Death in the Haymarket
Page 40
Lovoll, “Scandinavian Melting Pot,” p. 60; and see Robert H. Wiebe, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 65–72.
Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” pp. 45, 63, 65.
Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 345.
Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 53, 59; Flinn, Chicago Police, p. 148.
Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 59; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 253; Christine Heiss, “German Radicals in Industrial America: The Lehr-und-wehr Verein in Gilded Age Chicago,” in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, pp. 211, 214, 224.
Heiss, “German Radicals,” p. 214.
Spies, “Autobiography,” p. 67.
Medill quoted in Wayne Andrews, Battle for Chicago (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1946), p. 68; A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” pp. 30–31; Parsons quoted in John D. Lawson, ed., American State Trials (St. Louis: F. H. Thomas Law Book Co., 1919), p. 310.
George A. Schilling, “A History of the Labor Movement in Chicago,” in L. Parsons, The Life, p. xxii.
Ibid., p. xxiii. On Schilling, see Hartmut Keil, “The German Immigrant Working Class of Chicago, 1875–90: Workers, Labor Leaders and the Labor Movement,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent European Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 165–66.
Avrich, Tragedy, p. 23. On southwestern humor, see Falk, “Writers’ Search for Lost Reality,” in Morgan, ed., Gilded Age, p. 215.
Avrich, Tragedy, p. 22; Chicago Tribune, quoted in Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 244; A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 31.
Chapter Five / The Inevitable Uprising
Quotes from Flinn, Chicago Police, pp. 157–58, 202.
Advertisement in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 7, 1877, reprinted in Joshua Freeman et al., From the Gilded Age to the Present, Vol. 2 of Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 26.
Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 477.
Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1876.
William J. Adelman, Pilsen and the West Side: A Tour Guide (Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 1983), revised 1983 version, photocopy in the author’s possession, courtesy of the Illinois Labor History Society.
Richard Schneirov, “Free Thought and Socialism in the Czech Community in Chicago, 1875–1887,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., “ Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 123–24, 127, 129, 133. Quote from Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 33.
Schneirov, “Free Thought,” pp. 125, 128, 133. On Czech socialist exiles in Chicago, see Thomas Capek, The Czechs (Bohemians ) in America: A Study of Their National, Cultural, Political, Social, Economic, and Religious Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), pp. 140, 148.
Schneirov, “Free Thought,” p. 126; and Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 103.
Flinn, Chicago Police, p. 151.
Ibid.; Schneirov, “Free Thought,” p. 133.
Flinn, Chicago Police, pp. 151, 158.
Ibid., pp. 158–59.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 159; Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 17–18.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 55; Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” pp. xvi–xxvii.
Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 254, 346, 351, 539; Flinn, Chicago Police, p. 15; Schneirov, “Free Thought,” p. 197; and Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 103, 140.
Richard Digby-Junger, The Journalist as Reformer: Henry Demarest Lloyd and Wealth Against Commonwealth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 21–48; and John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), p. 77.
See Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), pp. 74–114.
Quotes from Flinn, Chicago Police, pp. 154, 159–60.
Ibid., p. 159.
Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 246; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 71. Handbill reproduced in Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, following p. 98.
Flinn, Chicago Police, pp. 160–61; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 71.
Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” p. xviii. See Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 29–30; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 72; and A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p.
Speech quoted in Adelman, Pilsen, p. 13.
The following account of the railroad strike in Chicago is based on Bruce, 1877, pp. 235–53.
Miller, City of the Century, p. 232.
Bruce, 1877, pp. 239–40; Flinn, Chicago Police, p. 165.
Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 73.
Ibid., pp. 74, 105–10.
Quoted in Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 250.
Spies, “Autobiography,” p. 68.
Adelman, Pilsen, p. 50.
Miller, City of the Century, p. 233; Flinn, Chicago Police, pp. 199, 208.
Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 251.
Chicago Tribune quoted in Flinn, Chicago Police, p. 203; and see Richard C. Marohn, “The Arming of the Chicago Police in the Nineteenth Century,” Chicago History 11 (Spring 1982), pp. 42, 44, 46.
Wolfgang Abendroth, A Short History of the European Working Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 40.
For a revealing study of how widespread the uprising of 1877 became and how it pulled thousands of nonstrikers from local communities into the protesting crowds, including many middle-class city dwellers who had been alienated from the railroad companies by their invasion and destruction of urban space, see David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement, pp. 459–60.
