Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  That spring, units of the Lehr und Wehr Verein began drilling in public and deploying their militiamen in defense of socialist meetings and picnics. By the summer, the workers’ militia could marshal four companies with several divisions (each with forty men). Its officers explained that the militiamen would act only if workers’ constitutional rights were violated, as the police had done when they invaded the cabinetmakers’ meeting at the Vorwärts Turner Hall that summer. These assurances failed to calm the nerves of worried city leaders, and when the Bohemian Sharpshooters were observed drilling on a prairie lot outside Pilsen, word spread that the socialists were preparing for an armed insurrection. The Sharpshooters’ commander ridiculed the rumor. Albert Parsons, however, spoke in a different tone. “If people try to break up our meetings,” he threatened, “as they did at Turner Hall, they will meet foes worthy of their steel.”5

  The Citizens’ Association’s leaders took this warning seriously and accelerated their efforts to raise money to arm their own regiment and to push legislators to ban public drilling by the worker units. One year after the great uprising, Chicagoans were hiving off into armed camps.

  The city’s businessmen, the Tribune reported, openly expressed their alarm at the possibility of “trouble with the Communists” that summer or fall. Perilous days lay ahead, warned the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Poor people were desperate for relief; they were listening to the socialists and questioning the conventional wisdom about economic laws. “There is distrust, dissatisfaction, discontent about us everywhere,” the paper’s editor declared. “Communism proper has little to do with it, but a common feeling of disgust, discouragement, and uncertainty feeds the flame that makes the communist kettle boil.”6

  Albert Parsons at about age thirty

  BY NOW LUCY PARSONS had joined her husband, Albert, in fanning the flames of discontent. The couple immersed themselves in the city’s lively socialist movement and in the cultural life it spawned. By the fall, the Socialistic Labor Party had established four German sections in various neighborhoods, as well as Scandinavian, Bohemian, French and English branches. The party’s German newspaper, Der Vorbote, expanded its circulation and its members started a Danish paper, as well as an English paper, the Socialist, which Albert helped to edit. Lucy contributed as well with a mournful poem about poor people “wandering up and down the cheerless earth, aimless, homeless, helpless,” as “the cries of their hungry children and the prayers of their despairing wives fell upon them like curses.” Lucy also joined Albert in debates sponsored by socialist societies, plunging into the discussions, speaking with her own resonant voice and arguing with what one male observer called “spirit and animation.”7

  Propelled by young enthusiasts like Albert and Lucy Parsons, the Chicago socialists mounted an ambitious campaign aimed at the spring municipal elections of 1879. They nominated a popular and respected German physician, Dr. Ernest Schmidt, for mayor, and put candidates up for all major offices. 8 The campaign reached a climax in March at an ambitious rally and festival: a lavish celebration of the Paris Commune’s eighth anniversary. The socialists rented the largest meeting hall in the city for the event—the enormous Exposition Building on the lakefront, constructed after the fire to showcase the commercial and industrial accomplishments of Chicago. The pageant featured ceremonial maneuvers by 500 armed men who formed units of the Lehr und Wehr Verein, Bohemian Sharpshooters, the Irish Labor Guard and the Scandinavian Jaegerverein. People flocked to the event, and so many of them packed the hall—more than 40,000—that it was impossible to carry out the full program of speaking, singing, dancing and drilling. Still, the event was a spectacular achievement for the socialists and a reminder that the memory of the Paris Commune had acquired mythical power in the minds of many immigrant workers.9

  The next day a Tribune editorial asked who were the thousands who had jammed the Exposition Building that night. The answer oozed with contempt. “Skim the purlieus of the Fifth Ward,” read the editorial, referring to Irish Bridgeport, “drain the Bohemian socialist slums of the Sixth and Seventh Wards, scour the Scandinavian dives of the Tenth and Fourteenth Wards, cull the choicest thieves from Halsted and Desplaines Street, pick out from Fourth Avenue, Jackson Street, Clark Street and State Street and other noted haunts the worst specimens of female depravity, scatter in all the red-headed, cross-eyed and frowsy servant girls in three divisions of the city and bunch all these together . . . [and] you have a pretty good idea of the crowd that made up last night’s gathering.”10

  The socialists knew, however, that their pageant had attracted many respectable immigrants—merchants, builders, musicians, teachers, doctors, tradesmen and saloonkeepers who still resented the Tribune and its haughty editor. They remembered well that Medill, as mayor, had offended them, not only with his hostile words but with his attempts to close their saloons on Sundays and to stop them from rebuilding their wooden homes after the Great Fire.

