Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  DURING THE NEXT MONTHS the anarchists gained something close to celebrity status as they received constant attention in the press and entertained a steady flow of visitors. Joseph R. Buchanan, a prominent organizer and editor for the Knights of Labor, arrived from Denver to bring good tidings from western workers; he then called regularly to see “the boys” after he moved to Chicago to work for the defense. Leading European socialists also visited the jail, including the German party leader, Wilhelm Liebknecht, along with Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor and her husband, Edward Aveling. Parsons enjoyed many visits from old friends such as the anarchist Dyer D. Lum, who would play a prominent role in the anarchists’ story. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Lum had become an abolitionist and a devoted admirer of John Brown. He enlisted in the Union army to liberate the slaves and after the war joined Wendell Phillips in the reform movement. Lum met Parsons in 1879, when they were lobbying for a national eight-hour law, and drew closer to the Texan as both men moved toward anarchism. A brilliant writer and a sophisticated intellectual, Dyer Lum was utterly devoted to the revolutionary cause and as committed to the use of force as his hero John Brown had been. Lum was also deeply committed to the Haymarket defendants, so much so that he sold his business in New York after their arrest and moved to Chicago to aid in their defense and to reopen Albert Parsons’s newspaper, the Alarm.30

  In addition, the defendants were interviewed by scores of reporters from the very newspapers whose editors had already tried them and condemned them to death. One of them was Charles Edward Russell, who filed daily reports from Chicago for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. The journalist spoke at length with them all, save Lingg. At first, they regarded Russell as their natural enemy and part of the capitalist press machinery that had convicted them in the public eye, but, eventually, the inmates became approachable, even cordial. The impressions the convicts made on this reporter and other journalists began to seep into news stories, which often described the anarchists as ordinary men visiting affectionately with family and friends. Russell, for example, found Spies attractive, “well educated, magnificently set up, fluent and plausible in English as well as German, a blue-eyed Saxon, emotional, sentimental and rash.” Fielden seemed an affable, almost comic figure, a likable, awkward “galoot.” Schwab looked the part of a German university professor, “a thin, angular, sallow person, spectacled, long-haired, black-bearded, unkempt”—a man with “the best mental equipment” but a “dreamy” way about him. Fischer, on the other hand, seemed to Russell a hotheaded youth, “a half baked student of German philosophical anarchism.” Engel’s beliefs, however, were the genuine product of his hard experience as an orphan who had been kicked from pillar to post. “He had a chubby, good-natured face, looked like an elderly German bar tender, seemed to cherish no resentments,” and he “talked freely and entertainingly” with anyone who approached him.31

  Albert Parsons was the special one to Russell, who confessed that he took a strong liking to the prisoner. Russell found the Texan an immensely engaging conversationalist and a picturesque storyteller with good taste in poetry and an excellent singing voice. The reporter regarded Parsons’s political thinking as incomplete and confused, but still found it impossible not to like him.32 Thus the anarchists, once demonized as beasts, began, now that they were caged on death row, to be humanized by the newspapermen who had helped put them behind bars.

  George Engel (left) and Adolph Fischer

  Art Young, a twenty-year-old artist from Wisconsin, depicted the condemned men in their cells for the Chicago Daily News as they assumed casual poses. In one drawing Parsons is seated looking like a lawyer relaxing in a businessman’s club, one leg thrown over the other, a newspaper dangling loosely from one hand, a cigarillo held elegantly in the other. Another less artful drawing by a different illustrator showed Albert embracing his daughter, Lulu, while Lucy is seen looking in at them from behind the bars. Young also drew Maria Schwab dressed in a shirtwaist and wearing a large hat, sitting in a chair and talking to her husband, Michael, as he leaned against the bars to be close to her.33

