Parsons, Lucy

PARSONS, LUCY (1851-1942). A radical orator, editor, essayist, and fiction writer, Lucy Parsons embraced socialism and then anarchism. She is best known as the widow of Albert R. Parsons, executed in 1887 for his (alleged) role in the Haymarket bombing the year before. However, Lucy Parsons was a political force in her own right, making national headlines for her forceful and provocative denunciations of the capitalist class. Throughout her life she remained a fierce advocate for free speech. The police and her other critics labeled her a “firebrand” who engaged in “incendiary” speech that threatened to spark a class revolution of historic proportions.

Parsons was born in Virginia in 1851 to an enslaved woman named Charlotte; both mother and daughter were owned by an enslaver named Dr. T. J. Taliaferro. (It is possible that he was Parsons’s father.) Parsons later in her life portrayed herself as the daughter of Mexican and Native-American parents. She remained circumspect about her background, telling a reporter, “The public have no right to my past."

During the Civil War, Taliaferro forcibly transported at least part of his enslaved workforce from Virginia to McLennan County in Central Texas. After the war, Charlotte took her three children—two sons and her daughter, then known as Lucia—to the town of Waco, in an effort to flee the anti-Black violence that was engulfing the Texas countryside. In Waco, Charlotte married a freedman, Charlie Carter, and Lucia took “Carter” as her last name. Along with her mother, Lucia found work as a domestic servant. She also briefly attended a school for freed children during this period. Around 1867 or 1868 she had a liaison with a Black man named Oliver Benton; he later claimed that a baby she had (in 1869) was his. (The fate of baby Champ is unknown.) Nevertheless, by this time Lucia had met and fallen in love with a former Confederate scout named Albert Parsons. A printer by trade, he had political ambitions; he joined the Republican Party, travelling around Central Texas and (after 1867) urging Black men to vote to vote Republican.

Lucia and Albert married in September 1872, when the Republican Party held power in Texas. Within a year, however, the white-supremacist Democrats had won control of the state, prompting the couple to leave for Chicago (Lucia changed her name to Lucy and took her husband’s last name). They settled in a German-immigrant neighborhood in the northwest part of the city. Albert found work as a printer, and Lucy opened her own dressmaking shop.

Both Lucy and Albert Parsons became immersed in the radical socialist politics of Gilded Age Chicago, organizing protest demonstrations against the city’s great industrialists. Socialists focused on the widening gap between the rich and poor, and decried the capitalist system. They believed that the end of capitalism was inevitable, but that workers could hasten that collapse. They appealed mostly to the white male urban laboring classes, especially craftsmen and factory workers, drawing on the experiences of European radicals at the time.

By 1877, Albert Parsons had won a well-deserved reputation as a powerful speaker. He came to the attention of the Chicago authorities in July 1877, when he took part in the Great Railroad strike in that city. Albert continued to aspire to political office, now running several times on the Socialist Party ticket for local positions. After losing all these contests, he condemned voting as an inherently corrupt process, and he and Lucy turned toward anarchism.

Most Chicago anarchists were German immigrants. They held many of the same beliefs as the socialists, with a number of critical exceptions. The anarchists believed that trades unions were the embryos of a just society, which would eventually take the form of a cooperative commonwealth. They rejected the wage system, as well as partisan politics of all kinds. They remained contemptuous of US institutions such as the courts, Congress, and the Presidency, and US founding documents such as the Constitution. They also disparaged organized religion. Anarchists often used the language of force, arguing that violence was necessary to rid the nation and the world of capitalists and their minions, at times invoking dynamite as the great leveler between workers and bosses. Chicago anarchism also included highly performative elements, such as parades that ventured into wealthy Chicago neighborhoods. Floats and banners attracted and entertained large numbers of onlookers and curiosity-seekers.