  City elections in Chicago were usually fought out over issues like tax rates, building codes, construction contracts and saloon regulations, but in 1879 the socialists addressed economic issues that concerned unemployed workers as well as consumers, saloonkeepers and home owners. Voters were startled by the socialists’ dashing confidence and the boldness of their proposals, such as municipal ownership of the streetcar lines and utilities, which were owned and operated by high-handed monopolists. 11

  Dr. Schmidt finished third in the spring election of 1879, polling 12,000 votes. The socialist vote constituted only one-fifth of the total, but it was large enough to deny a victory to the Republicans, who, since 1860, had always prevailed in two-party races with the Democrats. Dr. Schmidt had attracted support from German and Scandinavian tradesmen and professionals who had traditionally supported the Republican Party, as well as from saloonkeepers and brewery owners angered by the Grand Old Party’s zeal for temperance reform. As a result, Kentucky-born Carter Henry Harrison became the city’s first Democratic mayor since the Civil War.12

  The businessmen who led the city’s Republican Party were furious about losing control of City Hall so soon after they had won it back from the immigrant People’s Party, but socialists like Albert and Lucy Parsons were in high spirits, riding the waves of a surging political movement and anticipating the birth of their son, Albert, Jr., who was expected in September.

  Lucy’s pregnancy did not slow her down; indeed, she escalated her political efforts by joining the new Chicago Working Women’s Union and helping to expose the plight of female domestic servants, who could be dismissed by their mistresses without notice if accused of “misconduct.” Here she encountered a small but brilliant constellation of radical women that included Lizzie Swank, a frail young woman of Yankee stock. Swank could have joined the Daughters of the American Revolution, but instead she adopted her mother’s libertarian beliefs and began writing for the provocative anarchist paper Lucifer. Attracted to Chicago from Iowa by the great uprising of 1877, Swank found work in a sewing shop and soon after joined the Working Women’s Union. There she met Lucy Parsons, who persuaded her new friend to join the insurgent socialist movement. The two young women bonded immediately and plunged into radical activism with abandon. In the summer of 1879 they took part in a joyous three-day festival around the Fourth of July, riding on top of a float decorated with pink cloth and ribbons bearing banners praising STRENGTH OF UNION and promising world peace in these words: WHEN WOMAN IS ADMITTED TO THE COUNCIL OF NATIONS, WAR WILL COME TO AN END, FOR WOMAN KNOWS THE VALUE OF LIFE.13

  The high hopes of summer did not last, however, for in the fall elections the socialists’ vote plummeted. The German distillers, brewers, tavern owners and saloonkeepers who voted for Dr. Schmidt in the spring as a protest against the antisaloon elements in the Republican Party returned to the ranks of the Grand Old Party in 1880 after party leaders assured them their breweries and beer gardens would remain open. Democratic workers, who had favored the socialist program for public relief, found the demand less compell
ing when the long depression finally ended. The party’s ward bosses soon shepherded most of these stray workingmen back into the fold. What is more, the newly elected Democratic mayor, the shrewd charmer Carter Harrison, offered city jobs to socialists, who eagerly joined the mass of job seekers flooding City Hall.