L. Parsons, The Life, p. 120; McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement, pp. 459–61.
Gompers, Seventy Years (see Prologue, n. 16), pp. 46–47.
The following account is from A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” pp. 32–34.
Chapter Six / The Flame That Makes the Kettle Boil
Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” p. xviii; and see Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 57–58.
Quote in Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 58.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Heiss, “German Radicals in Industrial America” (see chap. 4, n. 40), pp. 216, 219–20. A. Parsons quoted in Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1878.
Quotes in Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 87; and Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 59.
Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 34.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 60.
Harzig, “Chicago’s German North Side” (see chap. 4, n. 20), p. 218; and Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” p. xix.
Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1879.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 62–64; quote in Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” p. xix.
Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 91. The Socialistic Labor Party sent three more members to the Common Council, where they worked with Democratic aldermen to employ factory inspectors, to abolish labor for children under twelve years old, to open public baths and water closets and to gain funding for new public schools and reading rooms.
Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), p. 41; Avrich, Tragedy, p. 150; Blaine McKinley, “Holmes, Lizzie May Swank,” in Schultz and Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago (see chap. 4, n. 17), p. 400.
See Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 33–36; Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” p. xx; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 67–68; quote from A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 36.
Hartmut Keil, “German Working-Class Radicalism in the United States from the 1870s to World War I,” in Hoerder, “Struggle a Hard Battle,” pp. 81–82; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 33–34.
Harzig, “Chicago’s Ger
man North Side,” pp. 217–18.
A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 36; and see August Spies, “The Right to Bear Arms,” Alarm, January 9, 1886.
Oscar Neebe, “Autobiography of Oscar Neebe,” in P. Foner, Autobiographies, p. 165.
Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 259.
Quote in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 59.
James Joll, The Anarchists (London: Eyre & Spottswoode, 1963), pp. 120–24; Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 76.
Joll, The Anarchists, pp. 124–25.
Avrich, Tragedy, p. 58.
Population at the Eleventh Census, p. 374; and see Einhorn, Property Rules, p. 249.
Quote in Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 15–16. During the 1880s, Chicago’s Bohemian population increased to 25,105, the Polish population to 24,086, the Norwegian to 21,835, the British and Scottish to 47,149, the Swedish to 43,032 and the German to 161,039. Furthermore, the Irish kept coming, increasing their numbers to 70,028; Population at the Eleventh Census, pp. 671–72. On Poles and Russian Jews, see Pierce, Vol. 3, pp. 34–39; Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991); and Edward Mazur, “Jewish Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb,” in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, eds., Ethnic Chicago (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 73–75.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 67, 69, 85, 96; Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), p. 35; Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, p. 407; Gary P. Steenson, “ Not One Man! Not One Penny!”: German Social Democracy, 1863–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), pp. 30–31.
See Schwab’s life story in Michael Schwab, “Autobiography of Michael Schwab,” in P. Foner, Autobiographies, pp. 99–121 (quote from p. 109).
Quotes in P. Foner, Autobiographies, pp. 112, 120–21, 123–24.
Avrich, Tragedy, p. 62.
Ibid., pp. 63–64; David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), p. 137.
Avrich, Tragedy, p. 64.
Bruce, 1877, pp. 193, 318.
Avrich, Tragedy, p. 24. And see Robert Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 32.
A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 37; P. Foner and Roediger, Our Own Time, pp. 132, 137, and quote on p. 121; “Statistics on German Bakers,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 26, 1882, translation in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, p. 81; John R. Commons, History of Labor in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1918), Vol. 2, p. 250, n. 8.
Quotes in Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 78, 128–29.
Ibid.
See Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 48; United States Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on Manufacturing Industries in the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), pp. 133–42; “The Fate of Women Workers,” from Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 16, 1882, in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, p. 81; and Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 197. On female carpet weavers and other “lady Knights,” see Susan Levine, Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).
Harper’s Weekly, July 22, 1883; Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 97.
Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” p. xxiii.
Norman Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895: A Study in Democracy (New York and London: D. Appleton & Co., 1929), pp. 129, 131.
Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 129; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 39.
Quote from A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” pp. 39–40.
Quote ibid., pp. 38–39, 41.
Quotes from Spies, “Autobiography,” pp. 68–69, and from A. Parsons, “Autobiography,” p. 47.
Chapter Seven / A Brutal and Inventive Vitality
On the railroads, see Miller, City of the Century, pp. 182, 241–42; and on the iron industry, the Union Steel Co. and other producers, see A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1885), Vol. 2, pp. 673–700.
