by Philip Dray
Unionist Oscar Neebe’s connection to the other defendants and the cause of anarchy was sufficiently vague that, as one observer put it, all the accusations against him, even if true, “would not justify a five-dollar fine.”77 Neebe tweaked the prosecution by testifying that, yes, he had committed many crimes—the “crimes” of organizing bakers so that instead of working fourteen- and sixteen-hour days they now worked only ten, and that he had committed the same “crime” for brewers and grocery clerks, many of whom now had Sundays off. “That,” he conceded, “is a great crime.”78
Confronted by the state’s apparently weak case, Albert Parsons tried turning the tables on the prosecution by offering his own version of the disaster. Rather than an anarchist plot to stoke revolutionary violence, he declared, the bomber was likely a Pinkerton agent or other kind of spy dispatched to cause an incident that would license a sweeping crackdown on anarchists and labor advocates. As the labor journalist John Swinton had observed, “The bomb was a godsend to the enemies of the labor movement. They have used it as an explosive against all the objects that the working people are bent upon accomplishing, and in defense of all the evils that capital is bent on maintaining.”79 Parsons’s claim that the bombing had been a kind of reverse conspiracy, a deliberate provocation, was unproven but not far-fetched; it was, to its credit, as compelling an explanation of what had occurred as the state’s largely conjectural story.
The defense also assaulted the state’s claim that the anarchists intended the rally in the Haymarket to trigger “a revolution,” since any intelligent person knew that when anarchists spoke of revolution they were referring to an ideal—a change in the economic and civic conditions of society that would someday replace government authority with greater individual autonomy. Workers might arm and prepare for that day of deliverance, but no anarchist leader was so naive as to think a single act of terrorist violence would compel it into being. “Anarchists do not make the social revolution,” as Parsons explained. “They prophesy its coming.”80
Black’s closing argument begged for the jurors’ objectivity and perspective, reminding them that Jesus had also been a Socialist, in a sense no different from the defendants. Grinnell wrapped up for the state, saying there could be no place for anarchism in America’s free, egalitarian society.
On August 19, after ensuring they understood his instruction that the defendants could be found guilty of murder even though no physical evidence linked them to the victims, Judge Gary sent the jury off to deliberate on the men’s guilt as well as their sentence, as was the practice in Illinois. The culpability and punishment of all the defendants was agreed upon quickly by the jurymen—an hour into their deliberations they were glimpsed through a window relaxing and smoking cigars—the only sticking point being whether Oscar Neebe, whose role was tangential, deserved execution. The jury ultimately recommended his conviction and a sentence of fifteen years; the others were all sentenced to die on the gallows.
There was widespread approval of the verdicts, particularly in Chicago, where shouts of celebration were heard in the streets surrounding the courthouse and the Tribune trumpeted its extensive coverage, “Nooses for the Reds.”81 Fearing an outbreak of anarchist protest, Inspector Bonfield sternly advised against any public demonstrations in support of the condemned, warning that “if any violence is done by the friends of these men the lamp posts of Chicago will bear fruit … [and] the police will be powerless to quell the popular rage.”
It is not recorded whether Bonfield appreciated the irony of his words: lynching would be tolerated if anarchists misbehaved.82
THE LABOR MOVEMENT, like the rest of America, had been stunned by the Haymarket carnage, and out of concern for its image in the face of public anger it had initially condemned the attack and the men who stood accused of the crime. But the biased trial and convictions produced a slow but certain change of heart, as outrage grew that men who had defended and championed workers could be indicted, convicted, and sentenced to death solely for their opinions. As Adolph Fischer offered, “I was tried here in this room for murder, and I was convicted of Anarchy. This verdict is a death-blow to free speech, free press and free thought in this country.”83 No sooner had the fatal verdicts been rendered than a process began by which the condemned were transformed into heroes, martyrs to the First Amendment and the rights of labor. Even Samuel Gompers, who detested radical influence in labor’s affairs, vowed that working people would never willingly surrender Spies, Parsons, and the rest to the “vengeance of the common enemy.”
This trend was abetted by second-guessing over the way in which the trial had been conducted—the judicial shortcuts taken by Judge Gary, the lack of physical evidence, and the fact that under the circumstances in which the trial was held no other result was possible. The Chicago Express dared print what many people privately believed, that it was not the anarchists but Inspector Bonfield who was most directly to blame for the tragedy, as he had foolishly marched his police to disperse a nonviolent gathering that was only moments away from its peaceful conclusion.84
The defendants were themselves allowed to comment on their precarious fate when, at a hearing in October, defense attorney Black’s call for a new trial was formally rejected. Spies defended his innocence and mocked the prosecution’s conceit that in hanging seven men the cause of laboring people would be stilled. “If you think you can stamp out the labor movement, then hang us!” he demanded, but the protests of dissatisfied working people would not be silenced. “Here you will tread upon a spark,” he warned, “but here, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.”85 Parsons criticized the judge for upholding convictions obtained in a trial that had taken place in a hostile atmosphere, calling the jury’s decision “a verdict of passion, born of passion, nurtured in passion … the sum total of the organized passion of the city of Chicago.” He defended anarchists as people who sought the humane goal of an egalitarian society without oppressive authority, and complained that the police, Chicago businessmen, the press, as well as the court, had conspired to muzzle the community’s true sentiments. “Think you the people are blind, are asleep, are indifferent? You deceive yourselves! I tell you, as a man of the people, and I speak for them, that your every word and act … are recorded.” He assured Judge Gary, “You are being weighed in the balance…. I, a working man, stand here, and to your face, in your stronghold of oppression, denounce … your crimes against humanity.”86
Gary’s rejection of the retrial motions led the defense to appeal the case to the Illinois Supreme Court and ultimately to the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that the trial had been conducted improperly. The Illinois court examined the issue for months before announcing it saw no procedural unfairness, while the high court in Washington in turn refused to hear the appeal, saying no federal issues were involved.
