Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  In 1868 delegates to a National Labor Union congress elected William Sylvis president, made A. C. Cameron’s Advocate their official organ and dispatched representatives to Washington to lobby for an eight-hour law for government employees. Much to their delight, Congress enacted such a law on June 25, 1868, one that mandated an eight-hour day for mechanics and laborers employed by the federal government.20

  On the Fourth of July, Cameron trumpeted these glad tidings in his paper. He then reconvened the Eight-Hour Committee to plan a torchlight parade celebrating the first congressional victory that the labor movement had ever enjoyed. The procession that took place was, however, a pale reflection of the spectacular march to the lakeshore on May 1,1867.21

  The years that followed the defeat of the eight-hour strike were arduous ones for Chicago’s workers, skilled and unskilled alike, as employers cut wages and hired newcomers, “green hands” willing to work for less pay. During the fall the ranks of unemployed people swelled and the lines of desperate people seeking charity lengthened. Of the forty trade unions that had marched in the grand procession on May Day a year before, only a few survived that grim winter.22

  Everywhere he turned, it seemed, Cameron’s efforts were repulsed, his hopes deflated. He even failed in his effort to put a legislative ban on convict labor. This new defeat was a painful coda to the betrayal of the 1867 law. Cameron’s despair deepened when Washington officials refused to implement the eight-hour law for a few thousand mechanics employed by the federal government. Though President Ulysses S. Grant claimed to be in favor of the statute, his cabinet secretaries issued orders that negated the law by “virtually cheating workers” out of a portion of the pay they earned for eight hours’ work.23

  When William Sylvis died of stomach cancer in 1869 at the age of forty-one, the young labor movement he had inspired seemed to die with him. Sylvis’s hopes for an emancipatory eight-hour law had been dashed by the realities of politics in Washington, and his dreams of a unified labor movement foundered on the rocks of race and ethnicity. Delegates to three National Labor Union congresses had listened respectfully to the celebrated reformer’s appeal that “every union inculcate the grand ennobling idea that the interests of labor are one; that there should be no distinction of race or nationality,” but each time they ignored him and refused to open their doors to black workers. The conventioneers had also listened to the president of the Colored Laborers’ Union ask for their support for the reconstruction of the Old South, and they had heard his warning that the bloody struggle to grant the black man full citizenship would be “a complete failure” if he was barred from the nation’s workshops, but they paid him no mind. 24

  Andrew Cameron delivered an eloquent eulogy to his friend Sylvis and returned to his desk at the Advocate, where he wrote renewed calls for racial equality in politics and industry. However, Cameron’s hopes for a national labor movement based on egalitarianism were difficult to sustain after Sylvis’s death. Indeed, the National Labor Union passed away soon after its leader died. Yet, something remained of William Sylvis’s dream. The visionary iron molder left a legacy to future worker activists who would create the nation’s first national labor movement. It was a legacy based on two powerful ideas: the idea of an eight-hour system that would allow the self-educated workman to rise out of wage dependency and the idea of one big labor movement that would unite working people, transcend their divisions and recapture the Republic for the great majority.25

  In 1870, however, it seemed that even this intellectual inheritance would be lost forever. The year began with a hard and bitter winter for Chicago’s working people. More than 20,000 “houseless wanderers” roamed the city by day and huddled in alleys and under bridges. The city’s few existing unions shriveled up in the cold. It was then that Andrew Cameron sounded a bugle of retreat, announcing, without much emotion, that the Chicago Trades Assembly he had helped to create and lead through its glory days had died a natural death.

  Gone was the spirit of solidarity that once infused the city’s labor movement. German workers formed their own trades assembly and published their own newspaper, Deutsche Arbeiter, edited by a group of new exiles arrived from Germany who adhered to the socialist ideas of Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx. But little came of their efforts, and these new arrivals soon disappeared from public view, submerged within the city’s enormous population of German workers who were struggling to make their way in this workers’ paradise.26

  DURING THE LATE 1860s many of the European immigrants flooding into the city could not gain as much access to employment and housing as those who had arrived before the Civil War, according to an agent for the German Society of Chicago. The city’s reputation for opportunity continued to draw a mass of people from overseas who came to Chicago expecting to find “a new El Dorado” but instead found a city filled with jobless and homeless immigrants suffering from hunger and misery.27 An abundance of products was available for purchase in Chicago’s many stores, but these goods were inaccessible to most of the newcomers. Houses were readily available to immigrants who could afford small down payments, but many newcomers did not have the cash or the income to make mortgage payments, so they flopped into rooming houses, crowded into the cramped quarters of relatives or camped outdoors. Those who could manage mortgages moved into houses in a vast district of pine shanties that spread west from the Chicago River’s South Branch and farther south, to Bridgeport below the river, where open sewers and unpaved streets with pools of waste emitted a stench noxious enough to asphyxiate cats and dogs.28

