Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Nowhere in the nation were wage earners as conscious of the crisis as they were in Chicago; this had less to do with the sophisticated commentary of reformers like Lloyd and George than it did with the speeches of socialists like Albert and Lucy Parsons and the reports of journalists like August Spies and his new associate Michael Schwab.

  When Spies became editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1884, he sent Schwab into the streets of Chicago. Already well read and well traveled, the former bookbinder proved to be a tireless investigator, who exposed the city’s dark side to tens of thousands of German-speaking workers. After a day in the South Side slums, he wrote of “hovels where two, three and four families lived in one room with little ventilation and barely a stream of sunlight” and of people he saw “living from the ash barrels where they found half rotten vegetables and from offal they were given by local butchers.” Pride kept the destitute from seeking aid, and so they were left “deep in the shadows.” He told a shocking tale of two cities: one city of overcrowded tenement houses and fetid streets where a smallpox epidemic took 2,000 lives, and another city of spacious mansions and well-groomed avenues where pedestrians caught the lake breezes. 35

  Besides exposing extremes of wealth and poverty in Chicago, the socialists insisted on dramatizing the contrast and moralizing about what it meant. On Thanksgiving Day, 1884, the International Working People’s Association staged a “poor people’s march” to expose the self-indulgence of wealthy people who gave thanks to God for their blessings and blamed the poor for their own sufferings. While grateful families ate turkey dinners that day, the International marched its cadre of workingmen and workingwomen through the cold streets carrying “the emblem of hunger,” the black flag. They proceeded through the fashionable thoroughfares of the city, said one police observer, with two women as standard-bearers carrying red and black flags, stopping before the residences of the wealthy and “indulging in all sorts of noises, groans and cat calls.”36

  Then the procession marched downtown to Market Street, where its leaders held forth. Albert Parsons began by saying, “We assemble as representatives of the disinherited, to speak in the name of 40,000 unemployed working men in Chicago” who had nothing for which to be thankful. To those who supped in their comfortable homes, he offered jeremiads, quoting first from the Epistle of James, Chapter 5, on the miseries that would come upon rich men when the treasures they heaped together for their last days became rusted and cankered, and then from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, who warned, “Woe to him who buildeth a town by blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity.”37

  Hard times had returned to Chicago, but the consequent ordeal did not turn working people into socialists. In fact, unemployment depressed them and forced them to depend on local charities and patronage bosses, or to seek out saloonkeepers and police officers who might give them a place to sleep at night; and it often compelled them to beg for work and accept it on any terms the employer dictated. What roused many of the city’s workers from a state of hopelessness was the incessant activity of the socialists, because they offered thousands of unemployed poor people a way to understand the crisis they experienced and to identify who was to blame.38 Albert Parsons, for one, delivered many lectures about why periodic panics occurred and why they were growing more frequent and intense. The main cause of the current crisis, he said in 1884, was overproduction caused by the race for profit. In this competition among capitalists who wanted to corner the market, wage earners were the first to suffer because, during business panics, wage cuts and layoffs would always be made in order to preserve profits. 39

  And yet social revolutionaries like Parsons believed that beyond the current crisis there was hope for the future. Insufferable conditions were making workers more conscious of common class interests. As a result, despite the many differences that divided them and the many delusions that clouded their thinking, wage earners would come together. When they did, workers would feel their power and grasp the possibility of creating a new cooperative society to replace the old competitive order. 40

  IN THE EARLY 1880S, few American social commentators, other than the socialists, believed class consciousness could emerge in the United States, because of its open frontier, its endless opportunities for entrepreneurs and its vaunted democracy. Class hatred existed in Europe, but in America it existed only in the minds of deluded socialists. In 1883, however, some leading citizens remarked on an alarming deterioration of relations between a huge population of laborers and a tiny population of employers, investors, bankers and lawyers. Some even found themselves using the language of class to describe what they saw and felt in testimony before the United States Senate Committee Upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital.41

  When asked by commissioners about the state of feeling between the laboring class and the employing class, the Chicago Tribune’s Joseph Medill said that a general feeling of distrust and dissatisfaction existed and was increasing fast enough to pose a serious threat to the country. “The trades unions of this country are feeling more and more dissatisfied with their position, and they are developing more and more of what might be called a communistic feeling—a tendency or desire to resort to what might be called revolutionary or chaotic methods for rectifying things. They are not satisfied with their division of the profits of business, and they look at the enormous and sudden acquirement of fortunes by a few speculators with feelings of anger.”42

  Medill blamed these hard feelings on strikes by “trades union people” who seemed in unanimous agreement that employers could afford to pay higher wages without increasing prices, and that the bosses refused out of “pure selfishness.” Given this regrettable bias among union men, said Medill, it was no wonder that worker protests threatened “to rend the social fabric” and that every strike seemed like “a species of civil war.”43

  The situation Medill described seemed particularly acute in Chicago, where he expected trade union people to cause a good deal of trouble in the coming years. The first sign of the big trouble to come appeared at the McCormick Reaper Works, where the union iron molders angrily grumbled over a 10 percent wage cut young Cyrus had imposed even though the company had earned record profits the previous fall. When some of the workers struck on March 16, 1885, McCormick’s general manager discharged men in the wood department to intimidate the rest of the workforce; he also ordered crews to build barracks inside the plant gates to house strikebreakers around the clock. Meanwhile, a call went out for nonunion molders, who were offered protection from the strikers by guards hired from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, headquartered in Chicago.

