by James Green
In fact, Albert Parsons did not know he was supposed to speak at the protest rally. He had returned from Cincinnati that morning fatigued from his long train trip but exhilarated by the massive eight-hour demonstrations he had witnessed. After a morning nap, Lucy awakened him to tell him her own exciting news of a mass meeting of “tailor girls” who, she now believed, could be organized to join the eight-hour movement en masse. Parsons then walked downtown to Grief’s Hall to find a room for such a meeting. But since all the halls were occupied with eight-hour strike meetings, he had to settle for the little room in the Arbeiter-Zeitung office. While he was making these arrangements, Parsons was invited to speak at the Haymarket meeting; he declined because he had already made other plans and because, as he later revealed, he did not approve of holding an outdoor rally on May 4 since he feared the police would break it up and, as a result, more violence would ensue.13
Later that afternoon Parsons met two reporters on the West Side who asked him where he would speak that night. During the interview, one of the reporters later testified that “Mrs. Parsons and some children came up just then and Parsons stopped a car and slapped me familiarly on the back, and asked me if I was armed, and I said, ‘No. Have you any dynamite?’ ” Parsons laughed at this, and Lucy said jokingly of her husband: “He is a very dangerous-looking man, isn’t he?” Later that evening, after eating supper, Albert and Lucy left their home at 245 West Indiana with their two children and Lizzie Holmes and made their way downtown to meet with the “tailor girls.”14
Meanwhile, across the river in Haymarket Square, workers had gathered in the dark, waiting for the protest rally to begin. Unable to locate Parsons, Spies returned to the market and began the rally. Nearly spent, he decided to speak briefly and simply in English. The small size of the crowd, far smaller than the rally organizers had expected, deflated him even more. It was already quite dark in the dreary street, which smelled of horse manure and rotting vegetables. A single gaslight on a lamppost had been lit, casting eerie shadows on the factory walls. By day, the market was a jumble of horse carts that streamed in from the German and Dutch truck farms outside the city, bringing in tons of hay and bushels of vegetables.15 By night, this lively market scene disappeared and the district took on an ugly, forbidding aura. It was bounded by huge piles of dirt from railroad construction, a few rows of “pitiful, wretched houses” crowded together like huts, a “horrendous grey-black junk shop” and the large foundry on Desplaines Street owned by the Crane brothers. The only cheerful signs of life in the dark streets came from the gaslight showing through the smoky windows of Zepf’s Hall on Lake Street and the bright electric lights on the marquee of the Lyceum Theater on Randolph Street.16
Spies began by saying that the meeting should be peaceable, that it was called not to raise a disturbance but to protest the killing of strikers and to rally workers to the eight-hour movement. For twenty years, he declared, workingmen had asked in vain for two hours less work a day, only to be betrayed by legislators and treated with contempt by their employers. He then spoke about his role in the battle at McCormick’s, calling the factory’s owner “an infamous liar” for saying that he, Spies, had caused the riot. The men who stormed the reaper works the previous day were not anarchists but “good, honest, law-abiding, church-going citizens,” who had been goaded to madness by the lockout. Spies said that when he first tried to speak at the rally on the Black Road, some workers in the crowd objected that he was a socialist, and that when he tried to restrain the breakaway group, they ignored him and, “like ignorant children, they indulged in bombarding the plant with stones.”
Then Spies caught sight of the man he was looking for making his way happily through the crowd. “I see Mr. Parsons is here,” he said with relief, realizing that his comrade had changed his mind about attending the rally. “He is a much abler speaker in your tongue than I am,” Spies remarked, “therefore I will conclude by introducing him.” 17 Parsons parted company with his family, and then, as Lucy seated herself on a nearby cart with the two children and Lizzie Holmes, he climbed up on the wagon near Crane’s Alley and looked out on a street that was now packed from sidewalk to sidewalk with 3,000 workers.
