Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Cartoons and drawings of the Haymarket events and the wicked-looking anarchists proliferated in the press that May. The most influential image appeared in Harper’s Weekly on May 15 in an enormous two-page drawing of the bombing scene that would become, and remain until this day, the single most important visual representation of the incident. The artist’s view is from street level just north of the speakers’ wagon, where a white-haired figure, presumably Fielden, is gesturing at the police with one hand raised in the air. To the right in the rear, the flash of an exploding bomb illuminates policemen falling and writhing in agony. Nearby two policemen fire their pistols at the crowd, while in the foreground, a man in a bowler hat shoots at the officers as his comrades flee for their lives. Thure de Thulstrup’s famous drawing elided a series of events that occurred over a few minutes’ time into one dramatic moment of simultaneous action in which the violence seems clearly to have resulted from the speaker’s effort to incite the crowd. This indelible image reflected and magnified a popular perception that the city streets had finally become domestic battlefields in a growing class war.47

  During these wild days a grand jury listened as witnesses were called to testify that an anarchist plot had existed to annihilate the police at the Haymarket. On May 27 the jury returned murder indictments against ten anarchists, despite the objections of one troublemaker among them who argued that, before they indicted the men for conspiring to commit murder, they ought to know who threw the bomb.48

  By this time, ten labor meeting halls, seventeen saloons and several newspaper offices had been raided; numerous houses had been searched, often without warrants; and 200 arrests had been made. Some prisoners were held without benefit of counsel, and some were pressured for hours in Schaack’s sweatbox. Scores of witnesses were questioned, including forty-five people who were promised financial support in return for their testimonies. The state’s attorney, Julius Sprague Grinnell, had gathered a mountain of evidence against the eight defendants who would finally stand trial for what was generally regarded as the worst crime committed in the United States since the assassination of Lincoln.49 Grinnell wanted the trial to begin immediately, but the defense lawyers objected given the enormity of the task before them—one that seemed almost hopeless at this point, when many newspaper editors and city leaders demanded the speedy trial and execution of the men they held responsible for the shocking deaths of six policemen.50

  Thure de Thulstrup’s imaginative depiction of events at the Haymarket, covering two pages of Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886

  Wilbur Storey’s Chicago Times insisted that all the indicted anarchists in custody should be tried and hanged for murder, along with every leader of the Central Labor Union. Furthermore, justice also demanded the arrest, trial and execution of Albert Parsons and “the negro woman who passes as the wife of the assassin Parsons.” Finally, the paper insisted that every organization, society or combination calling itself socialist or anarchist should be “absolutely and permanently suppressed.” 51 Even a respected law journal expressed the opinion that “the long-haired, wild-eyed, bad smelling, atheistic reckless foreign wretches” who thought they could “level society and its distinctions with a few bombs” ought to be crushed like snakes. According to the Albany Law Journal, the anarchists’ evil deeds almost justified resorting to “the vigilance committee and lynch law.” At the least, Illinois courts should treat all these godless fiends as murderers and extirpate them from the face of the earth.52 It was in this climate that the trial of the Chicago anarchists opened in the Cook County Courthouse on June 21, 1886.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Every Man on the Jury Was an American

  MAY 28, 1886–AUGUST 21, 1886

  WHEN TWO WELL-KNOWN Chicago socialists formed a defense committee for the eight accused anarchists during the heat of the red scare, they seemed to be embarking on a perilous journey. Yet Dr. Ernest Schmidt, the respected physician who ran as a socialist candidate for mayor in 1879, and George Schilling, the influential labor leader and eight-hour advocate, decided to swim against the roaring stream of public condemnation. Both men had vociferously criticized the anarchists for their violent words and ultramilitant demands, but they knew some of the accused men well enough to believe in their innocence. Schilling and Schmidt began quietly by raising funds in the immigrant union halls to pay for the legal services of two young lawyers from the Jewish community who had represented the Central Labor Union and many of its members after they were arrested in the police roundup that began on the day after the bombing.1

