Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  When the judge finished reading his ruling on October 7, the convicts were allowed to speak on their own behalf before the sentence was passed. Normally, this judicial ritual permitted defendants to offer a belated confession or to express sorrow over their victims’ fate. What happened next in the Chicago courthouse was anything but normal, as the eight anarchists recited a litany of injustices perpetrated against them by the police, the press, the prosecutors, the judge and the jury. For three days the anarchists took the floor and held it while they addressed a higher court of popular opinion, a court constituted, in their minds, by the worldwide community of workers. The anarchists believed they were being tried for the words they had spoken in the past, and now they aimed to be remembered in the future for the last words they uttered.

  On October 8, as August Spies rose to speak before the court, Judge Gary repeated his caution to the audience to refrain from any demonstration. He then ordered all to be seated, even though some had to sit on the floor. After some moving and shuffling, everyone quieted as the so-called ringleader of the Chicago anarchists looked out over the room and began to give the speech of his life. It lasted for several hours as Spies rebutted Grinnell’s charges one by one, impeached the testimony of paid witnesses and took exception to the state’s attorney’s appeal to patriotism, “the last refuge of the scoundrel.” “I have been a citizen of this city as long as Mr. Grinnell,” he declared, “and am probably as good a citizen as Grinnell.” Indeed, Spies asserted, he was a principled man, not a common murderer with no principles as the attorney charged. He was indeed a man of ideas and he would not allow the state to deny this. Spies said he would not divest himself of his ideas, even if he could, because they constituted part of himself. 5

  August Spies

  When Spies stopped defending himself, he took the offensive, challenging those who believed that killing the anarchists would bring an end to the nation’s labor troubles. “If you think you can stamp out the labor movement, then hang us!” But, he added, “Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.” Spies concluded by declaring that if the state thought people should suffer capital punishment because they “dared to tell the truth,” then he would “proudly and defiantly pay the costly price.” “Call your hangman!” he said to Judge Gary. He was prepared to die like others before him—from Socrates to Christ to Galileo—who had been “crucified” for telling the truth.6

  Like their leader, August Spies, the other defendants who addressed the court refused to beg for mercy. Michael Schwab offered a defense of anarchy, saying it was the antithesis of violence. Violence was used on all sides, he argued, and the anarchists only advocated “violence against violence”—as a “necessary means of self defense.” Louis Lingg took a very different tack. His speech was emphatic and angry. He said he would die gladly on the gallows knowing that hundreds of people he knew would now make use of dynamite. Then he denounced the entire process as a sham. When his concluding remarks were translated from German to English, gasps arose in the courtroom. “I despise you and I despise your laws,” Lingg had shouted. “Hang me for it!” 7

  Oscar Neebe described his dilemma with biting irony, saying that he had been accused of the “crimes” of organizing workers, publishing a workers’ newspaper, marshaling a parade of anarchist union members. No evidence had been introduced to show that Neebe was connected to the alleged conspiracy in any way, but for crimes like being the marshal of a demonstration, he was to be confined to prison for fifteen years. He alone would escape the gallows, but at this reprieve he expressed only despair. “Your honor,” he concluded, to the dismay of his lawyers, “I am sorry I am not to be hung with the rest of them.” Neebe said it would be more honorable to die suddenly next to his comrades “than be killed by inches” in prison.8

  At the end of the day on October 8, Albert Parsons took his turn to speak. He had made many speeches in tense settings—at gatherings before freed slaves on Texas plantations and at rallies before vast throngs in Chicago’s raucous market squares—but now he spoke in a court of law before a captive audience of a thousand of his fellow citizens and scores of reporters. He wanted to give a speech not only for the moment but for the ages, a speech that might not save his life but that would preserve his voice for posterity.

  Looking sallow and wasted from his confinement, Parsons stood before the courtroom in a black suit with a red flower in his lapel and a necktie to match. He placed an enormous folder of papers on the table in front of him and then began speaking in his remarkably clear voice. At first, he assumed the role of a petitioner.