The value of capital invested in the city’s ten leading industries rose from $40.5 million to $247.7 million, while the force of wage earners in these sectors grew from roughly 42,000 to 101,000. The value added by these manufacturing firms (after subtracting the value of materials) soared from $38.2 million to $810.7 million. Wages in the aggregate grew, but modestly, from a yearly average of $478 per worker in 1880 to $607 a decade later. If the cost of materials and the cost of wages are subtracted from the total value of manufactured goods, then “value added” multiplied twenty-seven times—from $27.7 million to $760.3 million, while wages paid grew from $19.3 million to $58 million. Based on census figures compiled in Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 12–13, and Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 534–35. Quote from Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 218.
Saul Bellow quoted in frontispiece of Miller, City of the Century.
Rudyard Kipling, American Notes (New York: F. F. Lovell, 1890), p. 149; Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Signet, 1905), pp. 39–42; and Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 218.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on the Manufactures of the United States at the Ninth Census, 1870 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), p. 849; Manufactures at the Tenth Census, pp. 391–93; Report on Manufacturing, 1890, Part I, Statistics of Cities, pp. 130–45; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 112, n. 11.
Miller, City of the Century, pp. 211–13; Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 218; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 107.
Miller, City of the Century, p. 223.
Ozanne, Century, pp. 5–7, 9–10.
Quote in Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 46.
Ibid., pp. 10–11; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 187–90.
From Keil and Jentz, “German Working-Class Culture in Chicago,” pp. 128–47. During the 1880s, capital investment grew from $8.4 million to $38.9 million in slaughtering, from $7.2 million to $14.7 million in men’s clothing, from $4.5 million to $25.6 million in foundry and machine works. Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 534–35.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 13; Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, p. 37; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 119, 189.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 24. Also see David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 9–19.
Arbeiter-Zeitung quoted in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, p. 78.
Ibid.; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, Table 4.3, p. 87, and Table 4.4, p. 89; Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, p. 72.
Newspaper articles reprinted in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, pp. 56–57, 59, 72, 78–79, 81, 82, 88.
Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, pp. 12–13.
See ibid., first quote from p. 13. Also see Laurie, Artisans into Workers (see chap. 1, n. 12), pp. 102, 110–11, 162; and P. Foner, Labor Movement (see chap 1, n. 11), Vol. 2, pp. 56–74.
See David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 130–62.
Gompers, Seventy Years, pp. 62, 72–73.
Ibid., p. 62; quote in Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, p. 37.
Franklin E. Coyne, The Development of the Cooperage Industry in the United States, 1620–1940 (Chicago: Lumber
Buyers Publishing Co., 1940), pp. 21–22; Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, p. 46.
Schwab, “Autobiography,” p. 114.
Arbeiter-Zeitung quoted in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, pp. 55–56.
Quote in P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, p. 514.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, pp. 41–42, and quote p. 44.
Ibid., p. 95; Schneirov, “Free Thought,” pp. 126–27. Also see Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 124–25; Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, pp. 92–94.
Schneirov, “Free Thought,” pp. 126–27; Schwab, “Autobiography,” p. 103.
May, Protestant Churches, p. 83; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order (see Prologue, n. 13), p. 136.
Josiah Strong, Our Country (1885; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), pp. 177–79, 186; also see May, Protestant Churches, pp. 114–15.
See Herbert Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” reprinted in Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, pp. 79–118; and quote from McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement, p. 468.
Spies, “Autobiography,” pp. 62–63.
Alan L. Sorkin, “The Depression of 1882–1885,” in David Glasner, ed., Business Cycles and Depressions: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 149–51; Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, pp. 269–70.
On Lloyd, see Digby-Junger, The Journalist as Reformer (see chap. 5, n. 17), pp. 57–62, 67; and on George, see Thomas, Alternative America (see chap. 5, n. 17), pp. 140–41. Quotes from Henry George, Social Problems (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Page, 1883), pp. 17–18, 35, 68–69.
“Workers’ Lodgings: A Report by the Citizens Association,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, September 3, 1883, in Keil and Jentz, eds., German Workers, Documentary, pp. 129–31. See Miller, City of the Century, p. 414.
Quote from Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, p. 77.
Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, p. 141; A. Parsons quoted in Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, p. 77.
My interpretation of the political impact of hard times is based on Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 59, 61.
L. Parsons, The Life, pp. 25–27.
Ibid.