  The agency’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, had become renowned eight years earlier when he hired a spy, James McParlan, to infiltrate the Molly Maguires, a militant cadre of Irish coal miners who had been fighting a guerrilla war against mine operators and their hired gunmen in Pennsylvania. Pinkerton’s famous informer testified against the Mollies in a murder trial that sent ten mineworkers to the gallows on June 21, 1877. The hangings provided a stunning demonstration of the state’s power to impose the ultimate penalty on militant workers, and it left a haunting memory of “Molly after Molly walking to the gallows in the pale light of dawn, often holding a single rose sent by a wife or girl friend.” This terrible day of retribution was known as Black Thursday not only in Irish mining patches but in urban ghettos across the land, places like Bridgeport in Chicago, where crowds of Irish iron molders and their supporters encountered the hated “Pinks” at the McCormick works in the winter of 1885.44

  Young McCormick had made the decision to cut wages with no understanding of the possible consequences; nothing he had learned at Princeton or as an understudy to his father (who had died the previous year) had “given him any insight into the feelings or the temper of the 1,400 men who labored in his factory.”45 McCormick also failed to realize that hiring Pinkerton gunmen to protect strikebreakers would infuriate the Irish residents of Bridgeport. Indeed, confrontations between the strikers and th
e agents quickly turned violent. During one set-to, Pinkerton’s men fired off a few rounds from their Winchesters, seriously wounding several people, including some bystanders. The police viewed this action as cowardly and arrested four of the private guards, who were later charged with manslaughter, but McCormick’s general manager wrote in despair that, while most of the men wanted to keep working, a “fighting Irish element” was ready to knock down and beat anyone who wanted to work and not a policeman would stir a hand to offer protection.46

  A climactic struggle erupted at the plant gates on April 28, 1885, when the Pinkertons failed to hold their ground after strikers attacked trolleys full of strikebreakers headed for the plant. The union forces then assaulted a busload of Pinkertons, beat them with fists and clubs, burned their vehicle and seized a case of rifles intended for use in guarding the factory. One of the agents reported back to the agency’s downtown office that the attack on the guards was the work of Irishmen employed as molders and helpers, “nearly all members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who have the most bitter enmity against the Agency since the hanging of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania.”47

  In 1885 many of the Irish workers employed at McCormick’s were members not only of the Hibernians but also of the radical Land League and the secret Clan-Na-Gael, whose nationalist cadre, led by Chicago’s Alexander Sullivan, had begun bombing government buildings in London. Both organizations were condemned as communistic by Catholic clergy, just as the Mollies had been condemned; nonetheless, all three groups remained popular among Irish workingmen in Chicago. Although the anarchism of the International won very little support in the city’s poor Irish parishes, Catholic laborers displayed passionate attraction to various forms of radicalism, including currency and land reform, as well as cooperation. All this developed alongside a growing nationalism spurred by the war for land in colonial Ireland.48

  The Catholic Church governed the religious practices of the Irish, just as the Democratic Party determined their voting habits, but neither parish priests nor ward bosses were able to control working-class militants or radical nationalists (they were often one and the same) as their activities escalated in the mid 1880s. In 1885, German anarchist workers and Irish nationalist workers at McCormick’s swam in different streams of radicalism, but early in the following year, the two streams would join at the big farm machinery plant on the South Branch of the Chicago River.

  In the midst of the April crisis in 1885, McCormick appealed to Mayor Carter Harrison for more police so that the plant could run at full capacity. The mayor refused, and instead called for a settlement of the dispute. He also praised the union negotiating committee, even though it included labor leaders the company regarded as prime movers in the disturbance. McCormick still refused to meet with the men in a body and insisted that the wage cut was necessitated by the business depression. At this point Chicago industrialists became alarmed that the rising tide of union defiance would produce a general strike. Philip Armour firmly advised Cyrus, Jr., to give in to the men because the strike was becoming an “open war.” 49

  Cyrus McCormick, Jr.

  At the risk of losing face in the business community, McCormick withdrew the wage cut he had imposed on his unionized craftsmen. The skilled molders refused to accept the offer, however, unless it was extended to the less skilled piece-rate men and unless all strikebreakers were removed from the works. McCormick again relented, but the harrowing experience convinced him that he must rid the works of the union molders by replacing them with machines.

