Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Magazine cover of Cook County Jail cells at visiting time, with inset portraits of Nina Van Zandt and August Spies

  Albert Parsons took his own case directly to fellow citizens in a public letter written on September 21. Commenting on the effort to prevent his “judicial murder” by seeking a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment, he wrote: “Knowing myself innocent of crime I came forward and gave myself up for trial. I felt it was my duty to take my chances with the rest of my comrades,” rather than “being hunted like a felon.” Since surrendering, he continued, “I have been locked up in close confinement for twenty-one hours out of every twenty four . . . in a noisome cell, without a ray of sunlight or breath of pure air.” He did not want to bear this for even a few more years and said he was prepared to die rather than plead for a life behind bars. And then with a flourish, he wrote: “No. I am not guilty. I have not been proven guilty. I cannot, therefore, accept a commutation to imprisonment. I appeal—not for mercy, but for justice.” He ended by quoting his favorite revolutionary, Patrick Henry: “I know not what course others may take, but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”7

  Parsons’s letter was reprinted in many labor newspapers whose editors regarded it as a heroic demonstration of courageous manhood; it even appeared in some mainstream dailies. The bold declaration enhanced Parsons’s celebrity and convinced many readers of his innocence, but it caused dismay among leaders of the Amnesty Association. The clemency campaign proceeded, nonetheless, under the determined leadership of Parsons’s old friend George Schilling, who held out hope he could change the convict’s mind about pleading for his life. The tireless labor activist was assisted in this effort by Dr. William Salter and Henry Demarest Lloyd, two of the city’s leading intellectuals, men who dared to risk public condemnation as a result.

  William Salter had been educated in the best divinity schools, but he then turned to secular free thought and became a lecturer for the Ethical Culture Society. An open-minded person, he even accepted invitations from the International’s American Group to debates about socialism. He had been one of the first citizens outside the International who came to the defense of the accused anarchists during the frightening days after May 4, 1886. When the verdict was rendered that August, Salter threw himself into defense work. After bravely venturing out to lecture against the death sentence at the Opera House, he endured a steady stream of condemnation, even from members of his own society.8

  Henry Demarest Lloyd, who joined Salter in speaking for the defense effort, suffered even more tangibly. When he condemned the trial in a public forum, his powerful father-in-law, William “Deacon” Bross, an owner of the Chicago Tribune, denounced Lloyd and removed him as an heir to his fortune. Henry and his wife, Jessie Bross Lloyd, were drummed out of polite society and shunned in public arenas. Even an old friend gave him a “look of the most intense hatred possible from one human being to another.” Yet Lloyd did not shrink from the commitment he made to advocate for the men he believed were unfairly tried and unjustly condemned. Indeed, the writer seethed over the conduct of the trial in which Judge Gary acted like a prosecuting attorney, over the behavior of the police who set a precedent of arresting citizens without warrant and over the conduct of a jury that condemned men to death for being outspoken protest leaders. 9

  Lloyd also knew that the anarchists were deeply involved in the eight-hour movement, a cause in which he placed great hope, and that his old enemies, Chicago’s barons of banking, trading and manufacturing, were using the bombing to discredit the entire labor movement. The Haymarket tragedy was a transforming event in Henry Lloyd’s life, propelling him into an alliance with the American labor movement and into a brilliant phase of his career as the most influential worker advocate and business critic of the early progressive era.10

  Under his leadership, the Amnesty Association hoped to attract more support from the middle-class public, but at first the responses came mainly in the form of resolutions from labor unions and cash contributions from workers in many cities across the country, particularly from immigrant unionists in Chicago who were kept constantly informed by a revived radical press comprised of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, which had reopened under new management, Bert Stewart’s Knights of Labor and Joseph Buchanan’s Labor Enquirer, a popular radical newspaper the editor had produced in Denver until the Haymarket trial compelled him to move to Chicago and publish there. Buchanan was a major player in the national affairs of the Knights of Labor and one of Powderly’s main adversaries. A legendary organizer with anarchist sympathies of his own and an editorial voice that had national resonance, Buchanan led the way in making the anarchist case a cause célèbre in the national labor movement during the summer of 1887.

