by James Green
Devastated by the news at first, the seventeen-year-old immigrant found that the “martyrs’ ordeal” implanted “something new and wonderful” in her soul, “a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic death.” From then on, she would honor November 11, 1887, as the day of her “spiritual birth.” After she plunged into the anarchist and labor movements in the next years, Emma Goldman met hundreds of other people whose lives were also changed by the executions on Black Friday.9 For example, there was Abraham Bisno, a cloak maker living in Chicago’s Russian-Jewish colony, who knew nothing about the anarchists until he and his fellow strikers were beaten by the police on May 5, the day of the first arrests. In the next days and months he frequently discussed the case with other workers, while studying all the evidence he could find and learning in the process to lecture on social questions and to lead in organizing unions among his people.10
Mary Harris Jones, another Chicago resident, also followed the trial closely and attended the funeral. The widowed dressmaker heard the anarchists speak at Knights of Labor assemblies and at lakefront rallies, where she listened to what Parsons and Spies, “those teachers of the new order, had to say to workers.” And though she was opposed to their violent message, Jones was deeply affected by their execution and by their immense funeral procession with thousands of wage earners marching behind their hearses, not because they were anarchists but because they were regarded as soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the workers’ struggle. Many years later, after Mother Jones gained renown, she recalled that time in Chicago. “Those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor,” she wrote. “Those were the days of the martyrs and the saints.”11
Far away, in a mining camp at Rebel Creek, Nevada, high in the mountains, young Bill Haywood read about the hangings in a Knights of Labor paper. He called it a turning point in his life, a moment when he became entranced with the lives and speeches of Albert Parsons and August Spies. In the years that followed, no one did more to translate the words of Parsons and Spies into action than William D. Haywood did when he became the founder and notorious leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, a twentieth-century manifestation of the “Chicago idea.” 12
While some young workers like Emma Goldman and Bill Haywood were inspired by the Haymarket martyrs, most trade union leaders, even those who had fought to win clemency for the anarchists, were utterly dismayed by how much damage the anarchist case had caused. Samuel Gompers said the bomb thrown in the Haymarket not only killed policemen, it killed the eight-hour movement and struck at the foundations of the new house of labor he was constructing as head of the new American Federation of Labor. A decade later Gompers and his followers found ways to revive unionism and re-create a more moderate eight-hour campaign, but for Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor there would be no recovery. Indeed, for visionary workers and labor reformers inspired by the Knights and the Great Upheaval, Haymarket was an unmitigated disaster; it sounded a death knell for the great hopes they shared in the spring of 1886 when they imagined their movement to be on the brink of achieving a new cooperative social order that would replace the wage system.13
A few American intellectuals were radicalized by the events and found themselves pulled closer to the labor movement, though the process was a painful one. H. C. Adams, a young economics professor at Cornell University, was one of the few academics who criticized the Chicago trial. The professor denounced the anarchists as vile madmen who had no understanding of how democracy worked, but he also insisted that even their incendiary speeches needed protection. If freedom of expression was denied to dissenters, he reasoned, even law-abiding protesters might turn to violence. Adams did not stop at this: he even charged that industrialists were using the anarchist hysteria to stigmatize the socially constructive proposals made by the Knights of Labor. The New York newspapers printed sensational accounts of Adams’s remarks, and a Cornell benefactor, the wealthy lumber king Henry Sage, demanded the professor’s ouster. The university trustees met in secret and agreed that the offensive professor Adams had to go. In the aftermath of Haymarket, even defense of the First Amendment seemed threatening. Dr. Adams took his medicine and decided economists had better not speak out against social injustice.14
Adams’s case was one of several indicating that the Haymarket bomb marked a decisive event in the history of American free speech. After the Civil War, freedom of expression was denied to black citizens in the South, but other Americans were often able to express extreme opinions in speeches and writings without interference. This had been the case in Chicago, where Mayor Harrison had allowed the anarchists to make violent speeches on a regular basis. While some latitude prevailed for free speech during the Gilded Age, no one seriously examined the philosophical and political principles that underlay constitutional guarantees of liberty. As a result, legal precedent and tradition counted for little when the Haymarket affair precipitated a sharp turn against toleration for citizens expressing extreme opinions and for those, like Professor H. C. Adams, who defended their right to do so.15
Henry Demarest Lloyd was one of the only prominent journalists to denounce the prosecution of the Haymarket case, and he paid a price for it. Disinherited by his father-in-law, Tribune co-owner William Bross, shut out of the paper for good and ostracized by his friends, Lloyd did not begin writing and speaking again until 1890, when he turned his formidable talents to producing a series of moral attacks on the “cannibals of competition, tyrants of monopoly, devourers of men, women and children,” culminating in the publication of his Wealth Against Commonwealth, an exposé of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, the first influential muckraking effort of the progressive era.16
