Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Elsewhere, however, particularly the Latin world, the Haymarket story was told and retold many times over. Indeed, no other event in United States history after the Civil War exerted the kind of hold the Haymarket tragedy maintained on the popular imagination of working people in other countries, particularly in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Uruguay and Mexico, where exiled Spanish and Italian anarchists organized the first labor unions and led militant strikes and May Day marches in the decades after Haymarket. 29

  Even in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay, where military dictators destroyed unions, imprisoned their members, executed their leaders and suppressed all forms of oppositional writing and speaking during the 1970s, stories about the Haymarket martyrs were told and icons to their memory were preserved. While traveling in a remote tin-mining region of Bolivia during the 1980s, the writer Dan La Botz met a worker who invited him into his little home. As he was eating dinner with the miner and his family, La Botz noticed a small piece of cloth hanging in the window, an embroidery that in the United States might have read GOD BLESS OUR HOME. He moved closer to take a look and saw that it read LONG LIVE THE MARTYRS OF CHICAGO.30

  IN 1985 THE URUGUAYAN AUTHOR Eduardo Galeano came to Chicago from Montevideo, where he had been a union activist and radical journalist until 1973, when a military coup sent him to prison and then into a long exile.31 He fondly remembered the May Day marches that took place in his home city every year until the generals seized power; and so when Galeano came to Chicago during springtime, he wondered if May 1 would be celebrated in this city full of factories and workers. As soon as he arrived, he asked his hosts to take him to the Haymarket district to see the historic site, but when he arrived on Desplaines Street, he found nothing to mark the spot. No statue had “been erected in the memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” he recalled. Not even a bronze plaque. Furthermore, May Day came and went without notice. “May 1st is the only truly universal day of all humanity, the only day when all histories and all languages and religions and cultures of the world collide,” Galeano wrote. “But in the United States, May 1st is a day like any other. On that day, people work normally and no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss.”32

  Eduardo Galeano left Chicago without meeting those kindred spirits who did remember Haymarket and May Day—the old radicals and union veterans of the Depression-era struggles in the stockyards and steel mills who were custodians of the city’s plebeian memories. Unbeknownst to Galeano, a small party of these people had been trying for more than fifteen years to erect a memorial in Haymarket Square to the workers who died there and to those who later swung from the gallows.

  The most famous of them was Studs Terkel, a noted expert on jazz, a popular radio host, a much-loved raconteur and a keeper of the city’s memory books. Terkel appeared on public television on May 1, 1986, to speak on the centennial of “one of the most traumatic moments in American labor history, the Haymarket tragedy.” It was all about the fight for a freer workplace, he explained. Some young workers “bad-mouthed unions,” he declared, but at the same time they accepted the freedom unions gained for workers “as a matter of course.” But did they “know how it came about, how many blacklistings, how many busted heads, how many busted lives” it took? “Whatever benefits American working people have today didn’t come from the big-heartedness of those who employed them,” Terkel added. “They were hard-fought gains, through hard-fought battles.” 33

  For sixteen years Terkel had been working with a small group of Chicagoans dedicated to preserving the memory of the workers who died during and after the riot in 1886. Studs first learned the Haymarket story from Wobblies who roomed in his mother’s hotel and was reminded of it again and again, particularly on one memorable occasion in 1926 when he heard Lucy Parsons speak in Bughouse Square. For him the Haymarket saga was at the heart of Chicago’s story as he knew it and told it.34

  Terkel’s preservation efforts took a public turn on May 4, 1970, when he addressed a small memorial meeting in Haymarket Square. He spoke that day of the duty to remember striking workers who came there to protest on May 4, 1886, and who deserved their monument, the same as the police who were memorialized by the old statue that still stood at the end of the square, now hovering perilously close to an expressway that tore the West Side apart.35

  Studs Terkel speaking at the Haymarket Memorial Committee rally on May 4, 1970, on the site where the speakers’ wagon was located on May 4, 1886

  The meeting took place in rough political waters still churning from violent events involving the Chicago police. After Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968, angry black protesters appeared on the streets of the West Side, and 5,000 police officers massed to protect the downtown Loop. Once again blood flowed on those streets when patrolmen shot 48 African-Americans. Four of them died.36

  A week later Mayor Richard J. Daley said the police had been too soft on the rioters and issued a militant “shoot to kill” order in cases involving arsonists and looters. The next day, in a speech observing May 1 as Law Day, Mayor Daley rephrased his controversial order, but he kept the police force on high alert and activated a special “Red Squad” to deal with black militants and the antiwar radicals planning to demonstrate at the Democratic National Convention in August.37

  When protest groups applied for permits to march and rally at the event, they were denied them, but as the convention neared, demonstrators poured into the city anyway, expecting a showdown between “a police state and a people’s movement.” On the night the convention opened, the whole world watched on television as Chicago police furiously beat demonstrators and news reporters in front of the Hilton Hotel’s Haymarket Bar and then pursued them into Grant Park.38

