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

T HE RADICAL LABOR AGITATOR LUCY PARSONS LIVED MUCH OF her long life in the public eye, but she has nevertheless remained shrouded in mystery. Skilled in the art of rhetorical provocation in the service of justice for the laboring classes, she also offered up a fiction about her origins and denied key elements of her own past. She was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851, and twenty-one years later married a white man, Albert R. Parsons, in Waco, Texas. Together the couple forged a tempestuous dual career, first as socialists and then as anarchists, urging workers to use all means at their disposal, including physical force, to combat the depredations of industrial capitalism. Their raw rhetoric of class struggle led to Alberts conviction on charges of murder and conspiracy related to the 1886 bombing in Chicagos Haymarket Square, and he died on the gallows in November 1887. Among workers then and successive generations of historians since, Lucy Parsons has achieved secular sainthood by virtue of her widowhood. Yet her career transcended the fate of her famous husband.

By the time Albert was executed, Lucy had gained a national reputation as an orator

Public speaker, editor, free-speech activist, essayist, fiction writer, publisher, and political commentator, Parsons was one of only a handful of women of her day, and virtually the only person of African descent, apart from Frederick Douglass, to speak regularly to large audiences. She addressed enthusiastic crowds up and down the East Coast, across the Midwest, and into the Far West for well over five decades. She was a courageous advocate of First Amendment rights, notable for her confrontational tactics and what many considered her shocking language in pursuit of those rights. She had a never-wavering commitment to a free press, and the alternative periodicals that she edited or that published her writings served as a bracing corrective to the contemporary mainstream news outlets that furthered the interests of the powerful. Her stamina over the decades (she was born in a year when the average life expectancy was forty years) speaks to her deep drive: she loved the spotlight, whether that meant center-stage in a hall or a front-page, above-the-fold headline.

Lucy Parsons lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction and engaged directly with the monumental issues shaping the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Red Scare during and after World War I (a political movement with its origins in efforts to silence her during the late 1880s), the reactionary 1920s, and the Great Depression and New Deal. She demonstrated a remarkable prescience about the vicissitudes of modern capitalism, including the effects of technology on the workplace and the structure of the labor force; the role of labor unions as a countervailing force to corporations; the corrupting influence of money on politics; the inadequacy of the two-party system to address fundamental economic and social inequalities in American life; the cyclical depressions and recessions that hit hardworking people; the lengths to which local police forces and private security companies would go to suppress strikers and violently intimidate their leaders; and the everyday struggles of ordinary people, men and women, to make a decent life for themselves and their families. On countless occasions she defied the attempts of the authorities to silence her, and she remained uncompromising in her denunciations of an economic system that ravaged the unemployed and the white industrial laboring classes. From the early 1880s onward, Parsons held fast to the ideal of a nonhierarchical society emerging from trade unions, a society without wages and without coercive government of any kind.

Neither she nor her anarchist comrades, though, appreciated the larger political significance of many Americans fierce ethnic and religious loyalties. And she ignored the unique vulnerability of African Americans, whose history was not merely a variation on the exploitation of the working class, but a product of the myth of race in all

A saint, secular or otherwise, Lucy Parsons was not. Her life was full of ironies and contradictions: She was born to an enslaved woman but maintained a pronounced indifference to the plight of African American laborers, not only those in the South but also in her adopted home of Chicago. She was a frankly sexual being who presented herself publicly as a traditional wife and mother. She extolled the bonds of family, but left behind in Waco a mother and siblings whom she ignored for the rest of her life. She used her children as political props, and rid herself of her son when he threatened to embarrass her in public. She was a labor agitator who had neither the patience for nor an interest in organizing workers, an anarchist who took a long historical view but remained stubbornly oblivious to major political and economic developments that transformed postCivil War America. She expressed a deep commitment to informed debate and disquisition, on the one hand, and, on the other, an unthinking invocation of the virtues of explosive devices.

A vehement critic of government in all its forms, Parsons used the courts and police to settle personal disputes with creditors, neighbors, lovers, and even blood relations. She preached the need for a united front among the laboring classes and their allies against predatory capitalists, but she famously feuded with many fellow radicals, even those who shared her basic views on power and justice. She glorified the masses as agents of an impending revolution, but believed that in order to launch the revolution, ordinary people needed to master complex texts in the fields of history and political theory. She never grasped that the European tactics and cultural symbols she favored would fail as effective organizing devices among native-born Americans. Her story is a cautionary tale about the challenges of promoting a radical message that would appeal to laborers divided by craft, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, gender, and ideologies of race.