Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones (review)

Jacqueline Jones's exhaustively researched and gracefully written biography of Lucy Parsons supplants Carolyn Ashbaugh's uncritical and much briefer Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary, published in 1976 for the Illinois Labor History Society. Ashbaugh's Parsons is a heroine of Gilded Age labor strife. Jones, in contrast, finds a self-created woman who concealed her past, feuded with her fellow radicals, and ruthlessly pursued her own interests. Parsons was one of the few women, and even fewer African Americans, of her day who regularly addressed large audiences, and Goddess of Anarchy skillfully integrates her public and private selves. It illuminates her struggle as a woman of color as well as her contentious life as a labor agitator.

Jones has filled in the blank of Parsons's origins and fleshed out her early years in Waco. She was born a slave in Virginia and during the Civil War was force-marched with her family and other enslaved laborers to Texas by her owner, who may also have been her father. As a teenager after emancipation (and then known as Lucia Carter), she worked intermittently as a cook and seamstress and attached herself to an older freedman who considered her his wife and paid her tuition to the first school for freedpeople in Waco. She bore a child who may or may not have been his and had a love affair with Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier who had become a prominent organizer for the Republican Party. They married in 1872, during a brief period when interracial unions were legal in Texas, and left for Chicago the following year, the Democrats' "redemption" of state government having dimmed Albert's prospects of rising in politics. They settled in an immigrant neighborhood and joined the largely foreign-born ranks of socialists and anarchists who sought to upend predatory capitalism and establish a workers' paradise.

Albert's enduring legacy as one of the men unjustly hanged after the Haymarket riot of 1886 has tended to cast Lucy in his shadow. Jones, however, shows that within a few years of their arrival Lucy, while running a dressmaking business and raising two children, emerged as a well-read debater, lecturer, and writer. Newspaper reporters were as fascinated by her looks and skin tone as by her exhortations to workers to arm themselves with explosives. She steadfastly and falsely insisted that she was Mexican and Indian, and sometimes even claimed to speak Spanish. Like her fellow Marxists, she ignored the plight of black workers, who were resented for taking jobs as strikebreakers, and in her writings she made only one reference to lynching in the South.

Using dozens of newspaper files from around the country, Jones documents Parsons's speaking tours, rough handling by police, and affiliations, including the Industrial Workers of the World; the Syndicalist League of North America (founded in her living room in 1912); and the International Labor Defense, founded by Chicago communists. But in the twentieth century her interest in anarchism declined, and she focused on keeping alive the memory of the Haymarket martyrs and championing the freedom of speech for which they were executed. Throughout the 1920s she defended Russia's Bolsheviks, including their use of military force.

To younger activists Parsons was an honored forebear, but Jones, as a labor historian, is clear-eyed about her legacy. She idealized a brotherhood of labor that did not exist in Chicago, where unions often clashed with each other, sometimes violently. Like her fellow radicals, Parsons failed to understand that European theories and symbolism had little appeal to the majority of American workers, who believed that capitalism could be reformed and made more humane. She was an inspiring speaker and writer but lacked both patience and interest in actually organizing workers. "A saint, secular or otherwise, Lucy Parsons was not," Jones concludes, stressing that "her life was full of ironies and contradictions" (xi...