Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  The studious Schwab brought these views with him to America in 1879. When he first arrived in Chicago, the bookish Bavarian kept aloof from all organizations and spent his energy studying the English language and reading American history. Eventually he discovered that bookbinders were paid no better in his adopted city than they were in Hamburg and that, here too, thousands of children were “worked to perdition.” In 1881, when Schwab could get no work as a bookbinder, he found a job translating an American romance into German for Arbeiter-Zeitung. His skill impressed editor Grottkau, who hired him as a reporter for the daily. Before long, Schwab had resumed his life as a socialist agitator. He attended many meetings where German comrades delivered elaborate speeches and long denunciations of their rivals. But even a dedicated social revolutionary like Schwab was bored by all this talk. Yearning to be inspired, he joined a throng of German workers who packed into the North Side Turner Hall one night in October 1882 to hear a speech by the notorious firebrand Johann Most.28

  Most, already well known to Chicago’s German socialists as a revolutionary agitator and bold provocateur, was born an illegitimate child to poor parents at Augsburg, Germany, in 1846. He lost his mother to cholera when he was a little boy, and then endured a bitter childhood under the rule of a stepmother. At age thirteen his miserable life worsened when a botched operation on his jaw disfigured him and crushed his hopes for a career on the stage. His misery deepened after he apprenticed himself to a cruel master bookbinder.29

  Ridiculed and ostracized because of his deformity, Most found solace in reading books after he finished a long day of binding them. Resentful and embittered, he left Germany when he was nineteen and wandered through Switzerland, where he lived in isolation until, in Zurich, he met some socialist workers who befriended him and shared their ideas with him. “From then on,” he recalled, “I began to feel like a human being.” 30

  Dedicating his life to “the cause of humanity,” Most returned to Germany and threw himself into the burgeoning socialist movement. A tireless organizer, orator, songwriter, pamphleteer and popularizer of Marx’s Das Kapital, he even won election to the Reichstag for two terms. But when Bismarck launched his assault on the socialists, Most was arrested and imprisoned. Upon release, he left Germany for London, where he published his own newspaper, Freiheit, and used it to attack all authority with boundless fervor.

  When Most wrote an ecstatic response to the assassination of the czar in 1881, British authorities jailed him. After enduring sixteen months of hard labor, the agitator emerged from prison a hero and a martyr to German revolutionaries in exile around the world.

  When Johann Most reached Chicago in 1882, 6,000 people came to hear him speak. The crowd spilled into the aisles and massed outside to hear his furious bombastic attacks on the capitalists and their government lackeys, who had already declared class war on the poor. Speaking in English with a heavy German accent and performing like a seasoned actor, Most elicited thunderous applause from the huge immigrant audience, who found him shocking, entertaining and enthralling at the same time. Many immigrant workers who heard him speak were thrilled by his acidic diatribes against the rich and powerful and excited by his talk of manning the barricades and dynamiting police stations. Utterly contemptuous of election campaigns and legislative reforms, he insisted on direct action and revolutionary violence.31

  Johann Most

  Most galvanized young German socialists like August Spies and Michael Schwab, who felt mired in the tedium of their own propaganda. Though they were thrilled by Most’s speeches, Chicago’s social revolutionaries did not form conspiracies or launch violent assaults on the authorities. Most appealed to them more on visceral or emotional terms than on practical ones; indeed, the city’s revolutionaries remained convinced by Marx and Engels that the road to socialism was a long one and that there were no shortcuts through individual acts of terror. And so, in 1883, Spies, Schwab and their comrades patiently set out to organize new clubs of Social Revolutionaries and to expand the circulation of their paper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung.

  ALBERT PARSONS WAS ONE of the few Americans who played a prominent role in this activity because he shared the young Germans’ belief that workers needed their own clubs and newspapers to absorb revolutionary ideas just as they needed their own militia to defend their rights; yet a truly powerful and radical workers’ movement required something more as well: a unifying issue and a solidifying organization. Parsons found the issue in the old eight-hour demand, and he found the organization in a mysterious order called the Knights of Labor.

  Founded in 1869, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor existed secretly in a few eastern cities for several years and then emerged out of the shadows to hold its first national assembly a few months after the 1877 railroad strike.32 Albert Parsons had joined the order on July 4, 1876, a time when the organization was little more than a fraternal order of craftsmen with elaborate rituals, mostly borrowed from the Masons. The mystic aura of the Knights attracted him, as did their moral code, one that glorified chivalrous manhood and generous fraternity. The young printer also believed that the Knights could create a genuine “brotherhood of toil” among men of different crafts, religions, races and nationalities, even among men who fought on opposing sides in the Civil War. Furthermore, he shared the conviction of the order’s founders that the wage system created opposing classes and caused bloody conflicts, and that it should be replaced by a cooperative economy that would allow dependent wage workers to become independent producers. Soon after he joined the Noble and Holy Order, Parsons linked up with his comrade George Schilling and founded the first Chicago assembly of the Knights, later known as the “old 400.”33