The year 1878 marked the beginning of Lucy’s lifelong career as essayist, fiction writer, and political commentator. The Socialist, a Chicago paper edited by her husband, published a series of letters she wrote condemning the idea of “harmony of employer and employed (master and slave),” a non sequitur akin to harmony between the “robber and the robbed.” Largely self-taught, she also engaged with popular magazines of the day, lambasting their advice to housewives and coverage of British royalty. It was around this time that she gave her first speech—at a weekly socialist meeting—calling for the end of private landownership. She declared herself “very ultra in her views” and predicted she would get into trouble for them.

In October 1884 Albert launched a new English-language anarchist publication, Alarm. Its first issue included a piece written by Lucy. “To Tramps” was addressed to the laboring men of Chicago, toiling for up to sixteen hours a day yet barely able to support their families: “With all your squeezing, pinching and economizing, you never were enabled to keep but a few days ahead of the wolves of want.” She exhorted the jobless who despaired of the fate of their starving wives and children to “Learn the use of explosives!” Reprinted many times over and circulated as a handbill, the essay gained iconic status in anarchist circles around the country.

A rally called by anarchists for May 4, 1886, in Chicago’s Haymarket Square turned violent only when police arrived on the scene; someone (the identity of the perpetrator is still a mystery) threw a bomb that killed seven police officers and many other people (the number unknown) as well as injuring many. Albert had spoken at the rally earlier in the evening, but at the time of the bombing he and Lucy were at a nearby tavern. Nevertheless, on 20 August 1886, he and seven other anarchist defendants were convicted of conspiracy to murder. In October they were sentenced to die by hanging.
In order to fund the defendants’ appeals of their death sentence, Lucy went on two extended speaking tours in the fall of 1886 and the spring of 1887. (By this time the couple had two children.) Before embarking on the first tour, in October, she and Albert concocted a story about her background, with Albert telling a reporter, “She is Indian and Spanish, and has no African blood in her veins.”
Lucy quickly gained fame as a speaker in defense of her husband and his comrades, denouncing the judge and jury of what was a patently unfair trial. Wherever she went, local newspapers covered her assiduously, noting the contrast between her self-presentation—as a prim Victorian wife and mother—with her militant rhetoric. Indeed, she prided herself on her fashionable appearance, and an iconic portrait shows her in a silk striped dress, with a black lace collar, a gold pin and gold earrings, and a hat trimmed in black ostrich feathers.

Listeners thrilled to her speeches, and in fact she was aiming for a visceral response to her lengthy speeches. She condemned the “damnable” capitalists such as Philip Armour, “a slaughterer of children as well as hogs,” and Chicago’s Chief of Police as “that chief of sewer rats.” Of the “gift of dynamite,” she told her audiences, “You want to take advantage of it.”

In the fall of 1887, Albert rejected the possibility of a life sentence when he refused to renounce his militant writings and speeches. He and three comrades were executed on 11 November 1887.
After his death, Lucy travelled around the country, keeping alive the memory of the Haymarket “martyrs” and condemning “The Judicial Murder of 1887.” In November 1888, she went to London at the invitation of the socialists there and met with William Morris and Peter Kropotkin. Her descriptions of her speaking tours—in the United Kingdom but also within the United States—could take the form of charming travelogues. Her writings, published in a number of radical journals and especially the Denver Knights of Labor’s Labor Enquirer, include current commentary and sentimental and futuristic fiction.

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Parsons found herself embroiled in a number of controversies. She offended the comrades of her dead husband by carrying on a highly public and ultimately sensational love affair with a young married German immigrant. She offended the officers of a group formed to support the widows and children of the martyrs when she made money from her talks and the works and likenesses of Albert, and managed to buy her own house. She frightened Chicago police, who began to monitor her closely (there is even the suggestion that the city’s feared “Red Squad” was formed as a result of her provocations), and tried to shut down her speeches. In 1892 she started her own anarchist paper, Freedom, but feuded with contributors and rival editors; the paper lasted less than a year.