  In the fall of 1969 tensions escalated again when the trial of the “Chicago Eight” began in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman. Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale were among the eight radicals accused of conspiring to incite riots at the Democratic National Convention in a trial that conjured up the prosecution of the eight Haymarket anarchists eighty-three years before. Under the circumstances, the young revolutionaries who came to the city for the trial focused their anger on the Chicago police, whose history was symbolized by the police statue that still stood in Haymarket Square.39

  The erection of public monuments had sometimes provoked controversy in the past, but no city experienced a conflict as explosive as the one that erupted in Chicago over the memorial legacy of Haymarket Square.40 The Haymarket police statue had aroused resentment as soon as it was dedicated in 1889, and when it was moved to Union Park on the West Side a few years later, it was good riddance, according to the city’s labor unionists. Then, in 1957, the Haymarket Businessmen’s Association restored the monument and returned it to the square in an effort to promote tourism in a dingy part of town. And there it stood on Randolph Street until the night of October 6, 1969, when the monument was blown apart by several sticks of dynamite placed between the bronze patrolman’s legs.

  The explosion broke windows in nearby buildings and rained down pieces of metal on the Kennedy Expressway, but no one was hurt. “The blowing up of the only police monument in the United States . . .” was, according to the leader of the city’s police sergeants, “an obvious declaration of war between the police, and the S.D.S. [Students for a Democratic Society] and other anarchist groups.” In fact, the statue had been destroyed by members of the militant Weathermen faction of SDS, who knew the Haymarket story and regarded Spies and Parsons as heroic figures.41 The explosion did nothing, however, to relieve the rage young revolutionaries felt toward the police—a rage that became an uncontrollable fury when two Black Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were killed by Chicago police officers during a nighttime raid on their apartment in December of 1969.42

  Under these adverse circumstances, a small group
of union veterans formed a Haymarket Memorial Committee to undertake the formidable task of erecting something in the square to honor the memory of the workers killed by police gunfire that night in 1886 and of the men who were tried and executed for the bombing. The committee’s secretary, Leslie Orear, drew an explicit connection between past and present in his call for a new memorial. The Haymarket tragedy, he wrote, offered a useful analogy to the present because the conflicts that produced it were so much like the outbreaks of violence that caused bloodshed in the late 1960s.43

  The memorial committee had no success, however, when it challenged what Les Orear called “a deliberate amnesia” on the part of city officials concerning the Haymarket tragedy. An even more serious problem was the police department’s investment in its interpretation of violent events. “Our story is that the Haymarket was a police riot—nobody did a damn thing until the police came,” Orear explained. “Their story is that they saved the city from anarchist terrorism.” Mollie West, a Memorial Committee member who had nearly been killed by police gunfire during the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937, thought there could be a historical park in the Haymarket that would give the police a “fair shake” but also restore some balance to the site by honoring the protesters, though she realized that in Chicago this would be a hard act to complete.44 West had no idea just how difficult this task would become over the next few turbulent years.

  When city officials regularly rebuffed appeals for some marker to commemorate the worker casualties of Haymarket, preservationists found another way to remember them. On May 4, 1970, the same day that Mayor Daley unveiled the newly repaired police statue, Studs Terkel and other Illinois Labor History Society members pluckily gathered in the square to dedicate a small plaque honoring the union dead, which they placed on the wall of the Catholic Charities Building on Randolph Street; it was all they could get, because city officials refused to allow any such thing to be put in public space. Shortly after it was hung, the plaque was torn down. There would be nothing new mounted in the square to contest the police department’s story of Haymarket, the story embodied so gallantly in the figure of the bronze patrolman with his hand raised in the air.

  And then, on October 6, 1970, the Weathermen struck again, blowing up the police monument a second time.45 Months later, when the battered statue was repaired and returned yet again to its concrete pedestal, the mayor ordered round-the-clock police protection at considerable cost and embarrassment to the city. At this point, Les Orear of the Labor History Society wrote to Daley and suggested that the monument be moved out of the violently contested space in the Haymarket to a more secure location. The metal policeman remained on his pedestal for two more years until the statue was quietly transferred to the lobby of the Central Police Station; it was later placed in a nearly hidden courtyard of the Chicago Police Training Academy, where it could be viewed only by special appointment.46

  The square was now emptied of any physical reminder of the 1886 tragedy. This vacancy still seemed a shame to Orear, who had devoted years of work to memorializing the place. He had met people who visited the site and broke down in tears “when they found there was absolutely no demarcation there,” and he had often led delegations of foreign travelers to the spot, pilgrims who came from all over the world to Chicago and who viewed the site “in awe, like it was a holy place.”47

  So Orear and his party of memory carried on until they finally achieved a victory in 1986, when the Illinois Labor History Society persuaded the new mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington (elected in 1983 as the city’s first black mayor), to support a memorial park in the square that would honor the workers who died there, including the four anarchists who were later executed. On May 4, 1986, when the centennial of Haymarket was observed in various parts of the city, Mayor Washington issued a proclamation honoring the first May Day in 1886 as the beginning of “the movement towards the eight-hour day, union rights, civil rights, human rights” and describing the Chicago trial and execution that followed as “a tragic miscarriage of justice which claimed the lives of four labor activists.”48 However, when Mayor Washington died at the start of his second term in 1987, hopes for a memorial park expired with him. And so nothing existed in the Haymarket to recall the lives of anyone who died there, not the protesters and not the police.

