Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

by Jacqueline Jones

Overview

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived

Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans.

Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Jacqueline Jones presents not only the exceptional life of the famous American-born anarchist but also an authoritative account of her times-from slavery through the Great Depression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465078998
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	680,559
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Jacqueline Jones holds the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women's History and the Mastin Gentry White Professorship in Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin. Winner of the Bancroft Prize for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, Jones lives in Austin, Texas.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part 1 An Enduring Civil War

Chapter 1 Wide-Open Waco 3

Chapter 2 Republican Heyday 29

Part 2 Gilded Age Dynamite

Chapter 3 A Local War 45

Chapter 4 Farewell to the Ballot Box 69

Chapter 5 A False Alarm? 95

Chapter 6 Haymarket 117

Chapter 7 Bitter Fruit of Braggadocio 139

Chapter 8 "The Dusky Goddess of Anarchy Speaks Her Mind" 161

Chapter 9 The Blood of My Husband 183

Part 3 Blatherkite-Goddess of Free Speech

Chapter 10 The Widow Parsons Sets Her Course 209

Chapter 11 Variety in Life, and Its Critics 233

Chapter 12 Tending the Sacred Flame of Haymarket 263

Chapter 13 Wars at Home and Abroad 291

Part 4 The Falling Curtain of Mystery

Chapter 14 Facts and Fine-Spun Theories 315

Epilogue 343

Acknowledgments 353

Abbreviations in Notes 357

Notes 361

Index 417

Editorial Reviews

10/02/2017
In the first biography in more than 40 years of radical labor agitator Lucy Parsons, Jones (A Dreadful Deceit), Bancroft Prize–winning chair in history and ideas at the University of Texas at Austin, lucidly portrays a fiery, outspoken woman whose life holds significant lessons about the past and future of labor in America. Parsons wrote and spoke on issues that remain urgent in the 21st century: the punishing wealth disparity between workers and bosses, organizing amid police brutality, and the impotence of the two-party system. Both Parsons and her husband, Albert, called for armed struggle, believing it would act as the catalyst to destroy the capitalist machine. After a bomb exploded at Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886, Albert was hanged for his inciting rhetoric. Jones uncovers new aspects of Parsons’s story, such as her birth to an enslaved woman in Virginia, which she disguised with tales of Spanish-indigenous origins. Jones also casts a critical eye on the dissonant aspects of Parsons’s life and politics, such as her refusal to engage with black-working-class struggles and her distaste for doctrines of free love propagated by fellow anarchists (notwithstanding the widow Parsons’s own public affair with a married man). Despite some dry prose, Jones impresses with this richly detailed and empathic study of a complex figure. Illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Goddess of Anarchy displays the powers of a master historian, taking the reader to both post-Civil War Texas and to Gilded Age Chicago."—ChicagoTribune

"An outstanding book.... Jones' fascinating portrait presents an enigmatic, unpredictable activist who sustained a lifelong oratory and writing career."—Booklist

"Goddess of Anarchy is meticulously researched."—Harper's Magazine

"Jones impresses with this richly detailed and empathetic study of a complex figure."—Publishers Weekly

"[A] tough-minded biography of a fiery revolutionary whose activism spanned the decades from Reconstruction to the New Deal...comprehensive and fair."—Kirkus Reviews

"In disentangling the riddle of Lucy Parsons, one of America's most famous Anarchists, Jones has written an important biography."—National Book Review

"Jones's book persuasively explains both the causes for which Parsons fought as well as inconsistencies apparent in her character and actions. This readable biography will appeal to readers with many interests, including the history of women's studies, radicalism, labor, race relations, urbanism, and especially Chicago."—Library Journal

"Thanks to Goddess of Anarchy...readers finally have a penetrating account of Parsons's long, remarkable life."—New York Review of Books

"Jacqueline Jones has produced a stunning, meticulously researched, complex narrative of Lucy Parsons, America's first black woman anarchist."—Kali Nicole Gross, author of HannahMary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence inAmerica

"No scholar has done more to illuminate the tangled politics of race and class in American history than Jacqueline Jones.... A richly revealing story, brilliantly told."—Michael Willrich, author of Pox: AnAmerican History and City of Courts

