Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1865.

  Quote in Sandburg, Lincoln, p. 742.

  First quote in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 100. Second quote from Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1865.

  James C. Sylvis, The Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, Late President of the Iron-Moulders’ International Union and also of the National Labor Union (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfiner, 1872), pp. 129–30, 169.

  Ibid., p. 129.

  Ibid., p. 25. Also see David Montgomery, “William H. Sylvis and the Search for Working-Class Citizenship,” in Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, eds., Labor Leaders in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 3–29.

  Sylvis, The Life, pp. 31–32.

  On antebellum labor history, see Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924); and Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1947), Vol. 1.

  Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), pp. 75–94, 103–6. In fact, no workers died in strike-related violence until 1850, when New York City police killed two German tailors. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 771.

  David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 94–96; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 157.

  Sylvis, The Life, p. 15; and P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, p. 348.

  P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, p. 348.

  Robert Ozanne, A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 5; Philip S. Foner and David R. Roediger, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 310, n. 46.

  Quote in P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, p. 361.

  J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 519, 616; G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement, 1789–1947 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948), pp. 95–96; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 116–21. Quote from E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991), p. 830.

  On Andrew Cameron, see Allen Johnson et al., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner, 1937), pp. 433–34.

  Ibid. Also see Richard Schneirov, “Political Cultures and the Role of the State in Labor’s Republic: A View from Chicago,” Labor History 32 (Summer 1991), pp. 387–93.

  Workingman’s Advocate, July 7, 1866.

  Workingman’s Advocate, April 28, 1866.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 90–91.

  P. Foner and Roediger, Our Own Time, p. 86. Also see Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 254–55.

  P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, p. 364; Steward quoted in Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 251.

  George McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (Boston: A. M. Bridgman & Co., 1886), p. 128; and P. Foner and Roediger, Our Own Time, pp. 86, 108, 127.

  Marx quoted in P. Foner and Roediger, Our Own Time, p. 82.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, pp. 168, 174; Workingman’s Advocate, April 28, 1866.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 176; Sylvis, The Life, pp. 349–50.

  Quotes from John R. Commons et al., eds., Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1910), Vol. IX, p. 145.

  E. Foner, American Freedom, pp. 99, 106.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 306; and Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 175.

  McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement, p. 130.

  Quote in Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 176.

  Boston Daily Evening Voice, April 6, 1867, quoted in Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 307.

  Quote in Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 254.

  Workingman’s Advocate, September 28, 1867.

  Miller, City of the Century, p. 121.

  Chapter Two / A Paradise for Workers and Speculators

  Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1866.

  Miller, City of the Century, p. 114; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 230.

  Miller, City of the Century, p. 89; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, p. 90; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 50.

  Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, pp. 91–92.

  Ibid., p. 91; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, pp. 67, 71, 81–82, 110, 158, and quote on p. 103; John B. Jentz, “Class and Politics in an Emerging Industrial City: Chicago in the 1860s and 1870s,” Journal of Urban History 17 (May 1991), p. 231; Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 209; Ozanne, Century, p. 5; and Arthur C. Cole, The Era of the Civil War (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1919), pp. 381–82.

  Miller, City of the Century, p. 114; Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1866; and see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, pp. 149, 163, 230.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 482; and Jentz, “Class and Politics,” pp. 231–32.

  Quote from Miller, City of the Century, pp. 143–44.

  Workingman’s Advocate, April 28, 1866.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 231, 248, 254–57, 380–81.

  Quote ibid., p. 308.

  Description from Illinois Staats-Zeitung, May 2, 3, 1867, quoted in Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, “German Working Class Culture in Chicago,” Gulliver 9 (1981), pp. 254–55, 257.

  Ozanne, Century, pp. 6–7, including quote; and Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 309–10.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, pp. 178, 258, 505; and Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 309.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 310.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 179.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 310–11; and Montgomery, “William H. Sylvis,” p. 15.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 179; Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 226–27; and Workingman’s Advocate, August 17, September 28, 1867.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 227.

  P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, pp. 376–77.

  Workingman’s Advocate, July 4, 1868.

  Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 263.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, p. 185; and Workingman’s Advocate, April 24, 1869.

  Charlotte Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union (New York: International Publishers, 1942), pp. 74–76.

  Ibid., pp. 75, 106–9.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 2, pp. 18, 159; Jentz, “Class and Politics,” pp. 235, 237–38, 241, 243; and see Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 38–39, 54.

