Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

The next day, Darrow recalled, “a flood of vituperation and gall was poured out upon Altgeld’s head.” A United States Supreme Court justice compared the governor to the traitor Jefferson Davis, and Robert Todd Lincoln, an influential figure in the Pullman Company, declared Altgeld’s pardon a disgrace to the state where his martyred father was buried. Newspaper editors far and wide joined the chorus of condemnation. The Tribune’s Joseph Medill, who despised Altgeld, now attacked him for issuing the pardon to pay off his electoral debt to socialist and anarchist voters. The governor “was not merely alien by birth but an alien by temperament and attitude” and an anarchist at heart.54

  Altgeld had never shown the slightest degree of sympathy for anarchists, but he had expressed indignation when immigrants were stereotyped as lawless and disorderly. However, the governor’s pardon statement was not motivated mainly by sympathy for fellow Germans but by what Clarence Darrow called his “patriotic love of liberty” and his belief that the methods used to convict the anarchists were a greater menace to the Republic than what they had done. Altgeld feared that when the law was bent to deprive immigrants of their civil liberties, it would later be bent to deprive native sons and daughters of theirs as well.55

  Not everyone in Chicago condemned Altgeld, however. Three Chicago newspapers, including the Republican Inter-Ocean, defended his decision to pardon the anarchists. Some members of the city’s legal and business communities who felt ashamed of the miscarriage of justice in 1886 also welcomed the pardon. One of them, a businessman named E. S. Dreyer, had headed the grand jury in the Haymarket case. After the trial he changed his mind about the case and signed the letter requesting clemency. When Governor Altgeld called Dreyer to the capital and asked him to take the pardon papers to Joliet Prison and present them to the three convicts, Dreyer broke down in tears.56

  Governor John Peter Altgeld

  Arriving at the penitentiary, Dreyer found the anarchists soldiering away at their assigned tasks—Neebe serving food in the commissary, Schwab binding books, as he had done in Germany, and Fielden breaking stone in the sun, working on contract for the same firm that had employed him as a teamster when he was a free man. The three men were amazed by the tone of Altgeld’s tough statement, and, in an outpouring of gratitude, they promised to live obscure lives, so much so that when they made their way back to Chicago, they jumped off their train in the freight yards to avoid the press. 57

  The three anarchists made good on their promises. Michael Schwab returned to the Arbeiter-Zeitung, where for two years he wrote articles friendly to the workingman. He then resigned and opened a shoe store, but he failed at this and died of tuberculosis three years later. Schwab asked to be buried at Waldheim with his old comrades. Oscar Neebe, whose first wife had died when he was in the Cook County Jail, married a German widow and quietly tended bar in her saloon near the stockyards until he died in 1916. He was interred next to his former partner August Spies. Sam Fielden inherited a small legacy from an English relative and moved to Colorado, where he lived a solitary, robust life in a log cabin until he died in 1922 at the age of seventy-four.58

  Altgeld’s pardon, for all the fury it caused in elite circles, removed a bone that had been sticking in the throats of liberal Chicagoans since the anarchist trial ended and the four bodies swung from the gallows. Now these concerned citizens could look forward more easily to a glorious summer when the Columbian Exposition would forecast the city’s spectacular future of progress, reform and civic enlightenment. Indeed, before the summer ended, the miraculous White City erected on the lake had revealed Chicago’s greatness to the world. The day before the fair closed in the fall of 1893, Mayor Harrison said this and more in a memorable speech predicting that the exposition would inaugurate a wonderful new era for Chicago.

  THE EUPHORIC SPELL the fair cast over the city ended that same night, however, when a terrible event marred all the days of glory just past. The mayor was murdered in the living room of his mansion, felled by a bullet from the gun of a deranged office seeker. In death, even Carter Harrison’s enemies extolled his virtues while all Chicago mourned his passing; it even seemed as though the mayor’s legacy as a great unifier might inspire Chicagoans to maintain the civic solidarity and communal joy the fair had evoked. However, this wish would not come true, because in the next few months the city slid into another depression, and during the summer of 1894 its residents suffered another trauma produced by what seemed an unending and distressingly bloody conflict between labor and capital.

