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Lizzie Swank Holmes
Lizzie Swank Holmes was an American labor organizer. She wrote for many anarchist and socialistic papers, journals and periodicals. Holmes was essential in paving the way for women’s involvement in the economic and political domain.

Early Life
Lizzie Swank Holmes was born Elizabeth Mary Hunt on December 21, 1850 in Linn County, Iowa. Holmes’s great great great great grandfather Samuel Church was born in England in 1630 and immigrated to Hadley, Massachusetts before 1665. Her great-grandmother, Hannah Church, moved to Erie County, Ohio sometime between 1806 and 1817. Jonathan Hunt married Hannah Matilda Jackson on March 6, 1850, and later that year Holmes was born. A younger sister, Lillian, and a brother were both born in Ohio. Her parents separated in the 1860’s. Holmes was a schoolteacher by the age of 15. She was a talented piano player and singer and gave music lessons for extra income.

On April 29, 1867 Holmes married Hiram Swank, a disabled Civil War veteran. They had a son, Raphael on July 2, 1886 and a daughter Gladys in 1873. Their marriage failed between 1875-1878. It was assumed that Hiram moved to Colorado with Raphael.

Career as an Activist
Holmes believed it was the Great Railroad Strikes of 1877 that sparked her interest in the “subject of economics,” though she admitted that at the time she, “had no idea of solutions to such problems.”

Her mother was living in Chicago and in 1878, Holmes moved to Chicago with her daughter and sister. Holmes and her sister took jobs in a garment factory in 1880. Here she realized, “The present systems create beggars, paupers, tramps, millionaires and money kings, poverty, slavery, disease, luxury, dissipation and waste.” The factory where Holmes and her sister worked used a procedure that prevented the women from being paid for their finished work until the garments came back from the buttonhole factory, leaving the workers penniless for weeks at a time. Holmes wrote a petition threatening to strike if the workers continued to be mistreated. With the help of her sister, she got 150 signatures from the almost 160 workers. The agreement was that if just one of the women got fired, they would all walk out, causing production to come to a halt and forcing management to comply with their demands. In the end, Holmes was fired, the supervisor called all the women “silly hussies,” and referred specifically to her as “the instigator.”

Holmes denounced all forms of hierarchy, including capitalism, organized religion, government, racism, and social stratification. She attended a meeting for the struggling Working Women’s Union in 1880 and met Elizabeth Rogers and future life long friend, Lucy Parsons. Within a year, Holmes is made the secretary of the WWU and joins the Socialist Labor Party. In the SLP she meets Lucy Parsons’s husband, Albert, and William Holmes, her future husband. They encourage her to join the International Working People’s Association, which at the time was one of the few labor organizations that “called for the participation of both men and women.”  She was also the statistician for the women’s section of the Knights of Labor, Local Assembly #1789, where she investigated working conditions in the factories and communicated with the working women in hopes they would join the union.

Around this time, Holmes received a package of Raphael and Hiram’s things and a message that they had both passed away.

On October 4, 1884 the IWPA issued the first edition of The Alarm: A Socialist Weekly. The editor was Albert Parsons and Holmes was assistant editor, unofficially, until 1885 when the articles began to include signatures and authors. At that point Holmes wrote under her legal name, Mrs. Lizzie M. Swank, and her pseudonym, Miss May Huntley. Many of her articles bore the alias, which was a play on her middle name, as Mary had morphed to May, and her maiden name. The Alarm declared that, “without a single exception every English newspaper in Chicago is published by capitalist in the interest of their profit-mongering, labor-robbing, slave driving schemes,” and the publisher’s purpose was to “issue this paper on behalf of the wage slaves of this country.” In the first year 2000 issues of The Alarm were distributed. The following year 3000 copies were dispensed and Holmes stopped using her pseudonym in The Alarm. Aside from being the assistant editor and on the Board of Directors for The Alarm, Holmes also averaged three articles per week. Her articles were pointed and radical, directly attacking the injustices of the current system. In her article, “Notice to Tramps,” she reveals the impossible position the homeless and vagrants found themselves in. “You mustn’t ride, you have no money, and those tracks and cars you helped to build are not for such as you. You must not ask for anything to eat or a place to sleep. You must not lay down and die…” She ended her article with “Have you a match about you?” This referenced her friend, Lucy Parson’s article, “To Tramps” where Parsons encouraged the multitudes of working class people who were starving to death, to instead kill themselves with dynamite in a manner that would kill a capitalist as well.

Holmes wrote for many publications, including Freedom, Free Society, Solidarity, Lucifer the Lightbearer, Labor Enquirer, Wilshire’s Magazine, Our New Humanity, and co-edited The Labor Exchange. Needless to say, she covered a considerable number of topics, ranging from Insane Asylum Abuses to her discontent with the electoral system. She often wrote that if humans could end the inequalities between the sexes, races and the classes that the rest of society’s problems would soon solve themselves.

November 25, 1885 William Holmes married Lizzie Swank, making her Lizzie Swank Holmes, though she continued, occasionally, to write as Swank. Her daughter Gladys was now 12 years old and one of the few witnesses to their small ceremony. The new family moved to Geneva, about 35 miles outside of Chicago.