  “Annual Report of the Agent of the German Society of Chicago,” April 1, 1870, quoted in Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 40.

  Ibid., pp. 39–40; and Miller, City of the Century, p. 135.

  Miller, City of the Century, p. 134.

  Einhorn, Property Rules, Table 1, Property Ownership, p. 250. Mean total wealth in 1870 was $19,257 for native-born, $2,475 for German, $2,580 for Irish and $2,227 for Scandinavian. Edward Bubnys, “Nativity and the Distribution of Wealth: Chicago, 1870,” Explorations in Economic History 19 (April 1982), Tables 2 and 3, pp. 104–5.

  Miller, City of the Century, pp. 120, 127–31.

  Alfred T. Andreas, History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (New York: Arno Press, 1975), Vol. 2, pp. 769, 775; Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 117, 153. Bismarck quoted in Miller, City of the Century, p. 131.

  Quote in Miller, City of the Century, p. 121.<
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  Twain’s novel The Gilded Age was published in 1874. See H. Wayne Morgan, “An Age in Need of Reassessment,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1963), p. 1. Whitman quoted in John Tipple, “The Robber Baron in the Gilded Age,” in Morgan, ed., Gilded Age, p. 32.

  Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” reprinted in Perry Miller, ed., Major Writers of America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), Vol. 1, pp. 1086–87, 1104.

  Ibid., pp. 1087, 1100. Last Whitman quote in Robert Falk, “The Writers’ Search for Lost Reality,” in Morgan, ed., Gilded Age, p. 200.

  Chapter Three / We May Not Always Be So Secure

  See Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871 (1937; reprint, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), pp. 61–173; quote on p. 90.

  Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmarte: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 18–19.

  Quote ibid.

  Jellinek, Paris Commune, pp. 338–70.

  Katz, From Appomattox, pp. 69, 71, 75, 83, 85.

  See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), pp. 91–92.

  Quote from Katz, From Appomattox, pp. 149, 153–54.

  Workingman’s Advocate, July 8, 1871.

  Workingman’s Advocate, July 8, 1871; and Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France, in Workingman’s Advocate, July 17, 1871.

  Workingman’s Advocate, July 8, August 19, 1871.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 191.

  Quotes in Miller, City of the Century, pp. 159, 171; and Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 44.

  Smith, Urban Disorder (see Prologue, n. 14), p. 49.

  Quote ibid., p. 51. I have relied here upon Smith’s discussion of the hanging rumors, ibid., pp. 53, 55–57.

  See ibid., p. 34.

  Ibid., pp. 33, 71, 73.

  Miller, City of the Century, p. 164; and Einhorn, Property Rules, p. 234.

  Sawislak, Smoldering City, pp. 79, 44; and Miller, City of the Century, p. 167.

  Quotes in Katz, From Appomattox, pp. 124–25.

  Quote ibid., p. 125.

  Einhorn, Property Rules, pp. 235–36.

  Sawislak, Smoldering City, p. 44. Also see Miller, City of the Century, pp. 134, 147–48.

  Einhorn, Property Rules, p. 236.

  Sawislak, Smoldering City, p. 93. On Medill, see Nord, “The Public Community,” p. 423; Einhorn, Property Rules, p. 236.

  Quote in Einhorn, Property Rules, p. 236.

  Ibid., pp. 236, 239, 250.

  John J. Flinn, History of the Chicago Police from the Settlement of the Community to the Present Time (Chicago: Police Book Fund, 1887), pp. 137–38, 140.

  Quote from ibid., pp. 142, 144.

  Jentz, “Class and Politics,” p. 261.

  Quote ibid., p. 248.

  See Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 61; Einhorn, Property Rules, pp. 219–21, 226–27.

  Quote in Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 19, 194.

  Katz, From Appomattox, p. 169.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 194, 196, 240–41.

  Einhorn, Property Rules, pp. 233–34, Sawislak, Smoldering City, pp. 87–88, 97; and Miller, City of the Century, pp. 162–63.

  Quote from Floyd Dell, “Socialism and Anarchism in Chicago,” in J. Seymour Currey, ed., Chicago: Its History and Its Builders (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1912), p. 366.

  Ibid., p. 365. Horace White quoted in Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 53.

  Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 53; and quote in Herbert Gutman, “The Workers’ Search for Power,” in Morgan, ed., Gilded Age, pp. 61–63.

  Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 54; Chicago Tribune, December 23, 24, 25, 29, 1873, January 2, 1874.

  Quotes from Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 58; and Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 345.

  Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 53–54.

  Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in America (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 186.

  Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 54.

  Jentz, “Class and Politics,” p. 249.

  See Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 57; Ozanne, Century, p. 8; and quotes from Gutman, “Workers’ Search,” p. 45.

  Quotes from Gutman, “Workers’ Search,” p. 45.

  Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 59.

  Chapter 4 / A Liberty-Thirsty People

  Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists (Chicago: Shulte & Co, 1889), p. 49.

  On southern migrants to Chicago, see Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 21.

  On the Levee District, see Richard C. Lindberg, Chicago Ragtime: Another Look at Chicago, 1880–1920 (South Bend, IN: Icarus Press, 1985), pp. 119–20.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 408.

  Nord, “The Public Community,” pp. 416–17.

  Ibid., pp. 419–21, and quote on pp. 431–32.

  Albert R. Parsons, “Autobiography of Albert R. Parsons,” in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 30.

  Ibid., p. 27.

  Ibid., pp. 29–31.

  See W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935), pp. 553, 556. By the middle of 1868 more than 400 Texas blacks had been killed in the violence, most of them murdered by white desperadoes. Some white men died as well, including some racists killed by army and militiamen, and some northerners, like seven men from Illinois murdered by a mob because they were carpetbaggers. See Randolph B. Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), pp. 17–18, 165, 176–78, 184.

  Albert Parsons to George A. Schilling, in Lucy Parsons, ed., The Life of Albert R. Parsons (Chicago: Lucy Parsons, 1903), p. 217; and A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 29.

  Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction, pp. 17–20.

  Parsons to Schilling in L. Parsons, The Life, p. 216.

  Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction, pp. 19–20; A. Parsons to Schilling in L. Parsons, The Life, p. 218; and A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 29.

  A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” pp. 29–30.

  Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976), pp. 14, 268; and Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1886.

  Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 14, 268; and Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, “Lucy Parsons,” in Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 668–69.

  Lucy Parsons quoted in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 11.

  DuBois, Black Reconstruction, pp. 561, 624, 684, 708.

  William J. Adelman, Haymarket Revisited: A Tour Guide of Labor History Sites and Ethnic Neighborhoods Connected with the Haymarket Affair (Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 1976), pp. 65–75; and Christine Harzig, “Chicago’s German North Side, 1880–1900: The Structure of a Gilded Age Ethnic Neighborhood,” in Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850–1910: A Comparative Portrait (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), pp. 127–44.

  United States Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), pp. 417, 448.

  United States Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), p. 374; United States Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on the Manufactures of the United States at the Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), p. 870. Quote in Bruce Carlan Levine, “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Freimanner: German Chica
go in the Civil War Era,” in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, pp. 176–77.

  Hartmut Keil, “Chicago’s German Working Class,” in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, pp. 28, 31; Harzig, “Chicago’s German North Side,” p. 129.

  The following account is based on August Spies, “Autobiography of August Spies,” in P. Foner, Autobiographies, pp. 59–69.

  Quotes ibid., p. 66.

  Manufactures at the Tenth Census, p. 392.

  Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, pp. 170, 175–76; Hartmut Keil, “Immigrant Neighborhoods and American Society: German Immigrants on Chicago’s Northwest Side in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Hartmut Keil, ed., German Workers’ Culture in the United States, 1850 to 1920 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), pp. 25–58.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 22–23; Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, pp. 34, 170–71, 176.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 23; and Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, pp. 160–68, 176–81.

  Avrich, Tragedy, p. 123.

  Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture: Nineteenth-Century German America on Parade,” in Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 49–50.

  Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 489.

  Hartmut Keil and Heinz Ickstadt, “Elements of German Working-Class Culture in Chicago, 1880 to 1990,” and Christine Heiss, “Popular and Working-Class German Theater in Chicago, 1870–1910,” in Keil, ed., German Workers’ Culture, pp. 94–95, 181–202; Christa Carajal, “German-American Theater,” in Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed., Ethnic Theater in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 178–79, 183, 185.

  Manufactures at the Tenth Census, p. 540; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 31; and Odd S. Lovoll, “A Scandinavian Melting Pot in Chicago,” in Philip J. Anderson and Dag Blanck, eds., Swedish-American Life in Chicago: Culture and Urban Aspects of an Immigrant People, 1850–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 62.

  Quote in Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 28–29; Lovoll, “Scandinavian Melting Pot,” p. 63; S. N. D. North, The Newspaper and Periodical Press at the Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884), p. 221.