  Meanwhile, Parsons tried, almost single-handedly, to revive the eight-hour crusade Chicago workers had abandoned after their devastating defeat in 1867. He invited the legendary founder of the Eight-Hour League, Ira Steward, to the city and then joined the old man in an effort to create a new movement that would “band together all workers” of all races and all nationalities into “one grand labor brotherhood.” In 1882, Parsons’s hopes for such a movement suddenly rose when union carpenters walked out to reduce their workweek and German bakers struck to reduce their long, hot workday, which averaged more than fifteen hours and often stretched to seventeen or eighteen. These job actions confirmed the view of Parsons and other socialists that the eight-hour system could be achieved only through direct action by workers, not by laws that could be subverted by judges, ignored by elected officials and defied by employers.34

  Such a transformation would not occur without a new kind of labor movement that amalgamated the fractured trade unions into one solidified organization. The few existing trade unions, based largely on the power of craftsmen like carpenters, cigar makers and ironworkers, had formed a new national Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881, but no unified action had taken place as a result. The first sign of change came in March 1882, when a group of German tanners struck and demanded a wage equal to that of the more skilled English-speaking curriers. When employers refused the demand, the curriers struck in support with the immigrant tanners. This action astounded the Chicago Tribune, because the curriers acted not on the basis “of any grievance of their own, but because of a sentimental and sympathetic feeling for another class of workmen.” The sympathy strike even surprised the editor of the trades council newspaper, who said it was “something new and wonderful.” The seventy-two-day exercise in solidarity was, according to the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, “one of the most remarkable on record,” an action “conducted on the principle of the Knights of Labor which proclaims that ‘an injury to one is the concern of all.’ ”35 Suddenly, a group of divided workers actually demonstrated the ideal of working-class solidarity espoused by dreamers like Albert Parsons.

  A few weeks later the Knights of Labor found a new constituency among Irish brickyard workers on the Southwest Side who took a job action to restore wage rates cut during the l
ong depression. The Knights advised the strikers to refrain from the violence that had characterized earlier protests in what police called the “terror district.” After hearing these assurances, Mayor Carter Harrison ordered the police to stay out of the conflict. Unable to shield strikebreakers from running a gauntlet of verbal abuse by the strikers, their families and their neighbors, the brickyard owners conceded to their workers’ demands and the Knights’ prestige soared. 36

  During the spring of 1882 hundreds of immigrant workers in Chicago became Knights of Labor—butchers and packinghouse workers in the stockyards, brick makers and iron rollers on Goose Island, blacksmiths and brass finishers on the West Side, dry-goods clerks and telegraphers in the downtown business district. Besides trade assemblies for skilled workers, the Knights created mixed assemblies to reach out to unskilled workers of all kinds: female bookbinders, shoe stitchers and carpet weavers, even 7,000 “sewing girls” who toiled in clothing factories.37

  In the summer of 1883 one assembly of the Knights felt confident enough to challenge one of the nation’s most important monopolies, the Western Union Telegraph Company, controlled by railroad magnate Jay Gould. The telegraphers formed an assembly of the Knights, and when Western Union’s president refused to talk with them, the operators struck on July 19, 1883. Even the religious press, uniformly hostile to strikes and to unions, supported the walkout, because it was conducted peacefully, and above all because it was caused by a monopoly company under the control of the notorious speculator Gould. Harper’s Weekly expressed amazement that several thousand men and women in the United States and Canada had quit work at precisely the same moment and had then managed their strike with “great skill and marvelous precision.” The journal said that Western Union had displayed a “grasping and unscrupulous attitude” toward its operators, but its editor worried that the walkout would cause a disastrous breakdown of the nation’s communication system.38

  The telegraphers’ unified action caused an enormous stir in Chicago, where Western Union was headquartered and where the nation’s railroads and commodity markets were centered. No city depended more upon instant telegraph communications. Yet the strikers won widespread public support, despite the “universal inconvenience” caused by their actions. All trade unionists and many small businessmen avidly supported the telegraphers in their brave stand against the mighty Gould empire. To Albert Parsons and the socialists, the strike represented far more than a moral stand against monopoly power. At one packed meeting of strikers and their supporters, Parsons likened the union telegraphers to his own printers, referring to both groups as “brain workers” whose fingers controlled the composition and flow of information so essential to modern business and government. These highly skilled workers were quite capable of running the nation’s communications industry without the likes of profiteers like Jay Gould in the way.39

  Expressions of solidarity with the telegraphers, including Parsons’s eloquent outburst, did not, however, arouse tangible support in the form of strike relief or sympathetic action. When the aid the strikers expected from the Knights of Labor did not arrive, the head of the telegraphers’ union called off the strike and ordered the men back to work. Those who returned to Western Union were required to sign “an ironclad oath” pledging not to join any labor organization.40

  The telegraphers’ defeat added to the woes of the Chicago Knights, who, after the spectacular strikes of 1882 and the heady months of expansion that followed, now faced employers who refused to recognize the order or to arbitrate disputes with them. By the fall of 1883 the Knights’ hopes of organizing 50,000 workers in Chicago had faded and their ranks had dwindled to a mere 1,000 members.41