During the months leading up to the Haymarket Tragedy, The Alarm and corresponding organizations focused on the Eight-Hour Day. Terrance Powderly, the head of the Knights of Labor, did not support the Eight-Hour movement because he considered it a frenzied appeal that diverted focus from other, more important ideals. The General Executive Board voted against the May Day Strike, but the movement had accumulated momentum and was not going to be stopped. On May 1, 1886 over 80,000 workers marched in a nationwide exhibition. More than 300,000 workers from 13,000 companies participated in the strike, 40,000 of which were in Chicago with the Parsons and the Holmes among the leaders of their parade.

A few days later, Holmes led an all female march of 400 seamstresses and garment workers, all petitioning for the Eight-Hour Day. They sang as they marched and went in and out of shops, trying to persuade women still remaining in oppressive jobs, to join the march. The Chicago Tribune describes the event, labeling the women as, “Shouting Amazons.”

Haymarket Tragedy
On May 4, 1886 Holmes traveled with Albert and Lucy Parsons and their children to the Arbeiter-Zeitung building for an American Group meeting. At the end of the meeting Albert Parsons and Samuel Fielden left to speak at an extemporaneous rally to deliberate the McCormick Murders. Lucy Parsons, the children and Lizzie Holmes followed, but they, with Albert, left before the last speaker was finished due to the deteriorating weather. As they congregated in Zepf’s Saloon, they heard an explosion and gunfire. Holmes and the Parsons left out the back door and Albert left their company at the corner of Desplaines and Kinzie Street.

Later, in The Alarm, Holmes indicated her high level of involvement in Albert Parsons’s initial escape. Anticipating that he would be suspected of any crimes that had been committed, Holmes persuaded Parsons to go to her home in Genveva and stay with her husband until things calmed. Holmes accompanied him to the train station, they assumed he would be recognized traveling with his multiracial wife, and purchased a train ticket for him so he would not be seen by anyone, then returned to Lucy Parsons’s side.

When the women arrived at the office of The Alarm to start work on an emergency issue, they were roughly arrested. Parsons was released after a short time in hopes that she would lead the police to her husband. Holmes was kept in jail for three days. The truth that Holmes, “with one or two others, knew more of his [Albert’s] whereabouts and his motives than anyone else,” would not be revealed until an 1888 issue of The Alarm.

After her home was searched, with out a warrant, and she was arrested again an again, Holmes hired Kate Kane as her attorney. Though Ashbaugh says the main goal of the case was not to prove that any of the men on trial threw the bomb but to prove “their speeches and writings in the several years prior to the bombing inspired some unknown person to throw the bomb, and that they were therefore liable for conspiracy,” Holmes and Lucy Parsons were not indicted. The prosecutors assumed, because of the death penalty, it would be hard to obtain the desired guilty verdict when it included the women.

During her testimony in the Haymarket Trial, Holmes remained calm and collected, answering twisted questions on violence and anarchy with confidence. The Trial had lasted two months, Albert Parsons had turned himself in and on August 20, 1886, the first guilty verdict was announced. On September 14, 1887, after a lengthy appeals trial, the Supreme Court sentenced the seven men to death. The morning of November 11, 1887, Holmes escorted Lucy Parsons and her children to the jail to see Albert one last time before the execution. After being redirected from officer to officer outside the jailhouse amid the cold Chicago morning, they were strip searched and left naked in separate cells. They called out for answers and eventually just for water but were ignored. At three o’clock in the afternoon, they were told the executions were over and released.

After Haymarket
After the Haymarket Tragedy, there was a city-wide suppression of anarchism and unions. Holmes did not weaken. She and Elizabeth Morgan started the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union and the Illinois Woman’s Alliance in 1888. Together, these women persuaded Samuel Gompers to start the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union #2703.

The Alarm’s popularity had grown immensely over the course of the past two years. Holmes continued as the assistant editor and published quotes from the Haymarket martyrs. Along with her mother and sister, she also wrote for Lucifer, the Lightbearer. Providing a mental escape from the labor movement, this publication focused on anarchism, atheism, and free speech but is specifically recognized for its radical position on sexuality, marriage and feminism.

Holmes’s ebbing health forced her and her husband to move to Colorado, where they resided for a time in La Veta near their commorade Samuel Fielden. While here, both Lizzie and William Holmes helped to organize the Chicago Anarchist Conference of 1893. They are selected by the International Revolutionary Congress of the Working People to write a summation of the “state of the American movement,” which was presented to the organizing committee of Paris by Emma Goldman in 1900. In April 1898, the Holmes arrange for Emma Goldman to lecture in Denver.

Death
While still fighting for several causes, in 1905 the Holmes move to New Mexico. At the age of 76, Lizzie Swank Holmes dies on August 8, 1926 in Santa Fe.

Holmes believed in revolution, but later in life settled for reform. Her idea of reform, however, was “more than a well-wisher of humanity.” In the same breath she described revolutionaries as the ones “realizing the danger yet patiently, bravely awaiting it.”

Related Reading

 * 1) Anarchist Women 1870-1920 Marsh, Margaret S.; Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1981


 * 1) A Documentary History of the American Years Volume 2 1902-1909 Goldman, Emma; University of California Press 2003


 * 1) Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America Green, James 2006


 * 1) Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists Nelson, Bruce C.; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988