  Your Honor, if there is one distinguishing characteristic which has made itself prominent in the conduct of this trial it has been the passion, the heat, the anger, the violence of everything connected with this case. . . . You ask me why a sentence of death should not be pronounced upon me. You ask me why you should give me a new trial that I might establish my innocence and the ends of justice be served. I answer, your Honor, and say that this verdict is a verdict of passion, born of passion, nurtured in passion, and is the sum total of the organized passion of the city of Chicago. For this reason I ask your suspension of the sentence and a new trial.9

  Then Parsons altered his tone, shifting from the part of petitioner to the role of denouncer. He first attacked those who claimed to represent public sentiment, “that vile and infamous monopoly of hired liars—the capitalist press.” Addressing Gary, he proclaimed, “this trial was conducted by a mob, prosecuted by a mob . . . an organized and powerful mob.” At this moment, the convict uttered the words that would be quoted over and over again by those who looked back in anger at the trial. “Now, your Honor, I hold that our execution, as the matter stands now, would be judicial murder.” He kept on speaking through the afternoon and then, as evening approached and gaslights popped on, Parsons calmly turned to the judge and said: “Your Honor, if you will permit it, I would like to stop now and resume tomorrow morning.”10

  At 10 a.m. the next day, seemingly refreshed and composed, Parsons carried on with his discourse. He would hold forth for the rest of the day. Once again, he began in a solicitous way. “Well, possibly I have said some foolish things,” he granted. “Who has not?” He explained that the plight of the workers and the assaults made upon them by policemen and militiamen overwhelmed him with feelings of pity and indignation, and so he had said some things he might not have said in a cooler frame of mind. The angry words he had uttered did not, however, mean that he was an assassin. “I am called a dynamiter by the prosecution here. Why? Did I ever use dynamite? No. Did I ever have any? No.” Then why was he called a dynamiter? Simply because he told workers that dynamite would, like the invention of gunpowder, serve to equalize social power.

  Then he was off again, speaking without apology. “So today,” he declared, “dynamite comes as the emancipator of man from the domination . . . of his fellow man.” Judge Gary grew visibly impatient, but Parsons refused to change direction. “Bear with me now,” he said. “Dynamite is the diffusion of power. It is democratic; it makes everybody equal.” After infuriating most of his listeners with this lecture, the speaker returned to the legal question of free speech. “It is proposed by the prosecution here to take me by force and strangle me on the gallows for these things I have said, for these expressions,” he remarked, but did it follow that he was a dynamiter because he held these views and expressed them in angry speeches?11

  Parsons continued in a less provocative way, assuming new speaking roles as he proceeded into the late morning. He spoke as a historian, narrating the development of the labor movement and the history of bloody lockouts and massacres suffered by workers, devoting special attention to the Pinkerton Agency, “a private army” employers hired to terrorize workers and suppress their protests. He spoke as a political philosopher, defining the meaning of so
cialism and explaining that it took two forms— anarchism, an egalitarian society without a controlling authority, and state socialism, which meant governmental control of everything. He spoke as an economist, examining the wage question, the eight-hour reform movement and the relations of capital and labor. And he spoke as a journalist about the “real facts of the Haymarket tragedy,” quoting the testimony of Mayor Harrison, who said that the meeting was peaceful and that none of the speakers had incited the crowd.12

  Albert Parsons

  Parsons even assumed the role of a prosecutor, turning the tables on the representatives of the state; they were the ones who had violated the defendants’ rights to free speech, to a free press, to free assembly and the right to self-defense. Flipping the prosecution’s script, the speaker claimed that the bombing itself was “the deliberate work of monopoly— the act of those who themselves charge us with this deed,” and insisted that the accused were the real victims—victims of a conspiracy hatched by the city’s millionaires to deprive them of their lives and liberties. 13

