newspapers and from law enforcement. Police officers,
Pinkerton agents, detectives and others infiltrated anarchist meetings and plain clothes,
and then sometimes the organizers of those meetings tried to
use this to their own advantage. Sometimes they would intentionally
(17:31):
use more extreme language when they knew that they were
being watched. The idea here was stoking fear of what
their movement might do, and then trying to use that
fear as leverage to reach their goals. Lucy started writing
for the i w p as publication The Alarm, which
was one of seven anarchist publications in Chicago, but the
(17:52):
only one that was printed in English. Her article two Tramps,
the Unemployed, the disinherited, and Miserable, published in October four
four became a widely distributed key document within the American
anarchist movement in the late nineteenth century. It began quote
a word to the thirty thousand, now tramping the streets
(18:14):
of this great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly
about you at the evidences of wealth and pleasure of
which you own no part, not sufficient even to purchase
yourself a bit of food with which to appease the
pangs of hunger now gnawing at your vitals. It is
with you and the hundreds of thousands of others similarly
(18:37):
situated in this great land of plenty, that I wish
to have a word. Parsons then meditated on the fact
that so many people had been toiling for decades but
had nothing to show for it, and she called for
a total change to the industrial system. This piece ended
with quote, each of you hungry tramps who read these lines,
(19:00):
vail yourself of those little methods of warfare which science
has placed in the hands of the poor man, and
you will become a power in this or any other land.
Learn the use of explosives. In six Lucy published one
of her few pieces that directly referenced the idea of race.
(19:21):
In January of that year, Afro Indigenous brothers Ed and
Charlie Brown were delivering molasses and Carrollton, Mississippi, and accidentally
ran into a white man named Robert Moore. More than
a month later, More told lawyer James Liddell about it.
Liddell had an altercation with the Browns that ended in
a gunfight, and the Browns tried to press charges against him.
(19:44):
White people were outraged at the idea of black people
pressing charges against a white man. An armed white mob
stormed the courthouse during an evidentiary hearing, opening fire and
killing both Ed and Charlie Brown, along with multiple other
black people who were in the courtroom. This happened on
March seventeenth, eight six, and it became known as the
(20:06):
Carroll County Courthouse massacre. A couple of weeks later, Lucy
published a piece called The Negro Let him leave politics
to the politician and prayer to the preacher. She published
that in the Alarm She condemned these killings stridently, but
also argued that it had not happened because the victims
were black. She wrote, quote, are there any so stupid
(20:29):
as to believe these outrages have been, are being and
will be heaped upon the Negro because he is black,
not at all. It is because he is poor. It
is because he is dependent, because he is poorer as
a class than his white wage slave brother of the north.
On May one, six a general strike started in Chicago
(20:52):
in support of an eight hour work day. The Haymarket
affair took place three days later. We're not going to
go back over the details of this incidents since we
covered it in another episode less than a year ago
in quite a bit of detail. But it was during
the aftermath that Lucy Parsons became one of the most
widely known anarchists in the United States, and we'll talk
more about that after a sponsor break. Prior to the
(21:24):
Haymarket incident, Albert Parsons had been traveling and speaking extensively.
Presumably Lucy was keeping everything going at home while also
writing for the Alarm a lot and working with local
labor and anarchist groups in Chicago. We really don't have
the specifics of how this was all working. It's possible
that she was taking the children with her, and the
(21:46):
idea that she had her children with her was a
key part of Albert's defense during his conspiracy trial, the
whole idea being we never would have brought our children
with us if we had thought it was going to
be dangerous. But after the Haymarket incident, Lucy often had
to leave her children in other people's care. Lizzie Swank
was often the person who was keeping her up to
(22:08):
date on how they were doing. Albert Parsons and seven
other men were tried together after the Haymarket bombing. Lucy
attended every day of the trial, along with jury selection.
The proceedings stretched from June twenty one to August even
all eight men were found guilty and all but one
(22:28):
of them were sentenced to death. That included Albert Parsons.
Lucy did a lot of work to raise money for
a clemency campaign and to raise awareness of what had happened.
