(Excerpt from Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Bas...)
Excerpt from Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis as Defined by Some of Its Apostles And now. I speak as one who knows and has the right to speak N O nobler, purer, truer, more unselfish man ever lived, than Albert R. Parsons, and when he and his comrades were sacrificed on the altar of class hatred, the people of the nineteenth century committed the hideous crime of strangling their best friends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Albert Richard Parsons was born on June 24, 1848 in Montgomery, Montgomery County, Alabama, United States. He was one of the ten children of Samuel and Elizabeth (Tompkins) Parsons. His parents, both of whom were born and reared in the North, were of colonial ancestry. The mother died when the boy was two years old, and three years later the father. An elder brother, William Henry Parsons, took Albert to his home in Tyler, Texas.
After some schooling, Albert Richard Parsons became a "printer's devil" in the composing room of the Galveston Daily News. At the outbreak of the Civil War, though small of size and but thirteen years old, Albert Richard Parsons joined a local military company, later serving in the cavalry brigade commanded by his brother. After the war, Parsons studied for six months at Waco (now Baylor) University, and then returned to the printing trade.
In 1868 Albert Richard Parsons started a weekly newspaper, the Waco Spectator, which soon expired, and in the following year he became a traveling correspondent for the Houston Daily Telegraph. He was for several years in the service of the internal revenue bureau and at one time was the reading secretary of the state Senate. In the fall of 1873 Albert Parsons settled in Chicago. Here he joined the Typographical Union and was soon active in labor and radical circles. He became a Socialist, and in the spring of 1881 was the candidate of a Socialist faction for mayor. Already, however, he had come to reject political action, and by 1883 he considered himself an anarchist.
On October 1, 1884, the International Working People's Association founded, in Chicago, a weekly newspaper, The Alarm, and Parsons was chosen as editor. While occupying this post he made many speaking tours and became widely known as an exponent of extreme radicalism. The movement for the eight-hour day, in which he took a leading part, came to a dramatic climax in front of the McCormick harvester works on May 3, 1886, when police fired into a crowd of strikers. Parsons, who was absent from the city, returned in time to speak at a protest meeting in front of the Haymarket on the following evening. It was a peaceable gathering, the tone of the speakers, according to Mayor Carter Henry Harrison, who was present, was temperate, and Parsons, with hundreds of others, had left the place when a force of 200 policemen appeared and ordered the remainder of the crowd to disperse. Some one threw a bomb, which exploded, killing or mortally wounding seven of the police and injuring about fifty others. A round-up of radical agitators followed. Though the thrower of the bomb was never identified, eight persons were brought to trial (June 15), charged with being accessories to the murder of one of the policemen. Parsons, who had been indicted but not apprehended, voluntarily joined his seven comrades as the case was called.
On August 20, a verdict of guilty was rendered, and Parsons, with six others, was sentenced to death. On September 14, 1887, the state supreme court affirmed the verdict, and on November 2, the federal Supreme Court denied an application for a writ of error. From the beginning the case had aroused an excited interest throughout the country. The complicity of the defendants in the bomb-throwing was denied, the methods employed in the trial were hotly denounced, and efforts were made by citizens in all walks of life to save the prisoners from death.
On June 26, 1893, Governor John P. Altgeld made public a severely condemnatory review of the trial and at the same time pardoned the three surviving prisoners.
(Excerpt from Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Bas...)
Albert Richard Parsons and his wife joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1876.
Albert Richard Parsons' social philosophy was unformulated. Usually, he employed the terms socialism and anarchism interchangeably. His expressed views on the use of violence were contradictory, and he nursed the fantastic notion that the invention of dynamite had rendered armies and police bodies powerless.
Albert Richard Parsons and his wife were founder members of the International Working Men's Association (the First International), a labor organization that supported racial and sexual equality.
Albert Richard Parsons was brave, upright, truthful, and passionately devoted to the cause of freedom and justice. He was a friendly man, greatly beloved by his intimates.
On June 10, 1871, in Austin, Albert Richard Parsons married Lucy Eldine Gonzalez.
