Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  A few businessmen and bankers realized, however, that Mayor Harrison had exhibited rare political genius following his election in 1879. He had co-opted leading socialists into his administration. He then created a labor-friendly regime that helped cast the Socialistic Labor Party into oblivion. Moreover, he restored social peace after five harrowing years of civil strife.57

  Mayor Carter H. Harrison

  Carter Harrison was a naturally gifted politician who loved “pageantry and display of almost any kind”—marching bands and ethnic parades, Irish wakes and high masses, German folk festivals and socialist picnics. He attended them all, usually riding upon his white thoroughbred horse and wearing a black felt hat tilted rakishly to the side. He was extremely insensitive to criticism and could be tactless around influential men, but these traits, along with “bubbling geniality,” his “sense of fair play” and his “social insight,” put him “in touch with the desires and aspirations of the masses.”58

  Unlike his predecessors, Harrison recognized that Chicago was a foreign city, and he made the most of it. He spoke some German and a little Swedish, claimed Norwegian and Irish roots, and knew something about Bohemia from his European travels. He was a truly cosmopolitan man. “Harrison,” the Tribune observed, “is American only through an accident of birth.” He was also a crafty urban politico who earned and maintained the trust of Chicago’s immigrants.59

  Harrison presided over a city with a huge working class of people who had endured a terribly long depression and now faced a second one. He knew that many of these people resented the high-handed editors who chastised the poor, and despised the hard-driving employers who turned the Pinkertons and police loose on their own employees. It was not surprising to Carter Harrison that skilled agitators like Spies and Parsons found an audience in the city’s working-class wards. The mayor was quite familiar with the socialists; he read their newspapers, observed their rallies and heard their speeches. They fancied themselves orators, he later recalled, and often “talked like damn fools,” but they did not seem like dangerous men. Better to let them speak than to arouse popular wrath by closing their newspapers and banning them from the streets.60

  Harrison had succeeded year after year, performing like a seasoned ringmaster in Chicago’s human circus, but as he took office for a fourth term in May 1885, the mayor was a weakened leader. He had gained reelection by a razor-thin margin of 375 votes, and now he waited as the Republicans challenged the election results in court. In the meantime, the Citizens’ Association issued a report that denounced the police for their “flagrant neglect of duty” during the strike at McCormick’s and accused the mayor of being afraid to anger “any large body of rioters” for fear of losing their votes. In fact, the votes Harrison feared losing were those of businessmen and property owners, who helped provide him with the popular mandate he needed to keep the peace and attempt to govern an ungovernable city.61

  HARRISON MAINTAINED HIS balancing act as usual during the first few months after his reelection, but then, on July 2, 1885, he lost control of the forces under his command. Before dawn that day 400 police officers reported to the Desplaines Street Station near the Haymarket to hear orders from their field commander, Captain John Bonfield, who was determined to break the strike of the streetcar drivers on the West Side line. City officials needed a hard man to head the strikebreaking force, and they found him in Bonfield, a failed businessman who had joined the force in 1877, just in time to see action in the great uprising that summer. He saw riot duty in Bridgeport, where he was humiliated after being disarmed and beaten by a gang of strikers. Following this traumatic incident, the ambitious Bonfield rose rapidly in the force. After being promoted to lieutenant, he was assigned to the West 12th Street Station, not far from where the Great Chicago Fire had started in 1871; this was a frontier police station in the midst of the sprawling Second Precinct, one that included Pilsen and the polyglot Southwest Side, home to more than 30,000 immigrant working people. Located in the heart of what the police called “the terror district,” it was a command center during the violent summers of 1876 and 1877, when the lumber shovers’ strike and the railroad workers’ uprising “were so admirably repressed,” in the words of the police department’s historian. It was here that Lieutenant Bonfield won fame by putting the nation’s first system of call boxes on street corners, so that patrol wagons could quickly be called into action when trouble began in a precinct where “scarcely a month passed without some kind of demonstration, strike or riot.”62