  Moses Salomon, a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor, lived with his parents on the West Side. Raised in Peoria, Illinois, he attended public schools there and then went to Chicago to work in his father’s grocery business. He clerked in a law office, and entered the city’s Union Law School, where he prepared to pass the bar. Sigmund Zeisler, a year younger than Salomon, was born in Austria of German parents and resided on the North Side with his wife, a pianist. He had lived in the United States for just four years but had learned English quickly while in law school, where he won a prize for the best thesis. Salomon and Zeisler, who formed a partnership in 1885, were considered excellent “book lawyers” but novice defense attorneys. Leaders of the city’s German-Jewish community had kept a distance from the labor wars that afflicted the city during the previous decade, but with Salomon and Zeisler on the anarchist case, the city’s Jews may have felt themselves being pulled much closer to the fray.2

  Because the two young lawyers were so inexperienced, Schmidt tried to persuade a pair of leading criminal lawyers to take the case; they refused, fearing the consequences for their practices. Eventually, the doctor found a way to convince a corporate lawyer named William Perkins Black to lead the team. A native of Kentucky and a descendant of Scotch-Irish from Ulster, Black had studied in Indiana, where he lived at the outbreak of the Civil War. He volunteered for the army and served under Union general Lew Wallace, then moved to Illinois, where he helped recruit an infantry company with which he saw combat as a captain. Black’s battlefield heroics earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor before he turned twenty. After the war, the captain entered a profitable law practice in Chicago. Like his friend Carter Harrison, the lawyer engaged in Democratic Party politics and, with his wife, Hortensia, enjoyed the social life that flourished in the city’s West Side Kentucky colony. An open-minded man, Black had once expressed sympathy for the Russian populists on trial for killing the czar, and had shown an interest in socialism, which he called the “cry of the people.” He had heard Schilling speak on the subject, and he had been introduced to Spies and Parsons, though he had not studied their ideas.3

  The captain’s surprising decision to lead the defense team meant that the Blacks would be ostracized, excluded from polite society. Black also knew that his action would entail “an almost total sacrifice of business.” But he made his decision and stuck to it, and Hortensia backed him up. Black’s “act of heroism”—Attorney Zeisler’s words—gave the defense a brilliant and respected lead counsel.

  William Black was not a criminal defense attorney, however, so he set out to find a partner who could play that role. It took him three days to locate a trial lawyer who would join him—a criminal defense attorney named William A. Foster, who had arrived in the city from Iowa a few months before.4

  On June 5, 1886, the grand jury presented its report to the court. It read: “We find that the attack on the police of May 4 was the result of a deliberate conspiracy, the full details of which are now in the possession of the officers of the law.”5 Five days later Captain Black asked the sitting judge to recuse himself because of prejudicial statements he had made. The new judge, Joseph Eaton Gary, was a sixty-five-year-old native New Yorker, first elected to the Cook County Superior Court in 1863. Highly regarded as a lawyer and an impartial judge, he seemed to Black as good a choice as any, at least until Gary rebuffed Black’s request for a delay in the trial. The proceedings would begin, as planned, on Jun
e 21.6

  In the meantime, Black had entered into secret discussions with Lucy Parsons concerning the whereabouts of her husband. “Never had a fugitive from justice been more systematically hunted,” wrote one chronicler of the trial, but, though police forces far and wide had been on Parsons’s trail, they had not run him down.7 Black argued that, rather than maintaining the appearance of guilt by hiding, Parsons ought to turn himself in and stand trial. After all, there was no evidence to link him to the bombing. It took some time for the captain to persuade Lucy on this point, but she finally agreed and sent out word to Albert that there were good reasons for him to return to Chicago.

  For the previous six weeks Parsons had lived in secrecy and safety in Wisconsin, but all the while he endured the agony of being separated from his family and comrades, escaping the wrath they all endured in the city. He believed, as he later told a friend, that if he surrendered he “could never expect to be a free man again.” Nonetheless, he left Waukesha on June 20 to meet his fate in Chicago. Still disguised, he jumped off the train on the North Side and made his way to a friend’s house, where he met Lucy and the children for a joyful, tearful reunion.