  ALTHOUGH HAYMARKET SQUARE lacked any visible reminders of the tragedy, the story of what happened there in 1886 and of what happened afterward gained more and more attention in the years after the centennial ceremonies. The old radical press in Chicago, the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, produced a rich documentary collection, reprinted William Adelman’s popular walking tour of Haymarket sites, and published the music and lyrics to Eight Hours, a cabaret-style musical production. These centennial publications were followed by a parade of scholarly studies by historians interested in Haymarket as a watershed moment in U.S. history.49 In 1998 historians at the Newberry Library achieved some public recognition of the event’s significance when they persuaded the United States Park Service to make the martyrs’ memorial at Waldheim a national landmark.50 In addition, various artists and imaginative writers produced cultural interpretations and artistic representations of the story and its characters, most recently in a novel and in three plays about the ever intriguing lives of Albert and Lucy Parsons.51 This continuing fascination with the Haymarket affair is based on the story’s timeless qualities: its inherent drama, its tragic victims and larger-than-life characters, and its resonance with the political fears and moral concerns of the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century world.52

  ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2004, several hundred Chicagoans gathered to dedicate a memorial in Haymarket Square, finally erected as a result of persistent efforts by the Illinois Labor History Society and the officers of the Chicago Federation of Labor. The city’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, the son of Richard J. Daley, approved the project, and the head of the city’s police union spoke at the ceremony, even though both men seemed well aware of Haymarket Square’s explosive history.53

  There is a statue now on the exact spot where Sam Fielden stood speaking on a hay wagon when Captain Ward gave the order to disperse that night in 1886. Instead of naming the casualties of the Haymarket tragedy, the new monument on Desplaines Street offers the public a symbolic memorial: a figurative composition of rounded-off bronze figures with a reddish hue, shapes of people who are assembling, or perhaps disassembling, a wagon. 54 The base of the structure features a cautiously worded inscription that refers to the affair as “a powerful symbol for a diverse cross section of people, ideas and movements,” which touched “on the issues of free speech, the right of public assembly, organized labor, the fight for the eight-hour workday, law enforcement, justice, anarchy, and the right of human beings to pursue an equitable and prosperous life.”55

  This language is nothing like what the fierce partisans of the Haymarket martyrs would have chosen. Rather, the inscribed words on the monument’s base reflect a point of view carefully hammered out by a committee of citizens and local officials trying to mark a spot and an event that left a painfully conflicted memory as its legacy. So it took some time for citizens, advocates and officials to agree on an appropriate Haymarket memorial—thirty-five years after the idea was first raised by Studs Terkel and others. For all those years, said the city’s cultural historian, the idea of commemorating Haymarket was impossible because the event aroused such strong emotions; it took a long time for Chicagoans to gain a perspective that allowed people “to look back on the Haymarket and see that it was everybody’s tragedy.” 56

  MANY PEOPLE ON ALL SIDES suffered, directly and indirectly, from the terrible events that unfolded in Chicago beginning on May 3, 1886. Besides the policemen and workers who lost their lives as a result, and scores of family members and friends who lost loved ones, other Americans sustained a different kind of loss—a loss of heart. This was particularly true in the case of many of the worker activists and labor reformers who imagined creating a new a
nd better world on the eve of the Great Upheaval. In 1865 their forefathers, Andrew Cameron, William Sylvis and Ira Steward, believed that the Republic’s sacrifices in the Civil War, including the death of their beloved president, had made it possible for the United States to become a more perfect union. With the slaves emancipated and the South under democratic reconstruction, union workers in Chicago and other cities began to anticipate their own emancipation from the endless workday and growing tyranny of wage labor. For nearly twenty years they clung to that dream despite their bitter disappointment with failed laws, despite their suffering in two crippling depressions and despite their bloody defeats in strike after strike. On May 1, 1886, all this was forgotten as workers celebrated their “emancipation day” and looked forward to a new era when, they believed, America would become a cooperative commonwealth, free of violence and coercion or “class rule of any kind.” Three more days of hope followed, until the tragic bombing and shooting in Haymarket Square shattered the euphoria and unleashed the forces that led to Black Friday, when four workers in muslin robes dangled from ropes in Cook County Jail.

  In the decades that followed, there would be other moments like May 1, 1886, when laboring people would strike and march and demonstrate their desire to create a new world of work, moments when they could even imagine the coming of a new cooperative society. But never again would there be anything quite like the feeling thousands of American workers experienced on that first May Day, that day when they believed that their dreams of freedom would really come true.

  The nonviolent mass protests of May 1, 1886, could have marked a turning point in American history—a moment when our industrial relations could have developed in a different, less conflicted way, but instead the killings at the McCormick plant, the bombing in the Haymarket, along with the court proceedings and the hangings that followed, ushered in fifty years of recurrent industrial violence, a period when workers, especially immigrants, often found themselves at war with their employers, the courts, the police and the armed forces of their own government.