Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  George Ingham, the third state’s attorney, followed Zeisler’s polemic with an appeal by telling the jurymen that their verdict would make history. “For, if I appreciate this case correctly . . . the very question itself is whether organized government shall perish from the earth; whether the day of civilization shall go down into the night of barbarism; whether the wheels of history shall be rolled back, and all that has been gained by thousands of years of progress be lost.”46

  Defense lawyer Foster followed with his own passionate speech, one that lasted the rest of the day. A droll man with a shock of red curly hair and a mustache and complexion to match, Foster played every card he had used as a defense attorney in previous murder cases. He made it clear that he had no sympathy for the anarchists or their political beliefs. He was a defender of the law, but he wanted the law to be just. Foster then attacked the entire chain of evidence the state had tried to forge and found broken links everywhere. He said that Spies had no idea of the significance of the word Ruhe when it went into the letter box of his newspaper, a key item in linking Spies to the alleged conspiracy and the actual bombing. Turning to Parsons, the defense lawyer noted that no evidence had been produced that he was part of any alleged conspiracy. If Parsons had expected violence at the meeting on May 4, the attorney asked, why would he have brought his wife and children to the rally?

  Foster also analyzed the prosecution’s case against Louis Lingg. The defense attorney conceded that Lingg made some bombs and that one of the bombs he manufactured might have been thrown onto Desplaines Street. But even if the prosecution’s chemical experts were correct in identifying the lethal bomb as one Lingg that had made, this evidence did not prove that Lingg was party to any conspiracy or that he deliberately gave one of his bombs to the man who threw it. The state’s whole case against Lingg was based on guesses, suppositions and inferences.47

  Foster next turned to the case against Oscar Neebe, who was on trial for his life because he left a few copies of the Haymarket circular on the bar of a saloon, and because police found a shotgun, an old revolver and a knife in his house. He asked the jurymen if they were going to hang Neebe on the basis of such evidence, or hang any of the defendants based on circumstantial evidence. “Are you going to be driven by passion, influenced by prejudice to do that which you will regret the longest days of your lives?” he inquired. “Are you going to do something which will haunt you to the grave?” Then Foster ended for the day by saying: “If these men are to be tried on general principles for advocating doctrines opposed to our ideas of propriety, there is no use for me to argue the case. Let the Sheriff go and erect the scaffold; let him bring eight ropes with dangling nooses at the ends; let him pass them around the necks of these men; and let us stop this farce now.”48

  The next day William Black presented his closing to a courtroom packed with 1,000 people. The captain impressed journalists, including one who described him as a tall, handsome, military-looking man with a graceful, gentlemanly manner, a large vocabulary and a powerful voice softened by a pleasing Kentucky accent. Black argued that the testimony of the prosecution’s star witnesses, Thompson and Gilmer, had been utterly discredited and that the state’s case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. He said the whole story of Spies stirring up trouble was contradicted by testimony showing he went to the Haymarket to counsel peace. The prosecution had not proven that Spies knew anything about the May 3 meeting where the alleged conspiracy was planned, or that he had any contact with the bomb maker or the bomb thrower. 49

  Moreover, Black thought he had all the testimony he needed to show that six of the men charged with murder were not at the scene when the bomb exploded. The only ones present were Spies and Fielden, who were clearly visible on the hay wagon just before the explosion occurred. As a result, the state relied upon testimony that Fielden threatened the police and fired a gun at them—testimony contradicted by many witnesses. In the end, the prosecution stopped trying to show any direct connection between the defendants and the bomb thrower. Grinnell even admitted the defendants may not have known the bomber. The whole case rested on the contention that each of the indicted anarchists “abetted, encouraged, and advised” the throwing of a bomb and were therefore as guilty of murder as the one who threw it.50

  This allegation was based on the existence of a plot hatched on May 3 to launch an armed struggle the next night at the Haymarket; the conspiracy supposedly involved Lingg, who volunteered to make the bombs, including the one that killed Officer Degan. However, Lingg was not present at the meeting, nor were any of the other defendants except Engel and Fischer. These two men did propose the Haymarket protest rally but, according to police witnesses, said nothing about taking any kind of action there. Even the testimony of two anarchists who turned state’s evidence failed to show that any plot was formed on May 3 that led to the explosion on May 4. In any case, the prosecution had not proven that the unidentified bomber was part of that alleged conspiracy and that the defendants were therefore accessories who helped plan a criminal act.