Lloyd’s ostracism came at a repressive time in Chicago life. As a result of the red scare, the trial and the hangings, said the Illinois writer Edgar Lee Masters, the city’s spiritual and civic life was “fouled” as “Hate and Fear and Revenge stalked about.” Outspoken journalists and public figures like Lloyd had been silenced; the editors of the big newspapers who celebrated the anarchists’ executions had won, but they too were fearful, and walked around the city with armed guards.17
Only a few clergymen, like Hugh Pentecost in Newark, responded to the events of 1886 and 1887 by criticizing the use of capital punishment and by urging acts of Christian charity and moral reform to address the social evils that bred anarchism. The Great Upheaval of 1886, the bombing and the red scare that followed traumatized many clergymen and churchgoers, especially native Protestants, who saw these events not as a crisis that called for moral reform, but as the opening scene in a doomsday scenario for the American city. The Haymarket affair exacerbated the hostility to organized labor that already existed in Protestant churches, while it also helped to push many middle-class people and their ministers out of the cities and into streetcar suburbs, where they could escape the lava of a social volcano that seemed ready to blow again at any time.18
UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, Chicago’s dissenting voices remained quiet, and public discourse was dominated by those who celebrated the executions of the anarchists and venerated the memory of the police who died in the bombing and the shooting. A lavish history of the Chicago police appeared in 1887, supported by contributions from scores of businesses. The book, written in a vivid style by a Daily News reporter, John J. Flinn, featured heroic sketches of Inspector Bonfield, Captain Schaack and their brave men, along with a narrative of the strikes and riots that culminated in the Haymarket bombing, when the department “attracted the attention of all Christendom.”19 George McLean’s The Rise and Fall of Anarchy, published in 1888, another handsome volume with lifelike drawings of all the Haymarket participants, offered a comprehensive account of events leading to the bombing and of the trial and executions that followed. The author left no doubt about the moral of the story. After saluting the courageous policemen who fell in defense of American freedom, McLean turne
d his pen to the “hideous cruel monsters” responsible for their “cold blooded massacre”—an act of treachery unparalleled in history. 20
A year later came the publication of Captain Michael Schaack’s enormous book Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe. Composed largely by two professional writers, the volume offered a sweeping history of revolutionary activity in Europe beginning with the French Revolution, all of which is seen as prologue to the events in Chicago. The title page, faced by a heroic portrait of Schaack, is followed by extensive documentation of the “Haymarket conspiracy” and sensational reports of Schaack’s undercover men, along with vivid police photos of bombs, fuses, guns, cartoon-like drawings of anarchists and a moving group portrait of the slain policemen. The seven official “Haymarket martyrs” were pictured with an eighth officer who was thought to have died later of wounds he sustained on May 4, 1886. Although the funerals of the dead patrolmen were barely noticed in the press at the time, Schaack’s book reminded Americans that these men were “as worthy as the heroes of a hundred military battles.”21
Soon after the riot, Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, started a fund drive to erect a statue in the Haymarket to honor the fallen police officers. Donations came slowly at first, but eventually businessmen’s clubs raised enough funds to pay for a statue—a bronze figure of a policeman holding his right hand high. The model was Officer Thomas Birmingham, a statuesque Irish patrolman who had marched into the square that night. The monument was dedicated in somber ceremonies on Memorial Day of 1889, when speakers likened the slain officers to the Civil War heroes who defended the nation against the southern rebels.22
The police statue in Haymarket Square symbolized more than heroic sacrifice, however. The bronzed officer mounted on its stone base also stood for a victory of the forces of law and order, not simply over anarchists who used public spaces so freely and spoke so defiantly of government, but also over the larger forces of disorder generated by the pitch and roll of an immigrant sea that had flooded urban America. A rough-and-tumble democracy had flourished in many cities since the age of Jackson, and had brought immigrant workingmen, and even some workingwomen, into the streets on various ceremonious and sometimes riotous occasions. Now, after the Great Upheaval and the Haymarket affair, the courts and the police would severely restrict urban workers’ use of public spaces as arenas for self-expression and organization. 23
Police statue in Haymarket Square, 1892
Yet, for all the accolades Chicago’s policemen received, they still seemed inadequate to the task of defending the city against what business elites feared would be the next mass insurgency. Marshall Field convinced members of the elite Commercial Club that they needed a U.S. Army fort close to the city, instead of a thousand miles away. While the anarchists awaited their fate in the jailhouse, the club raised money to buy 632 acres of land just thirty miles north of the city; its leaders then persuaded the secretary of the army to construct such a fort on this site. In addition, Field and his associates hired the famous architects Daniel H. Burnham and John W. Root to design and build a massive armory in the city to guard their neighborhoods and businesses. Within a few years the imposing First Regiment Armory at 16th Street and Michigan Avenue rose like a stone monster with a huge open mouth, poised between the downtown business district and the insurgent Southwest Side.24
