Albert R. Parsons - Anarchist as Trade Unionist
By Dave Roediger

Albert Parsons was for a short time a Confederate soldier, a Radical Republican office-holder, a socialist political candidate, and an anarcho-syndicalist activist. More durable than any of these commitments was his membership in trade unions, which stretched over at least a decade and perhaps a quarter century. There would be no more important figure in the Chicago labor movement until the emergence of John Fitzpatrick early in the twentieth century.

Parsons' first trade union contacts go back at least to 1861 when, not yet a teenager, he worked as an indentured apprentice at the Galveston Daily News . He subscribed during that year to the The Printer, the official organ of the National Typographical Union. His printing career interrupted by the war, Parsons returned to the trade as a typesetter and, in 1868, as editor of the (Waco) Spectator. It is unclear whether he held a union card while working in Texas. His autobiography relates that on coming to Chicago in 1872, he "at once became a member of Typographical Union No. 16," suggesting he may have obtained a traveling card in Texas. Rodney Estvan's useful study of Parsons holds that the autobiography may err on this point since Parsons' membership in No. 16 became the object of a vote in April, 1877 after his application had been held in abeyance more than three years. The most likely explanation for the lapse of time is that Parsons was working in a nonunion, indeed fiercely anti-union, shop at the Chicago Times during this period, under a secret "permit" from No. 16.

In any case, Parsons was a No. 16 member when he addressed demonstrators on behalf of the socialist Workingmen's- Party-USA during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The chairman of the union's Executive Committee, S.A. Manion, stood by Parsons during the repression which followed the latter's militant speeches during the strike but Parsons nonetheless lost his Times job and fell victim to an effective blacklisting in Chicago printing shops. Ironically, the Times accused Parsons of being a "rat" (that is, scab) who joined the union only to gain support for campaigns in electoral politics, before firing him for his union activities.

While seldom able to find work as a printer, Parsons remained an active and respected No. 16 member. In January, 1878 he became one of the local's three. delegates to the city central labor union. He was reappointed to that position as late as April, 1883, long after he had become active in the anarchist Social Revolutionary Clubs. Parsons often spoke at union meetings, especially on the eight-hour movement, and appropriately, given his personal situation, he led union efforts to find work for unemployed printers. Especially in 1879, he successfully encouraged No. 16's participation in Socialistic Labor Party demonstrations.

Throughout the last decade of his life, Parsons was also a member of the Knights of Labor. He came into the Knights in 1876 while that organization was still a secret society. Initiated in Indianapolis before there was a Chicago branch, Parsons was probably, as Bruce Nelson has recently emphasized, Chicago's first Knight. He joined Local 400 in Chicago and switched membership in 1885 to Local 1307. By his own account, he served two terms as delegate to Knights' District Assembly 24. He may also have once been Master Workman. Parsons' writings appeared in the Knights' Journal of United Labor. He remained a Knight until his execution.

Parsons' most vital trade union activity came at the citywide level. He led the Council of Trade and Labor Unions of Chicago, a group founded late in 1877 to bring together more than a dozen organized trades. As tensions over socialism, ethnicity and admission of secret societies developed, Parsons helped heal a series of factional fights and at least one split in the city central in 1878 and 1879. He later recalled that he thrice served as president of the city central. Interestingly, Parsons was considered a "compromise" leader acceptable to both socialists and "pure and simple" unionists, to Knights and craft unionists, to Germans and the American-born.

Indeed, it was in large part Parsons" commitment to aggressive trade unionism which ultimately led him away from the electoralism and reform politics of the Socialistic Labor Party and toward anarchism. He first clashed with Chicago SLP leader Tommy Morgan in 1878 over the latter's refusal to countenance secret societies in central labor bodies. Their more bitter quarrel, a year later, focused on reaction to the speech of the great eight-hour working-day advocate, Ira Steward, at the SLP's 1879 July 4 celebrations. Steward spoke, as he almost always did, on the shorter working-day as a key to labor unity and social transformation. Morgan countered with the position that reforms in wages and work would be unimportant until workers began "to organize politically and set their own men to making laws." Parsons, who publicly debated Morgan on the issue, held that the trade unions "sought to organize all workers for the purpose of securing better homes, better food, clothing and surroundings for all, and this would be affected through reduction of the hours of labor."