  During the Civil War era well-to-do merchants and lawyers had lived on the same streets as printers, tailors and brewers, and, in some cases, not far from the pine-box neighborhoods of factory hands and construction workers. But as the city’s wealth in real and personal property grew (ninefold in the 1860s), the nouveaux riches moved uptown toward the new Lincoln Park and out of the West End to Union Park and to the town houses along tree-lined Washington Boulevard—far from the filthy, stinking streets of the old inner city.29 In 1870 the median value of real estate properties owned by the upper classes averaged nearly ten times the valuation of homes owned by unskilled workers. Many clerks, managers and salesmen also bought more modest houses on the North and Far West sides. As a result, homeownership increased to 38 percent among business and professional men at a time when working-class homeownership declined.30

  These social differences between the rich and the working poor were masked to Chicago’s many wide-eyed visitors. Tourists invariably expressed amazement at the city’s physical characteristics—the awesome distances it encompassed, the range of industries it incorporated, the huge volume of train traffic it handled, the stunning height of its grain elevators and office buildings, the unending passage of ships that came and went from its river and harbor every day. These observers were awed by the city’s audacity in reversing the flow of the Chicago River so that its foul wastes would flow down a canal and into the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, and they were impressed by its ingenuity in creating a new water system to draw lake waters into its tunnels—a feat of engineering genius symbolized by a grand new water tower that rose 138 feet into the sky. They were taken, above all, with the city’s sheer energy and vitality.31

  A leading promoter of Chicago as the Empire City of the West was General Philip Sheridan, the Civil War hero who now commanded the U.S. Army’s Division of the Missouri, with forces deployed as far south as Texas and as far west as Montana. Sheridan, knowing the city’s centrality, had moved his divisional headquarters there from St. Louis. He rarely missed a chance to sing Chicago’s praises, and he did so in 1870 when he traveled to France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. When the general met with the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck after his forces defeated the army of Napoleon III, the two men reviewed the conquering troops and the “Iron Duke” told Sheridan: “I wish I could go to America, if only to see that Chicago.”32

  Chicago’s entrepreneurs and promote
rs naturally basked in this kind of flattering attention, but some old settlers feared that the city’s performance as a moneymaking machine would make it “a town of mere traders and money getters; crude, unlettered, sharp, and grasping.” They feared that the civic virtue and sense of community they had cultivated would be lost amid the endless and ruthless competition for gain. The pioneers also worried that city government, fragile as it was, would simply become an arena for the buying and selling of influence.33

  More than any other city in the nation, Chicago came to embody what Mark Twain and others would call the Gilded Age—an age of excess when businessmen accumulated huge fortunes, constructed lavish mansions, exploited the public domain and corrupted public officials. No one captured the spirit of the age better than Walt Whitman, who wrote in 1871 of cities that reeked with “robbery and scoundrelism.”34 The nation was like a ship sailing in a dangerous sea of seething currents without a first-class captain. Of all the “dark undercurrents” Whitman sensed beneath that sea, none was more dangerous “than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest like a line drawn—they not as privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.”35

  The famous poet put aside these fears, however, because he was seized with the hubris of Gilded Age nationalism. For all the danger that lay ahead as the “labor question” exposed “a yawning gulf” between the classes, it seemed to Whitman “as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, as dazzling as the sun.” That sun shone over a people “making a new history, a history of democracy,” and that sun was moving west from Whitman’s beloved Brooklyn toward Chicago and the vast Pacific. “In a few years,” he predicted, “the dominion heart of America will be far inland toward the West.” There in that region of “giant growth” Americans were fulfilling their destiny as a people. It was an epic era, one of those times, Whitman wrote, when “[a]ll goes upward and outward, nothing collapses.” 36

  Chapter Three

  We May Not Always Be So Secure

  SEPTEMBER 1870–APRIL 1874

  ALL DURING THE LATE SUMMER of 1870, as Chicago’s economy roared on, readers of the city’s dailies had intently followed news of the Franco-Prussian War: first the stunning news of the French army’s defeat at Sedan, and then the capture of Napoleon III and the fall of his empire. Chicagoans pondered these events in the Old World with the assurance that their bloody war was behind them and that peace and prosperity now reigned.

  In September all eyes turned to Paris, where citizens rushed to join a democratized National Guard and to defend their city when it fell under siege. When an armistice was signed in January of 1871, Parisians denounced it and crowds marched to the Bastille flying the tricolor and the red flag of the International. Within a month “a mysterious authority made itself felt in Paris” as vigilance committees appeared throughout the city. In March, just as the French army seemed ready to restore order, even more sensational news appeared in the dailies: the people of Paris were refusing to surrender their arms. Indeed, when French generals ordered the Parisian National Guard to disarm, the guardsmen turned their guns on their own army generals. Government forces withdrew to Versailles, now the seat of a new provisional government, and on March 28 the citizens of the former capital created an independent Commune of Paris. Americans were utterly fascinated by this news, and the press fed their hunger for information about the momentous event. As a result, the Commune became an even bigger story than the Franco-Prussian War had been.1

  When the French army laid siege to Paris and hostilities began, the Chicago Tribune’s reporters covered the fighting much as they had during the American Civil War. Indeed, many Americans, notably Republican leaders like Senator Charles Sumner, identified with the citizens of Paris who were fighting to create their own republic against the forces of a corrupt regime whose leaders had surrendered abjectly to the Iron Duke and his Prussian forces.