The thwarted appeals did succeed at least in helping to publicize the wrongs of the trial and in encouraging a worldwide movement protesting the death sentences. Pleas for Illinois governor Richard Oglesby to exercise clemency—to change the death sentences to life imprisonment—came from former U.S. senator Lyman Trumbull, architect of the Fourteenth Amendment; former Massachusetts congressman Benjamin F. Butler; reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd; and the influential editor William Dean Howells, who thought the defendants not guilty of “anything but their opinions” and termed the convictions “the greatest wrong that ever threatened our fame as a nation.”87 Lucy Parsons took to the road, visiting sixteen states to plead her husband’s and the others’ innocence and to raise funds in support of the clemency campaign. She also conducted a one-woman letter-writing crusade, targeting notable figures in the United States and overseas. Partly as a result of her activity, petitions arrived from as far away as England bearing the signatures of Oscar Wilde, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, William Rossetti, and Friedrich Engels.
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The appeals for mercy soon overwhelmed the office of Governor Oglesby. One petition arrived bearing one hundred thousand signatures, and several delegations of prominent people trooped to the capital at downstate Springfield in an attempt to persuade the state’s chief executive to delay or halt the executions. Samuel Gompers told Oglesby that if Jefferson Davis, the traitorous president of the Confederacy, could be granted amnesty, a group of anarchists whose only crime was to be labor activists were deserving of reprieve as well. Gompers also cautioned that putting men to death for their words and associations, not for a specific misdeed, was bound to turn them into eternal martyrs to radicalism and encourage further violence. From prison, August Spies wrote to Oglesby to suggest that the state of Illinois execute him alone, since “if legal murder there must be, let one, let mine suffice.” The governor also heard from Albert Parsons, who pointed out that if he was to be hanged for coming to Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4, so should his wife and two small children, as they had also been present. “My God, this is terrible!” blurted Oglesby to an aide, upon reading the Spies and Parsons letters.88
Once the convictions had been handed down and the fate of the guilty sealed, the tone of the press coverage had also changed markedly: newspapers which had gleefully vilified the accused, began to record their prison lives as if they were celebrities, noting their every visitor, guessing at their mood, and reporting extensively on their private business. Parsons’s wife, Lucy, and their children were frequent visitors to the jail, while Spies and Lingg both had admiring female friends. Spies’s romance took a turn for the sensational when he and Nina Van Zandt, a local woman from respectable society who’d come to know Spies only since his arrest, announced their intention to wed. The press was happy to mine this development for its compelling copy, but nonetheless feigned outrage that a condemned killer of policemen would be allowed to marry a woman of decent reputation. Even Spies’s attorneys advised against it, fearing it would harm any chance of appeal. But the two lovers were undeterred, Spies’s brother Henry standing in as proxy for him in an exchange of vows with Van Zandt when the authorities refused to release Spies to attend his own wedding.
In Springfield the clemency decision continued to weigh upon Governor Oglesby. A decorated Civil War veteran and confidant of Abraham Lincoln (he had been at Lincoln’s deathbed), Oglesby was genuinely sympathetic to the labor cause, having signed Illinois’s first eight-hour law in 1867. The compromise he finally offered was that he would commute the Haymarket sentences to life in prison if Chicago’s business leaders—men like retailer Marshall Field and Cyrus McCormick Jr.—approved of the measure, and if the condemned anarchists would, in turn, disavow in writing their words and actions. Schwab and Fielden did so, and had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment; Parsons, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Lingg refused, Parsons quoting Patrick Henry’s famous words, “Give me liberty or give me death.”89
Oglesby was not alone in his prevarication. Some prominent Chicagoans, including the conservative Chicago Tribune, had begun to question the need for the executions. The paper argued that law had triumphed, convictions had been sought and won. Hanging the condemned would only create martyrs to the cause of anarchism, whereas a public recommendation for commutation coming from the city’s business elite would, as a gesture, go a long way toward easing the city’s persistent labor troubles. Marshall Field, however, harbored a powerful enmity toward those who fomented labor unrest, an attitude dating from the railroad strike of 1877. Following that debacle, he had led an effort by the city’s business leaders to buy a 632-acre site for the construction of a new military base thirty miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan (soon named Fort Sheridan), as well as the construction of a new thoroughfare linking the fort with the city (the Sheridan Road), in order to enable the rapid intervention of federal troops in strikes and riots. With the local aristocrats of commerce, led by Field, remaining unmoved by the defendants’ plight, and Oglesby hemmed in by five of the condemned’s refusal to accept his offer and apologize, it was announced that the sentences would be carried out on the morning of November 11, 1887.
