“I really don’t trust monuments.”
—Michael Piazza, organizer of the “Haymarket 8-Hour Action Series”10
The lack of a monument at Haymarket from 1972 to 2004 did not mean that the site was any less contested or active. For some, the empty site presented an opening to cast one’s own perspective within public space. A monument, by its nature, is already defined, static, and rarely allows for participation.11 A monument may allow for critique, for the viewer to respond to it, but it does not allow one to take an active role in adding to the dialogue and inserting one’s voice into the landscape, unless of course one does something drastic. In this manner, monuments often define a singular point of view that shuts out other perspectives. The lack of a statue at Haymarket, however, allowed for multiple perspectives through the creation of ephemeral monuments—temporary actions, performances, and other types of decentralized public interventions—that many individuals and groups have undertaken to put forward different “unofficial” versions of the Haymarket history into the physical space and the collective memory. These actions, lacking any type of permission or government role, were in many respects much more closely aligned with the ideals of the Haymarket martyrs.
One such action took place in 1996, just before the Democratic National Convention that was being held in Chicago. Kehben Grifter (who works with the Beehive Design Collective) and Evan Glassman created a small, hand-cut stone mosaic to the anarchist martyrs and installed it within the sidewalk at the Haymarket site without attempting to go through any official channels to obtain permission.12 At the time, both were working nearby the Haymarket site and noticed that the sidewalks were being redone and that wet cement was in the process of drying, creating the perfect opportunity to install the mosaic. However, when they went to place the piece, they were spotted by city workers and were questioned. They quickly talked their way out of trouble by citing names in the city bureaucracy and falsely stating that the project had been given city approval. To verify their claims, the workers called their superior and described the mosaic and its content. To the artists’ luck, the city official did not comprehend the illicit nature of the project, and neither did he understand the mosaic’s message or the significance of the Haymarket site. Better yet, the official insisted that the workers on site install the mosaic for them! For five weeks it remained at the Haymarket site and would likely have lasted longer had not a Chicago Tribune article brought attention to the mosaic, prompting the city to remove it.
Remember the Haymarket Anarchists, hand-cut stone mosaic installed at the Haymarket site, 1996 (Kehben Grifter)
The pedestal of the Police Monument was also removed in 1996, just before the Democratic National Convention. The city must have finally realized how inviting the site was and likely feared that a large demonstration would take place there. To many, the removal of the pedestal was a great loss, for it represented just how contested the history of the Police Monument had been, and it had served as a grand stage for performances and other public interventions. However, when the cement slab was removed, it left a giant circle, eighteen feet in diameter, clearly marking where it once stood. Artists quickly realized that the circle was an ideal stage.
John Pitman Weber’s reenactment of a Eugene Debs speech, part of the Haymarket Eight-Hour Action Series, 2002 (Michael Piazza)
Michael Piazza, a Chicago artist, employed the circle for the “Haymarket Eight-Hour Action Series” that he initiated in 2002. Piazza was inspired to launch the series after seeing the Chicago printmaker Rene Arceo perform on the circle during a May Day celebration. Arceo’s performance was simple but poignant. He pulled up in a car, then ran up and started stomping on the circle as a crowd watched. Piazza’s tribute to the “Arceo Stomp” was to put out a call inviting other artists to do separate eight-hour actions at the site. Piazza notes that:
Ever since 1986, I had been monitoring this blank pedestal and I realized that there was a division between a small group of people in town who knew what it represented, who had this local knowledge and memory, while there was a whole other group who just thought it was an empty pedestal. That always fascinated me.13
Piazza reasoned that artists, with their talents and creativity, could reclaim this history and make it more visible. Yet after Piazza surveyed the site and measured the diameter of the circle, the city, either intentionally or coincidentally, paved it over, leaving no physical evidence of where the Police Monument had once stood. Undeterred, the first project of the Eight-Hour Action Series, involving Javier Lara and students from the School of the Art Institute, held a sewing bee at the site and constructed a large orange circle that became a visual reminder of the monument’s existence. In other performances, the new circle served as a stage for a number of soapbox presentations, including William Adelman’s historical presentation on Haymarket and John Pitman Weber’s reenactment of a Eugene Debs speech.
Other performances that were part of Piazza’s Eight-Hour Action Series used the circle as an end point. Larry Bogad did a project entitled The Police Statue Returns for which he created a giant puppet that resembled the original police statue. Bogad paraded the puppet along from the Daley Center, through downtown and eventually ending on Randolph Street. At the former location of the Police Monument, a large anarchist flag was placed over the circle in an act of reclamation.
Lauren Cumbia, Dara Greenwald, and Blithe Riley, Hay! Market Research Group, part of the Haymarket Eight-Hour Action Series, 2002 (Michael Piazza)
Another Eight-Hour Action Series project that spoke of the changing dynamics within Chicago was Hay! Market Research Group, a collaborative action by Lauren Cumbia, Dara Greenwald, and Blithe Riley. The group set up a table and a sign on Randolph Street at the location of the former Police Monument. The sign acted as a visual component, similar to a billboard, which first caught people’s attention. Various slogans on the sign were interchanged, including: “What Happened Here in 1886?”; “Guilt by Association: Who Died for Your Eight-Hour Workday?”; ” 4 Hung, 1 Suicide, 3 Pardons”; and “Public Hanging, Lethal Injection, Indifference?” Once people walked up to the information table, they could fill out surveys on Haymarket and issues that were connected to the present.
