The American: A Middle Western Legend (10 page)

—I asked him what he intended to do, and he said, work for the eight-hour day, that and organize. We were just gaining our strength in the eight-hour movement then. The trade unions got together and sent Parsons all through the middle west. He spoke everywhere; I don't know if there's one man in the country who gave to the workers what Parsons did. He was sent as delegate from Chicago to the big eight-hour convention in Washington, and the convention made him one of a committee to stay in Washington, coordinate the movements of organized labor, and study the whole question of the eight-hour day.

—What happened to Parsons in Washington, what he saw there, I don't know; you must remember, always, the kind of a man he was; if I believed in saints, I would call him that; but he was so human, so full of life, so enchanted with just the everyday process of living. That isn't a part of sainthood, is it? And he was always so madly in love with this wife of his—not what they call a pure love, but the love of two whose bodies understand each other, and if you ever saw them together you realized that right away. But in Washington, something happened; he changed; he looked at a country governing itself, and after that he talked differently.

—After that, he split with us wholly, and he joined the International Working People's Association. He became a revolutionary socialist. An anarchist? That's a name, a tag; I know what he was; I would be against him in any case—but he was that, a revolutionary socialist, not this crazy cartoon they make of him, a bearded lunatic with a bomb in each hand and the label of anarchist under him. That is not Parsons; even if I regard him as a man who has gone the wrong way, I must still say that is not Parsons.

—Yet when I think of what he did after that, how much can I condemn him? He went to the people. He traveled through the coal fields, the hell-towns of Pennsylvania and Illinois, speaking to the miners, living with them, always, always pleading the cause of socialism. Still, there was no labor struggle within five hundred miles of here in which he didn't participate. He founded and edited the
Alarm
, the first English weekly of their international; that you know. When the great strikes came, a few years ago, he stood with the strikers. Don't think they never tried to kill him before. The Pinkerton armies had secret orders, which I myself saw, to get Parsons. Also to get others, but first on the list was Parsons. The police were instructed to club him to death, first chance they got. And they tried, they certainly tried.

—And what else is there to tell, before I speak of Hay-market? You want to know how he lived? He lived on nothing. Lucy was clever. I've watched her weave his suits back together when they fell to pieces from wear. She could make meals of scraps. There were years when he couldn't work, when he was on the blacklist of every newspaper and every printshop in the west. Then his own people fed him from the little they had. He never took until it was forced on him; he never asked; he never complained. Once, when I met him, he had not eaten for two full days; but I was with him more than an hour before I realized he was faint from hunger.

—I know I will have to bore you by repeating what we both know, the facts of the meeting; I keep saying to myself, thank you for hearing me. But first I want to finish with the man; he isn't going to die if they kill him today; some men don't die. Maybe both of us will have to deal with him, and that's why I want to understand him, for myself as well as for you. They talk of socialism as a foreign importation, but what is foreign about Parsons? Once I met a United States marshal from Texas; he was like Parsons, quiet, gentle, polite, he never raised his voice and most often seemed to apologize, but he had a reputation for being a very brave man, and he too, in his own way, took the side where there was least strength and least hope. But don't think Parsons is a dolt; his reasoning is cold and logical; he's read everything on labor and socialism he could lay hands on. When he talks, there are ideas. I disagree bitterly with those ideas; I say he is wrong, dangerously wrong, and isn't what happened proof that he was wrong? For him, there is only one solution, for the workers to rise up and take over the land, the means of production, the factories and the schools and the halls of justice—and to me, that is insanity. So you see, I too am against him, and against Spies and the others. But are men to die, to be murdered simply because I do not agree with them?

—You could ask why, believing this, Parsons should fight so hard for the eight-hour day, for every advance and demand of labor. That is very interesting. I myself asked Parsons that; but to him there is no contradiction; every gain for labor is a gain for his own and their own cause—like that. I say that to show that the man lived what he preached; there is only one Parsons, not two.