  After the settlement, Cyrus McCormick received a letter of rebuke from his mother, the estimable Nettie Fowler McCormick, who had run the works for a time after her husband retired. She had turned the company over to her son and then devoted her time to philanthropy, but from far away in Philadelphia she kept an eye on things at the reaper works. After the plant reopened, she wrote to Cyrus, Jr., with “a sore heart” that his actions were “all wrong” and that the violent strike had damaged the family’s relations with its workmen. As a result, trouble had come to hundreds of families and in consequence “fierce passions” had been aroused.50

  Emboldened by the union molders’ triumph over McCormick and the Pinkertons, iron-ore shovelers in the nearby docks struck, as did printers and rolling-mill workers, and even hospital nurses. As this surge of worker militancy gathered force, news came of a horrible tragedy in the quarries just south of the city near Lemont.

  When quarry workers walked out to protest a wage cut and employers imported strikebreakers, large crowds arrived to block the replacement workers. Local authorities, overmatched by the strike force, called on the governor to send in the militia. Richard Oglesby, who had been elected to another term in 1884, reluctantly gave the order. Soon after the troops arrived in Lemont, the general in charge wired the governor to report that A. R. Parsons, the “Chicago communist,” was there inciting the strikers and plotting to “organize a commune.” The agitator had apparently failed in these efforts, but he remained in Lemont to cover the story for his anarchist newspaper.51

  On May 4, Parsons saw a crowd of quarry workers confront the militiamen who were protecting strikebreakers. When the strikers cast stones at the troopers, the troopers fired their Winchesters into the assembly, killing two men instantly and wounding many others. Parsons described the scene in an enraged newspaper report. “The shrieks of wounded and dying men filled the air,” he wrote, “the warm blood of the people bathed the flagstones of the sidewalks.” The shootings at Lemont made an indelible impression on Parsons and confirmed his belief that “without arms and organization, the worker is left to the mercy of those who rob, murder and enslave him.”52

  On May 20 a group of social revolutionaries met in Chicago to condemn the militia for the killings at Lemont; they also vowed to organize themselves into an armed company to defend workers against the militia and to establish “a school on chemistry” where the manufacture and use of explosives would be taught. One speaker went far beyond this call for armed self-defense. A Tribune reporter reportedly heard “Citizeness” Lucy Parsons make threats “redolent with gore,” which she directed at the militiamen and at the men whose interests they served. She even called for a “war of extermination” against the rich, saying, “Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live as Sheridan devastated the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah.”53

  The deaths at Lemont gave the anarchists fresh text for a storm of leaflets they dropped on the city. These circulars helped swell their meetings, but failed, one journalist noted, to create any great disturbance. In fact, when such a disturbance did erupt, the anarchists had little to do with it. It came on the city’s West Side during the sweltering month of July, when streetcar drivers and conductors, who were predominantly Irish Catholic, quit work to protest the sacking of fifteen union leaders who had demanded a wage increase. The company was an unpopular monopoly, so the strikers easily won public sympathy as West Siders, male and female, young and old, walked to and from their homes boycotting the line, while fervently hoping the car men would win.54

  Mayor Carter Harrison joined the Knights of Labor in urging arbitration, but the president of the company said there was nothing to arbitrate, because, if the union men were reinstated, it would imply that the company could not dictate who should be hired or fired. The mayor found himself pressured as never before, as businessmen protested that the city was threatened with anarchy and insisted that the police take forceful action against strikers who controlled the streets and made moving the cars impossible. On the second day of the confrontation, company and city officials held a war council and devised a systematic plan to break the back of the strike and reopen the West Side line. Mayor Carter Harrison attended the secret meeting and voiced his concerns about the planned police action, but at the end of the day, he consented to it.55

  SERVING HIS FOURTH consecutive term as mayor of Chicago, Carter Henry Harrison was widely regarded as the most popular and effective big-city mayor
of his era. A much-loved figure in the city’s immigrant wards, saloons and trade union halls, he was personally responsible for keeping the city’s warring tribes at bay.

  Carter Harrison was an unlikely populist hero. A Kentucky gentleman who lived in a grand house on Ashland Avenue, he dressed in silk vests, smoked the best Havana cigars, read literature in German and French and quoted Shakespeare from memory. He was thoroughly at ease with members of the city’s aristocracy of wealth, whose interests and concerns he readily understood. Towering above all other Democrats, he managed to keep the city’s corrupt patronage system from destroying public trust in city government. He was not personally corrupt, but he accepted and tolerated the “bummer” councilmen, the gamblers, the saloonkeepers and the policemen who protected their interests. The city’s big newspaper editors hated him for it and generally accused him of “being responsible for all the filth in the community.”56