Javier Lara and students from the School of the Art Institute hold a sewing bee and create a large orange circle that marks the former location of the former Police Monument, part of the Haymarket Eight-Hour Action Series, 2002 (Michael Piazza)
In nearly every intervention, the artists involved were responding to far more than just the Haymarket history. These actions responded to the entire city landscape and the culture at large. For some of these performances, Haymarket was simply a starting point. Brian Dortmund’s project for the Eight-Hour Action Series was a May Day bike ride that traveled from Haymarket to the Waldheim Cemetery. In subsequent years, Dortmund has continued to do the ride, but changes the route, so that the riders travel to different locations in the Chicago vicinity that are specific to labor and other radical struggles. In this manner, those who participated in the action formed a community, learned about various histories, engaged in dialogue, and had a shared experience.
The works in the Eight-Hour Action Series, as compelling and creative as they are, come with built-in limitations. Any action that is seen by such a small number of people has the potential to be easily forgotten and its effect may be minimal in creating widespread change. Mary Brogger’s monument at Haymarket, installed in 2004, allows us to compare these two divergent approaches.
Mary Brogger’s Haymarket Monument: The Monument That Forgot Class Struggle
“I think we’re showing a new way to do monuments at historic sites. You make them open rather than pressing a precise meaning on people or directing them toward a specific feeling or reaction”
—Nathan Mason, special projects curator of Chicago’s Public Art Program14
Nathan Mason’s quote accurately describes the scope and the vision of the new monument, sculpted by Mary Brogge
r, that now resides on Desplaines Street. The historic location, which had been empty for so long, now features an abstract monument of bronze, genderless figures colored in a red patina, constructing and deconstructing a wagon. At the base of the monument, a series of cautiously worded plaques explains the history of Haymarket. Its mere existence—a monument to Haymarket within a city that had long since refused to acknowledge the history except from the perspective of the police—is startling and leads us to wonder, Why now?
To better understand how this drastic change came to be, it is important to first examine the complicated decade-long process that led up to Mary Brogger’s public artwork that was funded and approved by the city. When talking about the new monument’s content, it is all too easy to focus attention on Mary Brogger, the sculptor herself. But it was the coalition of government agencies, labor organizations, and historians that first agreed upon a series of parameters that ultimately led to the monument’s realization and the content that it would project. A key player in this process was the Illinois Labor History Society.
The ILHS had lobbied the city government for a permanent monument at the Haymarket site since the organization’s founding in 1969. Despite the fact that the city and the police had created a formidable obstacle to any type of monument to Haymarket from the perspective of labor or anarchism, there were some in Chicago who were willing to challenge this blockade. Les Orear, a Packinghouse Union activist, and William Adelman, a labor historian, decided to pool their resources and energy to form the Haymarket Workers Memorial Committee. This project soon became part of a larger vision, and on August 5, 1969, the Illinois Labor History Society was formed. The ILHS, along with other local activists, including Bill Garvey, an editor of the newspaper Steel Labor, began the long process of lobbying the city government for a monument at Haymarket that represented the position of labor. One of the first steps toward revitalizing interest in a potential monument was a public performance in 1969 at the site where the bomb had exploded in 1886. Studs Terkel stood on top of a makeshift wagon and spoke of Haymarket’s history. Terkel’s performance, a public intervention in its own right, would foreshadow the many future actions that would take place in ensuing decades as others reclaimed the space’s history by means of temporary installationsa ndp erformances.
Mary Brogger, Haymarket Monument on Desplaines Street, Chicago, ca. 2006 (photograph courtesy of the author)
Around the same time, the ILHS began organizing events at Waldheim Cemetery for people to meet and listen to speeches in front of the Haymarket Monument on significant dates that corresponded to Haymarket’s history. The ILHS role of promoting Haymarket’s labor history became even more “official” in 1973, when the deed for the Haymarket Monument at Waldheim was transferred to the ILHS from the last surviving member of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, Irving S. Abrams. The ILHS assumed the role of its owner and became responsible for the monument’s upkeep and annual commemorations.15 Yet as Lara Kelland notes, this was not without opposition:
Anarchists have responded in kind. . . . A small group often appears at Waldheim during the ILHS events, jeering and interacting with the monument in an attempt to disrupt the proceedings in protest of the ILHS ceremonial work.16
Despite these constant jeers from anarchists, the ILHS made inroads in lobbying the City of Chicago to also have a monument to Haymarket commissioned at the original Haymarket site. This goal likely would have been reached had it not been for the untimely death in 1987 of Mayor Harold Washington, one of the rare high-profile politicians who advocated for the public recognition of Chicago’s labor history.17
However, in 1998, the ILHS, which had teamed up with the Chicago Federation of Labor, found an unlikely audience in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration. Daley (the son of Richard J. Daley, who had been mayor from 1955 to 1976) gave the go-ahead to listen to various proposals for a monument, and a coalition developed that would include representatives from the Chicago Historical Society and the Chicago Police Department. And rather than focusing attention on the anarchist martyrs, the police, the explosion of the bomb, or the subsequent trial, the group settled on the broad-based theme of a speaker’s wagon representing “free speech.” The wagon alluded to the place where Samuel Fielden had addressed the crowd on May 4, 1886, just before the bomb exploded, but the concept of free speech is much more elusive and abstract. Don Turner, who at the time was the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, notes the significance of this choice for the proposal’s eventual approval:
I think the key issue was removing the focus from the anarchists and making it a First Amendment issue—though it’s not unlike we still don’t have anarchists.18
Turner further explained: “We brought everybody into the process—the police, the labor community, historians—and we came up with this idea of the wagon as the symbol of freedom of speech. That’s how we really put our arms around it.”19 Everybody, that is, except the anarchists whose political forebears were at the heart of Haymarket’s historical significance.
