The review can be found @ http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060313crbo_books
Has anyone read the book?
"To add to the confusion over the war's legacy, Albert Parsons had fought on the side of the Confederacy. He was only thirteen at the time and had grown up in Texas. When the war was over, his politics shifted. In Waco, after learning to set type, he started a weekly paper that advocated respect for the civil rights of African-Americans, and he gave speeches encouraging them to vote. In 1869, he met a young woman named Lucy, who claimed to be the daughter of a Creek and a Mexican but was probably a former slave. In 1872, they married, or said they did. Texas outlawed interracial unions, and their marriage certificate has never been found.
""Anarchists don't marry," sneers a cynical diplomat in Joseph Conrad's novel "The Secret Agent." "They can't. It would be apostasy." But real life doesn't always conform to fiction; Parsons called Lucy "that grandest, noblest, bravest of women," and a friend wrote that "probably no married life had ever been less clouded." After the couple moved north, in 1873, Chicago newspapers reported that the "very determined-looking negress" marched beside her husband in parades and attended rallies with their two "anarchist sucklings."
"Parsons continued his political education in the burgeoning capitalist stronghold of Chicago. Green estimates that Chicago's industrial production grew in the eighteen-eighties by a factor of twenty-one. The city excelled in the production of iron, steel, men's clothing, and farm machinery, and its meatpacking industry perfected "the mechanized animal kill," in Green's vivid phrase. Along the way, Chicago also became the nation's leading producer of anarchists.
"Parsons and the other defendants at the Haymarket trial belonged to an organization called the International Working People's Association, or I.W.P.A. They never settled on a name for their ideology, however. Depending on the date and the speaker, it was called anarchism, socialism, communism, or some combination of the terms. "In their bottling of the social panacea, the social-revolutionaries were extremely careless both with label and ingredients," Henry David observed in his groundbreaking 1936 study, "The History of the Haymarket Affair." It was also unclear exactly how the utopia they hoped for was going to arrive. At first Parsons believed in elections. He ran unsuccessfully for alderman, state assemblyman, sheriff, and county clerk, and in 1879 the Socialistic Labor Party even nominated him for President. Then, in the spring of 1880, Chicago election officials stuffed ballot boxes and forged tally sheets in order to unseat a socialist alderman. The fraud failed, but Parsons and others lost faith in representative democracy. In 1881, a congress of revolutionaries condemned voting as "an invention of the bourgeoisie to fool the workers."" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060424/21f038b6/attachment.htm>