—I could tell more; I could spend most of the day telling this and that about Parsons, but there isn't most of today. There is only another hour and a half. So let us start with such a man and see what happened.

—You remember how a year and a half ago we decided that there should be a day for American labor, one day which was ours, which would mark our unity and our determination in the struggle for eight hours. We picked May the first. My word, you would have thought that we destroyed the foundations of the country by asking a day for ourselves, our own holiday. As it approached, you remember what happened. A whole army of Pinkertons poured into Chicago; the police armed themselves to the teeth, deputized every no-good bum who could be found on the streets. The National Guard was alerted; even units of the regular army were demanded, to come to Chicago and preserve the peace. Had we threatened the peace? All we proposed was to select a day when we could demonstrate our solidarity for the eight-hour movement. Of course, that Saturday came and went without any trouble; trouble was our enemy. We knew what we were after; we were organized throughout the nation—what good would violence do us?

—But on Monday, the third of May, a bad thing happened. You know about it, but I want to put all things in their place. The demonstration outside the McCormick plant was not held only by the Lumber Shovers' Union; there were over a thousand McCormick strikers there too, and though August Spies spoke there, he did not call for trouble; he called for unity. Is that a crime? The trouble came when the scabs began to leave the plant. The strikers saw them and cursed them, and called them names not fit to repeat. Just picture the scene, some six thousand striking members of two unions holding an outdoor mass meeting, and within sight of them, scabs leaving a plant. I saw what happened. The McCormick strikers began to move toward the plant. No one urged them; no one harangued them; they stopped listening and moved away toward the gates. Maybe they picked up some rocks; maybe they said things not nice to hear—but before they did anything, the plant police started to fire. My god, it was like a war! The strikers were unarmed, and the police stood like men on a range, pistols at arm's length, rifles too, potting, potting away.

—They say the plant called for reinforcements—that would take a little time, wouldn't it? But, within minutes, a patrol wagon filled with police dashed up, and behind them, on the double, came a detail of two hundred armed men.

—Well, it was the kind of a sight one would see in the old country, not here. The workers dropped like men on a battlefield. When they tried to stand fast, the police rushed them and clubbed them apart; when they broke and ran, the police followed them, clubbing them from the rear. It wasn't nice to see; it wasn't kind; it was a brute thing that made you want to go away and vomit. That's what it made me do, but it made Spies rush back to the office of the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
and send out a wild call for a meeting at Haymarket Square to protest this thing. That's how it began; it began because we were quiet and orderly on our day, May Day, and because it didn't satisfy them to have us that way. Better with guns—with guns they could make real trouble, and people would scream revolution.

—But the point is that Parsons was not there, just as Parsons was not at Haymarket when the bomb was thrown. It wasn't only McCormick and the lumber shovers on strike; Pullman was on strike too, and Brunswick and the packing houses, and not only Chicago, but St. Louis, Cincinnati, New York, San Francisco. Parsons was everywhere he could be, but not here; Parsons was tired and sick; he would come home and collapse into bed. A labor organizer isn't a life to grow old with; first the stomach goes, then the legs, then, when you've been beaten and clubbed enough, the head, the mind.

—So they got up the meeting at Haymarket for the next day. They picked Haymarket because of its size; you see, Spies was like a man gone crazy when he came back from the McCormick plant, his head full of the wounded, the dying. He thought that the workers would come out by the tens of thousands to protest; but McCormick was only a small part of a giant struggle, and already the workers were being defeated. Everywhere, they were being smashed and broken, and what would one more meeting change? But don't underestimate Spies—a brilliant man and honest, too; with the foreign-born workingmen, he was like Parsons with the Americans. He saw this as a chance not to be missed; if twenty thousand workers packed Haymarket Square, the whole trend of the eight-hour struggle might be reversed. Perhaps—I don't know; as I said, I don't agree with these men. To talk revolution is not to promote my fight, but to hinder it; that is the way I feel.

