Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  THAT NIGHT, ANARCHISTS DISTRIBUTED hundreds of English and German copies of what came to be known as the “Revenge” circular. A horseman rode down Lake Street dropping leaflets at union halls and saloons, including Grief’s Hall, where anarchists of the Northwest Side group were meeting in the basement. George Engel and Adolph Fischer attended the meeting, as did two commanders of the Lehr und Wehr Verein. These were hard men who had little faith in the eight-hour movement or in the leadership of union-oriented anarchists like Spies, Schwab, Parsons and Fielden.

  This meeting would later take on enormous significance in the trial of the eight anarchists accused of the Haymarket bombing, even though only two of the defendants, Engel and Fischer, were present in Thomas Grief’s saloon cellar that night. During the trial prosecutors would describe this gathering as the birthplace of the “Monday night conspiracy” to commit murder and mayhem at the rally the next evening. Two anarchists who turned state’s evidence in return for cash and safe passage out of the country testified that this group endorsed a plan Engel had laid out the night before to organize an armed response in case the police attacked striking workers. In the event of a dire crisis, a signal would be given by the appearance of the word Ruhe (rest) in the letter column of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Then, according to the witnesses, armed groups would form to take action, bringing down telegraph lines, storming arsenals, bombing police stations and shooting law officers—all tactics, said the state’s attorney, prescribed in Johann Most’s writings. However, Engel also made it clear, according to witnesses, that the plan would take effect “only in the event of a police attack”—that is, as an act of armed self-defense. 26

  This serious business had been transacted when news of the deaths at McCormick’s arrived. Shouts and curses burst forth from the men in Grief’s basement. They were determined to respond to the outrage, but they did not decide to put Engel’s plan into action. Instead, the group agreed to organize a public protest rally the next day in the usual meeting place on Market Street. Fischer argued, however, that this enclosed block would serve as “a mouse trap” if the police assaulted the assembly; and so the group agreed to hold the event the next evening in a much larger space—at the Haymarket, west of the river, where Randolph Street widened after it crossed Desplaines Street.27

  As the Northwest Side anarchists headed home from Grief’s Hall, the city’s newspaper editors prepared their reports on what happened on the Black Road that afternoon. The Tribune offered the news this way: “Wrought up by the inflammatory harangues of a lot of rabid Anarchists, a mob of nearly 10,000 men, most of them fighting drunk, attacked the employees of the McCormick Reaper Company as they came home from work yesterday afternoon.” When reinforcements arrived, “a sharp battle between the police and the rabble followed” in which a number of men in the mob were shot and carried away by their friends. The newspaper blamed one man, August Spies, for this “barbarian attack” upon the reaper factory.28

  That evening, after quiet descended on the Black Road, the police escorted the employees trapped in the McCormick works to their homes. As they did, the wives, daughters and mothers of strikers attacked the officers with stones and sticks while shouting curses at them in broken English. At one point, police charged on these angry women and drove them off the streets.29 “A bitter and vindictive spirit” prevailed on the South Side toward the police, according to the Tribune, but the forces of law and order had triumphed in Chicago’s worst trouble spot. Chief Inspector Bonfield announced that the city was secure. “I believe we are strong enough to suppress any uprising,” he declared. The police were ready to take action in all potential trouble spots. There would be more rioting, Bonfield warned, with “some blood spilling perhaps,” but he did not anticipate anything like the riots of 1877. “The police had finally grappled with the McCormick rioters in dead earnest,” a reporter observed, and whenever the men in blue were aroused to that point, he added, “then peace was sure to come to the city.”30

  Chapter Eleven

  A Night of Terror

  MAY 4, 1886

  “A FAIRER MORNING than that which smiled across the blue waters of Lake Michigan on the 4th day of May, 1886, never dawned upon the city of Chicago,” wrote the journalist John J. Flinn. “The wounded, crippled, bruised and bleeding anarchists who looked out upon it must have been maddened by the perfect beauty of the new day, the clearness of the sky, the freshness of the atmosphere, and the glorious awakening of Nature from her long sleep, made manifest in every peeping blade of grass and swelling bud.” The sun rose on a quiet city, and to those who attended to business that morning “it seemed as though the excitement occasioned by the eight-hour strikes and the troubles at McCormick’s was about to subside at last.”1