She also edited and published a book called The Famous
Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists. She went on a
speaking tour, traveling to seventeen states and making more than
(22:51):
forty speeches. She earned as much as a hundred dollars
a day through these talks and other activities, and she
sent the vast majority of it back to Chicago. For
the men's defense. She walked her audiences through her account
of what had happened at Haymarket, including, as I said earlier,
how she would not have taken her own children with
(23:12):
her if she thought it was going to be dangerous,
and she talked about all the ways she thought the
trial had been unfair. We noted at the beginning of
the show that at the very first stop on this
tour a reporter asked about parsons background and that she
refused to answer, But news coverage of her speaking tour
didn't drop this issue. There was a lot of focus
(23:32):
on her appearance and a lot of speculation that she
had some combination of African, indigenous and Mexican ancestry, and
a lot of reporters just described her appearance as they
would describe the appearance of a black person, focusing on
the color of her skin and the color and texture
of her hair and the structure of her facial bones.
(23:54):
A lot of reporters seemed to assume that she was black,
and they wrote about her in a way that drew
from areeo types of black people. But at the same time,
Lucy Parsons was defying stereotypes of anarchists, who were usually
imagined as white and male, with unkempt beards and kind
of an unhinged rhetoric. Parsons was always very neatly dressed
(24:18):
in dark colored dresses and elegant but usually simple accessories.
At all together just projected this sense of respectability, but
she combined that with radical rhetoric. She often started speeches
by declaring, quote, I am an anarchist. On December, she
gave a speech at Kansas City's Clump Hall in which
(24:41):
she said, quote, I suppose some of you expected to
see me with a bomb in one hand and a
flaming torch in the other, but are disappointed in seeing neither.
If such has been your ideas regarding an anarchist, you
deserve to be disappointed. Anarchists are peaceable, law abiding people.
What do anarchists mean when they speak of anarchy? Webster
(25:03):
gives the term two definitions, chaos and the state of
being without political rule. We cling to the latter definition,
our enemies hold that we believe only in the former.
Lucy Parsons faced arrest at various points on this tour,
and in Columbus, Ohio, she was jailed and told she
would have to return to stand trial for what was
(25:26):
deemed obscene language. She did not go back for that
court date, but the arrests continued after she got back home.
Two of Albert's co defendants asked for mercy and their
sentences were reduced to life in prison, but Parsons and
the rest refused to do the same, and by the
fall of seven it was clear that they were going
(25:47):
to be hanged. The days leading up to his execution
seemed to have been really tumultuous for Lucy. First, she
released a statement that she would never enter the jail
again until she could do so without being humiliated and degraded.
But a few days later she went to see her
husband and she fainted while she was there. A final
(26:08):
visit was arranged for the men's wives, but Lucy was
not there. Instead, she arrived at the jail with their
children the morning of the execution, insisting that they'd be
allowed to see their father one last time. Instead of that,
Lucy was arrested, and, according to a statement by Lizzie Swink,
she was stroop searched and all of them were detained
(26:28):
until the execution was over. Aside from this period, just
before the execution. Lucy Parsons had been described as just
relentlessly defiant through all of this, but afterward, at least
at first, she was described as distraught. She and her
children were living mostly on assistance from the Pioneer Aid
and Support Association, which had been set up to support
(26:51):
the surviving families of the Haymarket eight, but soon she
was back at work, and about six months after Albert's execution,
she all So became romantically involved with a married man.
This was the first of a series of relationships for
her that played out over the rest of her life.
In October of eight eight, less than a year after
(27:11):
Albert's execution, their daughter Lula died at the age of eight.
She had contracted scarlet fever during Lucy's speaking tour, and
the cause of her death was listed as lymphedema, possibly
connected to that earlier illness. Shortly after that, her son,
Albert Junior vanished. It turned out that he was with friends,
(27:31):
but this was not the only time that he disappeared.
In April of eighteen ninety one, he disappeared for about
six weeks. This seems to have been the start of
a growing estrangement between Albert Jr. And his mother, brought
on by the deaths of his father and sister, Lucy
moving on with other men, and her pressing her son
to be a part of her activism work. He does
(27:54):
not seem to have wanted to hand out pamphlets and
go to rallies with her. Lucy Parsons became increasingly radical
after her husband's death during the Homestead Steel Strike. She
wrote that she admired anarchist Alexander Berkman, who had tried
to assassinate the factories manager Henry clay Frick. Her increasing
(28:17):
calls for violence led some of the organizations that she
had been involved in to stop asking her to speak.
She was frequently arrested or police would try to stop
her from entering the places where she was supposed to speak.
All of this just made her more and more defiant.
In June of Albert Jr. Unveiled a Haymarket memorial statue
(28:39):
at Chicago's Waltime Cemetery, and the next day, the three
convicted men who were still living were all pardoned. All
three of those men cut ties with Lucy Parsons. Other
riffs emerged in the eighteen nineties, as well as what
example Parsons butted heads with anarchist Emma Goldman, largely over
(29:01):
the idea of free love. A lot of anarchists in
the late nineteenth century criticized the institution of marriage, since
it was essentially managed by the state. That wasn't the
only reason, but that was a big part of it.