  As the crisis deepened, however, American newspapers increasingly portrayed the Parisians as communists who confiscated property and as atheists who closed churches.2 The brave citizens of Paris, first described as rugged democrats and true republicans, now seemed more akin to the uncivilized elements that threatened America—the “savage tribes” of Indians on the plains and the “dangerous classes” of tramps and criminals in the cities. When the Commune’s defenses broke down on May 21, 1871, the Chicago Tribune hailed the breach of the city walls. Comparing the Communards to the Comanches who raided the Texas frontier, its editors urged the “mowing down” of rebellious Parisians “without compunction or hesitation.”3

  La semaine sanglante—the week of blood—had begun as regular army troops took the city street by street, executing citizen soldiers of the Parisian National Guard as soon as they surrendered. In retaliation, the Communards killed scores of hostages and burned large sections of the city to the ground. By the time the killing ended, at least 25,000 Parisians, including many unarmed citizens, had been slaughtered by French army troops.4

  These cataclysmic events in France struck Americans as amazing and distressing. The bloody disaster cried out for explanation. In response, a flood of interpretations appeared in the months following the civil war in France. Major illustrated weeklies published lurid drawings of Paris scenes, of buildings gutted by fire, monuments toppled, churches destroyed and citizens executed, including one showing the death of a “petroleuse”—a red-capped, bare-breasted woman accused of incendiary acts. Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a picture of what the Commune would look like in an American city. Instant histories were produced, along with dime novels, short stories, poems and then, later in the fall, theatricals and artistic representations in the form of panoramas.5

  News of the Commune seemed exotic to most Americans, but some commentators wondered if a phenomenon like this could appear in one of their great cities, such as New York or Chicago, where vast hordes of poor immigrants held mysterious views of America and harbored subversive elements in their midst.6 One of these observers, Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential clergyman in the nation, preached a widely reported sermon in which he reviewed the wantonness of the destruction in Paris and likened it to the terrors of the French Revolution. He trusted that the religious faith of Americans would prevent such a godless outbreak in our cities. The nation would be spared the terror that afflicted Paris as long as America remained without an aristocracy, as long as it maintained a free press and offered free education, as long as it was blessed with cheap land for farming; but Beecher also warned his fellow citizens: “we may not always be so secure.” He feared that an eruption like the one in Paris might someday occur here if the country stratified itself as European nations had, and if the upper classes did not show more concern for the poor.7

  Andrew Cameron devoted a great deal of attention to the Commune and its meaning in his Workingman’s Advocate.8 Without comment, he ran in serial form sections of Karl Marx’s Civil War in France, a fervid and favorable portrayal of the Communards.9 Cameron did not endorse the revolutionary methods Marx espoused; nor did he excuse the incendiary acts of the Parisian street fighters. He did, however, tell his American readers that the people of the Commune “fought and fell for the rights you either enjoy or are striving for, i.e., the right for self-government and the rights of the laborer to the fruits of his toil.” He concluded by quoting Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist-turned-labor-reformer, who had declared: “Scratch the surface . . . in every city on the American continent and you will find the causes which created the Commune.” 10

  BY THE TIME summer turned to fall in 1871, discussion of the Commune had disappeared from the press. The talk was all about business, because Chicagoans were enjoying another year of the sort of borrowing and investing, speculating and moneymaking that attracted hordes of newcomers each month. Banks recklessly lent money to entrepreneurs who were seriously depleting the cash reserves they held against liabilities, but business confidence kept rising, and still the city’s ec
onomy seemed destined to grow relentlessly and to create enough wealth for all. Despite widening class divisions, Chicago’s people shared a sense of pride in their thriving city. So many of the city’s self-made men had risen from low estate that poor folks could believe that they too would be beneficiaries of Chicago’s rapidly expanding wealth.11

  In one night of horror, on October 8, 1871, all these dreams went up in smoke when most of the city burned to the ground in a fierce whirlwind of fire that reduced 17,450 buildings to ashes. The fire started in a miserable slum of wooden shacks around DeKoven Street on the West Side and quickly leapt the Chicago River, devastating the entire downtown business district and most of the North Side up to Lincoln Park. Humble workers’ dwellings and marble mansions on the North Side, factories, lumberyards, banks, even City Hall and the Tribune building—all were incinerated by the holocaust. One hundred twenty corpses were found in the vast burned-over district, and many more bodies of missing persons were never recovered. Chicago, “unequalled before in enterprise and good fortune,” said one newspaper, was now “unapproachable in calamity.”12

  An immense body of literature appeared as writers struggled to make sense of the tragedy. Many survivors said the Great Chicago Fire had created a communal sense of shared suffering in which personal suspicions and social distinctions disappeared and in which the virtues of Christianity and democracy prevailed. Few escaped the suffering, and for a few harrowing days the rich and the poor stood on common ground.13