As that date approached, public outcry over the impending hangings was muted somewhat by the sudden (and suspicious) “discovery” of bomb-making materials in Lingg’s jail cell. How bomb-related items got into the heavily guarded lockup was never established. Author Louis Adamic suggests a “sweetheart” of Lingg’s was responsible, but the evidence is unclear.90 However, on the night before the executions Lingg managed to commit suicide by cracking a dynamite cap open in his mouth. His death left only four of the original eight defendants for the gallows—Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer—all of whom remained steadfast. Fischer assured Johann Most, “I am ready to deposit my life at the altar of the good cause,”91 while Engel, echoing Fischer’s sentiment, reassured friends, “Any man who is a true socialist, thoroughly imbued with its glorious principles, can go bravely to the scaffold and die for them.”92
Near the end Parsons was visited by Dyer Lum, his successor at the Alarm, who asked whether he now regretted returning from hiding in Wisconsin to surrender to Judge Gary’s court. “No, I still believe I did right,” Albert replied. “My comrades, like myself, were unjustly charged. They did not shirk the issue; honor demanded that I should share their fate. Even under all the experience of the year past I honestly believe I could do no otherwise today.”93 When Lucy Parsons and her children were denied a final visit, Parsons turned to his love of poetry to console himself during his last night on earth. He found a sympathetic listener in a jailhouse deputy, and read to him John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Reformer”:
Whether on the gallows high,
Or in the battle van
The noblest place for man to die,
Is where he dies for man.
“That song,” Parsons assured his companion, “will go ringing down the corridors of time.”94
HAYMARKET UNIQUELY CHALLENGED LABOR by forcing it to decide what long-term message to take away. There was of course great indignation at the verdicts and at the premise of the trial itself, but there was also frustration that the eight-hour crusade that had indirectly led to the affair was now discredited, and that anarchists had so badly sullied labor’s name. The bomb-throwing radical had become a popular caricature of worker unrest, newspaper cartoons depicting “The Anarchist” as a gnomelike, bearded figure (likely modeled after Johann Most), secreting a bomb behind his back or in his coat. One entrepreneur ventured to cash in on the sensationalist interest in anarchy by exhibiting the remains of Louis Lingg, offering $10,000 for the privilege and promising to return the corpse in good condition when he was through.95 Labor leaders were unsure whether to defend the principles for which the men had died, strive harder to distance themselves from anarchism, or simply move on.
The Knights of Labor were an especial victim of Haymarket fallout: the group had formally offered only tepid support for the giant eight-hour rallies of May 1, and had been quick to condemn those rounded up after the May 4 bombing. “Let it be understood by all the world,” stated the group’s Chicago house organ, “that the Knights of Labor have no affiliation, association, sympathy or respect for the band of cowardly murderers, cut-throats and robbers, known as anarchists…. Better that seven times seven men hang than to have the millstone of odium around the standard of this Order in affiliating in any way with this element of destruction.”96 When, at a national conference of the Knights in October 1886, the rank and file demanded a resolution to the effect that the Haymarket condemned were not guilty, Terence Powderly led an effort to defeat it; the meeting did, however, vote to request that those convicted receive leniency, and Powderly belatedly agreed that the court’s work in the case had been hasty. Johann Most called Powderly a “scoundrel” guilty of “wretched trickery” for having withheld more full-hearted support for Spies and company. “It [was] within his power to bring the whole organization of which he is the head to declare itself against the jud
icial murders,” Most said. “But Powderly did the very opposite…. The blood of our murdered comrades sticks forever to his hands.”97 The Master Workman felt deeply the sting of such criticisms; in October 1887 he confided his fear that anarchists were plotting to kill him.98
On the scaffold, moments from death, August Spies had cried out, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” The backlash from Haymarket, per Spies’s prophecy, did prove considerable, and the ever-ambivalent Powderly was among the first to be diminished by it.
But it was in more substantial ways not a good season for the Knights. In fall 1886, twenty thousand Knights struck the Chicago meatpacking plants for an eight-hour day. Management brought in scabs and special guards under the direction of the Pinkertons. The strikers, who stayed off the job for three weeks and believed they were close to wringing concessions out of the employers, were blindsided when Powderly unexpectedly ordered the strikers back to their jobs, threatening those who disobeyed his edict with dismissal from the union. With the support of the Knights national leadership withdrawn, the strikers capitulated and returned to the plant’s ten-hour regimen, but were furious at their own organization’s faintheartedness.