In 2000, with the concept established, funding was secured from a state program, Illinois FIRST, which designated $300,000 toward the project. By 2002, the project was under the jurisdiction of the “Haymarket Tragedy Commemoration of Free Speech and Assembly Monument,” directed by Nathan Mason, the special projects curator for Chicago’s Public Art Program. With the funding and theme in place, the next step was to select an artist to sculpt the vision that the committee had already established. Ten artists were selected to submit proposals, and an eight-member project advisory committee composed of representatives from labor, the police, historians, and community members chose the local sculptor Mary Brogger.20
Despite the fact that this was Brogger’s first figurative public commission, her Haymarket Monument satisfied the conditions of the committee’s vision of a nonconfrontational monument focused on the speaker’s wagon and free speech. Brogger states:
I was pretty adamant in my own mind that it would not be useful to depict violence. The violence didn’t seem important, because this event was made up of much bigger ideas than one particular incident. I didn’t want to make the imagery conclusive. I want to suggest the complexity of truth, but also people’s responsibility for their actions and for the effect of their actions.21
She further explained the symbolism and the message of the monument:
It has a duality to it. From the standpoint of the wagon being constructed, you see workers in the lower part are working cooperatively to build a platform from which the figures on top can express themselves. And for the viewpoint of the wagon being dismantled, you see [how] the weight of the words being expressed might be the cause of the undoing of the wagon. It’s a cautionary tale that you are responsible for the words you say.22
Brogger’s comments are as ambiguous as the monument itself; they could be understood to say that the anarchist labor activists had it coming to them for directly challenging the power structure. Although Brogger clearly seems more troubled by the speech of the anarchists than the indiscriminate gunfire of the police, a focus on the artist is not helpful here. Brogger was a minor player in the ongoing debate over the new monument. In the majority of public art projects today, the artist is simply hired to carry out the subject matter and the content that someone else has already determined. The artist can add an aesthetic quality to the work, and only in this regard can we critique Brogger’s efforts. Michael Piazza’s humorous commentary describes her sculpture as a “Gumby version of a romantic Civil War memorial” but that aside, the real issue raised by her Haymarket Monument is the nature of public art itself and the pitfalls of allowing a small group of individuals to decide what is placed within civic spaces.23
Graffiti on the plaque noting the National Historic Landmark status of the Martyrs’ Monument at Waldheim, 1997 (Bogdan Markiewicz)
The small committee of government agencies, historical societies, and labor organizations (the ILHS, the Chicago Federation of L
abor, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Chicago Police Department) that agreed upon the monument’s content was not a broad cross-section of the population. Instead, the process-by-committee was guarded and exclusive. For example, only ten artists were invited to submit proposals for the design. However, the bigger issue was the exclusion of voices that might have differed with the committee’s opinions. From the start, anarchists were shut out of the discussion. Nathan Mason, Chicago’s Public Art Program curator for the project, remarked in early 2004, “Who would they choose to represent themselves?”24 His dismissive comment indicates a lack of serious effort on the committee’s part to solicit the input of anarchists and also assumes that the committee itself was more qualified to visualize Haymarket’s history. The committee, with little effort, could have reached out to anarchists within Chicago and beyond. It didn’t.
On September 14, 2004, the new monument was dedicated. Not surprisingly, the public reaction to the dedication was deeply divided.25 During the official dedication ceremony, city officials, representatives of organized labor, and police officers were self-congratulatory with one another. A central theme of many of their speeches was reconciliation, the notion that the wounds of the past and the divisions between labor and the police were beginning to heal. A small group of anarchists in the crowd held up black flags to voice their disgust with the entire proceedings. Anthony Rayson was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying, “This is a revisionist history thing. They’re trying to whitewash the whole thing, take it away from the anarchists and make it a free-speech issue.”26 A New York Times article quoted another dissenting voice in the crowd, Steve Craig:
Those men who were hanged are being presented as social democrats or liberal reformers, when in fact they dedicated their whole lives to anarchy and social revolution. If they were here today, they’d be denouncing this project and everyone involved in it.27
A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Page 11
