Albert Parsons
Albert Richard Parsons was an American left-wing newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. As a teenager, he served in the military force of the Confederate States of America in Texas, during the American Civil War. After the war, he settled in there, and became an activist for the rights of the formerly enslaved, and later a Republican official during Reconstruction. With his wife Lucy Parsons, he then moved to Chicago in 1873 and worked in newspapers. There he became interested in the rights of workers. In 1884, he began editing The Alarm newspaper. In 1887, Parsons was one of four Chicago radical leaders controversially convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair.
Early years
Parsons was born June 20, 1848 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was one of the ten children of the proprietor of a shoe and leather factory who had originally hailed from Maine.Parsons described his ancestors as early English settlers, with the first Parsons family arriving at Narragansett Bay in what is now the state of Rhode Island in 1632. One of the Tompkins on his mother's side was with George Washington in the American Revolution and fought at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also a descendant of Major General Samuel Holden Parsons of Massachusetts, another officer in the Revolution, as well as a Captain Parsons who received wounds at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
His parents both died when he was a small child, leaving the boy to be raised by his eldest brother. William Henry Parsons, who was married and the proprietor of a small newspaper in Tyler, Texas, the Tyler Telegraph. In the middle of the 1850s, the family moved from Tyler to Johnson County, living on the frontier for three years. Thereafter, they moved again to the Texas Hill Country, establishing a farm in the valley of the Brazos River.
In 1859, at the age of 11, Parsons left his brother's household to live with a sister in Waco, Texas. Parsons attended school for about a year before leaving to become an apprentice at the Galveston Daily News, a relationship that Parsons characterized as being "indentured" for seven years in order to learn the printers' trade.
Civil War and Reconstruction
The coming of the American Civil War in 1861, or "the slave-holders' Rebellion," as he later called it, led Parsons to leave what he described as the "printer's devil": the position of newsboy. At 13 years old, Parsons volunteered to fight for the forces of the Confederate States of America in an irregular unit known as the "Lone Star Greys." Parsons' first military exploit was aboard the passenger steamer Morgan which ventured into the Gulf of Mexico to intercept and capture the forces of General David E. Twiggs, who had evacuated Texas en route to Washington, D.C.Upon his return, Parsons sought to enlist in the regular Confederate States Army, an idea ridiculed by his employer and guardian at the time, publisher Willard Richardson of the Galveston Daily News. Parsons left his job at the paper, joining an artillery company at a hastily constructed fort at Sabine Pass, Texas, where an elder brother was the captain of an infantry company. For a year, Parsons participated in military drill and served as a "powder monkey" for the cannoneers. Upon the expiration of his first enlistment, Parsons left Fort Sabine to join the cavalry unit of the brother who had previously brought him to Texas, the 12th Regiment of Texas Cavalry, also known as "Parsons' Mounted Volunteers."
Albert Parsons was a member of the "McInoly Scouts" and saw battle during three separate campaigns.
After the war, Parsons returned to Waco, Texas and traded his mule for of standing corn. He hired ex-slaves to help with the harvest and netted a sufficient sum from the sale of the crop to pay for six months' tuition at Waco University, today known as Baylor, a private Baptist college.
After his time in college, Parsons left to take up the printing trade, first working in a printing office before launching his own newspaper, the Waco Spectator, in 1868. In his paper, Parsons took the unpopular position of accepting the terms of surrender and Reconstruction measures aimed at securing the political rights of former slaves. This proved to be a pivotal moment in the 20-year-old's life, as he later recalled in his memoirs:
I became a Republican, and, of course, had to go into politics. I incurred thereby the hate and contumely of many of my former army comrades, neighbors, and the Ku Klux Klan. My political career was full of excitement and danger. I took the stump to vindicate my convictions. The lately enfranchised slaves over a large section of country came to know and idolize me as their friend and defender, while on the other hand I was regarded as a political heretic and traitor by many of my former associates.
In 1869, having left the printing trade, Parsons got a job as a traveling correspondent and business agent for the Houston Daily Telegraph, during which time he met Lucy Ella Gonzales, a woman of multi-ethnic heritage. The pair married in 1872 and Lucy Parsons later became famous in her own right as a radical political activist.
In 1870, Parsons was the beneficiary of Republican political patronage when he was appointed Assistant Assessor of United States Internal Revenue under the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. He also worked as a secretary of the Texas State Senate before being appointed Chief Deputy Collector of United States Internal Revenue at Austin, Texas, a position which he held until 1873.