  Meanwhile, in New York City, John Swinton, the most influential labor journalist in the land, attacked the death sentence as a judicial murder intended to “gratify the frightened bourgeoisie.” He then joined with fourteen union leaders representing various wings of the city’s union movement to condemn the verdict and to call for a mass protest on October 20. That night, a large crowd jammed into the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City to hear Samuel Gompers, the new president of the American Federation of Labor, denounce the proceedings in Chicago. Unlike Powderly of the Knights, who refused to endorse the campaign for clemency, Gompers joined the venerable Swinton and other trade union leaders in making an appeal for liberty, free speech and justice, expressing their belief that the impending execution would be “a disgrace to the honor of this country.” 11

  That same month, trade unionists and reformers in London spoke out against the executions; they were primed by the editorials that appeared in Commonweal, the socialist publication edited by William Morris, the noted poet and designer who worried that, after rioting by unemployed marchers, Scotland Yard would adopt the repressive tactics of the Chicago police, who “hunted socialists like wolves.” 12 Other European socialist newspapers also devoted an enormous amount of coverage to the Haymarket affair, far more than to any other news story in the post–Civil War era.

  Samuel Gompers (left) and John Swinton

  Although socialist leaders in Europe regarded anarchists as dangerous provocateurs at best, they embraced the Haymarket defendants as heroic social revolutionaries and gave their hard-hitting attacks on American freedom wide circulation. At a time when most Europeans regarded the United States as a promised land, a “new Caanan,” the repressive red scare in May of 1886, along with the Chicago trial and the shocking death sentences that followed, proved, at least in the minds of radicals, that the same class struggle they observed on their continent was going on across the Atlantic. Coming in the same year as the French government’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the United States, the Haymarket events gave European radicals an unprecedented opportunity to challenge the popular view that the United States was an exceptional country, open, free and democratic.13

  Coverage of the trial and the appeal hearings was especially extensive in Paris, a city with an active anarchist movement (though it was tiny compared to the International in Chicago). When word of the failed appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court reached France, the socialist newspaper Le Cri du Peuple announced a protest against what would be the most atrocious political crime since the hanging of John Brown. Public concern reached all the way to the municipal council of the Seine, whose deputies issued a plea for mercy to the U.S. legation, recalling the clemency that had been extended to the “vanquished leaders of the Southern rebellion.” Many of the same deputies also signed a clemency petition to Governor Oglesby. In October radicals called Haymarket protest meetings in London, The Hague and Rotterdam, in Vienna, Brussels, Lyon, Marseilles and Toulon. It was no wonder, then, that the Tribune observed on October 11 that “[t]he eyes of the world seem to be on the Chicago anarchists.”14

  ON OCTOBER 27 the U.S. Supreme Court heard the appeal prepared by Captain Black with the assistance of three nationally known attorneys, including former army genera
l Benjamin F. Butler, loved by workingmen in the North for his labor radicalism and hated in the white South for his ruthless military rule of New Orleans during and after the Civil War. The attorneys argued that the police and prosecution had violated constitutional amendments that protected citizens from unlawful searches (the Fourth), against self-incrimination (the Fifth) and against being tried by a biased jury (the Sixth).15

  Defense lawyers also argued that the trial violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. General Ben Butler proposed to the Supreme Court justices that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional amendments should govern state court cases, because they were the law of the land. “Any other meaning given to ‘due process law’ ” would, he declared, make the Fourteenth Amendment “simply ridiculous and frivolous.” But the old radical seemed resigned to defeat, concluding his Supreme Court presentation with the kind of histrionic remark that made him famous. “If men’s lives can be taken in this way,” Butler declared, referring to the Chicago trial and verdict, “better anarchy, better to be without law, than with any such law.”16