  IT WAS UNDER these sobering circumstances in October 1883 that Albert Parsons and August Spies boarded a train for Pennsylvania, where they would meet with other social revolutionaries to create a new organization that would prepare workers for what they saw as the hard and bitter struggle ahead. The Chicago militants joined other trade union delegates in Pittsburgh, where they announced the creation of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), a militant body dedicated to “agitation for the purpose of organization [and] organization for the purpose of rebellion.” The manifesto they addressed to the workingmen of America began by quoting Thomas Jefferson’s “justification for armed resistance” in a situation “when a long train of abuses and usurpations” created an “absolute despotism.”42

  The Pittsburgh Manifesto, written in part by August Spies and Johann Most, rejected formal political institutions as agencies of a propertied class that was becoming richer every day by stealing the labor of others. This system of exploitation of the laborer by the capitalist would continue until “the misery of the wage-workers is forced to the extreme.” There was no possibility of voluntary relief: “all attempts in the past to reform this monstrous system by peaceable means, such as the ballot, have been futile, and all such future efforts must necessarily be so.” 43

  Spies and Parsons returned to Chicago, distributed copies of the Pittsburgh Manifesto and organized about a dozen little clubs for the IWPA. But with business booming, the Knights of Labor fading from view and the socialist movement reduced to two small camps of warring sects, there seemed little likelihood that workers would notice, let alone respond to, the bold declarations of a few frustrated union militants with revolution on their minds.

  The socialists realized that most workers in Chicago maintained ancestral loyalties to their own kind and endured their hardships with surprisingly little complaint; this passivity seemed especially pronounced among devout Catholics of peasant origin. Most of these wage earners, especially immigrants, remained intimidated by the police and the businessmen’s militia and indebted to their employers and local patronage bosses for their jobs. They yearned for lives of security and comfort, not for futures filled with struggle and strife. Even the best socialist propagandist in the city, August Spies, had not overcome his fear that most workingmen were “simply tools of custom”— “automatons incapable of thinking and reasoning for themselves.” And even the best socialist agitator in the city, Albert Parsons, did not hide his fear that the new eight-hour movement was doomed to defeat by its enemies. “I know,” he said, “that defenseless men, women and children must finally succumb to the power of the discharge, black-list and lockout . . . enforced by the militiaman’s bayonet and the policeman’s club.”44

  And yet, despite their doubts and fears, Spies and Parsons remained active in the Knights of Labor and the eight-hour campaign because they wanted to be part of a broader class movement and not stand aloof from the mass of workers. Moreover, they had convinced themselves, against all sorts of discouraging evidence, that workers would rise up again, as they had in 1877, that workers would be impelled by forces they felt but did not wholly understand to move unconsciously and irresistibly toward social revolution. This, they believed, was the natural order of things, the logical outcome of the events they had witnessed during the violent years that had passed since they came to Chicago as young tradesmen hoping to improve themselves.

  Chapter Seven

  A Brutal and Inventive Vitality

  NOVEMBER 1883–OCTOBER 1885

  AT THE END OF 1883, Chicago’s business was booming like never before. Every day 800 freight and passenger trains came and left the city’s six busy terminals, hauling goods out and bringing people in. During the 1880s nearly 250,000 immigrants from Europe and Canada flooded the city looking for work in her roaring factories and mills. At this point, when labor was in high demand, the city contained forty foundries, fiftysix machine shops and five iron rolling mills, including the huge Union Steel Company on the edge of Bridgeport, where workers produced 180,000 tons of iron and steel rails each year during a decade of unprecedented railroad construction.1

  Overall, Chicago’s industrial production advanced at a breakneck pace, multiplying twenty-one times during the decade. The net value of goods produced by the city’s leading manuf
acturers leapt from $28 million to a staggering total of $760 million in these halcyon years when Chicago’s economic growth set a pace that amazed the nation and the world. A spontaneously exploding center of force, it embodied, as few other places could, “the brutal and inventive vitality of the nineteenth century.”2

  Nowhere was the creativity and brutality of “rough-and-tumble business Chicago” more obvious than in the slaughtering industry, where, as Saul Bellow wrote, progress was written “in the blood of the yards.” The “revolutionary newness” that made the city famous was indeed evident at the huge Union Stock Yards, where spectacular new forms of production and discipline yielded unprecedented outputs and profits. The city’s largest meatpackers, Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour, were true business revolutionaries whose innovations in industrial methods helped make Chicago “a world city.”3

  Map of Chicago during the early 1880s, showing prominent industries, railroads and other important sites

  Armour perfected the mechanized animal kill that became such a stunning spectacle to visitors, including writers like Rudyard Kipling, who later described the “pig men” who were “spattered with blood” and “the cow butchers” who “were bathed in it”—all working in a fearful stench with a furious intensity. Mechanization took command early and effectively in meatpacking, but soon other industrialists were following the packers’ lead.4