In the summer of 1873, Parsons travelled extensively through the Midwestern United States as a representative of the Texas Agriculturalist, getting a broader view of the country, deciding to settle with his wife in Chicago. With his move to the metropolis, a new chapter of Parsons' life was begun.
Chicago years
Socialist period (1874–1879)
Upon arriving in Chicago, Parsons was hired as a typesetter for the Chicago Times.In 1874, Parsons became interested in the labor politics as a byproduct of grassroot efforts to force the Chicago Relief and Aid Society to account for millions of dollars of relief aid raised by the group on behalf of victims of the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871. Commercial newspapers came to the aid of the Relief and Aid Society, denouncing its working-class critics as, among other things, "Communists" — a term given new currency after the rise and fall of the Paris Commune during the first half of 1871 — prompting Parsons to begin to study the essence of the charges. Parsons later recalled that this study had convinced him that "the complaints of the working people against the society were just and proper" and led him to draw parallels between the treatment of poor people in both the urban North and the Reconstruction South. "It satisfied me there was a great fundamental wrong at work in society and in existing social and industrial arrangements," he later declared.
In 1875, Parsons left the Republican Party and joined the ephemeral Social-Democratic Party of North America. Parsons attended the 2nd Convention of the SDP, held in Philadelphia from July 4–6, 1875, and was one of the group's leading English-speaking members in Chicago, joined by another able speaker, George A. Schilling.
As an interested observer, Parsons attended the final convention of the National Labor Union, held in Pittsburgh in April 1876. At this convention the dying NLU divided, with its radical wing exiting to establish the Workingmen's Party of the United States — a group that soon merged with the SDP to which Parsons belonged. This organization later renamed itself the Socialist Labor Party of America at its December 1877 convention in Newark, New Jersey, which Parsons attended as a delegate. Parsons was also elected as one of two Chicago delegates to the organization's 2nd national Convention, held in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, at the end of 1879.
Parsons was also involved with the Knights of Labor during its embryonic period. He joined the Knights of Labor, known then as "The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor," on July 4, 1876, after having been invited to speak at a mass meeting of workers. Parsons remained a member of the order until his death more than a decade later. Not long after joining the Knights of Labor, Parsons and his friend George Schilling co-founded the first Chicago order of the Knights, later dubbed the "Old 400".
In the fall of 1876, Parsons was nominated for Chicago City Alderman by the Workingmen's Party of the United States. He received an impressive one-sixth share of the vote.
In the spring of 1877, the Workingmen's Party ran a full slate of candidates in Cook County, including Chicago. The organization elected three of its members to the Illinois State Legislature and one to the Illinois State Senate. In this election, Parsons ran for County Clerk of Cook County, narrowly losing but polling nearly 8,000 votes. In the course of his life, Parsons ran three times for Chicago City Alderman, twice for Cook County Clerk, and once for United States Congress.
Parsons was one of the foremost speakers in the English language on behalf of the socialist cause in Chicago in the 1870s. In 1877 a Great Railroad Strike took place. On July 21, about a week after the beginning of the strike, Parsons was called upon to address a vast throng of perhaps 30,000 workers congregated at a mass meeting on Chicago's Market Street. Parsons gave a powerful speech to the assembled strikers and their friends on behalf of the Workingmen's Party — an action that cost Parsons his job at the Times the next day.
After being terminated in the morning, Parsons made his way to the offices of the leading German-language socialist newspaper, the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung. He was found there and escorted to Chicago City Hall, where he was ushered before the Chief of Police and about 30 of the city's "leading citizens". There Parsons was dressed down for about two hours, with the Chief of Police asking Parsons if he didn't "know better than to come here from Texas and incite the working people to insurrection." Parsons disclaimed any such notion, noting that he had urged the workers not to strike but to go to the polls to elect new representatives. With the agitated worthies present in the room audibly muttering such sentiments as "Hang him" and "Lynch him," the Chief of Police advised Parsons that his life was in danger and urged him to leave town. Parsons was allowed to leave, but he remained in Chicago despite the implied threat on his life.
The afternoon Chicago papers trumpeted that "strike leader" Albert Parsons had been "arrested" that day — neither of which things were true. The Chicago strike of 1877 was ultimately violently repressed by the action of the police and militia.