  Bonfield joined the Chicago Police Department in 1877, just before it emerged as the nation’s first effective antistrike force, acting with a lethal effectiveness unmatched in any other city. But during the early 1880s the influence of Irish trade unionists and politicians on the mayor kept the police at bay during strikes. The force was so unreliable in the eyes of many large employers that they equipped small armies of militiamen as reserve forces or hired private guards to protect strikebreakers. In Captain John Bonfield, these employers found a man who would change all that. 63

  As morning light broke and the temperature rose on July 3, Bonfield’s lead patrols found Madison Street lined with people looking as though they expected a great procession to pass. The captain ordered his men to keep people moving, but the crowds were too dense to budge. Many people on the streets, local residents and passengers as well as union workers of all sorts, came out to support the car men. Others in the throng appeared simply to witness what promised to be an especially exciting episode in the ongoing drama unfolding on Chicago’s turbulent streets.

  In spite of the crowds that grew as the morning passed, Bonfield moved ahead with his plan to open the line by sending in nine horsecars loaded with a huge body of 400 policemen he had gathered. Very soon after the convoy got under way from the Madison Street barn at the city’s western limits, it halted before a barricade of lumber, gas pipe, cobblestones and beer kegs. “As fast as the police removed these obstructions others were raised,” wrote one journalist. This method of street warfare seemed “so decidedly Parisian and communistic in character” that the captain assumed anarchists were responsible.64

  Captain John Bonfield

  Bonfield, a “large, powerful, resolute, ruthless man,” believed that unarmed crowds could be dispersed by a sizable, well-trained force of men ready and willing to club protesters into submission. The patrolmen could carry revolvers, but if they executed their captain’s tactical instructions with disciplined brutality, they could prevail without using firearms. 65

  Enraged by the blockades, Bonfield ordered his men into action as the convoy moved slowly down Madison Street toward the city. Officers were seen wading into the crowds lining the street, their “clubs descending right and left like flails,” said one observer, “and men falling before them, often frightfully injured.” The captain led the assault, beating down an elderly man who did not respond to his order to fall back. When some construction workers pitched shovels of dirt in front of the cars, the captain ordered them arrested. Two of them questioned Bonfield, and he beat them until they lost consciousness (one worker suffered permanent brain damage). Using these tactics, policemen cleared the streets and opened the line by nightfall, after taking 150 prisoners.66

  The next day, the Fourth of July, Chicagoans flocked to their picnics and baseball games, but West Siders still seethed with anger over the brutal assault they had witnessed the day before. Some of them even left the holiday celebrations and joined several thousand workers on the lakefront, where the International Working People’s Association held its own Fourth of July celebration. Various speakers, including August Spies, denounced Bonfield’s “vicious attack” on the citizenry and, according to one report, “advised streetcar men and all other workingmen to buy guns and fight for their rights like men.”67

  Looking back on these events eight years later, and trying to explain why the Haymarket tragedy occurred, the governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, offered a historical explana
tion. For a number of years prior to the bombing and the riot, there had been serious labor troubles, he wrote. There were strikes in which “some of the police not only took sides against the men, but, without any authority of law, invaded and broke up peaceable meetings.” And in many cases, officers “brutally clubbed people who were guilty of no offense whatever.” In the most notorious case, the invasion of a Harmonia Society meeting in 1877, one young man was shot through the back of the head; and in the streetcar strike on the West Side eight summers later, Governor Altgeld noted, “some of the police, under the leadership of Captain John Bonfield, indulged in a brutality never equaled before.” After the police assault on the West Side, leading citizens prayed for the dismissal of Bonfield, but, “on account of his political influence, he was retained.” (Indeed, a few months after the strike, Mayor Harrison had promoted the notorious captain to chief inspector, arousing the fury of organized labor.) In other cases, the governor continued, laboring people had been shot down in cold blood by Pinkerton men—some were even killed when they were running away— and yet none of the murderers were brought to justice. “The laboring people found the prisons always open to receive them,” he concluded, “but the courts were practically closed to them.”68