The speaker began by calling the audience’s attention to the discontent of the working class, not only in Chicago but throughout the world, and he declared that all this distress meant there was “something radically wrong with the existing order.” He referred to his travels to depressed cities and industrial valleys where he met thousands of workers clamoring for redress and relief. He also spoke of “compulsory idleness and starvation wages and how these things drove workingmen to desperation—to commit acts for which they ought not be held responsible.”18
Parsons reminded his listeners of the newspaper editorials inciting violence against strikers and tramps. He quoted Tom Scott, the railroad baron, who said of the striking trainmen in 1877: “Give them a rifle diet and see how they like that bread.” He indicted another robber baron, Jay Gould, who had hired thugs in East St. Louis to fire on unarmed workingmen. At the mention of Gould’s name, someone in the crowd yelled, “Hang him!” Parsons paused and said that this conflict was not about individuals, that it was about changing a system and that socialists did not aim to take the life of a millionaire like Gould but rather to end the causes that created the pauper and the millionaire.
When Parsons resumed, he condemned the police for the outrage at the McCormick plant the previous day as well as the newspaper editor who falsely charged him with inciting trouble at a time when he was out of town. He concluded by saying that all citizens who loved liberty and independence should arm themselves or else they would see their rights trampled underfoot and see themselves shot in the streets like dogs. 19
Mayor Carter Harrison stood on the street smoking his cigar and listening as Parsons spoke. Harrison had decided to attend the meeting because he wanted to make sure the assembly did not lead to another riot like the one at McCormick’s. He thought that if the Haymarket meeting threatened violence, it would be better for the mayor to personally disperse the protesters than to order any policeman to do it. Harrison was a courageous man not afraid to confront public assemblies, as he had demonstrated earlier that day when he rode his white horse through town, visiting places where strikers congregated. Some of them hooted and jeered at him, but he was not physically assaulted. 20
In the midst of Parsons’s oration, Harrison walked a short distance to the Desplaines Street Police Station and told Inspector Bonfield that the speakers were “tame.” He had heard no call for the use of force; he had seen no one in the street with weapons in their hands, and so, the mayor later testified, he told Bonfield that since “nothing had occurred yet or was likely to occur to require interference,” he “thought the chief had better issue orders to his reserves at the other stations to go home.” Bonfield replied that “he thought about the same way.” 21
When Harrison returned to the meeting from the police station, Samuel Fielden was addressing the crowd in a loud voice. Still dressed in his dusty work clothes, the speaker alluded to premonitions of danger everywhere. 22 After listening to Fielden for a few minutes, Mayor Harrison relit his cheroot so that it would illuminate his bearded face—the most familiar visage in Chicago. He wanted the men on the wagon and the men in the audience to see that he was there. He listened to Fielden shouting to the crowd but heard him say nothing to incite violence. Shortly after 10 p.m. Harrison mounted his horse and, with a tip of his black slouch hat to the crowd, trotted off down Randolph Street toward his mansion on Ashland Avenue, relieved that the day had passed without more bloodshed.23
WHILE THE HAYMARKET MEETING continued on the West Side, Louis Lingg and William Seliger busied themselves on the North Side, loading the bombs they had made into a trunk. According to Seliger’s later testimony, they carried the trunk to Neff’s Hall on Clybourn Avenue, where several men appeared and took some of the explosive devices away with them; Lingg and Seliger took some as
well. After they left the hall, the two carpenters walked past the Larrabee Street Police Station, where Lingg reportedly said “it would be a beautiful thing if we could walk over and throw one or two bombs in the station.” Then the two young men went to a nearby saloon and had a glass of beer.24
Meanwhile, at the rally, Fielden was bringing his speech to a close with angry words about the workingmen at McCormick’s factory who had been shot down by the police in cold blood. This was a horrible example, he told the crowd, of how the law was framed and executed by their oppressors. “Keep your eye on the law,” he cried. “Throttle it. Kill it. Stop it. Do everything you can to wound it—to impede its progress.” After hearing this, one of Bonfield’s detectives decided to report back to the chief inspector and tell him that the speaker was making incendiary remarks. 25
At this point the weather changed. The moonlit sky suddenly darkened, and the crowd was chilled as a black cloud blew over the West Side. A storm seemed to be brewing. Albert Parsons, worried about his children getting cold, suggested adjournment to Zepf’s Hall. Fielden said this was not necessary because he was about to conclude. Parsons left anyway with Lucy, Lizzie, and his children, and some people in the crowd who followed them to Zepf’s Hall on Lake Street, less than a block away. Even Adolph Fischer, who wrote the militant call for the meeting, departed the rally for the warmth of the saloon.
