In the summer of 1899, the anarchist Lucy Parsons was in her element, holding forth on Chicago street corners and condemning the United States’ incursion into the Philippines. Parsons and other radicals saw the Spanish-American War as an exercise in imperialism on behalf of American economic interests. One day in July, her 21-year-old son, Albert Parsons Jr., told her that he planned to join the army and serve overseas. She was enraged. She hauled him before a judge and had him declared legally insane, though by all other accounts, that was not the case; a high school graduate, he was now working as a clerk. The judge remanded him to Elgin Asylum, north of Chicago, where he languished for years, apparently tormented by inmates and guards alike because of his infamous mother. He died there of tuberculosis in 1919.
I had chosen to write about Parsons because of the vast amount of relevant historical material available. She was the widow of Albert Parsons, wrongly accused and then hanged for his role in the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886. Parsons was notorious in her day; the mainstream press covered her almost obsessively, especially during the period between 1886 and 1900. She gave many speeches reprinted in newspapers; wrote social commentary, poetry, fiction, and editorials for various radical magazines; and published and edited two short-lived newspapers during her long lifetime (1851–1942). She spoke in terms that seem familiar to us today, denouncing the growing gap between the rich and poor, arguing for the necessity of labor unions, and warning about the displacement of workers by machines. I did not lack for her writings or for newspaper accounts of her lecture tours around the country.
As Parsons’s biographer, I considered Lucy Parsons’s treatment of her son unfathomable, cruel in the extreme. I wondered how I could write about Parsons with the dispassion that a biography demanded. I knew I should somehow contextualize or account for this incident in her life, but that was no easy matter.
The writer Carolyn Ashbaugh wrote the first full-length biography of Lucy Parsons in 1976. It occurred to me that online sources and the proliferation of genealogical material—census data; historical newspapers; and birth, marriage, and death records—might open vast new possibilities for exploring Parsons’s life. A new biography of Parsons struck me as a good way to explore radical politics in America’s Gilded Age.