"With remarkable research and insight, the distinguished historian Jacqueline Jones has recovered the life and thought of an extraordinary historical figure who we barely knew."—Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural Southfrom Slavery to the Great Migration

"Lucy Parsons was a unique figure in the history of the American left: eloquent, beautiful, uncompromising in her anarchist faith, and loath to embrace her mixed-race identity. Jacqueline Jones, one of our nation's most distinguished historians, fills her narrative of this remarkable life with both the vivid drama and the critical understanding it deserves."
—Michael Kazin, author of WarAgainst War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918

"One of our most talented historians tackles one of American history's most enigmatic figures.... Goddess of Anarchy is at once a fascinating biography and a window onto the tumultuous debates of the Gilded Age."—Karl Jacoby, author of TheStrange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a MexicanMillionaire

"This dramatic and impressive book vividly brings the tumultuous and tragic life of ex-slave and American revolutionary Lucy Parsons to what should be a large audience. Even those of us who cherish a more heroic view of Parsons' life in struggle will learn enormously from this meticulously researched and learned biography."—David Roediger, author of Class,Race and Marxism

From the Publisher

2017-09-25
Tough-minded biography of a fiery revolutionary whose activism spanned the decades from Reconstruction to the New Deal.Bancroft Prize winner Jones (Chair, History and Ideas/Univ. of Texas; A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America, 2013, etc.) evinces considerable respect for her subject, a woman born into slavery who gained fame in 1880s Chicago as one of the anarchist movement's most vocal advocates of violent revolt. But the author finds plenty to criticize about Lucy Parsons (1853-1942), beginning with her decision, when she left Texas with her white husband, Albert, to disguise her racial identity and to almost entirely ignore the plight of African-Americans as she battled for the working class. Jones deplores the couple's praise of "the dear stuff dynamite" as an instrument of liberation—loose talk that helped convict Albert and seven other anarchists of conspiracy to murder in the wake of an 1886 demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square even though none of them threw the dynamite that killed seven policemen. The biographer's sympathies are clearly with more pragmatic radicals like Mother Jones, who argued that the anarchists' theatrical tactics and rhetoric were distractions in the struggle for real reforms like the eight-hour working day. Jones also finds distasteful Lucy's embrace of traditional gender roles, promoting herself as the widow of a Haymarket martyr and plugging her self-published copies of Albert's biography at every opportunity while leading a sexually free life and railroading her son into an insane asylum after a quarrel. Nonetheless, the author acknowledges Lucy's gifts as an orator and salutes her refusal to be relegated to a subordinate role by her male comrades. "In the end," she concludes, "there are few lives that are not a bundle of contradictions and shortcomings." Parsons remained committed to radical causes throughout her long life and gave her last speech, to a group of striking workers, scarcely a year before her death in 1942.Comprehensive and fair, though a little more warmth toward Parsons would have made the book more engaging.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Nylsa Smallwood’s bright, resolute voice fits the author’s robust writing and the pugnacious personality of this audiobook’s subject. Lucy Parsons was born a slave, but she didn’t fight solely for African-American rights. Instead, she advocated for First Amendment rights for all people, espousing violence, radicalism, and socialism to stamp out the evils of industrial capitalism. She married a man who was also involved in radical politics. She reminds us that change is messy and unpopular, but it’s necessary for democracy to move forward. This is Parsons’s life, and a fascinating one it is. Smallwood sounds like she’s reading the book rather than telling the story. Varying her tone and slowing her pace would have helped. Nonetheless, her crystal-clear diction helps to move the story along. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Nylsa Smallwood’s bright, resolute voice fits the author’s robust writing and the pugnacious personality of this audiobook’s subject. Lucy Parsons was born a slave, but she didn’t fight solely for African-American rights. Instead, she advocated for First Amendment rights for all people, espousing violence, radicalism, and socialism to stamp out the evils of industrial capitalism. She married a man who was also involved in radical politics. She reminds us that change is messy and unpopular, but it’s necessary for democracy to move forward. This is Parsons’s life, and a fascinating one it is. Smallwood sounds like she’s reading the book rather than telling the story. Varying her tone and slowing her pace would have helped. Nonetheless, her crystal-clear diction helps to move the story along. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2018 - AudioFile