  Lingg played a special part in this jailhouse mise-en-scène . His hostile looks, his defiance in court, his threatening words and his reckless attitude made the others seem less menacing. Art Young, who was the same age as the prisoner, drew him with his arms crossed and a faint smile on his lips. “My memory of Louis Lingg is distinct,” Young wrote later, “because the sun was shining in his cell as I sketched him. He was a handsome boy, sitting proudly and looking directly toward me as much as to say, ‘Go ahead, nothing matters.’ ” But to other reporters, Lingg seemed a horrifying character, the embodiment of evil. Russell found him a terrifying young man with a malignant stare. Indeed, Lingg seemed the only really dangerous man among the eight; so it struck the reporter as odd that this “tiger anarchist” had a sweetheart who visited him— a tall, statuesque brunette, who came frequently from the West Side and talked intimately with the prisoner through the steel bars and wire mesh of his cell.34

  The most sensational visitor of all was Nina Van Zandt, a well-bred young woman who had become closely attached to August Spies. “She was about twenty-four, slenderly-fashioned, handsome, always exquisitely gowned,” Russell recalled, and she conducted herself with the “deportment of a refined educated woman.” She came to see Spies every day and spoke quietly to him for her allotted hour. It was impossible for the reporter to imagine a figure more incongruous in such a grim place. Other journalists were fascinated by Spies’s lady friend as well, and they eagerly reported her appearances and speculated as to her motives.35

  The only child of a wealthy Chicago medicine manufacturer, Nina Van Zandt was a graduate of Vassar and the heiress to a small fortune. Like many other ladies, she had been a curious spectator at the trial of the century, but unlike the others, she had gradually become convinced of the defendants’ innocence. Driven by a feeling of horror that these men would die on the gallows, she plunged into defense work. After visiting all the prisoners, she turned her attentions mainly to Spies, and by December she had fallen in love with him. Though they spoke through iron bars and wire mesh, it was clear to observers that the couple had romantic feelings for each other. The jailers made no attempt to interfere, but after the installation of a new sheriff named Canute Matson, a tough disciplinarian of Norwegian origin, Nina’s visits were drastically curtailed.36

  In their next conversation the couple devised a bold plan. Because wives were allowed more visiting time than friends, Spies and Van Zandt decided they should be married. When their plans for a wedding on death row leaked out, the newspaper editors went wild with rage. Nina was suddenly the subject of unending abuse and ridicule. There would have been little comment, Van Zandt recalled, if she had been some “obscure, foreign girl,” but she was regarded as an American lady of privilege and standing, so lowering herself by agreeing to marry a condemned criminal seemed to the press like something akin to prostitution.37

  The defense attorneys, Black and Swett, were beside themselves with distress over Spies’s romantic intentions, which they feared would damage their chances for appeal; but they could not persuade him to alter his course. The lawyers were relieved when the sheriff refused to allow the marriage to take place in the jail. Yet the sensational affair did not fade from the news; it reappeared on January 29, 1887, when Henry Spies repeated the marriage vows on his brother’s behalf and Nina Van Zandt responded for herself, promising to love, honor and obey the most notorious man in America. A few days later a gang attacked the Van Zandt home, and the sheriff barred Nina from visiting her newlywed husband at all.38

  Nina Van Zandt

  While the newspapers still buzzed with talk of the jailhouse love affair, Black and Swett began their arguments before the Illinois Supreme Court. The captain was confident of a reversal of the judgment because, even though the press remained adamantly supportive of the verdict, public opinion seemed to be shifting. At about this time, Black learned from Eleanor Mar
x and her husband that most of the working-class people the English socialists met on a multicity tour that winter believed the anarchists’ trial to be a miscarriage of justice. Lucy Parsons reported similar responses while on the road for many weeks following the October sentencing. By March she had addressed fifty audiences in sixteen states, generating sympathy for the defendants and raising money for their defense. She was arrested in Columbus and Akron but pressed on with her solo campaign to seek support from various segments of the population.39

  Captain Black’s assurance of winning a new trial was based not on public opinion, however, but on his certainty that the appeal he drafted revealed that a legal travesty had occurred in Judge Gary’s courtroom. When he appeared before the supreme court justices, a half-dozen elderly men, the attorney argued that no conspiracy to commit murder had been proven and that the anarchists had been convicted entirely for their beliefs.40

