by James Green
Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Scribner, 1932), pp. 41–55, 96–104.
See Barnard, “Eagle Forgotten,” quotes on pp. 183, 187, and see pp. 204–8, 250–56.
Ibid., pp. 208, 218–19.
Adelman, “The Haymarket Monument,” p. 171. Also see Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 60–61.
Dabakis, Visualizing Labor, p. 61. On sites of memory that encourage “commemorative vigilance,” see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 8–22; and James Green, “Crime Against Memory at Ludlow,” Labor 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 9–16.
Quotes from Altgeld, Reasons (see chap. 7, n. 68), pp. 11–12, 35, 46, 36–37, 39.
Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 238–39, 439–41. Author’s interview with Tim Samuelson, Chicago, December 5, 2004.
On Lum, see Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 408, 442–45, and Paul Avrich, “The Bomb Thrower—A New Candidate,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook, pp. 71–73.
Altgeld, Reasons, pp. 35, 46; also see pp. 36–37, 39.
See Barnard, “Eagle Forgotten,” pp. 240–41; David, Haymarket Affair, p. 246; and Darrow, Story of My Life, p. 101.
On Altgeld’s criticism of those who associated immigrants with crime and disorder, see Barnard, “Eagle Forgotten,” pp. 132–33. On his love of liberty, see quotes from Clarence Darrow’s eulogy for Altgeld in Arthur Weinberg, ed., Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 544, and from Ray Ginger in Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal vs. Changing Realities (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958), p. 87. Altgeld did not live to see his prophecy fulfilled. He died in 1902, one year before a federal law banned alien anarchists from entering the United States and paved the way for the wartime suspension of civil liberties for all American radicals, native-born and foreign-born. For a contemporary version of Altgeld’s argument that the targeting of immigrants as potential terrorists leads to broader attacks on civil liberties, see the syndicated column by Molly Ivins, “Mr. Ashcroft, Let’s Not Repeat Past Mistakes,” Boston Globe, November 21, 2001, and the more extensive version of the argument in David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003).
David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 412–13. And see Barnard, “ Eagle Forgotten,” p. 214, and quotes on p. 248.
Barnard, “Eagle Forgotten,” pp. 236–38.
Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 446–48.
Buder, Pullman (see Prologue, n. 5), pp. 170–71, 179–81; Ginger, Altgeld’s America, p. 100; Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, p. 160.
Miller, City of the Century, pp. 546–49; Barnard, “ Eagle Forgotten,” p. 298; Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 185; Ginger, Altgeld’s America, pp. 192–93.
Miller, City of the Century, pp. 546–47.
Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 152–55; Ray Ginger, Eugene V. Debs: The Making of an American Radical (1949; reprint, New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 64, 108, 192–93; William E. For-bath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 42–43, 75–77, 168; Tomlins, The State and the Unions, pp. 30, 49, 57.
In the age of industrial violence that followed the Pullman conflict, dynamite bombs exploded with a frequency even August Spies and Louis Lingg could not have predicted. The bombs were not used as weapons in pitched battles between strikers and the National Guard as the Chicago anarchists imagined, but rather in secret campaigns waged by embattled trade unionists against antiunion employers and their hired gunmen. For example, in Rocky Mountain metal-mining districts, battles between union miners and the armed forces of the operators led to the deaths of sixty people, most of them as a result of the brutal conflict that erupted around the Cripple Creek mining district in Colorado. Many of the casualties were members of the Western Federation of Miners, a union organized by militant socialists like William D. Haywood, an admirer of Albert Parsons and August Spies. In addition to the union casualties, two mine foremen and thirteen strikebreakers died in dynamite explosions. The authorities blamed the blasts on “socialist dynamiters” like Haywood, but no one was ever charged in any of the Colorado killings. See Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Violence and Reform in American History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978), pp. 8–78; and Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 218–25, 244–47.
Quote in Ginger, Eugene V. Debs, p. 66; Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 199–200.
Joseph Kirkland, “Some Notable Trials,” in Moses and Kirkland, eds., History of Chicago (see chap. 14, n. 18), p. 208. Joseph Kirkland was a practicing lawyer in Chicago as well as a novelist whose book Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County (published the year of the Haymarket executions) focused on the life of a tightfisted farmer who became a hardheaded Chicago businessman devoted entirely to the pursuit of wealth. Kirkland was a leading figure in the city’s genteel literary circles, but his 1887 novel was anything but genteel; it was the first realist novel produced by what would become the Chicago school of novelists devoted to exposing the brutal conflicts that seemed to overwhelm the city’s residents. Timothy B. Spears, Chicago Dreaming: Mid-westerners and the City, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 53–54.
Kirkland, “Some Notable Trials,” p. 208.
Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 182; quote in Kirkland, “Some Notable Trials,” p. 204.
Quotes in Blaine McKinley, “A Religion in a New Time: Anarchists’ Memorials to the Haymarket Martyrs,” Labor History 28 (Summer 1997), pp. 391, 395–96. Holmes and Goldman quoted in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 449.
