Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  In this sense, the Haymarket affair was not “everybody’s tragedy.” The defeat of the eight-hour movement, the suppression of its radical wing and the extinction of the visionary Knights of Labor were great victories for employers in Chicago and other American industrial cities. Furthermore, the arrest, trial and execution of the anarchists were seen as moral and political victories for law and order, a series of events that were said to have saved the Republic from anarchy. The losers in the saga appeared at first to be merely a few maladjusted immigrant workers and the most militant troublemakers in their midst. But, in the long run, the losses were much broader.

  The people of Chicago lost any chance for the social peace all classes desired; instead, they inherited the “bone deep grudges” that would rest on their shoulders for decades to come. The officers of the court, the police captains, the prosecuting attorneys, the judges and jurymen in the Haymarket case had seemed like heroes in 1887, but within a few years, they lost their lustrous reputations when members of the bar and other influential citizens throughout the state and elsewhere came to believe that the convictions of the anarchists were, in Clarence Darrow’s words, “brought about through malice and hatred,” and that the tactics used by the police and the prosecution constituted a “standing menace to the liberty of the citizen.”57 What is more, the execution of Spies, Parsons, Engel and Fischer came to be seen by many people in the United States and overseas not as a victory of democracy over anarchy, but as a travesty that betrayed the American ideal of liberty and justice for all. It is impossible to say exactly what might have been different if the police hadn’t killed those strikers at McCormick’s, if the chief inspector hadn’t decided to break up the Haymarket meeting, if someone hadn’t thrown the bomb, but it is clear that, in some sense, we are today living with the legacy of those long-ago events.

  Acknowledgments

  My editor, Andrew Miller, initially approached me about writing a new narrative history of the Haymarket affair, one that situated the event in a large social context and re-created the tensions and passions surrounding the birth of the first labor movement. The challenge was an exciting one. Andrew has supported my efforts to meet that challenge at every critical step in the process. His attention to detail, structure and flow in several drafts of the manuscript helped me to improve it in many important ways.

  Howard Zinn persuaded me to undertake this project. And I am very happy that he did. Howard offered his own special brand of encouragement all along the way, and did me a good turn at first when he referred me to his agent, John Taylor Williams. Ike Williams agreed to represent me and has done so very well.

  Several of my Boston friends have read the manuscript at various stages and offered many helpful suggestions, especially Jim O’Brien and Michael Kenney, who waded through a first draft with me and helped me chart a smoother course to my final destination. Jim also helped me with the epilogue. Christopher Daly read the manuscript with the eyes of a journalist and a historian, and offered me many valuable suggestions. John Hess and Robert d’Attilio read through these pages as well and gave me the benefit of their exceptional knowledge of anarchists and anarchism. Martin Blatt also read the entire manuscript and added a rewarding installment to our long and valuable dialogue about doing movement history. My research assistant in Boston, Jacob Carliner Remes, not only made excellent research notes for me; he also helped me clarify my thinking about the anarchists’ trial and provided me with insightful suggestions about other critical aspects of my account. Ron Joseph, a former student, reappeared in my life a few years ago and offered to help me with this book: he has done so with great effect by carefully proofreading the text, by making editorial suggestions, by organizing and checking the citations, and by solving the mysteries of creating endnotes in Microsoft Word. My thanks also to Ellen Feldman and Dixon Gaines at Pantheon Books for additional editing.

  I am also deeply indebted to three historians whose own scholarship in labor and working-class history I respect and admire enormously. Bruce Laurie, David Montgomery and David Roediger each brought their own impressive knowledge of nineteenth-century social history to bear on my treatment of subjects they have studied in far greater depth.

  Any historian who seeks to retell an old story for a new time naturally relies upon the work of those who told the tale in earlier times. The Haymarket case is discussed in hundreds of books and articles and is examined exhaustively in three scholarly studies: in a pioneering political and legal study by Henry David; in a richly detailed account by Paul Avrich, the noted scholar of anarchism; and then, more recently, in an insightful cultural interpretation by Carl Smith. Anyone interested in the affair also owes a great debt to David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont for compiling and editing the superb Haymarket Scrapbook for Charles H. Kerr. Since my account is also a story of Chicago, its immigrant workers and their organizations, I have relied upon the excellent historical work on the city, first of all the three volumes authored by the wonderful writer Bessie Louise Pierce, and then all those who followed her. I am especially indebted to the valuable research about Chicago’s immigrant workers and their struggles produced by John B. Jentz, Hartmut Keil, Bruce C. Nelson, Richard Schneirov and Karen Sawislak.