  Attorney Swett chose a different approach. Speaking as a pioneer Illinois Republican and a close associate of Lincoln, the counselor appealed to those experiences he shared with the justices. He recalled the history of the party’s formation, when its radical leaders denounced the Constitution, established the Underground Railroad and conspired to act against the laws of the United States by aiding and abetting the escape of slaves. The storm finally peaked, he added, when John Brown violated the laws of Virginia. Swett then applied this history lesson to the anarchist case, arguing that all the Republicans who gave such subversive antislavery speeches and “believed in the utopian idea of a change in society for the benefit of a class” were criminal conspirators with John Brown and, therefore, by this logic ought to have been hanged as well.41

  After the plea had been argued before the supreme court, the city turned its attention away from the case to the exciting municipal elections taking place in April. Electoral politics, like most aspects of public life in Chicago, had been deeply affected by the anarchist trial. The new United Labor Party had made a surprising showing in the November elections, winning 26 percent of the vote across the city and much more in immigrant working-class wards. In the town of Lake, where eight-hour strikers in the stockyards had faced an occupying army of Pinkertons, sheriff’s deputies and National Guard troops, the insurgent vote was even higher. From his cell in the county jail, Albert Parsons had claimed that every vote cast for the labor ticket in Chicago was a protest against the verdict in his trial.42

  As the spring election neared, the socialists, anarchists and other labor activists cheered when Mayor Harrison refused to accept a fifth nomination as a Democratic candidate for mayor of Chicago; instead, he endorsed the Labor Party ticket headed by a socialist worker and supported by various factions of the union movement, including the anarchist-led organizations. Harrison’s action was quickly forgotten when panic-stricken Democratic Party leaders endorsed the Republican mayoral candidate and joined forces with their old rivals against the threat posed by a third party with radical leadership. The United Labor Party candidates campaigned against “Black Jack” Bonfield and promised to remove him as police inspector if they won. The Republicans responded by charging that the new party was a stalking horse for the anarchists, who wanted to abolish the police department and create a state of anarchy. On election day, April 5, the Tribune told its readers: “Ballots should be cast for law and order as against anarchy and incompetency.”43

  The law-and-order coalition played effectively on the public’s fear of urban disorder, a feeling that remained palpable nearly a year after Haymarket. As a result, the Republican mayoral candidate, John A. Roche, swept to victory and the Labor Party failed to increase its vote. Inspector Bonfield told the press there “wasn’t a prouder man in Chicago” that night than he, for the election represented a vindication of his course of action and a rejection of those who wanted to drive him from the city. When Albert Parsons heard the news in Cell 29, the Tribune’s reporter wrote that he raged over the results like a lunatic and let loose “a string of oaths that would have captured a Democratic convention.” From the day of his surrender, Parsons was sure the state was going to kill him, but he hoped that his trial and ordeal would at least revive the radical workers’ movement he had led for a decade; now he felt frustrated enough to bark at a reporter, “The fools are as plentiful as ever.”44

  Spies, Schwab and Neebe were also visibly upset, but they made no comment to the press. Sam Fielden chose to speak to reporters and told them he was downcast after the election. “I feel very bad about it,” he told one newsman. “Prejudice has been worked up by the press to such an extent during the campaign that popular feeling is now almost as bad as it was after the 4th of May, and this cannot but have a bad effect on the Judges of the Supreme Court.” He no longer held out much hope that he would receive a new trial. “We were convicted in consequence of public clamor,” Fielden said with his usual bluntness, “and we may hang from the same cause.”45