  Socialistic Labor Party militants angrily branded the office seekers opportunists and accused some of their leaders of corruption. Faction fights raged among former comrades. The quarreling socialists patched up their differences and put a ticket in the field for the spring elections in 1881, but the party had lost its dash and its sense of common purpose. Socialist vote totals fell in all but one ward on the Northwest Side, where Frank Stauber won reelection to the council—only to be counted out by two election judges who brazenly stuffed the ballot boxes. For many socialists like Albert Parsons, already dejected by the fickle habits of Chicago voters, this blatant case of fraud crushed what little faith they retained in the efficacy of the ballot. “It was then,” Parsons remembered, “that I began to realize the hopeless task of political reformation.”14

  AT THIS POINT, disillusioned radicals like Albert Parsons and August Spies bolted the Socialistic Labor Party. The rebel faction, which included most of the Chicago party’s German members, believed that running candidates for office was futile without the thorough organization of workers into aggressive, unified trade unions. Incumbent party leaders, mostly English-speaking socialists, insisted that trade unions serve as auxiliaries to their party. There was another bone of contention. The dominant group objected to armed workers’ organizations because they frightened potential socialist voters, while the militants maintained that their meetings and rallies would be attacked if left undefended, and that, even if their candidates gained public office, they would simply be removed without an armed force to defend them. These debates hardened hearts and closed minds, leading passionate young socialists like Parsons and Spies to reject electoral politics completely. 15

  The argument among socialists over the workers’ militia became even more heated when the Citizens’ Association succeeded in persuading the legislature to outlaw the activity of such militias. The Supreme Court of Illinois upheld this ban on armed marches of proletarian militiamen— a decision Parsons and Spies denounced as a clear violation of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protected citizens’ rights to bear arms.16

  This court decision seemed like a seismic political event to both young men. Parsons, grandson of a patriot militia commander in the American Revolution and a militia colonel in his own right, and Spies, who had drilled with the Lehr und Wehr Verein, would frequently refer to what they regarded as a monumental injustice in the court’s decision: the businessmen’s First Regiment would continue to arm itself and conduct drills on public streets, but the workers’ self-defense groups would be banned. The decision provoked an enduring sense of anxiety and hostility among Chicago socialists, who now believed the Bill of Rights no longer protected them, but only their sworn enemies.17

  In order to convince other workers that a crisis was at hand, the socialist militants took control of the party’s daily German-language newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung, which was nearly bankrupt. The dissidents hired August Spies to manage this publication as well as the weekly Vorbote and the socialist Sunday paper Die Fackel. Reviving the socialist press was a discouraging venture, because the party was so weak and divided, but Spies leapt at the challenge. He found a capable assistant in Oscar Neebe, a well-traveled young man who had left his birthplace, New York City, and come to Chicago at the age of sixteen. He worked first in a German saloon near the McCormick Reaper Works, where he heard molders and blacksmiths talk bitterly about the 1867 eight-hour campaign and its betrayal. Then, after several stints as a cook on lake vessels, Neebe found work at good wages in a stove factory, where he labored until 1877, when he was fired and blacklisted for defending the rights of other workers. Neebe endured months of near starvation before he found work selling compressed yeast, a job that took him all over the city and into the company of August Spies.18

  Spies, who owned his own shop, and Neebe, who had worked as a salesman, used their business skills to boost sales of all three socialist newspapers, and in just a few years they turned their Socialistic Publishing Company into a flourishing business. In the process, the daily Arbeiter-Zeitung became for thousands of German-speaking workingmen what the Chicago Daily Tribune was for native-born businessmen. Spies’s mastery of German, his skill as a speaker and writer, his knowledge of world politics and his sense of outrage over injustice made his editorials and essays well known to thousands of immigrant workers in his adopted land. Indeed, in no American city did a radical journalist speak to an audience of the size August Spies reached in Chicago.19

  August Spies (left) and Oscar Neebe

  Using his influence as an opinion shaper, Spies helped convene a meeting of militants who shared a sense of urgency about what they viewed as a vast conspiracy to deprive working people of their rights. The congress at a North Side Turner hall in October 1881 aimed at attracting all socialists “weary of compromise and desirous of accomplishing the social revolution by means other than political action.”20 Some delegates who came from New York City had already given up on electoral politics and taken up the revolutionary banner. Indeed, a few of them reported with high excitement on a meeting just concluded in London, where a band of revolutionaries had decided to revive the International Workingmen’s Association, the organization Karl Marx had dissolved when he feared it would be captured by the anarchist followers of Mikhail Bakunin.