  As the day wore on, the audience shifted uneasily, and Judge Gary became increasingly agitated, expressing his irritation with hard looks and gestures. But there were still more voices of Albert Parsons to be heard. He even lectured the jury as a scientist on—of all things—the chemistry of dynamite. Parsons argued that the missile thrown on May 4 was not made of dynamite; it was instead “what was known in the Civil War as an infernal bomb composed of gunpowder, not nitroglycerin.” The proof lay in the testimony of the surgeons who described wounds in the policemen’s bodies that were far less serious than if dynamite had been used. Dynamite would have blown them into “unrecognizable fragments.” 14

  Then, shifting abruptly to the high ground, Parsons identified himself as an American citizen, one whose ancestors fought at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. He and Oscar Neebe were the only defendants who “had the fortune, or the misfortune—as some people look at it—of being born in this country,” he said. The rest of his comrades were charged with being foreigners, “as though it was a crime to be born in some other country.” Then, rallying his strength, the speaker declared himself “an Inter-nationalist,” one whose patriotism extended “beyond the boundary lines of a single state.” Opening his arms wide, he declared, “The world is my country, all mankind my countrymen.”15

  At about 1 p.m. Parsons, clearly exhausted, asked the judge for a short lunch recess, explaining that he had been weakened physically by his confinement in a gloomy cell without his customary outdoor exercise. Judge Gary cut Parsons off and denied his plea for a recess.16 Angry now, the speaker turned on the judge and addressed him directly in a thin but insistent voice. “I am here standing in the spot awaiting your sentence, because I hate authority in every form,” he rasped. “I am doomed by you to suffer an ignominious death because I am an outspoken enemy of coercion, of privilege, of force, of authority.” He was nearing the end. “Think you, the people are blind, are asleep, are indifferent?” Parsons asked, addressing all those in authority. “You deceive yourselves. I tell you, as a man of the people, and I speak for them, that your every word and act . . . are recorded. You are being weighed in the balance. The people are conscious of your power—your stolen power. I, a working man, stand here and to your face, in your stronghold of oppression, denounce . . . your crimes against humanity. It is for this I die, but my death will not have been in vain.” Near collapse, he said in a low tone: “I guess I have finished. I don’t know as I have anything more to say.” 17 Not a single voice cheered, not a pair of hands clapped for this speech, the last one Albert Parsons would ever deliver.

  In a heartbeat, the judge pronounced the sentence. Oscar Neebe was to be imprisoned in the Joliet State Penitentiary, to serve a fifteen-year sentence at hard labor. Each of the other seven defendants would, at the appointed time and in the manner prescribed by state statute, be “hanged by the neck until he is dead.” Then Gary ordered the bailiff to remove the prisoners.

  And so it ended, one of the most remarkable criminal trials that ever occurred in this country; remarkable for its sheer drama and for the passionate interest it aroused among people all over America; remarkable for the prosecution’s unprecedented application of conspiracy law; remarkable for the quality of evidence used to convict seven men of murder; and remarkable for the way the proceedings and the verdict divided Americans along fault lines of class and nationality.18

  JUDGE GARY HAD ORDERED the execution of the condemned men to take place on or before December 3, 1886, but Captain Black held out hope for a reprieve until the case could be reviewed by the state supreme court. In the meantime, the anarchists’ supporters began to mount a defense campaign. Lucy Parsons took to the road and spoke to union audiences in several cities, where she raised money and aroused sympathy.19 Support for the defendants surfaced in the anarchist-led unions as well as in various assemblies of the Knights of Labor, where Parsons and the other Chicago anarchists were known as organizers and leaders of the eight-hour movement.