  In fact, the bloody rout of strikers at the reaper works did not end the excitement; on May 4 the strikes resumed, and tension began to grow by the hour. That day the Tribune reported acts of rebellion all over the city as ordinary working people behaved in extraordinary ways. A dozen laundry girls employed at the Clifton House Hotel told their foreman they wanted to run things their own way; when he refused, they got together and quit work. Two hundred pupils in a Bridgeport school named for the city’s military hero, General Phil Sheridan, engaged in a miniature riot and demanded a one-hour reduction in the school day. When the principal refused, the boys went out and began “to demolish the windows of the school house” and, in one journalist’s view, to “deport themselves as fullfledged strikers,” until a police patrol restored order in the school yard. Groups of young women from the clothing shops turned their protest for an eight-hour day into a general strike; at one shop strikers removed the belt from an engine and brought everything to a standstill, and then laughed at the owner’s predicament.2

  Map of Chicago showing locations of major strikes taking place during the Great Upheaval from April 25 to May 4, 1886

  The Tribune’s leg men also saw more worrisome “specks of war” arising from the freight yards and lumberyards. The dreaded freight handlers’ strike seemed about to become a general one, because the railroad managers had rejected their employees’ proposal. Business came to a halt at the Rock Island freight house and several others as well. Office clerks and managers handled freight in some warehouses, but movement was very slow. Even the officials of the imperial Chicago, Burlington & Quincy were “rattled,” the Tribune reported. They fretted even more when union switchmen on the Fort Wayne road left the yards clogged with trains on tracks shared by many other railroads using the busy Union Depot. Some railroad chiefs remained openly concerned about the reliability of the police department, and therefore called for the creation of a law-and-order league that would enlist all the businessmen of Chicago to aid the railroads and to “save the city from ruination.”

  Meanwhile, along the South Branch of the Chicago River scores of vessels rode at anchor in the docks and slips, their cargoes untouched, because the lumber shovers had decided to stop work until they received ten hours’ pay for eight hours’ work. The Tribune quoted an angry member of the union who said of the yard owners: “They want to starve us. We told them if we didn’t cull the lumber, they could not sell it, and they said they’d cull it and sell it in spite of us. Well, I tell you, we are not going to starve.” Before the bosses moved their lumber with scab labor, he warned, the strikers might burn it. The worker was promptly arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

  Farther south, in Pullman town, union workers sent a committee to the company’s palatial offices on Michigan Avenue to present their demands to Mr. Pullman. The delegation included cabinetmakers, tinners, finishers, carpenters, wood turners, car builders, wheelwrights, upholsterers and even common laborers who demanded a larger wage increase than the others. Suddenly, Pullman’s paternalistic world was turned upside down. His workers had never dared to speak up, but now these “dependent, servile” people had found their voices.3

  Pullman refused the committee’s demands, complaining that the company’
s profits were not sufficient to allow a wage increase or a reduction in hours. Disappointed and discontented, the committeemen returned by train to the model city, where at 7 p.m. they met with all of Pullman’s 3,000 employees at the company baseball park. After hooting at their employer’s response to their demands, the employees voted en masse to endorse their committee’s strike recommendation.