  I have also returned again and again to the work of four great historians— Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm— whose pioneering scholarship in social history informs this account of Gilded Age wage earners and their struggles. I trust the citations in my endnotes adequately express my debt to these historians and many others who have widened and deepened my understanding of the Gilded Age and its cities, its industries, its politics and its working people.

  One of my desires in telling this story was to re-create scenes and characters by borrowing a few of the approaches novelists and playwrights use when they turn to historical subjects. I was, therefore, fascinated by Martin Duberman’s exciting novel on Haymarket and by Zayd Dohrn’s gripping play on the lives of Albert and Lucy Parsons. Martin and Zayd both met with me in New York City to talk about the story that fascinates us all. Zayd also responded with helpful comments on my nonfiction treatment of characters and scenes he has dramatized.

  I owe many thanks to those in Chicago who assisted me when I visited there: to James Grossman, Alfred Young and Tobias Higbie of the incomparable Newberry Library, who made me welcome as a summer fellow in 2004, when I was just beginning to think about the book, and then offered me a chance to speak to a knowledgeable public audience about my work in progress; to William Adelman, who took me on a personalized tour of the Haymarket sites and brought his own unrivaled knowledge of the case to his reading of a draft; to Leslie Orear, Mollie West, Mike Matejka and the folks at the Illinois Labor History Society, who have supported my work in various important ways; to Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian, for providing me with his account of the struggle to create a memorial in the square; to Mary Brogger, the Chicago sculptor, for sharing her artist’s sense of how she has represented the Haymarket events in a public monument; and, most of all, to Studs Terkel, who granted me an unforgettable interview in his home in July of 2003 and told me his version of the Haymarket story in his inimitable voice.

  I am indebted to others in Chicagoland as well. During one visit my aunt and uncle, Ann and Bob DiVall, welcomed me back to their home and reminded me of my boyhood days when I ventured out of my little hometown of Carpentersville to see the big-city sites they selected: the ones we all remembered best were Union Station, Wrigley Field and the Chicago Historical Society—the source of many of the illustrations used in this book.

  In addition to the professionals at the Newberry Library and the Historical Society in Chicago, I owe other debts for research assistance. Elaine Bernard, director of the Harvard Trade Union Program, and the outstanding professionals at Harvard’s Widener, Littauer and Lamont libraries unlocked the doors to the treasure of books and documents in their care. Special thanks to David Cobb in the map room at Puse
y Library for helping me find the superb Railway Terminal and Industrial Map of Chicago from 1886 and for putting me in touch with Jonathan Wyss and Kelly Sandefer of Topaz Maps in Watertown, Massachusetts, who made the attractive and illustrative maps for this book. I would also like to acknowledge the professionals who staff the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; they helped me search the newly acquired Haymarket Collection.

  During the writing of this book I entered into a partnership with Leon Fink, who, as editor of the new journal Labor: Studies of Working-Class History in the Americas, proposed that the publication become the official journal of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, this at a time when I had just assumed the presidency of LAWCHA. Thanks to Leon, a portion of the epilogue of this book appeared in article form in Labor 2 (Fall 2005), and is reprinted here by permission. Leon perked my interest in writing a book like this some time ago when he asked why scholars of labor history weren’t tackling the large, epic stories as the journalist J. Anthony Lukas had done in his book Big Trouble. He also helped more directly by referring me to his graduate student, Aaron Max Berkowitz, who has worked as my capable research assistant in Chicago. Aaron has been especially helpful in finding and copying many of the illustrations that appear in this book.

  I also owe ringraziamenti to many friends and associates in Italy, where I spent a month working on the manuscript in the fall of 2004 at Centro Studi Liguri in Bogliasco, near Genoa. I thank the Fondazione Bogliasco for awarding me a valuable fellowship and affording me several weeks of time to write in a well-equipped studio on a hill above the Mediterranean Sea. As enchanting as the vistas were, as delightful as the meals were, as engaging as the company of the other writers and artists was, I was only moderately distracted from my writing, and so my time in Bogliasco was therefore extremely productive. So grazie mille to the staff at the Centro and to the other fellows, especially to my novelist friends from Germany, Beate Rygiert and Danny Bachmann, who took an interest in my Chicago Germans and helped me prepare a reading based on six episodes in the life of August Spies. My return to Genoa was enriched, as it always is, by my friends Nando Fasce and Carla Viale, who took such good care of me, as they always do. Nando was especially helpful in shaping my thinking about the memory of Haymarket in a walk around the Porto Antico and on a train ride to Milano. So helpful too was mio amico Bruno Cartosio, who invited me to Bergamo and shared his own insights on the legacy of Haymarket and the mysteries of la memoria pubblica e la memoria privata.