Quotes in McKinley, “A Religion in a New Time,” p. 399.
Epilogue
Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 211.
Quoted in Gerstle, American Crucible, p. 70; and see Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003).
Gerstle, American Crucible, pp. 54–55; William Preston, Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 29, 31.
Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1988), pp. 1–12.
Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 81; and Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, pp. 189, 193.
Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), pp. 56–57, 167–68, 171; Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 187. For an impressive argument that the IWW was strongly influenced by anarchists, see Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1989).
Robert D’Attilio, “Primo Maggio: Haymarket as Seen by Italian Anarchists in America,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook, pp. 229–32; Rudolph Vecoli, “Primo Maggio: May Day Observances Among Italian Immigrant Workers,” Labor’s Heritage 7 (Spring 1966), p. 35.
Vecoli, “Primo Maggio,” pp. 30–31, 40.
Rudolph Vecoli, “Primo Maggio: An Invented Tradition of the Italian Americans,” in Panaccione, May Day Celebration, p. 70.
On the important, and sometimes dominant, role of anarchists in forming militant trade unions in Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, see Woodcock, Anarchism (see chap. 8, n. 11), pp. 270–71, 370–80, 426; Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, pp. 172, 189, 191, 197, 202–3; Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Argentina (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 10, 12, 26–27; Peter De Shazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902–1927 (Madison: University of Wisconsin P
ress, 1983), p. 133, 158; and John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 83–94, 108–11.
Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 227.
E. Foner, American Freedom (see chap. 1, n. 6), pp. 163–64, 168; Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 245.
Philip S. Foner, May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886–1986 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), pp. 76–79, 87–90; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 83, 85–88, 93; Francis Russell, A City in Terror: 1919, the Boston Police Strike (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 21.
Ginger, Eugene V. Debs, pp. 372–413; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 430–36, 459; and Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 220–29.
Lawson, ed., American State Trials, p. vi.; James Ford Rhodes and Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, quoted in David, Haymarket Affair, p. 446, from Rhodes’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896 (New York: Macmillan, 1920) and Oberholtzer’s A History of the United States Since the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1917).
Quote from Frank O. Beck, Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman and Other Agitators and Outsiders in the 1920s and 1930s (1956; reprint, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2000), p. 35.
See Franklin Rosemont’s introduction to ibid., pp. 7–9.
Quote from Joughin and Morgan, Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (see Prologue, n.
, pp. 208–9. Also see Upton Sinclair, Boston: A Documentary Novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case (1928; reprint, Boston: Robert Bentley, 1978), p. 754.
The Haymarket story also appeared in books written by young writers on the left born to immigrant parents. See Anthony Bimba, The History of the American Working Class (New York: International Publishers, 1927), pp. 188, 314; and Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1934), pp. 65–85. On Adamic and second-generation ethnic writers with radical politics, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 447–48.
Sam Dolgoff quoted in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 246.
Toni Gilpin and Steve Rosswurm, “The Haymarket Tradition,” Haymarket: Chicago’s Progressive Journal of Politics and Arts 21 (May 1986), p. 21.
Jeffreys-Jones, Violence and Reform, pp. 18–19, 35, 40–44.
Richard Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence,” in Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 6, 11, 19–20, 39–40. Statistics from Philip Taft and Philip Ross, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character and Outcome,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted R. Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 270.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 299; Gilpin and Rosswurm, “The Haymarket Tradition,” p. 21; Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 262.
Cohen, Making a New Deal, p. 300; Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 262–64; and Studs Terkel, Chicago (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 35.
See Kenneth Rexroth, “Again at Waldheim,” in Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow, eds., The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), p. 221, in which the poet reflects on the death of Emma Goldman and her burial at Waldheim near the Haymarket anarchists. Rexroth’s poem reads in part: “What memory lasts Emma of you / Or the intrepid comrades of your grave . . . / Against the iron-clad, flame throwing / Course of time?” Howard Fast, The American: A Middle Western Legend (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946). On Howard Fast as a Popular Front writer, see Denning, The Cultural Front, p. 248, and Priscilla Murolo, “History in the Fast Lane,” Radical History Review 31 (December 1984), pp. 22–31. On Algren and Chicago, see H. E. F. Donahue, Conversations with Nelson Algren (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), pp. 61–64, 88.
Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (1951; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 23, 48, 52, 62–64, 66.
The story did appear in a few other books, in the pages of Ray Ginger’s fine collection of essays in Altgeld’s America (chap. 2) and in the chapters of a few labor histories written by leftist authors, published by small presses and read mainly by curious workers in independent labor unions who had learned to keep their heads down while the winds of McCarthyism raged about them. See Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, pp. 84–86; and P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 2, pp. 105–14. On the suppression of May Day and the impact of the Cold War on workers’ consciousness, see P. Foner, May Day, pp. 135–37, 145; James Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), pp. 133–209; Marianne Debouzy, “In Search of Working-Class Memory: Some Questions and a Tentative Assessment,” History and Anthropology 2 (Spring 1986), pp. 275–78; Bruno Cartoiso, “Memoria Privata e Memoria Pubblica nella Storiografico del Movimento Operaio,” Studi Storici 38 (Inverno 1997), pp. 897–910; and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 517.