At 10:20 p.m. only about 500 people remained on the dark street listening to Fielden speak as a light drizzle fell. The speaker concluded his remarks to a shivering audience by saying: “The Socialists are not going to declare war; but I tell you war has been declared upon us; and I ask you to get ahold of anything that will help you resist the onslaught of the enemy.” Then Fielden noticed a disturbance to his left at the corner of Randolph Street.
A tremor passed through the crowd as people saw through the dim gaslight an advancing column of blue coats that stretched across the entire width of Desplaines Street. George Brown, a young Yorkshire-born shoemaker, observed what he described as “a great company of police with their revolvers drawn, rushing into the crowd which parted to make way for them.” 26 The column covered the 180 feet from the station to the wagon in what seemed like a few heartbeats. The police commander, Captain William Ward, cried halt to his men and, with Inspector Bonfield at his side, exclaimed, “I command you in the name of the people of the state of Illinois to immediately and peaceably disperse.” Fielden protested, saying, “But we are peaceable.” A tense moment of silence followed, and Ward repeated his command. Then Fielden replied, “All right, we will go,” and moved to climb down to the street.27
At that moment, when all was quiet, scores of heads turned to look into the dark sky, where many people heard a hissing sound and then looked to see a lighted object arching out of the distance toward the front ranks of the police. One man thought it was a lighted cigar, but Lieutenant J. P. Stanton knew better. A veteran of the Union navy who commanded the third division of police, he recognized what he saw passing over his head: he had had enough active service to know what a bombshell looked like. He shouted frantically to his men, “Look out. Boys, for God’s sake, there is a shell.” A few men looked up, but there was no time to react when an orange flash lit the night sky and a terrific detonation resounded in the street. 28
August Spies had just jumped off the hay wagon when he heard the blast, but he could not see what had happened. His first thought was that the police had fired a cannon into the crowd. In the next instant Spies heard a fusillade erupt from police pistols. “Everybody was running, and people fell, struck by bullets, right and left.” As he crossed in front of Crane’s Alley, a number of officers rushed past Spies into the opening, some of them crying out that they had been hurt. “They had evidently been shot by their own comrades, and sought protection in the alley,” Spies observed. Spies and his brother Henry found themselves in the midst of the fleeing patrolmen, ducking to avoid the bullets whistling past them. 29
As gunfire rattled around Desplaines Street and men screamed out in agony, someone slipped up behind August Spies and stuck a six-shooter in his back. Before the assassin could pull the trigger, Henry Spies grabbed the gun. It discharged into his groin, and he fell down. The Spies brothers then became separated in the sea of humanity roiling around in the black street. “I lost my brother in the throng,” Spies wrote, recreating the scene, “and was carried away to the north.” He fell a few times over other men who had dropped to the street, but he made it safely to Zepf’s Hall, where he learned for the first time that the explosion he survived had probably been caused by a bomb.30
Just after he ordered Fielden to disperse the meeting, Captain William Ward heard a cry and turned to see the “bomb or shell thrown from the east side of Desplaines Street about 15 feet from the alley where there were a lot of boxes.” He saw it immediately, attracted by the light thrown off by its sizzling fuse. The grenade exploded almost as soon as it hit the ground, about eight or ten feet from where Ward stood, splintering the wooden blocks that lined the street and filling the night air with acrid smoke. “I think I heard a shot to the east of me,” he recalled, “and then I heard the command of some officer to the police to charge” followed by “a terrific firing from the officers.” After the gunfire abated, Ward hurried back toward the station. It was then that he saw lying on the southwest corner of Desplaines and Randolph, a half block from the bomb’s point of impact, the body of Officer Mathias Degan. He was already near death from his wounds.31