  The trouble began unexpectedly on May 11 in George Pullman’s model industrial town when 2,000 palace-car workers left their shops to protest drastic reductions in the workforce and a sharp wage cut of one-third for remaining employees. These losses were difficult to accept, because they came at a time when Pullman paid dividends to his stockholders. Furthermore, a piece-rate pay system, designed to boost output, alienated shop workers because they had to work faster and harder to make up for reduced wages and, at the same time, endure personal abuses from hard-driving foremen.

  The strikers sought assistance from a new inclusive union of railroad workers whose leaders carried on the Knights’ tradition of organizing all crafts and trades together. Led by Eugene V. Debs, a lanky organizer for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the American Railway Union revived the spirit of 1886 on the railroads. Debs resisted pressure to call his members out in a sympathy strike, because he knew that Pullman and his corporate allies had formed an association of the twenty-four lines operating in and out of Chicago—perhaps the most powerful group of businessmen ever organized. Nonetheless, when Pullman refused to negotiate with his men, Debs ordered a boycott of trains hauling Pullman sleeping cars. In a few weeks a great sympathy strike had spread far and wide, paralyzing the nation’s railroads west of Chicago, idling 50,000 workers and creating a panic among businessmen.59

  Never before had a union exercised this kind of strategic power over the levers of commerce. Unable to break the strike, railroad managers attached U.S. Mail cars to trains carrying Pullman cars, so that when workers refused to haul them federal authorities could intervene. The U.S. attorney general, a railroad lawyer named Richard Olney, persuaded Democratic president Grover Cleveland to send army troops into Chicago to break the strike, because, he insisted, the country was once again on the “ragged edge of anarchy.” In a short time, 15,000 regular army soldiers arrived from nearby Fort Sheridan, a base intended for just this kind of emergency by Marshall Field and his associates when they purchased the land on which it was constructed.

  The battles that ensued in Chicago between troopers and strikers were the worst the country had seen since the bloodbath in Pittsburgh that began the great uprising in 1877. Hundreds of Chicago workers were wounded and at least thirty-four were killed before the fierce resistance was put down by army troops. Debs was arrested and later, after he was tried, sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court because he had defied state authority. While he stood trial, he waited in a Cook County Jail cell next to the one where Albert Parsons had been held on similar charges.60

  Debs and his union brothers had been utterly defeated by Pullman and his allies in the federal government. But the victory was a costly one for Chicago’s most famous industrialist, one that cost him his reputation, and, some would say, his life. Pullman had created a model company town outside of Chicago, hoping to avoid its furies; he had resisted the winds of change when they penetrated the walls of his city during the upheaval of 1886 and when they came again eight years later, reaching hurricane force. Still, the violent events of 1894 signaled that the end was near for the great industrialist and his company town. In the aftermath a federal commission condemned Pullman for exploiting his own employees and for refusing to consider their grievances. Weakened by the strike, Pullman died of heart failure three years later in the midst of a legal battle with the state’s attorney general to maintain his corporate charter and his private company houses. Family members commissioned a grand Corin
thian column to top his grave, but also ordered that Pullman’s iron-clad casket be buried in reinforced concrete because they feared that angry workers might vandalize his remains.61

  The battle of 1894 also transformed Pullman’s adversary, Eugene Debs, who, during his incarceration, decided that Americans were losing many of their precious liberties and that only radical measures could recover them. In fact, in response to the Pullman boycott federal courts had outlawed two of the most effective forms of labor solidarity to emerge from the Great Upheaval: the boycott and the sympathy strike. The following year the Illinois Supreme Court obliterated another vestige of 1886 when it struck down an eight-hour law covering women and children working in industry. These court actions initiated an era of extreme judicial hostility to nearly all forms of union organization and collective labor activity, a time when some union leaders abandoned militant tactics and radical dreams in search of accommodation, while others turned to direct action and violent forms of resistance.62

