Leon Czolgosz slipped into presentable clothes and made his way along the familiar streets between his home and his old employer, the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company, harboring a bitter sense of defeat. The 1893 strike had left him idle for six months, vainly hoping that the mill’s managers would give in to the workers’ demands. Yet Cleveland Rolling had yet to show any sign of surrendering. It was time to swallow his pride and accept a meager paycheck rather than earn nothing at all.
By rights Czolgosz should have made it no further than the front gate. His name, like that of all the strikers, had been added to a blacklist of men the mill refused to rehire, retribution for walking out in the first place. The mill, however, had recently let Czolgosz’s old boss go. At a time when standards of identification had not yet evolved—no picture ID, no Social Security numbers—all Czolgosz had to do was supply a new name. He introduced himself to his prospective new managers as Fred C. Nieman. The foreman likely guessed that he was now face-to-face with a striker, yet the company needed bodies. Anyone willing to pitch in would be welcome. Czolgosz was hired and thereby adopted a new identity that he would periodically turn to for the rest of his life.
Though Czolgosz resented the humiliating wages, he masked it carefully while on the job. His supervisor quickly noted his diligence and soon trusted him with additional responsibilities. He became a wire winder, which required considerable skill, and rose to the post of assistant superintendent of some of the machines. While most men were fined for various lapses at work, Czolgosz received only a handful of such reprimands for minor transgressions.
Czolgosz may have changed his name, but he retained his rather quirky personality. He continued to lead a solitary, almost sullen existence. During lunch, he would often find a place apart, remove a sandwich from his pail, and quietly observe the conversations and friendly banter of the other men as he munched his food. After work, when colleagues made plans to meet up for a beer or a game of cards, he slipped out of the factory gates alone, heading to his usual place in the saloon at the corner of Third and Tod or straight home to read.
Why Czolgosz led such an antisocial lifestyle is not easily explained by anything in his upbringing. His siblings didn’t seem to share the trait. And although he had lost his mother at a tender age, so had multitudes of American children of the era without withdrawing into themselves. Normal social interaction simply seemed beyond his abilities. When he did find himself with a group of people, he was reserved and behaved awkwardly, as if he lacked self-confidence and attempted to protect his ego and emotions by shutting himself off from anyone who might discover his weaknesses.
Nevertheless, Czolgosz increasingly found himself drawn to men such as Zwolinski, the social radical who first introduced him to the political ideology of the underclass. He began to attend meetings around Cleveland organized by people who dared to utter their discontent with authority. Typically held in bars or small halls, the gatherings were poorly organized and primarily allowed angry workers to let off steam with bitter attacks on local industrialists, William Chisholm no doubt heading the list.
Czolgosz began to find company among these men. One was a short, plump cigar salesman with an iron-gray mustache named Walter Nowak. The two became friendly and began attending meetings together, and in a remarkable social stretch for Czolgosz, even went to the theater on occasion.1 Another new friend, Frank Dalzer, was also a foreman at the plant and was very impressed by how frequently Czolgosz attended socialist and anarchist meetings.2 Yet even among these like-minded comrades, Czolgosz was hopelessly out of step. He would alternately sit quietly in the back of the room while a speaker riled a whooping audience with attacks on capitalism and government, or awkwardly spew his own views in free-flowing rambles.
One victim of Czolgosz’s outbursts was the Catholic church. The Reverend Benedict Rosinski, pastor of St. Stanislaus Church in Cleveland, met with Czolgosz around 1897 when he asked him for a contribution for the parish. “He surprised me by refusing to give it,” the reverend later said. “I asked him why he would not contribute, and he said he was an Anarchist. I always supposed that he was a Catholic and that was why I had approached him on the subject of contributions. He told me he had no religion and that he did [not] wish to help churches. He said anarchy was his religion. I tried to argue with him and drive the anarchistic principles out of his head, but it was to no purpose. I believe that he was mentally unbalanced.”3
The fact is that by the final decade of the century, anybody who seemed to support anarchy was likely to be considered “mentally unbalanced.” Americans had seen plenty of those who subscribed to the theory and recoiled at even the mention of their names.
Two of these towered over the landscape of American social revolution. Though they never met each other, Albert Parsons and Emma Goldman had through their appetite for self-sacrifice and willingness to flirt with the law made anarchy a household word. Parsons would transform it from the intellectual parlor game of the overeducated and underemployed into one of the most feared and hated movements in the nation. Inspired by his example, a teenage Goldman eagerly took up Parson’s torch when he was ultimately sent to the gallows for his beliefs. The so-called Red Emma, the high priestess of anarchism, was a force of nature who discovered she could inspire by words as easily as others did by deeds. Together Parsons and Goldman formed a lineage that was passed on to Czolgosz almost as surely as if he had been their biological son. It is impossible to comprehend Czolgosz without understanding the stories of Parsons and Goldman and the worlds they hoped to create.
