Haymarket (18 page)

“Chucking me out?”

“Egotism—you goose.” With mock exasperation, she swatted him on the arm.

“And your second topic?” Albert asked. “Something tells me you have several dozen already laid out.”

“My second article will be about the semislavery of female servants. About the elegant Prairie Avenue ladies who work their maids sixteen hours a day and then dare to keep strict records of their weekly tea and sugar allotments. I want more women to know about the Working Women’s Union, to know they have a place to go with their complaints. The article would summarize what I said at the
WWU
public meeting in the spring.”

“Remember how surprised we were at John McAuliffe’s response?”

“He was right to castigate the
SLP
for having only five women members in Chicago.”

“Well, at least the party has endorsed women’s suffrage.”

“But done nothing to implement it. If the
SLP
doesn’t include a suffrage plank in its next platform, women should refuse all aid to the party.”

“The silly part, I thought, was when McAuliffe urged women to refuse even to
dance
with an
SLP
man. What next? Refusing to cohabit?”

Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t start me up again. We were beginning to have a civil conversation.”

“The first move you make to quit my bed and—”

“Yes,
and?”

“And, I immediately resign from the
SLP.”

“That’s my dear husband!” Lucy threw her arms around him, then quickly disengaged. “And my third article will be aimed directly at you.”

“Now what have I done?”

“You won’t admit that you’re wrong about electoral politics. Didn’t the recent results teach you anything?”

“The
SLP
got twelve thousand votes for Mayor—20 percent of the total, nearly half Carter Harrison’s winning tally!”

“And if you’d won? Your assignment would be to license wharves and farmers’ markets!”

Albert had had enough arguing for one day, but his glum expression all but handed Lucy the unspoken victory. “As you well know,” he said, “most of my spare time these days is going to the eight-hour movement.
I’m rethinking a lot of things.”

“Well, I’ve already rethought them. The essential struggle’s economic, not political.”

“Thank you, Karl Marx.”

“You’re indeed welcome. My advice is yours for the asking. It might speed up that ‘rethinking’ process,” she said with a taunting smile. “What helped me was a phrase from Mirabeau that Lizzie—your quiet, ‘unforceful’ Lizzie—showed me: ‘You cannot reform the world by the sprinkling of rose oil.’ ”

January 17, 1880

I’m more dispirited these days than in a long time. Even as the
SLP
loses strength, it’s breaking into antagonistic factions. An implacable stubbornness is in the air. I don’t feel comfortable with the brass-bound inflexibility emerging on all sides. I ascribe it mostly to disillusion; wretchedly disappointed in our hopes, we take out our frustration on the nearest targets. I’m sure the much-touted “return of prosperity” has also played a role. The newspapers exaggerate the recent improvement in conditions, but times are better. Farmers are reaping good harvests again, railroad construction has greatly expanded, some factories have reopened, the demand for labor has grown, and in some places wages have risen.

But for most of us the purported prosperity has been pretty thin gruel and will turn to water soon enough, as the next cycle of market manipulation begins. The upswing this year has mostly profited people like Jay Gould and his circle of high-flying financiers; they’re having a grand old time, with the balance of trade turned favorable, with Congress nullifying the income tax and restoring the gold standard, and with interest rates down and stocks up. For those of us who toil for a living and have no assets, “prosperity” has been marked at best by a two-dollar-a-week raise—with no guarantees about next week’s paycheck.

I keep trying to explain this to people when I go out to give a lecture or talk at a trade union meeting. But my audiences have dwindled by half, and that half is less than fiery in its response. A lot of workers seem to feel that “the system” has proven itself sound after all. It’s as if their memory of the horrors of the past decade has been wiped clean. Maybe this is the way people—black slaves or factory slaves—manage to survive:
they blot out their suffering or tell themselves that it’s their own fault or that nothing can be done about it (and that, besides, the joys of heaven await and will ultimately compensate). Certainly the pulpit and press cooperate with the plutocrats in pressing home the biblical message that “the poor always ye shall have with you.” It’s God’s will. How convenient. Only in times of desperation, it seems, does the wool drop from people’s eyes, and the woodenness from their limbs.