P. Foner, May Day, pp. 74, 80; and James Green, “Globalization of Memory: The Enduring Remembrance of the Haymarket Martyrs Around the World,” Labor 2 (Fall 2005), pp. 5–15.
Dan LaBotz to Jim Green, e-mail, November 18, 2004. The memory also survived in China, even in a year, 1987, when the Communist government held no May Day celebrations. “Yesterday is the holiday for the working class,” a friend wrote to me from Beijing on May 2, 1987. “Though we did not hold any grand meeting or some parade, yet the mighty struggle for the eight hour day is ingrained in our minds.” In the past “we paid great tribute to these heroes who sacrificed their lives for the benefit of the working class. May First is one of the most important holidays; on this day we pay tribute to the Haymarket martyrs.” Huang Shao-xiang to Jim Green, May 2, 1987, Beijing, PRC.
In 1976 Galeano escaped Argentina for Barcelona, the historic center of Spanish anarchism, where citizens and workers were still celebrating the death of dictator Francisco Franco and his fascist regime. There, in Catalonia, Galeano began to write his magnum opus, the trilogy Memoria del fuego, an epic prose poem dedicated to the people of the Americas and their bloody histories—memory books that transcended existing literary genres. “I am a writer obsessed with remembering,” he said, “with remembering the past of America, above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.” Galeano’s obsession with the past remains obvious in the third volume of the trilogy, finished in 1986, the year after he came to Chicago. In Century of the Wind he offers yearly calendar scenes that begin at Montevideo in 1900 with a new century being born as “the time of anybodies,” a time when “[t]he people want democracy and trade unions.” Biography of Eduardo Galeano from the Web site www.kirjasto.sci.fi/galeano.htm, including first quote; second quote from Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind (1986; English trans., New York: Norton, 1988), p. 4. Also see Luis Roniger, Luis Sznajder, and Mario Sznajder, “The Politics of Memory in Redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay,” Memory and History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 155–56.
Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 118.
“Forgotten Battle,” transcript of Studs Terkel television interview on the McNeill-Lehrer News Hour, Public Broadcasting System, May 1, 1986, pp. 13–14. Thanks to Martin Blatt for a copy of this transcript.
Studs Terkel, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Time (New York: Pantheon, 1971), pp. 48–49, 58, 197; Studs Terkel, Division Street: America (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. xxii; Terkel, Chicago, p. 28; and the author’s tape-recorded interview with Studs Terkel, Chicago, July 11, 2003.
Jeff Huebner, “Haymarket Revisited,” Chicago Reader, December
10, 1993, pp. 1, 14; press release from the Haymarket Square Workers Memorial Committee, April 25, 1969, signed by Leslie Orear, in Carolyn Ashbaugh Collection, Charles H. Kerr Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.
David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 140–43.
Ibid., pp. 145–48.
James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 298–99; Farber, Chicago ’68, pp. 161, 165, 179–80, 182–83, 199–201.
The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven after the case of Black Panther Bobby Seale was severed from the rest. See J. Anthony Lukas, The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
For an earlier example of a public controversy over a monument to revolutionary martyrs (the victims of the Boston Massacre of 1770), see Dennis B. Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), p. 132.
Huebner, “Haymarket Revisited,” pp. 2, 20; Miller, Democracy, p. 308. The bombing of the police statue was a symbolic act to inaugurate the Days of Rage, when young radicals planned to bring the Vietnam War home with violent attacks on war-related institutions. One of these Weathermen, Bill Ayers, wrote later about being there that night as he watched a comrade blow up the police monument in Haymarket Square. “Terry,” who set off the dynamite, had committed the story of the Haymarket anarchists to memory, Ayers recalled, and could quote what August Spies said to the court about “a subterranean fire about to blaze up.” The Weathermen had come to Chicago that October after whipping themselves up in a kind of frenzy, as Ayers put it, remaking themselves “into street fighters and persuading ourselves against all evidence that working-class youth were with us, that our uncompromising militancy was winning them over, and that Chicago would be the wild, unruly embodiment of the Revolutionary Youth Movement.” If the Weathermen brought the Vietnam War home to the streets of Chicago, Ayers thought, “August Spies and Albert Parsons would smile on us from their graves, and rest just a wee bit easier.” But when the urban guerrilla fighter and his comrades raged through the city streets, broke windows, set fires and fought with police, no one joined them. Worse, they were beaten, shot, maced and brutally interrogated by law officers. Ayers somehow escaped arrest and rejoined a few street fighters at a prearranged spot. When the battered Weathermen gathered at the charred base of the Haymarket police statue for their final march, they were surrounded by cordons of infuriated police, he recalled. The curtain then fell on what Ayers called their “theater of revolution.” Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. 162–63, 165, 168, 176.
