Lucy Parsons: Goddess of Anarchy
Several years ago ,* I wrote my first book for adults: The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism. It is a history of socialism, from its roots in Utopian idealism through Tea Party accusations that Barack Obama is a socialist.** I spent considerable time reading and writing about socialism and anarchism in America prior to World War I. And I’m pretty sure I never read a word about Lucy Parsons, a famous (or infamous, depending on your politics) socialist/anarchist leader and speaker whose career lasted from Reconstruction to the New Deal . As her recent biographer, Jacqueline Jones, makes clear, its not entirely my fault. Parsons’s story has been obscured by that of her husband, by her own choice to re-write her past, and by the general tendency to file notable women in the “let’s forget about this” drawer of history.
Jones untangles Parsons’s story in Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. She gives us a picture of a life filled with contradictions: a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, an African-American activist who focused on the cause of white labor in American cities, the “professional widow” of one of the martyrs of the Haymarket Square riots who took lovers after her husband’s death, a social reformer with a passion for fashion, a fiery public persona with a well disguised private life. With an eye for the telling detail and a vibrant writing style,*** Jones sets Parsons against a richly rendered background of American society in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, seen through the lens of the changing politics of race and class.
Parsons emerges as difficult, complicated, and not entirely admirable. But while Jones’ depiction of Parsons is not always a comfortable read, it is always a fascinating one.
*2011. A simpler time in what feels like the distant past.
** My basic take on this was and remains that if professed socialists say Obama is not a socialist, we should take their word for it.
***There’s a reason Jones won the Bancroft Prize and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.
1517: A Year in Review
On October 31, 1517, one man with a hammer changed the course of history. Thirty-three-year-old German monk Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 complaints about the practices of the Catholic church to a church door in Wittenberg–the sixteenth century equivalent of pinning them to a community bulletin board. (Or perhaps, as some scholars argue, the church door story is comic-book history* and Luther simply sent out copies to church officials.) Whether nailed or mailed, Luther was hoping to start a conversation within the church. Instead he started the Protestant Reformation.
Historically-aware media outlets highlighted Luther and that church door throughout October. But the distribution of his 95 theses wasn’t the only event to change the world in 1517. Here are a few other high and low points of 1517:
- The Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamluks of Egypt, thereby adding Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula to their empire and transforming the Ottoman state from a kingdom at the edge of the Islamic world to a mighty empire, with control over the Muslim holy places at Mecca and Medina
- The Portuguese, also in the process of building an empire, established a trading post in what was then Ceylon and sailed all the way to Canton: making the world just a little bit smaller.
On a smaller scale:
- Italian physician/poet Girolamao Fracastoro suggested that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living organisms–still a controversial subject in some circles.
- A new luxury good, coffee, made its way to Europe.
- Moroccan explorer Leo Africanus (ca 1494-1554) traveled to Timbuktu and back. His travel account, Description of Africa, was the West’s primary source on the Islamic world for some 400 years.
- On May 1, remembered as Evil May Day, artisans and apprentices rioted in London because they believed foreigners were taking their jobs. The story is complicated but the short version is that times were hard and the foreign-born minority who lived in London were a visible scapegoat. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
*The storybook version of history that we learn as kids and carry in out heads and hearts as adults.
1917: A Year in Review
In 1917, the War to End All Wars continued to dominate the headlines. On April 6, the United States finally abandoned isolationism and entered the war, after being given a strong shove by Germany in the form of the Zimmerman Telegram. On the Eastern front, Russia suffered devastating defeats, which contributed directly to the Bolshevik revolution (here and here) and separate peace talks between Bolshevik Russia and Germany. In the Middle East, Britain continued to support the Arab tribes in their revolt against the Ottoman empire, while at the same time the Balfour declaration committed Britain to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. (Anyone with half a brain would see that this was trouble in the making.)
It’s easy to forget that the war wasn’t the only news that was fit to print. Here are a few events that occurred off the battlefield in 1917 that are worth remembering:
- The first jazz recording was made in New York by a group of white musicians from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by cornet player Nick LaRocca. Their 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues” and the “Dixie(land) Jass [sic] Band One Step” on the Victor Records label was a huge success. Many older people thought the music was just noise. (Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, claimed that he played jazz records backwards “because they sound better that way”.) Young people loved the new music; they bought more than one million copies of the first jazz recording, more than any record had sold before. (Just to put this is context: The first commercial record player was released in 1895.)
- Clarence Birdseye developed freezing as a method of preserving food, triggering decades of foodie arguments about flavor and nutrition.*
- Sigmund Freud published Introduction to Psychoanalysis, triggering decades of other types of debate.**
- Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, also triggering debates, alas!
*As far as I’m concerned, the only thing frozen peas should be used for is an ice pack.
**You can argue that frozen food and/or Freudian analysis is good. You can argue that they are bad. But you can’t deny that they changed the way many of us live.