Stewardism gave Parsons, as it gave many other trade union socialists, a way to link an immediate working-class concern, the eight-hour day, with the ultimate transformation of society. It also led him, and many others, away from the single-minded electoral emphasis which characterized the Socialistic Labor Party. "In 1880," Parsons recalled in his autobiography,

I withdrew from all active participation in the political Labor party, having been convinced that the -number of hours Per day that the wage-workers are compelled to work ... amounted to their practical disenfranchisement as voters.

In one of his last bursts of political activity, Parsons acted as a labor lobbyist in Washington, D.C., joining other trade unionists appointed by the National Eight-Hour Association to press unsuccessfully for enforcement of the eight-hour law applying to federal government workers.

Parsons' further disagreements with the Socialistic Labor Party leadership hinged on his belief in the necessity for armed defense of strikes and labor organizations. Parts of Parsons' commitment to self-defense likely stemmed from his having witnessed the use of terror against black Radical Republicans in Texas. He further witnessed the use of terror against the labor movement during the bloody police attacks which left eighteen dead during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 in Chicago. Given these experiences, it is hardly surprising that Parsons wished to raise the "arming question" among trade unionists, and that he apparently had joined the Lehr-und-Wehr-Verein, a workers' militia, by 1879.

In short, many of the tenets of "Chicago-idea" anarchism had coalesced for Parsons well before he met Johann Most and joined the International Working People's Association in 1883. His commitments to the labor union as an agency of social transformation, to the armed defense of strikes and to economic rather than political action were established more through experience than through theory. Indeed, in the questions he raised, and in some of the answers he gave, Parsons was not unlike several other radical craft unionists who had undergone similar experiences with strikes and with political action by the early 1880s. Figures such as Samuel Gompers and Peter J. McGuire shared Parsons' emphasis on trade union organization and his growing distrust of legislative solutions to labor problems, though they opposed revolution, anarchism and the IWPA.

In Chicago, a breach was to open between Parsons and the craft unionists. The anarchists and some socialist unionists there responded to the October, 1883 refusal of the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly to recognize delegates from the Cigarmakers' Progressive Union No. 15 by forming their own citywide labor body, the Central Labor Union. Parsons quickly became a leader of the CLU, which rivaled the Knights of Labor and the Trades and Labor Assembly in influence, and possibly in membership, by April, 1886. But the breach was for a long while far from a total one. Parsons apparently quit the Trades and Labor Assembly only in April, 1884 and left the Chicago Typographical Union almost certainly by means of a withdrawal card-only weeks before Haymarket. He not only practiced dual unionism in the sense that he supported a labor federation separate from the existing labor movement, but he was also a dual (and, counting the Knights, triple) unionist in terms of simultaneous organizational affiliations.

Though a convinced anarchist, Parsons had good reasons to cut old ties slowly. The 1879 split in the Trades and Labor Assembly had been short, partly due to Parsons' peacemaking intervention, and there was reason to think that the division which began in 1883 might be similarly brief. Parsons would also have seen continued affiliation with the Knights and even with craft unions as providing a forum for spreading anarchist ideas. He spoke often under Knights of Labor auspices. As an American-born and English-speaking radical, Parsons would have been increasingly cut off from English-speaking workers had he only had CLU connections. While The Alarm, the English-language paper Parsons edited, claimed a circulation of 2500, English, Irish and American born membership in the CLU was small, especially in comparison to such membership in the Trades and Labor Assembly and the Knights of Labor.

But Parsons likely saw the non-CLU unions, especially the Knights, as more than just audiences of potential recruits. Like later Chicago syndicalists, especially William Z. Foster, Parsons both railed at the practices of existing nonrevolutionary unions and predicted that events and social forces would make such unions revolutionary. Amidst diatribes, especially directed against the Trades and Labor Assembly, Parsons' Alarm still held that "every labor union is a school of true civilization and a wedge driven into the body of the present infamous system of society." The IWPA, Parsons added in The Alarm,

recognizes in the Trades Union the embryonic group of the future "free society. Every trade union is, nolens volens an autonomous commune in process of incubation.... No, friends, it is not the unions but the methods which some of them employ with which the International finds fault.