  After reviewing the bloody history that preceded the violent clash in the Haymarket, Governor Altgeld drew what seemed to him an obvious lesson: “While some men may tamely submit to being clubbed and seeing their brothers shot down,” he observed, “there are some who will resent it, and will nurture a spirit of hatred and seek revenge for themselves.” 69

  DURING THE FALL of 1885 a cloud of class hatred hung over Chicago; it seemed as thick as the smoke that darkened its streets. Yet no one in the resentful ranks of the working class, not even the bombastic speakers of the socialist International, took revenge against the police and the Pinkertons. Instead, the social revolutionaries urged workers to join a mass movement for radical change and to arm themselves for the next confrontation with the forces of repression. The next time Bonfield’s blue-coated “clubbers” and Pinkerton’s “blackguards” moved against strikers, the workers of Chicago would be ready for them. They would be prepared to defeat the armed forces sent against them with the best weapons they could find. Moreover, they would be prepared to act against the powerful men who ordered the policemen around like hunters calling out their bloodhounds. Workers would be prepared, in other words, to carry out the “social revolution.”

  The social revolutionaries seemed to be everywhere in the city that troubled summer and fall—on the lakefront where they held “high carnival” every Sunday, in picnic groves where they delivered angry speeches, on the downtown streets where they led mass marches and demonstrations. They were, noted one alarmed observer, “free to come and go as they pleased, to hold meetings, parade in the streets, to expose their sentiments . . . to dispense their poisonous doctrines, to breed discontent.” 70

  By the end of 1885, Chicago’s working-class districts were seething with discontent, and the socialists were doing their utmost to incubate it, but they were not its only breeders.

  Chapter Eight

  The International

  NOVEMBER 1885–DECEMBER 1885

  AS THE TUMULTUOUS MONTHS of 1885 drew to a close, the Chicago Internationals looked back on a year of astonishing progress. They had enrolled nearly 1,000 core members into fifteen groups or clubs in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago ranging from the North Side to the South Side areas of Bohemian Pilsen and Irish Bridgeport. The IWPA expanded in other cities as well, but by 1885 one-fifth of all its members lived in Chicago, where the association had attracted 5,000 to 6,000 sympathizers, most of whom were immigrant workers recruited to militant trade unions grouped together in the Central Labor Union, with a membership of 20,000 that rivaled that of the established Trades Assembly.1

  Nearly all the workers who joined the International or supported it read the newspapers published by the Socialistic Publishing Company. A year after August Spies became editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1884, the German daily reached a circulation of 20,000, matching that of the Republican Staats-Zeitung. The society also printed an English paper, the Alarm, edited by Albert and Lucy Parsons, and unleashed a blizzard of literature in 1885, including speeches by Albert and Lucy Parsons, the writings of Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Johann Most, as well as thousands of copies of the Pittsburgh Manifesto translated into German, Czech and French.2

  The blossoming of the International in Chicago owed something to serendipity. The severity of the depression and the rapidity of mechanization, the hostile activity of Cyrus McCormick, Jr., and his riflebearing Pinkertons, as well as the brutality of Captain John Bonfield and his club-wielding police divisions—all of these experiences generated potential recruits for the insurgent movement within Chicago’s various immigrant working-class districts. But what transformed that discontent into social protest was the “intrusion of subversive propagandists.”3 The International’s surprising growth in Chicago came about because socialist agitators, particularly Spies and Parsons, possessed the ability to articulate workers’ grievances, as well as the unflagging energy it took to engage in relentless political activity. No other American city had ever witnessed anything like the agitation the Internationals created.