  Closer to home I owe thanks to my faculty colleagues and the administrators of the University of Massachusetts Boston who awarded me a sabbatical leave and a post-tenure review award, which supported the research costs for this project, and to Susan Moir, director of the Labor Resource Center, for a grant to cover travel and copying costs. I also wish to express appreciation to all the workers and union members who have supported me at UMass-Boston in the library, in the offices of the College of Public and Community Service, in the mail room, in the computer labs and in the copy centers.

  Even closer to home are the various members of my extended family who showed their interest and encouragement during this bookmaking process, especially my sister Beth Kress, her son Simon, and my parents, Mary Kaye and Gerald Green, who first took me to Chicago when I was a boy.

  Finally, I express my love and gratitude to the two people who mean the most to me: my wife, Janet Lee Grogan, and my son, Nicholas James Green. Janet and Nick have both understood what doing this work means to me and have supported my effort to do it in many important ways, even though it has taken me away from them too often and too long. Janet read the entire manuscript with her own perceptive eyes and helped me improve it. Nick turned his mind and his red pen on the prologue and the epilogue and let me know how a student feels reading a marked-up essay. He also offered me sage bits of advice about making good word choices and avoiding poor metaphors, usually in conversations we had on the way to and from his school. It has been a special pleasure to write this book; this would not have been the case but for the love and peace of mind Janet and Nick have given me. So, for these priceless gifts, and for many others as well, I dedicate this book to them.

  Somerville, Massachusetts

  May 15, 2005

  Notes

  Prologue

  Calculation based on 1880 and 1890 censuses of manufacturing, which calculated “value added” to manufacturing by subtracting the value of materials from the gross value of products. Figures from tables in Bessie Louise Pierce, The Rise of the Modern City, 1871–1893, Vol. 3 of A History of Chicago (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 534–35.

  Bessie Louise Pierce, From Town to City, 1848–1871, Vol. 2 of A History of Chicago (New York: Knopf, 1940), pp. 67, 110; and Chicago Tribune, May 5, 6, 1886.

  Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1886.

  Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 225–26, 228. On Pullman, see Bessie Louise Pierce, ed., As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), pp. 241–49. On Pullman building at Adams and Michigan, see Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 232, n. 102.

  Quote in Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 141.

  All quotes describing the events of May 4 are from the Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1886, unless cited otherwise.

  New York Times, May 6, 1886; and Chicago Tribune, May 6, 7, 1886. On the Tribune and its coverage, see Lloyd Wendt, Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), pp. 282–85, 287–88.

  On Medill, see Wendt, Chicago Tribune; Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1954), p. 57; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 86, and Vol. 3, p. 411; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 98; and David Paul Nord, “The Public Community: The Urbanization of Journalism in Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 11 (August 1985), p. 439.

  Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1886.

  Quotes from Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements (New York: Russell & Russell, 1936), p. 179; Mary Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925), p. 21; and Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 218.

  See Richard Sennett, “Middle-Class Families and Urban Violence: The Experience of a Chicago Community in the Nineteenth Century,” in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).

  Quotes from Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 276; and T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 29.

  Jeffory A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 36–39; New York Times, May 6, 1886; and Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 126.

  Reverend H. W. Thomas quoted in Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 169.

  Ibid., p. 168.

  Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography (New York: Dutton, 1925), pp. 238–39.

  Quote from John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 55. Also see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), p. 102; and Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1948), pp. 208–9.

  Quote from Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 154.

  Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 161; and Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, pp. 130–31.

  George Pullman to Andrew Carnegie, May 5, 1886, Carnegie Papers, Vol. 9, Folio 1445, Library of Congress; and see Buder, Pullman, pp. 33, 37, 140–42. Triumphant Democracy quoted in Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1886.

  On Oglesby, see Mark A. Plummer, Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter: Governor Richard J. Oglesby (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 178, 190–91; and quote in Carl S. Smith, “Cataclysm and Cultural Consciousness: Chicago and the Haymarket Trial,” Chicago History 15 (Summer 1986), p. 46.

  Chapter One / For Once in Common Front

  Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1865.

  Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1865; Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Twenty Days and Nights That Followed (New York: Castle Books, 1993), p. 235; and quote from Sandburg, Lincoln, p. 740.

  Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1865; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, pp. 256, 504–5; Lincoln quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 28.