Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  In the immediate aftermath, the Tribune called for severe action against those aliens responsible for the massacre. The riot in the market would not have occurred, the editor added, but for “the excessive, ill-conceived toleration” the mayor and city officials accorded to radical agitators. A bloody lesson had been learned; the government must deport these “ungrateful hyenas” and exclude any other “foreign savages who might come to America with their dynamite bombs and anarchic purposes.”9

  These staunch opinions failed, however, to reassure the public that law and order would prevail. City residents were seized with panic as fantastic rumors swept through the city. Remembering this moment during her difficult time as a widowed dressmaker in Chicago, Mother Jones wrote that “the city went insane and the newspapers did everything to keep it like a madhouse.” On the morning after the violent encounter, one observer said, he passed many groups of people on the streets engaged in excited conversation about the events of the previous night. Everyone assumed that the speakers at the Haymarket meeting and other “labor agitators” had perpetrated the horrible crime. The air was charged with hatred and cries of “Hang them first and try them afterwards!”10

  It was no time for careful public discussion of what had actually taken place in the Haymarket. In those first days of rage over the bombing, the daily press not only shaped but also reflected a popular certainty about who was to blame for the tragedy. There would be no discussion about why this catastrophe had occurred in Chicago, no talk of what might have been done to prevent it. Filled with horror at accounts of an unspeakable crime, citizens demanded an immediate response from the state, one that would punish not only the “dynamite orators” responsible for the bombing, but also those who sheltered and encouraged them.11

  And yet affixing blame for the tragedy did little to diminish the acute anxiety that swept the nation after the bombing. Indeed, identifying the anarchists as secret conspirators responsible for the lethal deed led to wild exaggerations of the menace these subversives posed to social order. In New York City, for example, the Times reported that workers who “placed responsibility for their poverty upon the bourgeoisie” were armed with rifles and bombs and were prepared with plans to bring down “the ruling class.” Even after these rumors disappeared from the press, the specter of radicalism would remain alive in “the bourgeois imagination.” 12

  The Haymarket bombing confirmed the worst fears of violent class warfare wealthy urban dwellers had harbored ever since the railroad strikes of 1877, when more than 100 workers and civilians were killed by policemen and militiamen. In all the street fighting that broke out episodically for the next nine years, strikers and rioters had been put down by the superior forces of state and local government, whose officers had suffered no fatalities of their own. Then on May 4, when one bomb thrown by a single hand shredded the ranks of the nation’s strongest police force, many citizens reacted hysterically, experiencing a kind of fear they had never known before. The invention of dynamite had changed the calculus of power. Now the weakest, most wretched elements of society had a weapon that could inflict incalculable damage.

  Politically motivated bombings had occurred the year before in London, where Irish-American nationalists attacked British colonial targets, and earlier in other European cities, where anarchists targeted imperial rulers, but nothing like this had ever happened in post–Civil War America. There had been many riots in the nation’s cities, but now, “for the first time in the history of the Republic,” the New York Times observed, law officers had been “killed by citizens attacking the right to private property.” As a result, the Haymarket affair generated emotional shock waves that would reverberate through the country for years to come.13

  As the frenzy of panic that gripped Chicago spread across the nation, it became clear that Americans were reacting to more than a single terrifying attack on the forces of law and order. No event since the Civil War had produced such profound excitement as the Haymarket violence, a perceptive Chicago minister observed. This was not just because this warlike act occurred during peacetime, but because the catastrophe provoked the widespread fear that the bombing was but “the first explosion of a deep discontent on the part of millions of poor people in this and other countries.”14

  THE BOMB BLAST on May 4 triggered an avalanche of events: a police riot in which at least three protesters died, a wave of hysteria in which police and prosecutors violated civil liberties, a sensational show trial of the eight workers accused of the bombing and the intensely publicized hanging of four anarchists accused of committing the crime of the century. Indeed, the whole Haymarket affair, lasting from May 4, 1886, until November 11, 1887, when the anarchists swung from the gallows in the Cook County Jail, produced what one historian called “a drama without end.” 15

  The hangings did not bring down the curtain on this drama, however. The Haymarket affair troubled the consciences of many citizens for years, and for the next two decades and beyond as jurists, trade unionists, journalists and other writers, even elected officials, kept trying the case over and over. The whole violent string of events in Chicago left a bitterly divided memory as its legacy. To most Americans, the dead anarchists were, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “the foulest sort of murderers.” But to other people, especially immigrant workers in America, the Haymarket anarchists were heroic martyrs, brave enough to die for the cause of working-class emancipation. Indeed, the anarchists’ trial and execution became, in the hands of working-class preservationists, a passion play about the prophets who surrendered their lives in order to give birth to a worldwide workers’ movement. No other event in American history has exerted such a hold on the imaginations of people in other lands, especially on the minds of working people in Europe and the Latin world, where the “martyrs of Chicago” were annually recalled in the iconography of May Day.