  George M. Pullman in the mid-1890s

  Eugene Debs refused to take either course after he was released from prison in November of 1895. Instead, he embraced democratic socialism and took the lead in building a popular movement that he hoped would regain workers’ lost liberties. Debs expressed no sympathy for anarchy in his jailhouse interviews or in the many speeches he delivered after his release from prison. However, when he came to Chicago two years later to found a new socialist group, Debs met with Lucy Parsons and made a pilgrimage to Waldheim, where he visited the graves of the men he regarded as “the first martyrs to the cause of industrial freedom.”63

  The Pullman disaster also led some influential Chicagoans to recall the Haymarket tragedy, and to reassess its meaning in light of current events. A year later, as Clarence Darrow pled Eugene Debs’s case before the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, an impressive new history of Chicago was published. One of the editors, Joseph Kirkland, a noted writer, carefully reviewed the Haymarket case, which he regarded as a critical moment in the city’s history. Kirkland’s detailed account of the trial reiterated the criticisms of the police, the bailiff, the prosecuting attorneys and the judge that Governor Altgeld had leveled against the same men in his famous pardon. 64

  The facts of the Haymarket case, wrote Kirkland, showed that the state had not only been unable to produce the bomber; it had failed to prove the existence of an anarchist conspiracy. Indeed, it was now known that much of the evidence given at the trial was “pure fabrication” and that prominent police officials had bribed some witnesses and even threatened to torture others unless they testified as they were told.65 Kirkland’s account of the Haymarket trial subverted the prosecution’s case and vindicated the defense. George Schilling, William Dean Howells and others involved in the amnesty movement in 1887 had impatiently awaited the judgment of history; now it came, sooner than expected, reversing in almost every respect the legal judgment rendered by the court.

  Kirkland closed the case in another way, however, one that gave no comfort to Lucy Parsons and the anarchist party of memory. As the years passed, he explained, the awful Haymarket tragedy had begun to fade from people’s minds, just like “the cloud of Anarchism,” which had once loomed in the sky like “a portentous menace to the peace of society,” and then had passed into “an innocuous vapor.” Now, he observed, the memory of the dead anarchists could only be “revived by their admiring disciples in feeble demonstrations on the anniversary of their execution.” 66

  Indeed, every November 11, Lucy Parsons, Lizzie Holmes and other devoted custodians of the anarchists’ memory faithfully gathered for the graveside ceremonies at Waldheim, where they sought to revive the martyrs’ spirit with a passionate, almost religious, fervor. On one of these elegiac occasions, Emma Goldman proclaimed that these “martyrs of liberty” would continue to grow in their graves and “would live with us always unto all eternity.” She also believed their memory would be revived by a resurgent anarchist movement in the next century, when humanity would enter a new time without warring nations, conflicting classes and dominating authorities. And so, in the years after Black Friday, anarchists gathered in little circles on November 11—not simply to mourn their heroes but also to venerate the men whose martyrdom would revive libertarian beliefs and inspire new believers around the world. This memorial day became an occasion for the faithful to express joy about the lives of the martyrs whose deaths mystically ensured the ultimate triumph of anarchism.67

  And yet, as the nineteenth century ended with the trumpets of militarism and imperialism blaring in Cuba and the Philippines, and with the engines of corporate capitalism roaring from Pittsburgh to Chicago, even dedicated visionaries like Lizzie Holmes harbored doubts that anarchist beliefs were spreading. She and William had left Chicago for Denver, where their home became a refuge for traveling anarchists like Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman. On these visits Lizzie and Lucy recalled the “stirring enthusiastic days” in Chicago, the loud rallies, colorful marches, the huge strikes and the desperate fight to save the lives of Albert and the other “Haymarket boys.” Lizzie Holmes and her husband had remained as keenly devoted to their anarchist ideals as they had been “in the days when their faith was young and their hopes were high.” As the November 11 memorial day of the Chicago anarchists approached in 1898, Lizzie wrote that she and William were “still looking longingly toward the east for the dawn of a new day for humanity.” But at the next anniversary ceremony at Waldheim, she confessed that her hopes were fading. “As we clasp hands above their graves today,” she said, “we cannot say the dawn is brighter, that mankind is happier and freer.” As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Lizzie Holmes admitted that the anarchists buried at Waldheim no longer had a known following and that their lives and their ideas no longer held deep meaning for working people. A little more than a decade after the hangings on Black Friday, it appeared that the Haymarket martyrs had become lost in the past, forgotten and misunderstood.68