  During and after the red scare in May of 1886, the powerful movement for shorter hours had all but expired, as employers regained the offensive and restored traditional workdays of ten or more hours. On October 11, 1887, the big meat companies in the Chicago stockyards announced a return to ten hours a day after negotiations broke down over the Knights of Labor’s demands to maintain an eight-hour day. A huge strike then erupted in the yards, where the Knights had recruited more than 20,000 members. The packers employed the Pinkerton Agency, which provided 800 armed guards to protect strikebreakers. The workers held out for three weeks, against the orders of national leaders, but they eventually gave up their struggle to save the eight-hour day, and trudged back into the yards in early November thoroughly defeated.20 This was the beginning of the end of the Noble and Holy Order in Chicago and in other cities, where the Knights suffered from crippling internal conflicts and from other devastating defeats at the hands of unified groups of employers who abandoned their competitive ways to form a solid coalition against their unionized employees.21

  The national leader of the troubled order, Terence Powderly, who had called an end to the stockyards strike, was denounced as a Benedict Arnold by his embittered followers in Chicago. He also faced growing sentiment among his members that the anarchists there had been unfairly tried and cruelly sentenced. At the union’s national convention that October, Powderly’s forces beat back a resolution declaring the anarchists innocent, but the delegates did issue a plea for mercy on behalf of the condemned.22 After this meeting, the Knights in Chicago endorsed a much stronger resolution branding the verdict “an outrage upon common justice” and a result of a “capitalistic and judicial conspiracy.”23 As recriminations mounted within the order, the imprisoned anarchists were left with the cold comfort that they had long before warned the labor movement about the Grand Master Workman’s cowardice.

  A few weeks later the editors of the Chicago Knights of Labor newspaper, who had said on May 5 that the anarchists should be treated like wild beasts, gave up ownership of the newspaper as a result of rising anger over the trial and verdict within the ranks. These editors, Powderly loyalists, were replaced by Ethelbert Stewart, a radical, who had been mentored by the journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd when the young Stewart was working in a coffin factory. As editor of the Chicago Knights of Labor, Stewart published several editorials calling the anarchists’ prosecution a blatant attack against workers’ civil liberties.24 Powderly soon demanded that all Knights stop supporting the anarchists, but Bert Stewart defied the edict and wrote another editorial insisting that the right to a “fair trial” was far more important than any order on earth.25

  ON NOVEMBER 23, the anarchists’ lawyer, Captain Black, argued for a writ of error before the Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield, and a few days later, for a stay of execution, which the justices granted, until a hearing on the appeal could take place.26 It was Thanksgiving when Black brought the good news to the cold, dark confi
nes of the Cook County Jail. There was much rejoicing as the anarchists ate and celebrated their reprieve with family and friends.

  With this vital challenge met, Captain Black and George Schilling searched for another associate to aid in preparing the appeal. They called first upon Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, who had championed the eight-hour law when he was Richard Oglesby’s attorney general. The colonel had already consulted with the defense committee, expressing his view that Judge Gary had erred when he instructed the jury that they could convict the defendants of murder if they had spoken with criminal intent. Ingersoll also thought the men had been tried unfairly because the jury was dominated by clerks who were there to do the bidding of their employers. 27 The colonel believed that the anarchists had made terrible mistakes in word and deed, but he thought they were motivated by humanitarian considerations. As the nation’s most prominent atheist, though, Ingersoll feared that he would harm, if not doom, the anarchists’ case if he was associated with it. 28

  Captain Black and George Schilling then searched further and found the kind of attorney Ingersoll thought the appellants needed when they secured the services of a famous Illinois criminal lawyer. Leonard Swett, then sixty-one years of age, had become Lincoln’s close friend when they rode the Eighth Circuit of Southern Illinois as young lawyers. Swett had worked with Richard Oglesby to help their friend win the Republican presidential nomination at the 1860 convention. During the Civil War, while he practiced criminal law, Swett had served as a trusted adviser to Lincoln. After the assassination in 1865, Swett moved his practice to Chicago, where he helped to found the city bar association and became renowned for winning acquittals in numerous murder cases.29