  On June 21, just six weeks after the bombing, the trial began, with scores of reporters in attendance. After the courtroom filled, the prisoners took their seats near the defense team. Black moved to quash the indictments and to hold separate trials for each defendant, but both motions were denied. Then, after the lunch recess, the proceedings resumed, and at about half past two that afternoon Albert Parsons calmly walked into the courtroom. Well dressed, his face tanned, his hair once again jet black, he made a dramatic entrance prepared to give a speech to the judge proclaiming his innocence and his willingness to face trial. One of the prosecutors immediately recognized him, however, and the state’s lead attorney, Julius Grinnell, rose and said: “Your honor, I see Albert R. Parsons in the courtroom. I move that he be placed in the custody of the sheriff.” Black strenuously objected that Parsons was there to surrender himself and that Grinnell’s action was “gratuitous and cruel.”8 Judge Gary would not allow Parsons to address the court, however, and so, as the buzz of excitement wound down, the prisoner silently took a seat with the other defendants, who were surprised and excited by the appearance of their leader. These unexpected developments sent reporters rushing for the door to telegraph the story of the infamous fugitive’s return. The stage was now set. The characters had taken their places, and the courtroom throbbed with excitement as the highly anticipated proceedings got under way.9

  After Parsons’s stage entrance, the courtroom calmed down and jury selection began. Because the normal, random process of selecting jurors had broken down, a special bailiff was charged to find jurors. The process went on for three weeks, and it went badly for the defendants, because the jurors who were seated seemed utterly biased against them.10 Black objected over and over to jurors who seemed clearly prejudiced against his clients, but, again and again Judge Gary refused to accept Black’s challenges for cause, even in the case of a juror who admitted kinship with one of the slain policemen. Nearly every juror called by the special bailiff stated that he had read and talked about the case and believed what he had heard or read about the defendants. Some even stated frankly that they thought the defendants were guilty. When these men admitted as much during the jury selection process, the defense attorneys rejected them one after another until they had exhausted their quota of challenges for cause.

  In some cases, Judge Gary worked hard to convince jurors who admitted to bias against the anarchists that they could, nonetheless, be fair. In one instance Gary nearly browbeat a potential juror into saying he believed he could render a fair judgment in the case, even after the man insisted he felt handicapped. Several of the twelve jurors finally selected were men who had candidly admitted they were prejudiced, but each, when examined by Judge Gary, was persuaded to say that he believed he could hear the case fairly nonetheless.11 To Black and the defense team, Gary’s procedure in the lengthy jury selection process seemed blatantly unfair, but the press praised all of the judge’s rulings and blamed the defense for needlessly delaying the start of the trial. When the twelfth juror was finally chosen, the newspapers cheered.12

  The dozen men seated in the jury box came from similar walks of life and held similar views of the anarchists. H. T. Sandford, who lived in the town of Oak Park and worked for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, admitted to having an opinion as to the throwing of the bomb and the necessity of convicting the defendants and was in that sense prejudiced, but he still thought he could hear the case fairly. Sandford was one of five clerks seated in the jury box along with five salesmen, including the foreman, an employee of Marshall Field. One juryman was a hardware dealer and another was a school principal.13

  These dozen men did not constitute a group of the defendants’ peers. Not one of them was an immigrant, a manual laborer or a trade union member, and, of course, none was a radical. Indeed, very few workers even appeared in the jury pool created by the bailiff, who had hand-picked many men in a stunning departure from the normal, random selection process.14 Approximately 980 jurymen were placed in the pool and examined; most of them listed their occupations as traders, buyers, shopkeepers, cashiers, real estate agents, foremen or salesclerks, including many who said they had been identified by their employers as good candidates. Only 14 potential jurors identified themselves as wage earners doing hand labor in the city’s factories and yards or on its docks and construction sites.15