  The London meeting had pulsated with talk about the Russian nihilists who had recently stunned the western world by assassinating Czar Alexander II. The result of this act was not the rising of the peasants envisioned by the conspirators, however, but rather a wave of savage repression that shattered the revolutionary movement. Still, this reaction from the czar’s forces did not discourage Bakunin’s London followers; indeed, they made the Russian conspirators into martyrs and vowed to follow their example. 21

  The anarchists who formed the new International Working People’s Association in London acted on their belief that socialist propaganda could not effectively reach workers through trade unions and political parties; nor would revolutionary change result from strikes, mass demonstrations and election campaigns. If the Reichstag of Germany could ban the most powerful socialist party in the world and if the imperial troops could crush any demonstration or strike, then revolutionaries must resort to a new method—“propaganda by deed.” These revolutionaries believed that an attentat, a violent act planned by a secret conspiracy and committed by a dedicated militant, could impress the world with the evil of the despotic state and with the fearless determination of those who intended to destroy it. Many European anarchists believed such deeds would terrorize the authorities who were targeted, arouse the masses and trigger a popular insurrection.22

  The new “Black International” formed in London would become a “fearful specter in the eyes of governments throughout the Western Hemisphere, which suspected it of being the directing power behind various acts of assassination and terror committed in the ensuing decades,” according to the historian Paul Avrich. These suspicions were “utterly without foundation,” however, because the International existed as little more than an information bureau that led a “phantom existence and soon faded into oblivion.”23 The one city where the Black International attracted an impressive following among workers was Chicago.

  DURING THE 1880S Chicago’s total population increased by 118 percent— a rate of growth five times faster than that of New York City. The city’s foreign-born population doubled, reaching 450,000, a total that made immigrant Chicago larger than the total population of St. Louis or any other city in the Midwest, a total swollen by thousands of impoverished Polish Catholic peasants and Jewish refugees from the ghettos of Russia.24 To many native-born Protestants, who constituted but one-fifth of the city’s p
eople, it seemed that Chicago had become “a foreign city,” a place that now contained “more Germans than Anglo-Saxons.” 25

  Political refugees from Germany formed a small but outstanding segment of this new immigrant population. For example, among the embittered German exiles who escaped Bismarck’s police forces came the well-known socialist Paul Grottkau. Born in 1846 to a noble family of Brandenburg, he went to Berlin to study architecture but became a stone-mason instead. Grottkau soon became a prominent socialist editor and organizer, and was forced to flee Germany when the antisocialist law took effect in 1878. The exile made his way to Chicago and immediately joined the Socialistic Labor Party, whose members already knew him by reputation. A compelling speaker and writer, Grottkau became editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and a role model for August Spies and other young Germans who joined him when he led the revolt of socialist militants against the party’s leadership. Like Grottkau, these young Turks began calling themselves Social Revolutionaries.26

  Another newcomer from Germany, Michael Schwab, would soon fall under Grottkau’s influence as well. Schwab was born along the Main River in northern Bavaria and raised in a prosperous family of devout Catholic peasants until he was orphaned at the age of sixteen. Forced to support himself, the youth became apprenticed to a struggling bookbinder for whom he worked sixteen hours a day. During the rest of the time he devoured books as fast as he could lay his hands on them. Soon after he joined a bookbinders’ union, its socialist leaders converted young Michael to the cause. Volunteering as an agitator in the weaving towns, Schwab was appalled by the condition of workers, who ate thin, brown bread and fat for dinner, and by the factory owners, who made young working girls their mistresses. After this disheartening life on the road as a traveling “trades fellow,” Schwab left his fatherland behind forever, having learned that political liberty without economic freedom was “a mocking lie.”27