Little about Parsons suggested social revolution. In contrast to the shaggy-haired, amply proportioned Germans that typically populated the movement, Parsons was a Texan, and a bit of a dandy at that. His build was that of a long-distance runner. He kept his hair and mustache finely clipped and black with regular coloring, and with his keen, dark eyes had the look of a terrier about him. He would not be caught wearing the rumpled-suit uniform of a socialist, always making sure his attire was fashionable and crisply pressed. Perhaps most surprising was his family background. Parsons could not have come from more respectable and stable stock. His forefathers had been among North America’s earliest settlers.4 Later generations had fought in the Revolutionary War, and one relative on his mother’s side had served General George Washington as a bodyguard.
Raised by a much older brother from age five in the Texas frontier after his parents died, Parsons seemed destined to become a respected southern gentleman. At age thirteen he enlisted with the local volunteers, the Lone Star Grays, and headed off to fight the Yankees. He later attended Waco University, now Baylor, and worked in Waco at a printing shop where he won the respect of the city’s elders.
Yet Parsons was not the man his friends and neighbors in Waco thought they knew. Deep within him burned a hatred for the ideals he had risked his life for fighting the Civil War—white supremacy and slavery. He had joined the military, he later would say, for the adventure of it, not the principles. Yet when he returned home, he could not reconcile the war’s aims with the loving fondness he felt for his “old Aunt Esther,” a former slave who had helped raise him with “great kindness and a mother’s love.” It was a shame that tormented him. At age nineteen, employing his printing skills and his brief university education, Parsons founded a newspaper called The Spectator to champion the rights of former slaves and began traveling around the state encouraging them to vote.5
It was an unpopular choice of occupations—one that ruined friendships and turned the upper crust of Waco against him. In various attacks he was beaten, shot in the leg, kicked down a flight of stairs, and threatened with lynching. He even made the local newspaper, which reported that Parsons was a “violent agitator,” ever ready to stir up the “worst class of Negros.”6 Confirmation that Parsons had really lost his head, townspeople felt, came when word got out that he had married a mysterious woman named Lucy, who claimed to be the daughter of a Mexican and an Indian. Yet her dark complexion and kinky hair led the townspeople to whisper that she was actually black.7 Equally enigmatic were details about her early life. She offered several different family names for herself as well as conflicting places of birth.
Whatever Lucy’s origin, there was no place left for Parsons in Texas as long as he was married to her and continued to spread his unorthodox views about race and politics. “He was practically a political exile,” his brother once noted. “He had either to fight every day, or leave.”8 Leave he did, for Chicago, where he hoped his marriage, and his political views, would be more readily accepted.
Parsons and Lucy arrived in Chicago in the winter of 1873, one of the low points in the city’s history, as the country suffered the first in a string of financial panics that would ravage the economy with increasing and maddening regularity through the end of the century. Triggered by the collapse of a pillar of American finance, Jay Cooke and Company, the financial system melted down, taking the rest of the economy with it.
Life was particularly brutal in Chicago. For two years, immigrants had been flocking by the trainload for jobs rebuilding the city after the great fire of 1871—Czechs, Poles, Scandinavians, and especially Germans. There were enough to support one hundred saloons and beer gardens, including tradespeople from Bavaria, German Jews, and more than a few political exiles.9
With banks no longer able to finance the reconstruction, building companies locked up their hammers, saws, and shovels and laid off their workers. In a matter of weeks, Chicago was awash in desperate foreign-born men who felt more than a little resentful about the circumstances that had led them to where they were. “The lumberyards, vacant buildings, sheds, railroad depots and all public places were thronged with idlers,” a journalist later wrote, adding that it was getting dangerous to go out after dark.10
The disparity Parsons saw all around him echoed the pain of the former slaves he had tried to help in Texas. Just as blacks had suffered under the stinging whip of the cotton farmer, workers in Chicago were enslaved by robber barons who demanded obscenely long hours for obscenely small pay. Parsons began reading socialist materials, including The Communist Manifesto. He joined the Typographical Union Number 16 and the Social Democratic Party. And he discovered that, combining humor, statistics, and a gift for mimicking his opponents, he could deliver a moving speech. By May 1876, Parsons and his cohorts had become in the words of the Chicago Tribune “a parcel of blatant communist demagogues.”11 There was, however, much more to Parsons than demagogy, as the city would soon find out.
In the summer of 1877 it was known simply as the Great Railroad Strike. A decision by the Pennsylvania Railroad in May to cut wages by 10 percent, a step quickly mimicked by other railroads, lit the fuse. For several weeks, railroad workers in seventeen states walked off their jobs in protest, by some measures the largest labor uprising of the nineteenth century to that point.12 By the strike’s end, tens of thousands of militia and federal troops had been called upon, more than one hundred people had been killed, and millions would fear for their safety.