People who advocated free love argued that existing social conventions
around love and marriage and sex were violating people's autonomy,
(29:24):
especially women's autonomy. So Emma Goldman argued for freedom and
all things, including love and sex. But Lucy Parsons argued
that the power imbalances that came from patriarchy extended to
women's sexuality as well, and that if women practiced free love,
it would reinforce the idea that women owed men's sex.
(29:48):
She also just generally advocated kind of a Victorian esque
idea of respectability, even though in her own life she
pursued relationships with men under her own terms, outside of
the framework of marriage, which was what a lot of
the free love advocates were advocating in the first place.
(30:09):
Parsons continued to speak at Chicago's annual Haymarket commemorations in
the eighteen nineties, and she established a journal called Freedom,
a Revolutionary anarchist communist monthly with Lizzie Swink, but later
Lizzie married a man named William Holmes and they moved away.
Lizzie had been one of Lucy's longest and most steadfast
(30:30):
friends and colleagues. Lucy Parsons was somewhat less active as
an activist and a radical in the eighteen nineties, and
she started supporting herself as a peddler. In February of
eve she was injured in a fall, and then she
had an altercation with the husband of the woman who
she hired to help her while she was injured. This
(30:51):
man said that Parsons was filling his wife's head with
quote socialistic teachings. In the summer of eighteen, her home
was badly damaged in a fire that destroyed a lot
of her mementos of her late husband. In eighty nine,
Albert Parsons Jr. Tried to join the army, something that
Lucy vehemently objected to, and in response, she had him
(31:14):
involuntarily committed. He was held in the Illinois Northern Hospital
for the Insane until his death from tuberculosis in nineteen nineteen.
He was reportedly bullied and harassed by the other patients
because of his mother's reputation and her activities as an anarchist.
We have absolutely nothing to document how Lucy felt about
(31:36):
this or justified it to herself, or whether she felt
like it was something that needed justification at all. Yeah,
Jacqueline Jones and her biography just describes this as cruel
and and kind of unimaginably and inexplicably cruel. Mainstream US
culture had always viewed anarchists as deeply suspicious at best,
(31:58):
and that became even more of the case in the
early twentieth century. In nine hundred, anarchist guy Tinobreski assassinated
King Umberto, the First of Italy, and in nineteen o one,
anarchist Leon Chol ghost shot President William McKinley, who then
died as a result of his injuries eight days later.
(32:20):
These and other events sparked a backlash against anarchists that
would eventually grow into the First Red Scare towards the
end of World War One. There were other factors involved
in that too. We've covered this on a show before,
but the United States also saw a new wave of
anarchism during these years, but this time it was largely
(32:40):
focused on Italian immigrants to the Eastern US. Parsons wasn't
as directly connected to this evolution in the anarchist movement,
but she was one of the founders of the Industrial
Workers of the World a k. The Wobblys in nineteen
o five. This was envisioned as a general union that
could bring together workers across industries, and it became known
(33:02):
for its radical and sometimes violent tactics. It was the
probably most reviled and distrusted union of this era, and
Parsons attended its founding convention. She was an unaffiliated delegate there.
She was the only woman to speak at the convention.
(33:22):
She advocated for women and racial and ethnic minorities, and
migrant workers from Central America and unemployed people to be
accepted as full members of the IWW. While she wasn't
heavily involved in many of the IWW's activities after this,
she did edit its publication, The Liberator in nineteen o
(33:42):
five and nineteen o six. This publication was named after
William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper that ran from the eighteen
thirties to the eighteen sixties. In the nineteen teens, Parsons
focused on trying to organize and advocate for people who
were hungry, unemployed, and homeless. She again faced arrests repeatedly,
including in Los Angeles for selling literature without a license.
(34:08):
In nineteen fourteen, she was charged with inciting a riot
when she was arrested while speaking and the crowd followed
her to the jail, although those charges were dropped. Parsons
demonstrations during these years included one that started at Jane
adams Hull House. It's involved hundreds of people marching against
hunger and unemployment, and hundreds of people were arrested. Jane
(34:31):
Adams paid Parsons bail and criticized these arrests, noting that
the only thing anybody was guilty of doing was parading
without a permit. She also praised parsons advocacy for the unemployed.
And this is such an interesting moment to me because
these two women were opposite in a lot of ways.
