Jacqueline Jones is the author of the new book Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. Jones's other books include Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow and A Dreadful Deceit. She is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women's History and is the Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Q: Why did you decide to
write a biography of Lucy Parsons?
A: Several reasons: When I teach American history, I am always on
the lookout for little-known women who did great things and/or lived
fascinating lives. Carolyn Ashbaugh’s 1976 biography of Parsons provided a good
overview, but LP’s early years—before she moved to Chicago—remained a mystery.
Now, with all the great digitized
historical databases available, I thought it was time to revisit Parsons and
see what more I could find out about her—the public persona she crafted for
herself, as well as her private life.
Too, I wanted to know more
about this self-identified anarchist—what that political stance meant in the
1880s and beyond. Parsons fits uneasily within the rigid Left-Right/liberal-conservative
categories we use today to label people and their political views.
She thought the federal
government was inherently oppressive, and she vehemently rejected what we would
call identity politics, arguing that her own background was irrelevant to her
message of class struggle. She was a strong proponent of labor unions.
After the early 1880s she
never voted for anyone at any time in any kind of election. She believed that
money and capitalist interests had thoroughly corrupted the two-party political
system.
I was also interested in
learning how she came to be so prescient about so many issues that strike us as
modern—the growing gap between the rich and poor, the mixed effects of
technology in the workplace, the lack of protections accorded workers, the
beleaguered state of labor unions and so forth.
She became one of the most
famous orators of her time, she wrote extensively and edited two of her own
anarchist newspapers. I wondered: How did she do it?
Q: How did you research the
book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I found that Parsons had
been born to an enslaved woman in Virginia (in 1851), and that her owner had
forcibly removed the family to Texas during the Civil War. Later, once Parsons
was on the verge of launching her first national lecture tour, she concocted a
fictional identity for herself, claiming that she was Mexican and Native
American.
I was struck by what a
celebrity Parsons was in her own day. Today her career is overshadowed by that
of her husband Albert, who was executed for his alleged role in the Haymarket
Square bombing of May, 1886, in Chicago.
The name of the person who
threw the bomb that killed seven police officers and four others, and wounded
many more, remains unknown to this day. Albert and his co-defendants were
arrested, tried, convicted, and hanged because they were anarchists, not
because anyone could prove they threw the bomb.
The four who were hanged on
November 11, 1887, became “martyrs” to the cause. Lucy became the heroic widow
of a “martyr,” and her subsequent career as editor, writer, agitator, and
orator has received relatively little attention.
Beginning in 1886, when she
launched her first speaking tour to raise money for Albert’s defense, and 1942,
when she died, she remained an icon in radical labor circles. She was notorious
in her day for her provocative rhetoric.
Her critics evoked the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871 when describing her—she was a “fiery” speaker, indulging
in “incendiary” and “inflammatory” remarks that were certain to “spark” a
revolution among the laboring classes.
Yet she was also a fierce
proponent of free speech, boldly standing up to those who would silence her,
whether conservative trade unionists, socialists, police chiefs, or mayors.
LP was smart and well read,
but like her husband and their anarchist comrades, she was convinced that
European-style labor organizing strategies would be successful in the United
States. In this she was mistaken.
Her denigration of American
institutions such as Congress and the courts, her contempt for organized
religion in any form, and her disparagement of the right to vote alienated
native-born white workers.
Also, the anarchists posited
a grim future at least in the near-term, until the day of revolution—a future
marked by starving children and downtrodden workers. That message did not
resonate among the many Americans who believed the future would be
better--especially for their own children.
Finally, I was surprised to
learn that Parsons and her radical comrades ignored the struggles of people of
color in Chicago and throughout the country. Instead, anarchists and socialists
pandered to the prejudices of the white laboring classes, who went out of their
way to demonize all black workers as strikebreakers.
Q: Can you say more about how
well known she was during her lifetime, and what some of the common perceptions
and misperceptions have been of her?
A: The mainstream press
covered her obsessively. When I plugged her name into various digitized
newspaper databases, I came up with hundreds of articles from large and small
mainstream and radical newspapers all over the country.
Because she was light-skinned
and her background was indeterminate, reporters and the general public
speculated endlessly about her ethnicity. Some believed she “looked” black,
while others took her at her word and saw in her a person of mixed Native
American and Mexican heritage.
Her personal life often
contradicted her public persona. She presented herself to the world as a
conventional Victorian wife, mother and then widow, when in fact she was quite
sexually liberated, especially before she met Albert (she bore a child when she
was living in Waco, where they met) and after his death.
She had one particular love
affair with a married younger man that ended very badly, splashed all over the
Chicago newspapers. Emma Goldman, who was outspoken in her own support for
“free love,” labeled LP a hypocrite for presenting herself one way to an
adoring public, and acting quite another way in her private life.
LP and Albert had two
children—Albert Junior and Lulu. Lulu died in 1890 at the age of 8. Quite
frequently the children were cared for by neighbors, when Albert and Lucy were
out of town speaking.
In 1899 Albert Junior
expressed an interest in joining the U. S. Army and going to fight in the
Philippines. His mother-- a staunch anti-imperialist—was enraged. She had him
committed to an insane asylum north of Chicago, where he died 20 years later. There
is no evidence that she ever went to visit him.
Q: How would you describe her
legacy today?
A: In some respects Parsons
seems irrelevant today. She believed that trade unions were the building blocks
of the good society, and that wage labor was destined to fade away. She
envisioned something akin to a cooperative commonwealth, where people jointed
together in voluntary associations and had no need or desire to exploit each
other for financial gain. These views strike us today as hopelessly
old-fashioned and quaint.
At the same time, her life
reminds us of the need to protect hard-won freedoms—especially freedom of
speech and assembly.
Today we think of anarchists
as masked people eager to do battle with the police and neo-Nazis. Parsons and
her comrades were exhilarated by confrontations with the powers-that-be, but
they also read widely and deeply. They were knowledgeable about political
theory, history, and economics, and committed to informed debate about the
state of the world.
I don’t think we gain much by
portraying women in the past as saints. Lucy Parsons had a fascinating,
complicated personality. Her life was shaped by her young years in slavery, by
her unwillingness or inability to speak freely about her background, and by the
prejudices aimed at women, people of color, and radicals. Those burdens
necessarily took a toll on her.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I hope soon to turn my
attention to a history of the black community in Civil War-era Boston.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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