  Captain Black insisted that since the state charged the defendants with murder, the sole question before the jury was the matter of who threw the bomb. It would not be fair to convict the defendants by showing that they favored violent deeds. He appealed to the “twelve good men” who sat before him to put aside their prejudices against the defendants and judge them solely upon the evidence. “Gentlemen,” he said, “these eight lives are in your hands” and “you are answerable to no power but God and history.” The captain finished his closing with a testimony to the virtue of his clients and their beliefs, proclaiming that “Jesus, the great Socialist of Judea, first preached the socialism taught by Spies and his modern disciples.” In this light, he could only close with the words of the “Divine Socialist”: “As ye would that others should do to you, do even so to them.”51

  Julius Grinnell responded with a powerful closing of the state’s case that displayed all of his eloquence and determination. He began by scolding Captain Black for descending so far that he compared “some low murderers to the Savior of mankind.” He also objected to comparing the anarchists to martyrs like John Brown. Then he lectured the jury on government and republican politics. Not all governments ultimately resulted in despotism, as Captain Black had stated in his closing. In fact, in the United States republicanism had triumphed in the American Revolution and then in the Civil War, said Grinnell, and, as a result, freedom was extended to all, even former slaves and those “driven here by oppression abroad.” But now that America was so free, it might be in danger, for “in this country, above all countries in the world, anarchy is possible.” Indeed, the state’s attorney warned, “there is but one step from republicanism to anarchy.” Freeing the anarchists would mean taking that step. And that was why, he explained, “there never was in the history of this country . . . a case that has attracted such interest as this.” If the jurymen unjustly acquitted the anarchists, their followers would “flock out again like a lot of rats and vermin.” And so the jurors would be making history when they rendered their verdict. “The law which has made us strong today and which you have sworn today demands of you a punishment of these men. Don’t do it because I ask you. Do it because the law demands it.”52

  After this grave discourse, Grinnell added an appealing personal note. “We may never meet again, Gentlemen. In this case I have been pleased to make your acquaintance. I hope I have done nothing to offend you, either as to propriety, decency, good sense, or anything else. If we part here, we part as friends.” After these pleasantries, he ended by telling the jurymen: “You stand between the living and the dead. You stand between law and violated law. Do your duty courageously, even if that duty is an unpleasant and a severe one.”53

  After Grinnell finished, Judge Gary brought the long trial proceedings to a close, instructing the jurymen they could find the eight men guilty of murder even if the crime was committed by someone who was not charged. According to one observer
, even the contemptuous Louis Lingg, “the tiger anarchist,” finally seemed to realize the danger of his situation. 54

  On August 19 the jury retired at 2:50 p.m. to the nearby Revere House Hotel. Crowds watched them through the windows that evening and saw men in their shirtsleeves resting in easy positions, smoking and apparently enjoying themselves. Clearly, they had speedily reached a verdict.55

  Judge Joseph E. Gary

  More than 1,000 people gathered around the courthouse at ten the next morning, anxiously waiting to hear the jury’s decision. A small army of bailiffs and policemen guarded the doors and held back the surging masses of people by sheer force. The well-dressed ladies who had been attending the trial as spectators were barred from entry this day; the only persons admitted were lawyers, police officers, relatives, reporters and a few favored members of the bar.

