Lucy Fox Robins Lang was born in Kiev, Russia, the daughter of Moshe Fox and Surtze Broche. Her father, a silversmith, immigrated to the United States to avoid military service in Russia but returned to bring his wife and children to America. Lucy Fox was nine years old when she arrived in New York City. She and her father soon moved to Chicago, where he worked in a picture frame factory.
She attended night school.
During her childhood, Lang worked in a cigar factory as tobacco stripper. Although influenced by Jane Addams, Fox identified at an early age with the anarchist movement. After she married Robins, she moved to New York City, where they bought a cigar store. During the next twelve years they moved in radical circles in both New York and California. In New York they met the fiery anarchist "Red Emma" Goldman, and Lucy formed a lifelong friendship with her.
In San Francisco the Robinses opened a restaurant, the St. Helena Vegetarian Cafe, which became a gathering place for West Coast radicals and labor activists.
About 1917, Robins began to organize support among workers and radicals for the Tom Mooney Defense Committee. This work brought her under the personal and political influence of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). She was initially hostile to Gompers, accepting the judgment of many radicals who saw him as a class collaborationist, but soon began to consider Gompers a true friend of labor. Robins' shift from radical left-wing politics to the pragmatism of the AFL was so abrupt that it calls for some speculation as to her motives. One possible explanation is that her radicalism was youthful romanticism; her conversion to trade unionism, the manifestation of greater maturity. Another explanation is that Robins simply passed from her husband's influence to the protective paternalism of Gompers. Both explanations fail to take into account Robins' sincere commitment to furthering the cause of the American worker.
This commitment can be traced to her own work experience as well as to her exposure to political thinkers. She recognized Gompers' political power as a force for the benefit of American labor. She was also attracted to his warm, if crusty, personality. Gompers, in turn, felt that Robins bridged the distance between the radical and conservative poles of the working population.
In 1919, Robins worked to secure amnesty for political prisoners, including conscientious objectors and the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. She greeted Debs upon his release from prison in 1921 and accompanied him to Washington, D. C.
In 1922, Robins organized a relief campaign among the United Mine Workers and the United Hebrew Trades to help striking miners. In subsequent years she was active in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and investigated labor conditions for the AFL in Europe and the southern United States. Her involvement with the AFL grew. Gompers repeatedly proposed marriage to Robins following the death of his wife, she declined the offer and their relationship remained a platonic one. She remained active in labor causes until her death at Los Angeles.
Lucy Fox Robins Lang made great contribution to the labor movement and to the anarchist movement as an assistant to major figures like Emma Goldman and Samuel Gompers. She was one of the founders of a fundraising group to set a cooperative in Palestine for European refugees. She also wrote "War Shadows" in 1922 about the successful amnesty campaign.
Quotes from others about the person
Gompers said in his autobiography: "Of the services given, none was more remarkable than that of Lucy Robins, who gave up everything to establish a better understanding between radicals and the labor movement. "
Debs said of "dear comrade Lucy": "Never was a soul more consecrated to a task than she to the liberation of her imprisoned comrades. She is so thoroughly in earnest and so tirelessly active that she feels the imprisonment as if it seared her body as it does her sympathetic spirit. "
In 1901 Lucy met Bob Robins, a bookkeeper-salesman with strong anarchist sympathies. They were married in 1905, but true to their radical principles, they considered the union a "trial marriage. " According to the terms of their marriage contract, they separated after five years of living together. Their arrangement attracted the attention of the press, which denounced it as a "veil to cover the shame of free love. " The Robinses soon reunited, though, and moved to the socialist utopian settlement of Home Colony on Puget Sound, in Washington. When they tired of this experiment in communal living, they went to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Montgomery, Alabama, and finally back to San Francisco. Some of this traveling was done in their innovative motor home, "The Adventurer. " They were divorced about 1920.
In 1932 she married Harry Lang, a longtime friend and staff writer for the Jewish Daily Forward.