(34:52):
By this point, Chicago's black population was significantly larger than
it had been when Parsons first arrived, up from less
than one percent of the population to about four percent,
and that community had also become more visible in terms
of the struggle for equal rights. For example, Pullman porters
had been trying to unionize since nineteen o nine. That's
(35:13):
something we covered on the show back in fourteen, but
parsons activism still did not really involve or address the
black community. During those years. She was more focused on
immigrants from Mexico who had fled the Mexican Revolution between
nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, and on raising money for
Americans and Mexican immigrants who tried to cross the border
(35:34):
to fight in the revolution that violated neutrality laws. By
the nineteen twenties, Parsons had become involved with the Communist Party,
although she didn't formally join the party until nineteen thirty nine.
She also started working with the Party's International Labor Defense,
which was formed in response to the trials of anarchist
(35:54):
Nicolas Aacko and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In ninety seven, Parsons was
elect did to serve on the International Defense Funds National Committee.
Later on, this defense fund helps defend nine black teenagers
who were falsely accused of raping two white women in
nineteen thirty one. They had become known as the Scottsboro Boys,
(36:16):
and they were convicted. This is a much bigger story.
It's been on my list for an episode of the
podcast for a long time, but it's a lot, which
is why we haven't done it yet. In the last
few years of Lucy Parson's life, she supported herself by
running a boarding house, and she continued to speak at
Haymarket commemorations and labor rights events. She lived with her
(36:39):
long term companion, George mark Stall. Some sources actually say
they were married. She eventually lost most of her sight
and was granted a pension from a fund to support
blind people. On March seventh, two, a fire started in
her home. She was killed in this fire, and George
marks All died of injuries that he incurred while he
(37:02):
was trying to save her. About three hundred people attended
a joint memorial that was held for the two of them.
As we mentioned at the top of the show, authorities
rated what was left of her home afterwards, seizing any papers,
writing books, and other materials that survived. Although Parsons had
not received a lot of formal education, she had been
(37:23):
a voracious reader and autodidact, and her personal library had
contained about three thousand volumes before the fire. Although Lucy
Parsons had been just notorious during her lifetime, after her death,
that notoriety faded, but interest in her life increased in
the middle of the twentieth century in tandem with the
(37:44):
Civil Rights movement, the Chicano movement, and just a growing
interest in black, Hispanic and Latino and indigenous history and people.
Historians and otherwise have really been all over the place
in terms of how they have characterized Lucy Parson's identity
and her ancestry based on her own contradictory descriptions of herself.
(38:07):
What's really undeniable, though, is that she was a woman
of color who carved a place for herself in a
movement that was just overwhelmingly white and male. Do you
have a listener mail? I have listener mail that comes
from Dylan, who wrote after our recent Saturday Classic on
the Right of Spring Riots, and Dylan says, Hello, Holly
(38:28):
and Tracy. This is Dylan, and I've been a fan
of the pod for a few years. I had never
listened to the episode about the Right of Spring until
you reposted it as a Saturday Classic. I found it
very interesting. I thought you might find it interesting to
hear about the piece. From a professional bassoonist perspective, the
opening solo of the right has become so standard that
(38:49):
I have never seen a principal bassoon audition list of
excerpts that didn't include it. I can't imagine what I
would have thought if I was the bassoonist playing the
premier year and walked into the first rehearsal and saw that.
He's rumored to have called it impossible to play, and
at the time it probably was nearly impossible. There have
(39:10):
been significant improvements to the high range of the bassoon
since then, so that our standard orchestral range actually goes
even higher. Now, it is still terribly difficult to play,
requiring special reads and vocals the part that you blow
into to make them possible to play consistently. Some bassoonist
Stephen wean themselves off of caffeine in the weeks leading
(39:31):
up to a performance because caffeine is a diuretic and
makes it slightly more difficult to breathe. Most people don't
even notice this effect, but when you're playing something that
challenging in such a high pressure situation, every little bit
makes a difference. Thank you for such a wonderful podcast.
Stay well, regards Dylan. Thank you so much Dylan for this,
since I am of the generation who has been listening
(39:54):
to the Right of Spring since watching Disney's Fantasia as
a child. Uh, that bassoon solo doesn't sound weird to me,
like it has just been a part of my existence
since childhood. So I did not really realize how difficult
it is to play as a bassoonists, So thank you
so much for giving us some insight into that. If
(40:18):
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at I heart
radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss
in History. That's where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
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the I heart Radio app and up podcasts and wherever
you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(40:44):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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