  When the jurymen entered at 9:55 a.m., the defendants displayed their customary calm. Parsons, sitting near a window, took out his red handkerchief and waved to the crowd below. Schwab said to him, “I wish I could go down there and make a speech to those people.” No longer side by side with the defendants, Captain Black sat down with his wife, who asked him, “Are they prepared for the worst?” “Prepared!” he said. “Yes, fully prepared to laugh at death.” They talked about their end, Black added, much more coolly than he could.56

  Then, in the perfectly still room, the jury foreman read the verdict. He said the jury had found seven of the defendants guilty of murder as charged and had fixed the penalty as death. Oscar Neebe was also found guilty of murder but was sentenced to imprisonment for fifteen years. At first the room remained silent, as though a thousand people had sucked the air out of it. Then the eerie quiet was broken by the hysterical screams of Michael Schwab’s wife, Maria.57

  Captain Black was shocked by the sentence; he had expected conviction from a jury he thought was prejudiced, but he never expected the death sentence to be pronounced on all but one of the eight men. The attorney hid his emotions in the moments after the verdict was announced and simply moved for a new trial. Among the prisoners sitting in the dock, only two men reacted. Oscar Neebe, who had been assured of acquittal by his lawyers, was visibly disturbed; and Albert Parsons, ever theatrical, was curiously affected: he stood, smiled and bowed to the audience and then turned to the window and tied the string on the shade into the form of a noose to let the crowd outside know the result. As the news leaked out into the street, cheerful shouts of relief erupted from the huge crowd.58

  The bailiffs then led the prisoners back to their jail cells. Spies and Fischer looked pale, said one reporter, but not visibly disturbed, nor did Engel or Lingg. Neebe, however, walked like a stricken man, Fielden shuffled out with support from his comrades, and the frail Schwab tottered behind Parsons, who, it was reported, had “lost none of his Texas nerve.”59

  Outside, courthouse reporters elbowed each other to interview the attorneys and the jurors. One juror said he disliked lawyer Zeisler and was offended by Parsons’s “impudence.” Another commented, “Every man on the jury was an American,” and, therefore, he explained, no one showed any “toleration for imported preachers of assassination.” 60

  The evening papers featured high praise for these jurymen and reported that wealthy businessmen would raise a large sum to pay them as a sign of gratitude. The Tribune reported “universal satisfaction with the verdict” because “the law had been vindicated.” The Inter-Ocean said, “The long strain of suspense and anxiety is over,” adding that no trial in living memory had generated such widespread interest in a verdict. “Anarchism has been on trial ever since May 4; and it now has got its verdict. Death is the only fitting penalty.” All editorialists declared that the defendants had been fairly prosecuted and ably defended; and some expressed dismay that the anarchists had exercised their right to appeal the decision, because it might delay their date with the hangman. 61

  DURING THE MID NINETEENTH century, murder trials became enormously attractive to the nation’s newspapers, and then during the Gilded Age, when big-city dailies mushroomed and competed ruthlessly for readers, some courtroom dramas became national events and certain defendants became celebrities. The breadth and depth of coverage devoted to the Haymarket case exceeded all others in the post–Civil War years, because, except for the presidential assassins John Wilkes Booth and Charles Guiteau, no civilians had ever been tried for anything like the crime the eight anarchists were accused of committing; nor had any defendants in a local criminal court ever been prosecuted in such an overtly political trial. The defendants were not only held accountable for the unimaginable crime of murdering seven policemen; they were also being tried for attempting “to make anarchy the rule” in America. 62

  As a result, newspapers across the nation sounded a chorus of approval at the verdict and the sentences. Many editorials reflected the conviction, or at least the hope, that the impending executions would kill anarchism in America and rid the nation of the high anxiety that had existed since May 4, 1886.63 For example, a New Orleans newspaper editor wrote that “all the chapters in the dramatic and horrible Haymarket tragedy have been written save one; all the acts finished but the last.” When the curtain rolled up again, with a nation watching, the final tableau would reveal “a row of gibbeted felons, with haltered throats and fettered hands and feet, swinging slowly to and fro, in the air,” said the New Orleans Times-Democrat. And then, to wild applause, the curtain would drop as the people exhaled in unison, knowing that anarchism was “forever dead in America!”64