Pittsburgh was the scene of the bloodiest and most destructive clashes. On the warm afternoon of July 19, 1877, some six hundred militia troops were called in from Philadelphia, after the Pittsburgh troops sided with the strikers, and forcibly tried to remove five thousand to seven thousand protesters, “greasy and ragged outlaws from the coal regions,” including a few women “with the faces of demons,” who had blocked traffic at the rail yard. When the Philadelphians bayoneted and shot into the ranks of demonstrators, Pittsburgh melted into a postapocalyptic scene of lawlessness and violence. Mobs roamed the streets, breaking into gun shops and threatening the armory in a quest to find weapons that could pry the militiamen out of the sturdy brick railroad buildings in which they had sought refuge. In a battle that lasted until the wee hours of the morning, the mob fired rifles and pistols at anything that moved, rolled a flaming railroad car into one building, and tried to blow a hole in another with a stolen cannon.
Similar scenes played out around the nation. In Baltimore, a 180-man state militia fought their way from the Sixth Armory to Camden Station, where they had been ordered to protect the trains. The angry crowd hurled stones and hunks of roadway at them, screaming insults and threats as they did so. Despite orders to hold their fire, the troops, many still teenagers, and terrified ones at that, began to take aim at anything that might have been a rioter, the flash of their rifles eerily pretty in the night air. Innocent shoppers fell writhing on the sidewalks. Shopkeepers slammed their doors shut and ran for the back rooms, while friends dragged wounded comrades behind sturdy wagons, sheltering themselves from flying splinters.13
So fast-moving and violent were the strikes that newspapers began to wonder whether they might be witnessing the first throes of a nationwide revolution. In every town, the work of radical agitators, socialists, or communists (little distinction was made) was suspected. A headline in The New York World asked RIOT OR REVOLUTION? The New-Orleans Times wrote: “War between labor and capital has begun in earnest.… America’s first experience in communism is now the most significant episode of the most extraordinary year in our political history.”
Most shocking was that the government seemed powerless to stop it. The police were hopelessly overwhelmed while the boys and old men who made up local militias had no stomach for this kind of fighting—and many sided with the strikers anyway. President Rutherford Hayes was so worried that he dispatched the ironclad Monitor—a heavily armed, low-profile navy vessel—to watch over the Treasury Building in New York from offshore and saw to it that postal employees were provided with rifles so that they might guard federal buildings in Washington, D.C.14
City by city, state by state, the strike spread through Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, and inevitably to Chicago, home to the greatest railway hub in the American West.
City leaders looked on in horror as the revolt, with the savagery and inevitability of a tsunami, worked its way toward them. Albert Day, a grain merchant, feared that “the mob” would attack “the best residence sections of the city.” In the Eighteenth Ward, financiers, storekeepers, and lawyers were sworn in as special police and received U.S. Army muskets.15 Marshall Field, the department store magnate, joined the makeshift force and lent delivery wagons and horses to the police department. Private militia companies, veteran groups, and citizens’ cavalry companies similarly prepared to defend the city from lawlessness. Mayor Monroe Heath, who had seen that local militias in other cities often sided with the strikers, persuaded President Hayes to dispatch six companies of the Ninth Infantry and two more companies from the Dakota Territory.
Parsons found that his popularity and notoriety increased the closer the strike drew to Chicago. Where before he was happy speaking before twenty or thirty people, now thousands clamored for him. On Saturday afternoon, July 21, 1877, crowds packed into Sack’s Hall to hear him deliver a speech savaging media moguls and railroad tycoons. “If the proprietor has a right to fix the wages and say what labor is worth,” he said, “then we are bound hand and foot—slaves—and we should be perfectly happy: content with a bowl of rice and a rat a week apiece.”16 The delirious crowd answered back: “No! No!”
Two evenings later, some ten to fifteen thousand workers marched in a torchlight procession to Market Square, an open area at the intersection of Market and Madison streets, to hear him again. Hoisting banners and placards in English, German, and French that read WE WANT WORK, NOT CHARITY and LIFE BY LABOR OR DEATH BY FIGHT, they thundered with cheers when Parsons began to speak. Railroad barons Tom Scott, Jay Gould, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were assailed for paying their workers ninety cents a day. He attacked newspaper editors for devoting their pages to titillating crime stories rather than offering real journalism about working conditions. He urged the crowd not to resort to violence, yet not to back down in the face of oppression either. “Enroll your names in the Grand Army of Labor,” Parsons exhorted the roaring crowd, “and if the capitalist engages in warfare against our rights, then we shall resist him with all the means that God has given us.”17
With those words, Parsons forged the first link in a chain of events that would span two decades and fundamentally shape the destiny of Leon Czolgosz.