  On November 2, 1887, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite read a unanimous decision of the court. The justices concluded that the constitutional violations cited by the appellants were relevant only in federal cases and, therefore, that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction because the case touched upon no federal law or national issue. In any case, the judges noted, “the defendants had not been deprived of a trial by a fair and impartial jury and had not been denied due process of law.”17

  At this point, the defense movement directed all its efforts to the governor’s office in Springfield, hoping Richard Oglesby would commute the sentences of the seven condemned men to life imprisonment. Knowing the law required the convicts to write statements of contrition, defense lawyers, family members and other supporters persuaded Fielden, Schwab and Spies to write to the governor conveying their regret over the violence of May 4 and repudiating their own statements calling for the use of force. Spies was very reluctant to write such a letter, and when he did, he insisted on adding a statement that he deplored all violence, not only the loss of life in the Haymarket but also the violence suffered by strikers in East St. Louis, at McCormick’s and in the Chicago stockyards. All three prisoners wrote that they had never advocated the use of force, except in the case of self-defense, and had “never consciously broken any laws.” However, urgent efforts failed to move Engel, Fischer and Lingg to write letters of appeal. The three intransigents did write to Oglesby, but to demand liberation, not a commutation of their death sentences. Captain Black said of their letters, “They are manly and courageous, but I regret the men felt called upon to write them.”18

  Albert Parsons also refused to change his mind and beg for clemency, even in the face of imploring visits from close friends and luminaries such as Henry D. Lloyd. Melville E. Stone, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, also made a plea. Stone talked with the condemned man for two hours, but to no avail. As he prepared to leave, Parsons said that he told the publisher, who had initially taken the lead in urging State’s Attorney Grinnell to try the eight anarchists for murder, even though no bomb thrower could be brought to trial: “You are responsible for my fate. Your venomous attacks condemned us in advance. I shall die with less fear and less regret than you will feel in living, for my blood is upon your head.”19

  Even longtime friend and admirer George Schilling could not sway Parsons from his stance; nor could a letter from his revered older brother, General William Parsons; nor could passionate pleas and compelling arguments from Captain Black, who explained to his stubborn client that leading men in Illinois now wanted his sentence commuted. Because of Parsons’s courageous surrender, many now believed the governor would grant him a reprieve if he would only comply with the state law that required a written petition for clemency from the condemned prisoner. Parsons heard him out but refused to renounce his beliefs. “I am an innocent man,” he told Black, “and the world knows I am innocent. If I am to be executed at all it is because I am an Anarchist not because I am a murderer; it is because of what I have taught and spoken and written in the past, and not because of the throwing of the Haymarket bomb.”20 Having accepted and then embraced his fate as a martyr, Albert Parsons was now staking out his place in history.

  While these intense conversations took place in Cell 29, the flow of petitions that poured into the Amnesty Association included more and more signatures from prominent citizens, including the banker and civic leader Lyman Gage and the head of the Chicago bar, William C. Goudy. Attorney Samuel P. McConnell then took the petitions to judges and lawyers, and several of them added their names; this reportedly left Judge Gary “very much aggrieved.” When McConnell approached the esteemed Lyman Trumbull, a former U.S. senator and state supreme court justice, the old man carefully read the petition, then buried his face in his hands and said, “I will sign. Those men did not have a fair trial.” Trumbull was the most prominent political figure to lend his name to the plea.