Albert Parsons was holding a schooner of beer, looking out Zepf’s window toward the remnants of the rally, when he saw what appeared to be “a white sheet of light at the place of the meeting, followed by a loud roar and then a hail storm of bullets that punctured the windows and thudded into the door frame.” Within a few seconds, men came rushing into the saloon to escape the hail of lead shot from policemen’s pistols. Parsons, who had been under fire on Civil War battlefields, remained calm, moving about the room telling the others not to be frightened.32 When someone shut the door and cut off the gaslights, many people rose from the floor and moved to the back room. There, Lizzie Holmes recalled, they all waited in an eerie quiet, “shut up in total darkness, ignorant of what had happened or what our danger was.”33
Map of the Haymarket Square area on May 4, 1886
THE MANY ACCOUNTS OF what happened that night in Chicago are in rough agreement up until the moment that Captain Ward gave the order to disperse; then the testimonies offered by witnesses diverge wildly. Some patrolmen thought they heard Fielden say, “We are peaceable,” but others thought that he said, “Here come the bloodhounds. You do your duty and I’ll do mine,” and that he then fired a gun at Captain Ward. Some policemen also told reporters that the bomb came from Crane’s Alley or from behind the speakers’ wagon, not from the east side of the street as Captain Ward had said. The direction of the bomb flight would later become important, because prosecution witnesses charged that Spies had given the bomb to a man who threw it from the alley.34
Most of the officers testified that as soon as the blast erupted they took heavy pistol fire from the crowd along the sidewalks. Inspector Bonfield insisted that this proved the events that night were not a riot but a deliberate, rehearsed conspiracy, because, he argued, the anarchists had planned to open fire on the policemen as soon as the bomb exploded. Captain Ward said he heard gunshots immediately after the explosion, but could not be sure who fired first because the firing was indiscriminate. Otherwise, the officers’ descriptions of the events that night were fairly consistent. 35 Their testimony would provide the main basis of press accounts of the bombing, the accounts that would shape public understanding of the tragedy.
The police version of the May 4 events would also serve as the foundation for the legal case state prosecutors would bring against the suspects accused of the bombing. Anarchists and supporters of the International, as well as other observers who were not connected with the unions or the radical movement, would, however,
challenge this authoritative narrative of the Haymarket incident on nearly every crucial point. These witnesses did not hear Fielden say the bloodhounds were coming or see him fire a gun at the police. One of them, S. T. Ingram, a nineteen-year-old worker at the Crane Brothers’ Foundry, read the Haymarket circular that day and returned to his workplace that evening to observe the meeting. Standing near the Crane building next to the wagon, he saw the police advance and Fielden jump from the wagon just before the blast echoed in the night air, but he saw no shots fired from the wagon. “After the explosion of the bomb,” he testified, “I stepped back against the wall to keep from getting killed. There was a great deal of shooting going on then; most of it coming from the policemen, from the center of the street.” He said his hearing and eyesight were very good, and he saw no citizen or person dressed in citizens’ clothes use a revolver. “It was a very peaceable meeting.” 36
Two businessmen saw events in a similar way. None of them saw firing from the crowd. Barton Simonson, a salesman, was an especially trustworthy eyewitness because he knew Captain Ward and Inspector Bonfield and other officers as a result of his prominence in charitable efforts to support soup kitchens for the destitute on the West Side. “The firing began from the police, right in the center of the street,” Simonson testified. “I did not see a single shot fired from the crowd on either side of the street.” 37