  Epilogue

  AT THE DAWN of the twentieth century few Americans had any reason to look backward to the dark age of bloody conflict marked by the Haymarket calamity. As Lizzie Holmes feared, no one but a small band of die-hard anarchists seemed to remember her beloved comrades and their tragic story. As the century wore on, however, the Chicago anarchists were not so easily forgotten. Indeed, whether they were remembered as terrible criminals or revered as venerable martyrs, the five men buried at Waldheim were recalled quite often, not only on the American scene, but in faraway places as well. Even after the last of their cohorts passed away, even after the living memory of the anarchists faded into oblivion, Parsons, Spies and their comrades appeared again and again in poems, plays, novels and history books, in drawings and posters, as well as on banners carried at demonstrations, in speeches delivered at commemorative rituals and in editorials written on free speech.

  The memory of the Haymarket anarchists endured not only because they became heroic figures in labor and radical folklore, but also because their words and actions, their trial and their execution raised so many critical questions about American society in the industrial age and after. Indeed, the most important issues raised by the Haymarket case— questions about equality and inequality, class and nationality, crime and punishment, free speech and public safety—remain as controversial in the twenty-first century as they ever were. All this is clear in retrospect, but in the two decades after the anarchists died, their story survived because a few radicals dedicated themselves to telling it and retelling it.

  It was during this time that Lucy Parsons worked relentlessly, and at times single-handedly, to preserve the memory of her husband and his cause. Lucy’s memorial work was always difficult, but at first it was an onerous and even dangerous task, especially in 1901 after Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley and it was revealed that the assassin had been in Chicago and that he claimed to be an anarchist. According to the Tribune, the Secret Service suspected the “Haymarket gang” of
being involved in the crime. When the paper sent its reporters to interrogate Lucy Parsons, she told them she had never heard of the assassin and that the shooting of the president was the worst thing that could happen to the anarchist movement. 1 She was correct.

  Lucy Parsons in 1903

  When President McKinley died, another red scare swept America, and the Haymarket-era image of the dangerous, anarchist immigrant reappeared. The new president, Theodore Roosevelt, set the tone, declaring that anarchism was “not the outgrowth of unjust social conditions but the daughter of degenerate lunacy, a vicious pest” that threatened “to uproot the very foundations of society” if it was “not speedily stamped out by death, imprisonment and deportation of all Anarchists.” 2

  In 1903, President Roosevelt signed a pathbreaking law that barred anarchists from entry to the United States, along with paupers, prostitutes and the insane. The statute also allowed the government to deport any immigrants who converted to anarchism during their first three years in the country; this was the first time the federal government moved to exclude and deport certain immigrants because of their beliefs and associations.3

  Nonetheless, Lucy Parsons plowed on with her publishing and speaking endeavors. She reprinted her collection of Albert’s speeches and letters, and then set off on an exhausting road trip to promote the book. Although she was now overshadowed by the notorious Emma Goldman, the widow of Albert Parsons was still a revered figure in immigrant union halls around the country. Grief, hardship, poverty and advancing age (she was fifty years old in 1903) had not diminished her beauty. A stunning photograph of her appeared in the new edition of The Life of Albert Parsons, one that would become an iconic image when radicals rediscovered Lucy many decades later. She is standing erect, looking taller and younger than she was, delicately holding a paper scroll and wearing one of the formal dresses she made with her own hands. Her dark hair is short and curled. A light shines on her face as she looks out at the world with sad eyes.