  DURING THE TEDIOUS WEEKS of jury selection, everything seemed to work against the defense. The only encouraging sign was an item in the Tribune that hinted at weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. On June 27 an anonymous police official criticized Inspector Bonfield’s leadership, saying that no one on the force but Bonfield had wanted to disrupt the Haymarket meeting, that it should not have been disrupted and that, as a result, the chief inspector was responsible for the injuries and deaths. The unidentified police official also indicated that many of the wounds the police sustained came from bullets fired by other policemen.16

  The unidentified source may have been Superintendent Frederick Ebersold, who resented Bonfield and Schaack for basking in the sunshine of public acclaim. The Bavarian-born superintendent had been at odds with the two captains ever since Mayor Harrison appointed him, passing over Bonfield, a favorite of the Irish officer corps. Ebersold, who harbored self-doubts about his own conduct during the Haymarket affair, had reason to fear that Bonfield and Schaack would continue to undermine his authority by questioning his competence and blaming him for mistakes made in the investigation, such as ordering the release of Schnaubelt, the suspected bomb hurler.17

  On July 15, State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell opened the prosecution case by indicating that this would be no ordinary murder trial. “Gentlemen, ” he began, “for the first time in the history of our country people are on trial for endeavoring to make Anarchy the rule,” and “to ruthlessly and awfully destroy human life” to achieve that end. “I hope that while the youngest of us lives, this will be the last time in our country when such a trial shall take place,” he declared. Grinnell then outlined the case in brief. He charged that Spies was the ringleader of a dynamite plot—a man who had frequently declared that only force could be used to achieve justice for workers, a provocateur who believed that the eight-hour movement could be used to further anarchy. The prosecutor declared that Spies had conspired with others for several months to start an uprising during the May strikes at a gathering like the one at the Haymarket and that he told this to a newspaper reporter and even showed him a bomb made of dynamite.18

  Furthermore, Grinnell argued, the riot at McCormick’s was deliberately provoked by Spies, who issued the “Revenge” circular in order to trigger the beginning of a large revolt when bombs were to be thrown in all parts of the city.19 The conspiracy to destroy Chicago, he explained, had been hatched on Monday, May 3, when George Engel and the other plotters met i
n Grief’s Hall. Engel was in contact with Lingg, who was making the bombs, including the one used on May 4. The bombs were supposed to be left in Neff’s Hall, where the anarchists would take them to various targets. Finally, Grinnell claimed that the Haymarket meeting was to be the starting event in the uprising and that only the timely intervention ordered by Bonfield prevented a revolutionary plot from being carried out.

  After this litany, the state’s attorney remarked: “It is not necessary for me to go into any more details of that conspiracy. It was carried out to the letter.” The indictment in this case was for murder, he concluded, adding that “it is not necessary in this kind of case . . . that the individual who commits the particular offense—for instance, the man who threw the bomb—to be in court at all. He need not even be indicted. The question for you to determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged it?”20

  Grinnell’s remarks deeply troubled the defense team. The prosecutor had asked the jury to determine who murdered Officer Degan, yet the state had not charged any one of the defendants with actually throwing the bomb that killed the patrolman. It was later revealed that Grinnell had been reluctant to try the defendants for homicide without charging someone with actually committing the murder. However, the newspaper publisher Melville E. Stone met privately with the state’s attorney and convinced him to take the case to trial anyway, because the anarchists “had advocated over and over again the use of violence against the police and had urged the manufacture and throwing of bombs,” and therefore, Stone thought, “their culpability was clear.”21

  Julius S. Grinnell

  Here was an extraordinary turn of events. Chicago’s newspaper editors had already prejudged the defendants and recommended capital punishment as the only just outcome of the case, but this was not unusual. Pretrial publicity often influenced juries in murder cases, but it was a rare instance when a newspaper publisher shaped the legal strategy of a state’s attorney the way Melville Stone did in the Haymarket case.