  In retrospect, the Haymarket affair marked a juncture in our history when many Americans came to fear radicals and reformers as dangerous subversives and to view trade unionists as irresponsible troublemakers. The explosion erupted at a time—the mid-1880s—when popular radical movements were attracting millions of farmers and workers, but after the bombing these movements labored under a cloud of suspicion. For mainstream trade unionists struggling to survive in a hostile environment, Haymarket was a catastrophe they wished to forget. The whole affair gave anti-union employers and government officials an opportunity to brand all labor activists violent subversives and to reject out of hand all ideas about cooperating with their workers. Still, even conventional union leaders like Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor could not forget that the revolutionaries put to death in Chicago were union organizers and leaders of the crusade for the eight-hour day—the cause that mobilized America’s first national labor movement in 1886.16

  The consequences of this tragedy for immigrants were far-reaching. Europeans of all nations had been welcomed to American shores during the post–Civil War years, but after the bombing in Chicago even the much-admired Teutonic peoples of Germany became suspect. At a time when immigrants seemed to be overwhelming cities like Chicago, the Haymarket events provoked a new kind of paranoia among millions of native-born citizens, who grew much more fearful of aliens in their midst. The memory of Haymarket haunted the national consciousness for decades because nativists painted a terrifying picture of the alien anarchist as “a ragged, unwashed, long-haired, wild-eyed fiend, armed with a smoking revolver and a bomb.” This reaction to the Haymarket bombing created a long-lasting popular impression of the immigrant as a dangerous figure, somehow more menacing than even the most violent American.17

  Indeed, the explosion and the red scare that followed the event produced an atmosphere of fear and hatred that prevailed for decades and influenced the fates of other immigrant radicals, particularly those of Sacco and Vanzetti. The ordeal of these two Italian anarchists, executed in 1927 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, dramatically reprised the case of the Ha
ymarket anarchists put to death forty years earlier. What Edmund Wilson said of the Sacco and Vanzetti case and its meaning for twentieth-century America applied to the Haymarket anarchists’ case as well: “It revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its classes, professions, and points of view and all their relations, and it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social system.”18

  The Haymarket case refuses to die because it involves so many troubling questions about the causes of violent conflict and the limits of free speech, about the justice of conspiracy trials and the fairness of the death penalty and about the treatment of immigrants, particularly foreign-born radicals, by the police, the newspapers and the courts. And perhaps most troubling of all, the Haymarket case challenged, like no other episode in the nineteenth century, the image of the United States as a classless society with liberty and justice for all.

  Americans had been using various languages of class to describe social reality since the American Revolution, and in the years after the Civil War they began to express serious worries about the possibility that bloody battles between workers and employers would erupt, as indeed they did in the mid-1870s. But almost everyone, politicians and preachers, employers and trade union leaders alike, thought these episodes were simply the product of hard times or the result of agitation by a few rabble-rousers. After the Haymarket events, however, more and more commentators openly expressed their concern that class conflict in the United States was becoming irreconcilable. For years this extreme view had existed only on the radical margins of public opinion, but in 1886 it moved toward the center of American public discourse about what came to be known as “the social question.”19

  IN THE DAYS AFTER the bomb exploded on Desplaines Street, as most Americans concluded that crazed immigrants were alone responsible for the Haymarket calamity, a few prominent men privately worried that the violence might have been caused by other forces, forces that menaced the well-being of the democracy itself.

  One of these thoughtful citizens was George Pullman. In 1883, three years before the tragedy, the industrialist had told a Senate committee that he was “deeply disturbed” that the conditions of life in industrial cities had become so “dangerous and deplorable.” He had invested millions in building a model industrial town to avoid the dangers of Chicago’s urban jungle, but in the process he had created a feudal domain that denied his employees the freedom they cherished. On the morning of May 5, 1886, as Pullman wrote letters in his Michigan Avenue office, he learned that his own loyal employees, most of them native-born Americans or assimilated immigrants, were ready to strike for an eight-hour day. Even these privileged employees whose loyalty to Pullman had been rewarded with high wages and good housing had not escaped infection by the strike fever that gripped Chicago that spring.

  One of the letters Pullman wrote that day was to his friend Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh, to thank him for sending a copy of his popular new book. In Triumphant Democracy the richest man in the world praised republican government as the reason why Americans enjoyed such exceptional opportunity, prosperity and domestic tranquility. Carnegie predicted that a new “American race” would be created when immigrants were educated and fused with natives “into one, in language, in thought, in feeling and in patriotism.” Pullman ended his letter by telling Carnegie that publication of his book was very timely, because “owing to the excesses of our turbulent population, so many are uttering doubts just now as to whether democracy has been a triumph in America.”20

  Many ambitious men like George Pullman had been attracted to Chicago in the mid nineteenth century, a time when the city embodied just the kind of triumphant democracy his friend Carnegie extolled. But after working-class discontent surged through the city on May Day of 1886 and spilled into Pullman town, the famous manufacturer and reformer beheld a democracy in crisis, a society divided by mistrust and class conflict.