While initiatives by the forces of law and order reassured an anxious bourgeoisie, they also heated up feelings of resentment that bubbled under the surface of plebeian life in Chicago. Labor leaders worried about the construction of military armories and criticized the use of militiamen to break strikes; some even urged their members not to join the National Guard. A gnawing fear spread among trade unionists that the nation’s armed forces would be used to protect employers’ interests, not to defend workers’ liberties. 25
Simmering working-class antipathy to the police also began to reach a boiling point. That sentiment spilled out when Chicago’s Knights of Labor newspaper denounced the newly dedicated police statue in the Haymarket for honoring a police department its editor branded “the most vicious and corrupt the country has ever known.” The paper was referring not only to the police conduct in the Haymarket affair, but to a scandal that broke in 1889 when Captain Schaack was removed from the Chicago police force as a result of wrongdoing. The case also involved Inspector John Bonfield and two other commanders of the divisions that marched into the Haymarket on May 4. The Chicago Times revealed that the officers had been taking money from saloonkeepers and prostitutes, and had been selling items taken from arrested citizens, including some jewelry Louis Lingg had left to his sweetheart. When Bonfield reacted by arresting the Times’s editors and attempting to shut down the newspaper, the public outcry was enormous. As a result, the mayor was compelled to remove the heroes of Haymarket Square from the police force. A short time later, former superintendent Ebersold revealed that Schaack had “tried to keep things stirred up” in May of 1886 and “wanted to find bombs everywhere.” He even sent out men to organize fake anarchist groups to keep the pot boiling. It is not clear how Schaack’s demise affected the sales of his sensational book, Anarchy and Anarchists, but he retained many admirers in Chicago, including one editor who called his firing a triumph for the anarchists.26
Even though working-class demonstrators lost much of the freedom they had enjoyed to gather in streets and public places after 1886, freedom of the press was suspended only for a brief time. Issues of the anarchist Alarm reappeared during the trial, and the Arbeiter-Zeitung resumed publication, although the German daily never regained the mass circulation it had achieved in August Spies’s day. In addition, anarchists produced and disseminated printed works memorializing the martyrs, including The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs and The Famous Speeches of the Eight Haymarket Anarchists, first published in 1886. The following year, Lucy Parsons issued a collection of Albert’s prison writings on anarchism, and then in 1889 she edited The Life of Albert R. Parsons, which became a sacred text for the party of remembrance and a conversion experience for many readers unfamiliar with the case. Introduced by George Schilling, the volume was filled with Parsons’s speeches and articles, an autobiographical essay and ephemera, most memorably the letters he wrote to his children just before his death and to Schilling recalling his thrilling days as a militant in the battle for black equality in bloody Texas.27 The Life of Albert R. Parsons, along with the anarchists’ autobiographies, typified the sort of personal narratives that had exerted a hold on the popular mind throughout the nineteenth century. Such heartfelt stories of tramps and beggars, former slaves and former prisoners and other lost souls, offered truthful, “unvarnished” accounts that presented compelling alternatives to official accounts and descriptions of reality.28
This literature was reproduced and translated to keep the anarchists’ memory alive in the minds of workers around the world, but it was also aimed at countering, indeed subverting, the official accounts of the Haymarket story that enjoyed much wider circulation. In these texts the condemned men appeared as martyrs who died for freedom and democracy, while their state prosecutors are seen as relying not upon truth and virtue, but upon deception and intimidation. 29 The autobiographies and speeches of the Chicago anarchists were translated into several languages and reprinted numerous times over the next few decades, when they were interpreted by many readers here and in other lands as stories that confirmed their suspicions that the United States was not a truly free country.30
Lucy Parsons and the small company of anarchists who kept this literature in circulation did not, however, rely on the printed word alone. Lucy, for one, took to the road as often as she could in her own relentless and exhausting campaign to exonerate the anarchists and to venerate the life of her husband. She even embarked on a trip after she lost her daughter, Lulu, who died of lymphoma and whose body was placed in an unmarked grave near her father’s tomb. She pressed o
n with her work even though she was criticized by socialists, excoriated by the mainstream press and harassed by the police, especially in Chicago, where the authorities seemed obsessed with the activities of this “determined negress.”31
A pariah in her own land, Lucy was treated as a celebrity when she traveled to the British Isles on a speaking tour in 1888. “The heroic widow” of Albert Parsons was described by one English socialist as a “woman of American Indian origin, of striking beauty.” Having invented a purely native identity for herself, she spoke to a London meeting as “a genuine American,” one whose ancestors were indigenous people waiting to repel the invaders when they arrived from Spain. Lucy’s violent speeches alienated some socialists, but her tour excited others and created an upsurge of support for anarchism in England.32