The passages on unions in the IWPA's 1883 Pittsburgh Manifesto allowed that it might be at some point necessary to "attack and seek to destroy all those [unions] who stand on reactionary principles." The Alarm sometimes verged on applying this stricture to the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, which was bitterly accused, with some justice, of excluding radicals from labor celebrations, of class collaboration, especially in the support of capitalist politicians, and of failing to build the local movement for the May 1, 1886 eight-hour strike. The Alarm also began an interesting critique of craft unionism generally. It emphasized that organizing according to craft had achieved only limited success. By one uncharitable Alarm estimate, only one Chicago trade in twenty-five had actually been thoroughly organized through the craft union strategy. Moreover, craft union prospects would worsen, according to The Alarm, as employers found ways to dispense with skilled workers. Ironically enough, The Alarm considered craft unionism to be unstable, arguing that the "principles and practices of the socialistic labor movement furnish the only safe and reliable foundation for keeping working people within trades' unions." Such a formulation is of interest not only for its sectarianism but also for its suggestion that socialism served trade unionism rather than vice versa. But especially in relations with the Knights of Labor, the Chicago IWPA never did require open espousal of socialism as a criteria for its supporting a labor organization.

The Knights, whose egalitarianism and tendencies towards industrial unionism exempt them from many criticisms which The Alarm made of conservative craft unions, did draw fire for their failure to give support as a national organization to the May 1, 1886 strikes and for their later refusal to defend the Haymarket prisoners. Nonetheless, Parsons held an open, nonsectarian and even forgiving attitude toward the Knights, one much like later Chicago syndicalists, including Lucy Parsons, would hold toward the AFL. Lucy Parsons herself was still organizing sewing women into the Knights, not into anarchist unions, as late as May 3, 1886. The Alarm even maintained that the Knights' constitution made certain that the organization would become a socialist one. Parsons reiterated the latter position from jail, in a public letter written in August, 1886:

The foundation principle of socialism or anarchy is the same as the Knights of Labor, viz., "the abolition of the wages system" and the substitution in its stead of an industrial system of universal cooperation.

Two months later, in an autobiography written for the local Knights of Labor newspaper, Parsons suggested that the Knights, rather than the IWPA, would be at the center of revolutionary change in the U.S.:

The Knights of Labor unconsciously stand upon a state socialist programme. They will never be able to seize the state by the ballot, but when they do seize it (and seize it they must), they will abolish it.

Parsons not only retained a commitment to trade unionism, of both anarchist and non-anarchist kinds, but he remained one of the best disciples of Ira Steward. Three years after Steward's death and two months before Haymarket, Parsons wrote that if the eight-hour day were

won then the employing class will have to pay us as much for eight hours' work as they do now for ten. Employers will put labor-saving machinery to work instead of the high-priced laborers. The laborers will then for the same reason that they reduced the hours to eight, have to reduce them to six hours per day. A voluntary reduction of the work hours is a peaceful solution to the labor problem.... Wages in this way will increase until they represent the earnings, instead of, as now, the necessities, of the wage-laborer. This would result in a system of universal cooperation and distribution.

Here is Stewardism undiluted, a defense of the same concepts Parsons had embraced in 1879. Here also is the main reason that Parsons was slow to support the May 1, 1886 campaign. He certainly did not oppose a shorter working day, the quest for which he characterized as "a class movement against domination, therefore historical, and evolutionary and necessary." Nor is it likely that Parsons enthusiastically embraced the IWPA's briefly held position-one he sometimes articulated in editorials-that eight hours was a "compromise ... a virtual concession that the wage system is just. " For Parsons the crux of the matter was that the eight-hour call was, without tremendous-and, he argued, armed agitation, "doomed by the very nature of things to defeat. " This was so because, according to Parsons, eight hours was essentially a revolutionary demand capable of uniting all workers and leading to further sweeping transformations.

As George Schilling later recalled, Parsons had "been a student of the philosophy of Ira Stewart [Steward] for years, and was one of a few men who understood the full impact of reduced hours. " Parsons, seeing the eight-hour demand as anything but the "soothing syrup" that, according to Schilling, some other IWPA leaders initially considered it, could not believe that capital would fail to use its full arsenal against the May I movement. He thus feared that "defenseless men, women and children [would] finally succumb to the power of the discharge, black-list and lockout ... the militiaman's bayonet and the policeman's club. " At first this fear led to a hesitation to plunge into support for the May I strikes. Later it led to an emphasis on armed defense of the strikes.

As Bruce Nelson's recent and excellent study of the IWPA shows, many anarchists besides Parsons had substantial records of labor leadership in pre-CLU craft unions, in the CLU and even in the Knights. The charge that conservative unionists and prosecutors made against Parsons and his associates-that they used trade unions for socialist purposes could have made little sense to the IWPA unionists who had come to see their unionism and their socialism as one. What is certain is that Parsons and others used trade union principles and trade union experiences to forge their view of the world and of the possibility of changing it.