  The governor of Illinois, Richard J. Oglesby, shared some of Pullman’s anxieties during those frightful days of early May 1886. He was appalled by the news he received from Chicago of “a vicious and riotous disturbance by the anarchists,” but he resisted demands from leading businessmen to call out the state militia immediately after the bombing. The governor feared that inserting militia companies might turn a tense situation into an urban civil war, because he knew that the discontent among urban workers ran deep, so deep that Chicago seemed to him like a “social volcano” ready to blow.21 Indeed, the city had become so divided that it was difficult for Oglesby to imagine how Chicagoans would come back together again as they once had been when he had arrived in the city on another May Day not so long before. That May 1 had been in 1865, when the governor entered Chicago and saw its people standing by the thousands in the rain, bonded together in grief. The slow train that Oglesby rode into the city that dismal morning was decked out in flags and black crepe, and it bore the remains of his old friend Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter he had helped to make president of the United States.

  Chapter One

  For Once in Common Front

  MAY 1, 1865–MAY 1,1867

  THE FIRST OF MAY was by custom a day of hope that marked the coming of spring, a day when children danced and twirled streamers around a May-pole. But in 1865 it was the gloomiest day Chicago had ever seen. For on that occasion “the merry May pole gaily wreathed for the holiday festivities of exuberant life” yielded its place to the “funeral catafalque draped with Death’s sad relics.” So wrote Abraham Lincoln’s friend and ally Joseph Medill in the Chicago Tribune that morning of the day when the multitudes would assemble “to do honor to the great and good King of men,” severed from his people when he was “slain so ruthlessly.”1

  In the dark hours of the early morning, crowds gathered all along the Illinois Central tracks on the lakeside. A light rain fell as the funeral train entered Chicago that morning; it hissed to a stop at Michigan Avenue and 12th Street, where 36,000 citizens had gathered to meet it. An honor guard loaded the presidential coffin onto an elaborate horse-drawn hearse, and citizens formed in military rank behind it. A group of thirty-six “maidens dressed in white” surrounded the carriage as it passed through an imposing Gothic arch dedicated to the “Martyr for Justice.” After each young woman placed a red rose on the president’s coffin, the carriage pulled away, followed by the column of Chicagoans who marched four abreast up Michigan Avenue toward the courthouse, where their martyred president’s remains would lie in state. The procession grew to 50,000 as it moved slowly up the lakeside. Along the way twice that many people lined the streets. From all over the Northwest they came—by train, in wagons and buggies and on horseback, all united in silent grief. “In the line of march and looking on, sharing something in common,” Carl Sandburg wrote, were native-born Yankees and foreign-born Catholics, blacks and whites, German Lutherans and German Jews—all “for once in common front.”2

  Up Michigan Avenue they trod in rhythm to the sound of drums beating in solemn tribute to Lincoln’s memory, expressing, as the Tribune put it, “the devotion with which all classes looked up to him.” A military band led the funeral procession of five divisions: first came the Board of Education and 5,000 schoolchildren, and then military officers and enlisted men, the combat troops of the Grand Army of the Republic led by the Old Batteries of the Chicago Light Artillery, whose cannon had laid siege to Atlanta. The black-coated men of the Board of Trade headed the next division, which also featured groups from various ethnic lodges, including 200 of the Turner gymnasts dressed in white linen. Contingents of workingmen followed, paying their respects to a president who said he was not ashamed that he had once been “a hired laborer, mauling rails, on a flatboat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son!” Nearly 300 members from the Journeymen Stonecutters’ Association walked behind a banner with two sides, one reading IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH and the other proclaiming WE UNITE TO PROTECT NOT TO INJURE.3

  All through that night of May 1 and well into the nex
t day, mourners stood in the mud and drizzle waiting to file through the courthouse for a last look at the man whose storied path to the White House had so often passed through their city. On May 2, after 125,000 people had gazed upon the face of their departed president, his coffin was escorted to St. Louis Depot on Canal Street by another elaborately organized procession led by a chorus of 250 Germans singing dirges. Lincoln’s corpse was placed inside its specially built car, and at 9:30 a.m. the funeral train pulled out of the terminal carrying Illinois’s “noblest son” to his final destination in Springfield, leaving behind a city whose people he had unified in life and, far more so, in death.4

  After its journey through the cornfields and little prairie towns Lincoln had visited as a lawyer and campaigner, the funeral train arrived in Springfield. The president’s body was buried the next day in Oak Ridge Cemetery, where the eulogist recalled the late Civil War as a momentous “contest for human freedom . . . not for this Republic merely, not for the Union simply, but to decide whether the people, as a people, were destined . . . to be subject to tyrants or aristocrats or class rule of any kind.”5

  Leading Illinois Republicans who gathered at Lincoln’s grave on May 4, 1865, rejoiced that free labor had triumphed over the slave system in that great war now won. They believed a new nation had emerged from the bloody conflict, new because now all of its people were “wholly free.” The “four million bondsmen the martyred emancipator had liberated” were, said the Tribune, a living epistle to Lincoln’s immortality.6 But were all the people now wholly free?