The widespread decline of interest in politics and trade unionism makes me despair. The comparative few who had joined the
SLP
now seem bent on deserting it. Given the party’s recent high hopes, the leadership is understandably sick with disappointment. It’s further fed by the deaf ear we get from the powers that be. Last week, for example, the Chicago Eight-Hour League sent me to Washington, DC, as a delegate to a conference of labor reformers. I presented a resolution calling on the government to explain why the federal eight-hour law passed back in 1868 has gone unenforced at a time when Washington is vigorously pressing legislation of all kinds favorable to the demands of the railroad barons. The conference adopted my resolution and I stayed on in Washington for a full week trying to lobby the issue in the Congress. I mustered no sympathy at all, let alone action. Probably this should cure me of any hope that politics will solve our problems. Yet that hope stubbornly stays with me. For how much longer?

January 18

Spies called an emergency meeting of our friends to discuss growing factionalism within the
SLP
; as its ranks decline, the rancor rises. Grottkau insists that building a strong trade union movement must precede political action. Spies insists that workers’ militias are an absolute necessity to protect against police brutality. Van Patten denounced them both for taking the
SLP
off course; he continues to insist that the party focus solely on political action. Spies later told me that Van Patten has actually threatened to expel him and others if they persist in their views. How utterly misguided! He’s jeopardizing long-standing ties forged against great odds.

January 19

At the meeting yesterday, a yeast salesman named Oscar Neebe, who helped establish the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
, was particularly outspoken against
any accommodation with Van Patten. I hadn’t met Neebe before and was impressed with his strong commitment to trade unionism. But he, and some others at the meeting, too, seem to regard me with suspicion because I refuse to take a tooth-and-nail attitude toward Van Patten. I can’t for the life of me understand why people who share the same social goals can’t disagree without personally vilifying each other.

February 5

I’m proud as punch of Lucy. She—and Lizzie, too—have pushed their way forward in the male world of politics, making their voices heard more and more. And their writings in various labor publications have been drawing admiring comments. I’ve always known how smart she and Lizzie are, but I wasn’t prepared—I admit it—for their articles to be so vigorously written and argued. I was more worried about Lucy, in truth, since Lizzie has had a good education, and has also had the advantage of being brought up in a family of free-thinkers. Yet Lucy has set the pace. She pulls no punches about the plight of her sisters. “It’s a fact,” she wrote the other day, “that women are paid less, driven a little harder, have less chance to cry out, are actually slaves of slaves.”

February 15

Lucy’s written a powerful piece excoriating the emerging Greenback Party for assuming that a “natural harmony” exists between capital and labor. As she put it, “That’s the same as saying there’s a natural harmony ’twixt robber and robbed.” Most American workers have been taught to believe that what’s good for the rich is good for the country as a whole. But the propertied class cares only for its own interest and defines “harmony” as the worker meekly accepting whatever terms are dictated to him. And what terms they are! You can’t pick up a labor newspaper these days without reading some heartbreaking account of mothers dying of tuberculosis and their children of malnutrition because they couldn’t afford to pay for medical care, or of penniless Civil War veterans being denied charity.

February 18

Lucy confided to me that Lizzie has been courting. And who should her swain turn out to be but William T. Holmes, a man I’d recently met at an
SLP
meeting and had immediately liked. He’s English-born, like Fielden,
but migrated here with his parents when five years old. Scholarly by nature, he had to drop out of school after his father became an invalid. He worked for a time as a sawyer in box factories and now, having taught himself shorthand, makes his living as a stenographer. His story is like so many others in our ranks: gifted people meant for a life of study and contemplation, but unable to follow their natural bent.

At thirty, Holmes is a year younger than Lizzie and three years younger than me. He’s a calm, modest man, with a temperament much like Lizzie’s own: both are peaceful, generous souls, born mediators. They’re a wonderful match, even though I’ve never been one to assume that similar temperaments guarantee a happy union (not that anything does). Look at Lucy and me—a hot-headed, cool-tempered mismatch if ever there was one, judged superficially. Yet my (comparative!) placidity helps cushion her hurtling energy, and her passion helps ruffle my calm.

Lucy has sworn me to secrecy about Lizzie and Holmes. They have no immediate plans for marriage and want to maintain their privacy. I’m delighted for Lizzie. She’s such a good soul, and so deserves this happiness.