  Following Pullman’s lead, other major employers stiffened their resolve. The Furniture Makers’ Association gained scores of new members over the weekend; they met that Tuesday to declare their unanimous resolve against granting the union shorter hours at higher pay and against dealing with the union in any way. After the strike was defeated, declared the owners, they would take back strikers selectively, one man at a time. Meanwhile, the railroad managers formed a common front to put pressure on a few company executives who were inclined to yield to their workers’ demands. In making their case, the militant managers had reportedly expressed the fear that “Communist blatherskates” would wrest leadership of the freight handlers’ strike from the “cool headed leaders” and might incite the men to violence. The Metal Manufacturers’ Association also decided on all-out resistance to the eight-hour movement. The owners of some machine shops and foundries had already agreed to reduce the workday to eight hours when their employees accepted a two-hour reduction in wages. But on May 4 the association forced those owners to renege on their agreements and take a hard line on any reduction of hours. A. C. Cameron, chair of the mainstream Eight-Hour Committee, despaired because the employers were no longer considering how to settle the eight-hour strike; instead, they were uniting to force their employees back to work.

  Besides refusing all concessions to their employees, anxious employers demanded a call-up of the militia to intimidate the strikers and protect strikebreakers. At noon on May 4, Colonel E. B. Knox, commander of the First Infantry Regiment, received a call warning that a mob of 6,000 strikers had formed in the lumber district and was marching downtown. Knox issued a call to arms and, within an hour, the National Guard armory was bustling with military activity. The mob from the “terror district” never arrived downtown because its existence was a fabrication, concocted perhaps by a nervous employer or an imaginative reporter. In any case, the threat of a unified workers’ movement focused on a common demand provoked an extremely well-cordinated response from the most powerful entrepreneurs in the Midwest, their financial backers in the East and their local allies. Businessmen who had been ruthless competitors now joined hands to battle a “common danger”—a mass strike by workers who challenged the laws of political economy and who risked provoking bloody civil strife. So, in Chicago, as in New York, the Great Upheaval marked a crucial moment in what one historian called “the consolidation of the American bourgeoisie.”4

  Business leaders were so alarmed by the working-class mobilization of May 1886 that they went far beyond invoking the laws of supply and demand in condemning collective efforts to raise wages and reduce hours. The field of forces had changed so radically that employers now threatened to employ the “whole machinery of government,” including the military, to “enforce the laws of the market.” However, the man in charge of state government in Illinois was not ready to crank up that machinery. A few hours after the National Guard was marshaled in Chicago, Governor Richard Oglesby, an experienced military officer, told the militia commander he had exceeded his authority and that he should disband his regiment until he received further orders. Oglesby was troubled by the vagueness of the Illinois statute applying to the use of state militia. He knew the pressure a governor could endure from agents of “incorporated wealth,” who impatiently demanded the use of militia in cases of threatened violence, as well as from elements of the press, who were ready to “malign, misrepresent and intimidate” public officials who refused to do their bidding. Oglesby’s decision to restrain the militia earned angry rebukes from his Republican backers in Chicago, but he resisted further pressure to call out the troops. The governor believed that Chicago was so explosive that putting militia in the streets might well cause a violent eruption.5

  Meanwhile, downtown at the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, the editors put together an afternoon edition of the daily. Spies, still infuriated by the killings he had witnessed on the Black Road the day before, wrote a column denouncing the police as trained “bloodhounds” and admonishing the McCormick strikers for being caught unprepared. Spies had no idea that he was tightening a noose that would later wring his neck when he wrote that the workers at the harvester plant could have defended themselves had they carried guns, as the Internationals had suggested. If the strikers, pitifully armed with stones, had instead been equipped “with good weapons and one single dynamite bomb not one of the murderers would have escaped his well-deserved fate.”6

  Unbeknownst to Spies, two young anarchist carpenters, Louis Lingg and William Seliger, were busily making bombs that day at Seliger’s home on the North Side. After he was later arrested and turned state’s evidence, Seliger testified that Lingg had been doing so for several weeks, and that on May 4 both men had stayed home to work diligently at the task with three other comrades. Together, they manufactured thirty or forty explosive devices that afternoon but made no plans for where or when to use them. According to Seliger, Lingg simply told his fellow bomb makers that the infernal devices would be “good fodder” to feed the police when they attacked.7