Lucy’s homelife during these years also made headlines. In 1890 her eight-year old daughter died of lymphedema, and her son ran away from home at least twice. In 1899 Lucy was outraged when her son informed her that he planned to join the army and fight in the Philippines-Cuba-Spanish-American war. An avowed anti-imperialist, she had hoped he would follow in his father’s footsteps; but the twenty-year old showed a distinct lack of interest in radical politics. When he expressed determination to enlist in what his mother held was the US war machine, she dragged him to a county “insane” court. The judge committed him to the Illinois Elgin Asylum, where he died twenty years later of tuberculosis.

In the 1890s Parsons found herself estranged from other radicals. She made a point of rejecting the anarchist turn to unfettered sexual expressiveness, a stance made famous by Emma Goldman. In public, Parsons defended traditional marriage and the nuclear family. Goldman considered Parsons a hypocrite for saying one thing and then living a free-love life. Too, neither Albert nor Lucy evinced any interest in Black workers, whether in Chicago or in the American South. In this respect Lucy offered a contrast to her contemporary, Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The Black activist had moved to Chicago in 1893 and devoted her considerable talents to agitating against lynching and other crimes committed by white supremacists.

Although associated with a number of major developments in radical politics, Lucy Parsons was not instrumental in them. She had a peripheral role in Eugene Debs’s Social Democracy in America, founded in 1897. However, like Chicago socialists and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Debs condemned Parsons’s militant rhetoric, believing that calls to violence tainted and hindered the work of all labor organizers. The founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) invited her to their first conference in Chicago, in July 1905, but they allowed her to speak only because she insisted; they had intended she serve a passive, ceremonial role as an icon of workers’ past struggles. Her paper Liberator, which she began in 1905 as part of the IWW organizing drive, lasted only a year or so. She was also associated with William Z. Foster’s short-lived Syndicalist League of North America (reportedly founded in her living room) in 1912.

In a speech delivered in 1905 and later distributed in pamphlet form, Parsons laid out her own view of anarchism. She reiterated her opposition to partisan politics and the suffrage. She considered anarchism the “safeguard of liberty,” with government the source of “nearly all the misery, poverty, crime and confusion existing in society.” Characteristically, she refused to describe her view of the good society because, she said, “the best thought of today may become the useless vagary of tomorrow, and to crystallize it into a creed is to make it unwieldy.” She still believed in the revolutionary power of self-regulating trades associations. With a contemptuous nod toward the conservative American Federation of Labor, she urged workers to eschew striking “for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less.” She lauded the generosity and fellow-feeling among family members, and declared those loving relationships should set the standard for all humankind, now beset by quarrels over property and possessions.

Parsons continued to travel and speak to workers’ groups, urging her listeners to disrupt production at its source: “If this cannot be done by peaceful methods, use force, tear machines apart, destroy property, and force capitalists to listen to the demands of their employees.” In 1913, she followed IWW labor organizers and free-speech campaigners to the Northwest and the West Coast, selling literature at union halls and charging a modest fee for her speeches. Increasingly, she devoted her energies to the causes of radicals who had been persecuted or unjustly accused of murder—“Big” Bill Haywood, Tom Mooney. During World War I, when many of Parsons’s friends were imprisoned for protesting against the war or resisting the draft, she kept a low profile.

In the 1920s she retained her radical (if dwindling) following, appearing at Haymarket commemorations and May Day celebrations throughout the Upper Midwest. She also supported the International Labor Defense, a communist effort to pay the lawyers’ fees of radicals accused of various crimes. However, there is no evidence that she ever joined the Communist Party. By this time she had gradually shed her Latina-Indigenous persona; unable to speak Spanish, she was vulnerable to the skepticism of Chicago’s growing Mexican-American population. A living symbol of the past, she was increasingly featured as part of commercial tours that attracted local college students and focused on Chicago labor history.

In the 1930s, Parsons expressed disgust with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal; she feared that its social-welfare and hours and wages legislation was only cementing the loyalty of workers to the Democratic Party, a development she abhorred. In 1938, she was still appearing at Chicago May Day celebrations, selling her books and tracts.

Ahrens, Gale. Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, & Solidarity, Writings and Speeches. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2003.

Ashbaugh, Carolyn. Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1976.

Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. New York: Basic Books, 2017.