May 1

More than a two-month break in my journal keeping. Lucy and I have had to move. We were not, like so many unfortunates, forced out of our flat. Rather, we decided to see if we could find a place with a bit more room. Albert Jr. has taken his first steps—and in our cramped space he’s banging himself into a mass of bruises. Besides, Lucy, much to our delight, is with child again, and we’d like to be settled in our new flat before she comes to term this winter. With a little more money coming in these days, thanks to my increased editorial work and to Lucy’s dress shop, we decided this was the right time to try and find a bigger place.

At first we thought of buying one of those six-hundred-dollar four-room cottages being built just south of Chicago. I guess we still have some nostalgia from our Texas days for wide-open spaces and greenery. But we realized that the urban din is part of our own rhythm now, for better or worse, and that to move outside the city would remove us from our friends and political work. “With only seventy-five dollars to our name,” Lucy said one day with a laugh, “no building and loan society is about to lend the notorious fanatics Lucy and Albert Parsons one penny. Besides,
something tells me that those cottage communities of white homeowners aren’t likely to take kindly to a woman of, ahem, tawny hue. Especially a woman who thinks nobody should own a home until everybody can.”

Nonetheless, thanks to Sam Fielden, we got lucky soon enough. He told us about friends of his who were high-tailing it out to California to make their fortune, leaving a three-room apartment on Grand Street with a rent just a few dollars more a month than we’ve been paying. Best of all, it’s just two blocks away, so Lucy would still be near her shop.

All we had to do to secure the place was to make a little “offering” to the landlord. We bought him and his wife an expensive (ten-dollar) colored lithograph—a chromo. Fielden warned us that they had “refined”—that is, petit bourgeois—tastes, and recommended we buy Robert L. Newman’s mawkish
Blue-Fringed Gentians
. For a moment in the chromo store Lucy got a wild gleam in her eye and said we should really get them Currier and Ives’s
Darktown
, with its depiction of negroes as feckless imbeciles. “That ought to confuse the hell out of them,” she said gleefully.
“Is Mrs. Parsons making fun of us or of herself?
That might at least close their traps—in front of us, anyway, which is all I ask—on the whole subject of race.” In the end we played it safe (for once) and bought the Newman—which Lucy promptly retitled
Violets in the Shape of Female Genitals
.

Moving day was a nightmare. It seemed as if all of Chicago had chosen the tenth of April to exchange apartments. It took us the better part of a day to travel two blocks, locate missing articles dropped on the way (some never found, others broken beyond repair), and complete the unloading and carrying of our possessions up three flights. Never mind—we’re beginning to settle in and feel very content with the grand amount of space. To celebrate, we’ve bought two second-hand armchairs for the living room, a draped center table, and a pine bookcase.

Until now, we had books piled in every corner, many of them gifts from Spies. At our urging, he took our education, or I should say, our lack of it, in hand, and we’ve been gratefully—and to tell the truth, often with great difficulty—reading our way through various European social thinkers. Glad as I’ve been for the increase in knowledge, I’ve felt some sadness about it, too, as if I’ve been moved still further away from my roots. I never did sound like a true Texas lad, but thanks to High European culture I no longer sound like one at all. I comfort myself with thinking
how pleased Aunt Ester would be. She used to shake her finger at me and scowl away: “You best be attendin’ those schoolbooks, boy, or for sure you’ll end up powerful ignorant.”

It’s been the anarchist writers—about whom we’d never even heard—who have most appealed to us, especially Proudhon and Prince Kropotkin. They’ve opened up new horizons, even a new view of human nature. It suits those with money and power to justify their ruthless ways by arguing that selfishness and aggression are part of the law of life, which they define as a race in which the ablest (which happens to be them) win the prizes. Kropotkin argues that evolution has relied more on cooperation among people than on vicious competition between them. He insists that we are social creatures; we crave harmony and connection with each other. The State and other forms of imposed authority, like the Church, interfere with our natural bent toward mutual aid. Voluntary association will be the basis of the free society of the future. It’s a noble dream—Good Lord, I was in the middle of writing about moving day and here I am getting carried deep in the meshes of philosophy!