  No one in the mainstream press would have noticed the few dissenting views on the trial contained in the radical press, such as the one voiced by the editor of the Workmen’s Advocate. “Look at the case in the light of Truth and Reason,” he urged his readers: a large squad of police raided a peaceful meeting, and were struck by a bomb thrown by an unknown assailant—as likely as not a Pinkerton agent provocateur. The next day a reign of terror began not only for the anarchists but for others who expressed similar criticisms of business and government. During the so-called trial, the prosecution called to the stand various “professional perjurers” but could not show that any of the defendants had any hand in the bomb throwing or had fired any shots at the police. The whole tragic performance, said the editor, concluded with the sentencing of the anarchists to death, not “for breaking any law, but for daring to denounce the usurpations of the robber rulers of our Satanic society.”65

  For a week following the verdict, no one in Chicago except the anarchists and their supporters expressed anything but jubilation over the verdict. Then, in the next days and weeks expressions of consternation began to rise from the city’s working-class neighborhoods, saloons and meeting halls. A small Chicago newspaper friendly to unions even reported that a vast majority of laborers in the city believed the bomb throwing was not the work of the anarchists but of some other party intent on deflating the eight-hour movement. This belief was rapidly spreading through all the ranks of labor, said the editor, but the city’s businessmen still had no conception of the reaction the verdict would eventually produce among workers in Chicago or in other cities across the nation and around the world.66

  Chapter Fourteen

  You Are Being Weighed in the Balance

  AUGUST 22 , 1886–APRIL 2, 1887

  THE DAY AFTER the verdict came down, a large group of discontented workingmen gathered at Greenbaum Hall on Chicago’s West Side. The assembly represented all the divisions of the city’s tattered army of labor—the skilled and the unskilled, the native and the foreign-born. There were Bavarian Catholics and Swedish Lutherans along with Irish-American Knights and British socialists, as well as German and Bohemian anarchists. Most of these men had voted for Mayor Carter Harrison and the Democrats in the last election; some had voted Republican, and some, the militants, had not voted at all. Now, after the tumultuous spring of strikes and a tense summer of trial news, they had had enough of politics as usual. They were assembled that day to f
ound their own united labor party and run their own candidates for office. Before the proceedings began, the delegates all rose to give a standing ovation, not to a labor leader, but to a middle-aged woman in a dark matronly dress. The woman they cheered that day was Mrs. Hortensia Black, who spoke for her husband, Captain Black, the corporation lawyer whose exhaustive defense of the Haymarket defendants had made him a working-class hero in Chicago and beyond.

  When the jury had rendered its verdict and its death sentences on August 20, few trade unionists commented in the press. Still, the news that came from Judge Gary’s courtroom alarmed many workers, who now feared losing their rights to protest and speak out in anger. A dangerous precedent had been set that day: if some kind of lethal violence occurred after the trade unionists freely assembled and expressed themselves, then their leaders could be indicted and tried as accessories to murder.1

  After hearing Mrs. Black’s critical remarks on the Haymarket trial and verdict, the meeting at Greenbaum’s voted to field a full independent ticket in the November elections, despite the opposition of some top union officials. On August 28, the Chicago Express, whose editor supported the Knights and the eight-hour movement, branded Inspector Bonfield the “real author of the Haymarket slaughter.” And on Labor Day various Chicago union members met to denounce the verdict and the role of the newspapers in whipping up hatred and fear.2

  Expressions of protest grew in volume during the fall, when Captain Black and his team harshly criticized the summer’s trial proceedings and made the case for a new trial.3 Judge Gary, who had received huge accolades from the fourth estate, gave the critics no satisfaction. After a week of hearings during the first week of October, he denied the defendants’ plea with a blunt statement insisting that the anarchists had received a fair trial during which the people had shown unprecedented patience toward the accused.4