  If Spies had known about the bomb factory, he might have approved of it, because he was convinced that the massacre at McCormick’s was a rehearsal for something worse to come, some awful attack strikers must be prepared to resist in order to defend themselves. Yet the publisher vacillated that day as he issued violent threats on the one hand and made cautionary warnings on the other. After finishing his angry editorial, Spies objected strenuously when he read a militant leaflet prepared to announce the protest meeting at the Haymarket that night. Spies’s compositor, Adolph Fischer, had taken it upon himself to add the words “Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force,” even though no one at the Grief’s Hall planning meeting had suggested that workers bring guns to the rally. Spies reacted angrily, fearing these words would frighten people and reduce the crowd at the Haymarket, and that the call to arms would heighten the chances of a police assault. He then said he would refuse to speak at the meeting as requested unless Fischer’s bellicose words were removed from the leaflet. The presses were held up and the provocative line was stricken from all but a few hundred of the flyers.8

  Flyer announcing the Haymarket meeting on May 4, 1886

  Spies rode home to Wicker Park that afternoon to get some rest and eat a supper prepared by his doting mother. “I was very tired and ill humored,” he recalled. His mind must have been spinning as he pondered some awful questions. Where would the next massacre occur—in the freight yards or in the lumberyards, on one of the viaducts or in a Turner hall, the places where unarmed workers had been slain by police in 1877? Would the workers be prepared this time? Would the next attack become the revolutionary moment he dreamed of, or would the people be slaughtered again as they were in Paris when the Commune was obliterated? And yet, maybe the next confrontation would have a different outcome. Maybe his own highly visible activity could somehow, even against long odds, turn an impending tragedy into a history-making victory.

  AFTER SPIES ATE SUPPER in Wicker Park, he and his brother Henry set out for the Haymarket on foot. “We walked slowly down Milwaukee Avenue,” he recalled, because it was warm. The revolver he usually carried was a bother, because he had changed clothes and the gun was too large for his pocket. So Spies stopped at a hardware store and left the pistol with the owner, Frank Stauber, the socialist councilman who had been unseated in 1880. Spies told his brother that he did not expect any violence at the market that night because he did not believe that the police would attack “an orderly meeting of citizens.”9

  What Spies did not know was that six companies of city police had already gathered half a b
lock away from the Haymarket in the Desplaines Street Station under the command of Captain William Ward, who had been ordered to move all available men from his precinct—100 in all—to reinforce the detail at the station. By early evening a formidable force of 176 patrolmen had assembled.10 Nor would Spies have known that a squad of detectives in plain clothing had been ordered to mix with the crowd when it assembled, or that Inspector Bonfield had insisted on assuming overall command of the force at the Desplaines Street Station, that the police were “arming for war” with Colt .50s and that ammunition was being sent to stations in different sections of the city along with the order “Don’t spare your powder.”11

  What Spies did know was that Bonfield’s men had fired pistols at unarmed men on the Black Road. They had abandoned the chief inspector’s policy of using extremely brutal force with clubs in order to avoid the use of bullets. The Chicago Police Department had no official policy on bearing and using firearms, but all officers carried guns in their pants pockets or in specially tailored overcoat pockets and could use them at their discretion.12

  As the Spies brothers approached the market district from the north, they walked past George Engel’s toy store and Aurora Turner Hall on Milwaukee Avenue, then headed south on Desplaines Street. The two men arrived late at the site of the demonstration, which they expected to be in progress. It was about 8:15 p.m., but nothing had been done to start the meeting. Groups of men were standing in the Haymarket, smoking, murmuring, waiting for something to happen. August Spies had expected Albert Parsons to kick off the rally, but he was nowhere to be seen. After searching the area for his comrade, Spies returned to the market, and, seeing a smaller gathering than expected on Randolph Street, he moved the group out of the market around the corner onto Desplaines Street. Then he jumped up on a hay wagon sitting in front of an alley by the Crane Brothers’ Foundry and called the meeting to order. Before he began speaking, Spies sent one of his newspaper employees back to the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, where he had heard that Parsons, Fielden and Schwab were attending a meeting with Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Holmes to discuss organizing more women in the clothing shops.