—But twenty thousand men did not appear in Haymarket the next night. When Spies arrived, as you know, there were very few, and as the evening went on, the greatest size of the crowd was less than three thousand. And because the crowd was so small, they moved the meeting from Haymarket to Desplaines, between Lake and Randolph. But I am telling you about Parsons; that is my only reason for wasting your time this morning. I am telling you how Parsons was not there, how he didn't even know about the meeting. As a matter of fact, Sam Fielden didn't know about the Haymarket meeting either.

—But to get back to Parsons. He had left Chicago on the second of May and had gone to Cincinnati to speak. All day on the third of May, when the terrible thing happened at McCormick's, Parsons was away. He got home on the morning of the fourth. He had gone without sleep all night; he was tired and haggard as he listened to Lucy's story of what had happened. It was not too different from what he had seen himself in Cincinnati. All over the same thing. The barons were angry; this dirty monster who had stood up to challenge them must be crushed, and they were busy crushing it, and all over it was breaking into pieces. A hungry, tired, unarmed man isn't any match for a Gatling gun.

—Parsons listened to his wife's story. He played with his two children. He drank the coffee she gave him and ate a piece of bread. He said to her, “We have to do something.” But what was there to do? “You're too tired for a meeting tonight,” she said. She was not speaking about the Haymarket meeting; she didn't know about that meeting. “There has to be a meeting,” Parsons said. You see, we called the men Parsons led the American group, because most of them were native-born workingmen. He decided there had to be a meeting and, tired as he was, went out to put an announcement in the
Daily News.
Then he came home and played with the children some more. Then he went to sleep. When he woke up, he was much better; he was his old self, laughing it away. Lucy says he spoke about victory instead of defeat; he talked about his children growing up into an America that would lead the world toward justice and freedom.

—In the evening, he and Lucy and the two children went out to the meeting. Like always, he and Lucy walked together, looking at each other as if they were lovers.

—Meanwhile, the Haymarket meeting, small as it was, had lingered past starting time. What a bad night that was, threatening, with every minute looking like rain! It was the instant threat of rain that had kept people away, and those who were there wanted it to start and finish. But, you see, they all depended on Parsons, and each discovered that he had left it to someone else to get Parsons to the meeting. Spies didn't want to start until Parsons came, and when someone mentioned the announcement in the
Daily News
, Spies said he would go get Parsons himself. But that would have probably taken all the life out of the meeting, and they persuaded Spies to start talking while someone else looked for Parsons. So Spies began. I don't have to repeat what Spies said; there's been enough of that in the papers. But it's worth recalling that he spoke in the main about the eight-hour movement. Because workers were shot and clubbed, he didn't say that everything must go; he said we have to pull together and fight harder. And he described what had happened at McCormick the day before. Meanwhile, someone had gotten to Parsons at the other meeting. Fielden was there too; he would be, you see; even though he's English, he can talk to Americans better than I can. Parsons was dog-tired, but he said, all right, he'd come back and talk again. Fielden came with him. Fielden is a big man, slow to anger, as they say Yorkshiremen are, but what was happening everywhere was fermenting in him, and he was bitter. And his bitterness came out when he talked.

—Well, Parsons, with his wife and the two children went to Desplaines Street, where Spies' meeting was. The children were very tired by then. Lucy carried one, Parsons the other. Yes, I'm telling you this to win your sympathy; there's no more time after today, and I'm not ashamed to try to win your sympathy.

—Maybe there were still two thousand people left, standing there under the black sky and waiting for Parsons. You don't know how that is, but there were times when I stood two hours and more, waiting for Parsons to speak. There were two wagons there; the speakers used one for a platform; men sat on the other, but they made room for Lucy Parsons and the children. Spies was relieved to see Parsons; you know how you feel when you think you have an occasion of such great importance, and the crowd begins to slip away.