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Law Is Vindicated

  APRIL 3, 1887–NOVEMBER 11, 1887

  SAM FIELDEN READ the signs of the time correctly. His fate and that of his comrades was linked to that of the labor movement, as it had been since he arrived in Chicago. The United Labor Party disintegrated over the summer months of 1887, and the once-powerful Knights lost most of their remaining members. Chicago union members who had gained shorter hours in May 1886 now faced employers determined to stretch them out again. The building trades unions beat back contractors attempting to return to the ten-hour day in the spring, but the strikers were isolated now, no longer involved in a mass mobilization like the Great Upheaval that shook the city a year before. The Haymarket bomb, the Tribune reported with relief, had shattered the Internationals’ attempt to build a unified movement of the skilled and unskilled through a general strike.1

  Equally distressing to the anarchists, and to other trade unionists, was the news that, on the first anniversary of Haymarket, the Illinois House of Representatives had enacted a statute providing that anyone who spoke to any assembly in public or private or who wrote, printed or published any words that “incited local revolution” or the “destruction of the existing order” could be found guilty of criminal conspiracy; and that, further, if a life was taken as a result of such speeches and writings, the person accused should be considered a principal in the perpetration of said murder.2 In other words, the unprecedented interpretation of conspiracy doctrine in the anarchist case had now been written into state law. This meant that the six state supreme court justices now reviewing the case would, if they ordered a new trial, not only have to discredit a prosecutor, a judge and a jury regarded as heroes in Illinois; they would also have to contradict the state’s new conspiracy law.

  Nonetheless, Captain Black remained hopeful that the errors in the Haymarket murder trial would compel the justices to agree with his objections. Other Chicago lawyers agreed, men like Samuel P. McConnell and his father-in-law, John G. Rogers, the chief justice of the circuit court. Both men were critical of Judge Gary’s conduct and of his rulings. McConnell thought the presiding judge had treated the whole Haymarket trial like a holiday event, as had the well-dressed women he invited to sit on the bench with him. Judge Rogers believed Gary had made new law and ignored established rules about jury selection that were intended to assure fair trials. As a result, the two men were as shocked as Captain Black was when, after six months of deliberation, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected the writ of appeal and affirmed the August verdict of the Chicago court. On September 13 the chief justice read the court’s ruling to an expectant throng. Before he had even finished, reporters raced each other to telegraph offices to transmit the news that the death sentence would be carried out on November 11, 1887.3 For the next two months the fate of the anarchists in the Cook County Jail captured the attention of the daily newspapers and the nation’s leading magazines.

  When Sheriff Canute Matson received the execution order, he doubled the guard around the Cook County Jail and ordered
his deputies to escort Oscar Neebe to Joliet State Prison, where he would serve his fifteen-year sentence at hard labor. The prisoner was spirited away in the dead of night with no chance to bid his comrades farewell, but somehow he talked to a reporter during his passage. Neebe repeated that his only crimes were organizing brewers and salesclerks and publishing a workers’ paper. “What I have done, I would do again,” he told the Daily News, “and the time will come when the blood of the martyrs about to be sacrificed will cry aloud for vengeance, and that cry will be heard . . . before many years elapse.” 4

  Organized labor responded immediately to the news from Illinois as union groups met in many cities to decry the supreme court justices’ decision. In New York City prominent leaders of the Central Labor Union, led by Samuel Gompers, declared that the convicted workingmen were victims of “the misguiding and corrupting influence of prejudice and class hatred” and had been condemned to death without any conclusive evidence. The execution of the death sentence would, the labor chiefs declared, be nothing less than a “judicial murder prompted by the basest and most un-American motives.”5

  Captain Black denounced the supreme court’s ruling as infamous, because it meant that nothing now prevented a citizen from being arrested, tried, convicted and executed for simply speaking as an anarchist. While the lawyers prepared to make a new appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, George Schilling and others on the defense committee created the Amnesty Association that they hoped would enlist a wide range of citizens in a petition drive asking Governor Oglesby to grant clemency. Robert Ingersoll signed on, saying there was hope because the governor was a courageous man with a good heart and noble instincts, even though he might be swayed by the general feeling among the upper classes in favor of the death penalty.6