  George Schilling (left) and Henry Demarest Lloyd

  Some pleas came from entire companies, such as one endorsed by 125 editors and reporters of the Boston Globe. Chicago druggists drafted their own appeal, as did two Jewish leaders, Rabbi Emil Hirsch and the attorney Julius Rosenthal. The Amnesty Association also set up tables outside City Hall where pedestrians could stop and affix their names to its petition for commutation; nearly 7,000 citizens did so on the weekend of November 5 and 6.21

  Much of this public support for clemency was generated by the critical literature on the case produced to counter the uniform praise the prosecution had received in the daily press. General Matthew M. Trumbull wrote a widely distributed pamphlet called Was It a Fair Trial? The author, unrelated to the famous Republican senator with the same surname, had earned a distinguished reputation as a Union army officer and a respected Chicago attorney. The general had been a Chartist in England and an abolitionist in America, but he could not be accused of sympathy with the anarchists. Even so, after reviewing the case, the attorney bluntly stated that “the trial was unfair, the rulings of the court illegal, and the sentence unjust.”22 Far more influential inside and outside the city was Dyer D. Lum’s Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists, in which the author, a highly skilled writer, dissected the trial proceedings after studying the court transcript and highlighted what he saw as the inconsistencies and contradictions in the prosecution’s case. Lum’s pamphlet helped convince the nation’s most prominent writer to join the movement for clemency.

  William Dean Howells, the son of an abolitionist printer and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, had reached literary heights by 1886, when he earned a princely sum of $13,000 a year as a columnist for Harper’s Weekly. The former editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, Howells was the “high priest of the genteel tradition” in literature and the author of popular novels like The Rise of Silas Lapham, a highly praised satire of the nouveaux riches. The nation’s most noted author became deeply concerned with the case as it went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the justices rejected the appeal, Howells sent a letter to the New York Tribune explaining why he had joined in the appeal for clemency. The High Court had dismissed the case on formalities, he explained, but it had not ruled on “the propriety of trying for murder men fairly indictable for conspiracy alone”; it had not “approved the principle of punishing men for their frantic opinions, for a crime they were not shown to have committed,” and it had not even considered the justice of the death sentence imposed on the men. This last question, wrote Howells, remained for history to judge, and he had no doubt about what the judgment of history would be.23

  Howells’s letter startled people who respected him as the dean of American letters. For speaking out on the Haymarket case, for what his biographer called a “lonely act of courage,” the writer would endure a heavy stream of abuse. It was a time, Howells recalled in a letter to Mark Twain, that the public was betrayed b
y its press, and “no man could safely make himself heard” on behalf of strikers, let alone condemned anarchists. 24

  No other American of comparable stature came forward to appeal for clemency. Indeed, during the whole appeal campaign, an even stronger wave of reaction set in so that Governor Oglesby received more death-to-the-anarchists letters than he did clemency appeals. Even the most influential radical writer and political leader of the time, Henry George, turned down a request to join the clemency effort. Reversing his earlier position as a critic of the trial, George now proclaimed that the conspiracy case had been proved beyond a doubt and that an appeal for clemency was groundless.25 This turnabout was probably motivated by George’s political ambitions. He had nearly been elected mayor of New York City as a radical in the spring of 1886, when he spoiled the chances of an ambitious young Republican office-seeker named Theodore Roosevelt.

  Portrait of William Dean Howells on the cover of Harper’s Weekly, June 19, 1886

  The following summer, while George campaigned for state office in New York, Roosevelt attacked his old rival for favoring clemency and insisted that it was in the interest of all Americans that the “Chicago dynamiters” be hanged. Henry George not only lost the election in November 1887; he also lost his reputation as a champion of workers when labor leaders branded him a turncoat.26

  BY NOVEMBER 7 an estimated 100,000 American citizens had signed the clemency petition. In addition, Oglesby had received numerous messages from Europeans who had reacted with indignation and horror when the Supreme Court refused to overturn the convictions, notably a telegram from London including the names of renowned artists and writers such as William Morris, Annie Besant, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Walter Crane, William Rossetti, Eleanor Marx and Friedrich Engels. The gloom that came over the amnesty movement after the U.S. Supreme Court decision was dispelled by this response and by the support of prominent Chicago citizens such as Lyman Gage. 27