  ON APRIL 28, 1885, the day strikers routed the Pinkertons at McCormick’s, the IWPA conducted an audacious protest over the dedication of the palatial new Board of Trade Building. Elaborate and gorgeous ceremonies were planned that night to open this majestic monument to Chicago’s economic power. The building dominated the financial district at the end of LaSalle Street with its 310-foot clock tower. Thick granite walls punctured by the austere stained-glass windows of the trading floor gave a churchlike look to this “temple of commerce.” To critics like the journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd, however, the Board of Trade seemed like “a great gambling shop,” where syndicates of traders cheated the market to keep commodities scarce and prices dear. The fixing of prices for essential commodities like bread invited big trouble, he feared. In a famous article, “Making Bread Dear,” Lloyd warned that just such “crimes” had provoked the sans-culottes of Paris to take to the streets and ignite the French Revolution.4

  Before marching to LaSalle Street, the Internationals rallied, as usual, in Market Street, where they heard Albert Parsons describe the Board of Trade as “a Board of Thieves” and a “robber’s roost,” and, according to a police reporter, declare that the new building ought to be blown up. When he finished, the band struck up “La Marseillaise,” the anthem of the French Revolution, and then Parsons linked arms with August Spies to lead the march downtown. Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Swank joined them in the lead, holding their red flags on lofty poles. As they marched toward the Board of Trade Building, the band’s music and the marchers’ shouts bounced around in the canyons formed by the tall, dark stone buildings. Curious spectators lined the sidewalks, and some of them fell in line with the marchers. The Internationals had become the most engaging troupe performing in Chicago’s colorful theater of urban life.

  The protesters never reached their destination that afternoon, because they were stopped and turned away by a formidable squad of 200 policemen. Many of the marchers, expecting a police assault, had armed themselves, but thanks to a cool-headed police captain, William Ward, no conflict erupted because the captain kept his men in line and persuaded Spies to turn his followers around.5

  Gaudy demonstrations and tense confrontations of this kind made exciting news and attracted enormous public attention, not only from downtown businessmen, but also from workingmen in the factory districts. But in the working-class precincts of the city, it took more than street-level theatrics to convert wage-earning people to socialism; it took hour after hour of serious political and philosophical discussion.6

  IWPA club meetings were organized so that various members would present thirty-minute prepared talks on assigned topics, to be followed by comments and discussion. Thus, the socialist
clubs served as arenas for group learning and for individual intellectual growth, as well as settings in which to recruit new members among workers who had enjoyed little schooling. Each group elected its own librarian and allocated funds to buy literature. Members could also borrow books from the central library located at the Arbeiter-Zeitung offices on Fifth Avenue.7 Some of the more educated Internationals also volunteered to instruct children in socialist “Sunday Schools,” partly in response to aggressive efforts made by Catholic priests in German and Bohemian parishes to recapture the souls of wayward immigrant children. The socialist instructors offered such children “reading, writing, natural history, geography, literature, general history and morality,” and as much of “ethics as young minds are capable of receiving.” 8 Of course, these instructors also taught their pupils about socialism and, more specifically, about what they called anarchism.

  AT SOME POINT in 1884 the militant socialists of Chicago began identifying themselves as anarchists. This caused confusion among observers as well as among members of the International, because the movement’s leader, August Spies, insisted he remained a follower of Marx, and not of Marx’s anarchist enemy, Bakunin. It was true that Spies and his Chicago comrades had given up hope of finding a peaceful path to socialism via elections and legislative changes, that they had broken decisively with their former comrades in the Socialistic Labor Party. Yet the Internationals continued to label their publications socialist in 1885, because they adhered to Marx’s belief that capitalism would be destroyed by its own contradictions and by the inevitable emergence of a class-conscious movement of workers prepared to abolish private property along with the forms of government that sanctioned and protected it. The Chicago militants thought of themselves as socialists of the anarchist type—that is, as revolutionaries who believed in liberating society from all state control, whether capitalist or socialist. Anarchists proclaimed that true freedom in a socialist society could be gained in self-governing communities and workplaces where working people determined their rights and responsibilities democratically, without the domination of a powerful national state with its judges and laws, its police forces and armies. This was the freedom anarchy promised, said Albert Parsons, in contrast to the vision of his old socialist party comrades, who still embraced “State Socialism,” which meant “the government controlled everything.” 9