McCormick had quickly made clear his managerial intentions by summoning the industrialists’ most trusted friend the Pinkertons, who had their headquarters in the city. The agency’s hard-boiled mercenaries garrisoned the McCormick Harvesting works, defending its periphery from incursions and guaranteeing the safety of strike-breakers shipped in from other states. With even the moderate Parsons claiming a core of 2,000 active anarchists in Chicago by the spring of 1885, and a hinterland of 10,000 supporters, the risk of escalation was only too obvious. It was heightened in December 1884 when the Pinkertons’ role was extended to include the infiltration of anarchist meetings. Inevitably, the agency had a vested interest in exaggerating the threat it reported for its own commercial benefit, or even in provoking the kind of clashes that its clients dreaded. Alarmism cranked up the political temperature of the city, with both sides hardening their stance. It seemed ever more likely that the ghosts of civil war and revolution to which Parsons so often alluded would soon take solid form.
On Thanksgiving Day 1884, and again at Christmas a year later, Chicago’s most affluent families were brought face to face with those on whose grinding efforts their comfortable existence rested. Down the millionaire’s row of Prairie Avenue, past mansions decked out for the holidays, the anarchists paraded bearing the black banner of mourning and starvation, chanting and abusing the unearned privilege of those inside. They were the same benighted individuals who, when attending the annual Commune celebrations, had been described by the Chicago Tribune as being what might be found should one ‘skim the purlieus…drain the bohemian socialist slums’. During a winter of mass unemployment, the same paper now urged farmers with land in the immediate environs of the city to poison their crops lest scavengers, left unfed by soup kitchens swamped by demand, steal crops from their fields. Whatever civil society had previously existed in Chicago no longer deserved to be dignified with the name.
For seven years, since his first election as Chicago’s mayor in 1879, Carter Harrison had tried to treat his constituents, rich and poor, with an even hand, respecting the cosmopolitan make-up of the city, and even appointing socialists to his administration. In April 1885, when pressed by Cyrus McCormick to provide still more police to enforce the strike-breaking, he had chosen instead to support the labour movement’s call for an arbitrated settlement. Captain Bonfield had first tested the mayor’s authority three months later, when he led his men into action against a transportation strike: requisitioning a streetcar to drive through the crowds of protesters, policemen had swung their batons with abandon as they passed the strikers, cracking heads and breaking morale. But whilst the industrial action came to a swift end, the attitude of the city’s anarchists stiffened in reaction, and the wafer-thin majority with which Carter Harrison was re-elected saw his authority wane. The first signs of a developing power vacuum in the city appeared. Union representatives began talking of their members ‘buying $12 guns and playing soldiers’, and the old socialist militias were said to be stepping up their training. With news that the industrialists were giving over their warehouses as drill grounds for their own clerks, the longstanding fears of bloody confrontation appeared to be coming to a head.
Through the long, hard winter of 1885, the air of militancy intensified, with the anarchist newspapers publishing ever more bellicose statements in favour of dynamite, ‘the proletariat’s artillery’, and even a letter purporting to have been sent by an army officer from Alcatraz Island, offering illustrated guidance on street-fighting tactics. The Tribune, in turn, demanded ‘A Regular Army Garrison for Chicago’, but had to be satisfied with the 300-strong police guard posted under Bonfield to enforce a lockout at the McCormick works, with orders that seemed conceived to provoke clashes with the strikers. Within weeks the ensuing violence led to the gunning down of four strikers. In April 1886, seven more were killed by police bullets in nearby East St Louis, and Chicago’s Arbeiter-Zeitung was reporting that the forces of law and order were readying themselves for a fight on May Day: ‘The capitalists are thirsting for the blood of workingmen.’
The battle would be precipitated, it was thought, by concerted demands for a watershed in labour relations. For many years, workers had campaigned for a mandatory eight-hour day, to counter the relentless demands of their employers. Recognising the importance of a single cause around which protest could coalesce, Albert Parsons had been collaborating with the Knights of Labor and other organisations for the past three years to press the case. Set against the reality of hundred-hour weeks in some industries, however, the campaign’s true purpose had always seemed more symbolic than achievable: to assert the respect and humane consideration that the working class deserved. Then at the beginning of 1886, a new intransigence entered the campaign, and the sense of possibility was further encouraged by Mayor Harrison’s decision in April to grant the new working terms, wholesale, to Chicago’s public employees. Finally, Parsons was able to convince Chicago’s hard-line anarchists of the benefit of joining the bandwagon, if only to be in a better position to direct it.
The depth of the anger and alarm felt by the likes of Cyrus McCormick at the prospect of such solidarity across the working population should not be underestimated: the 71 per cent increase in profits since he had taken over could not be sustained in such circumstances. ‘To arm is not hard. Buy these,’ Herr Most told a meeting in New York’s Germania Gardens, holding aloft a rifle, ‘steal revolvers, make bombs, and when you have enough, rise and seize what is yours. Take the city by force and the capitalists by the throat.’ The news that Most was due to be in Chicago on 1 May must have sent a shiver through the ranks of the city’s businessmen, who hastily pledged $2,000 to arm the police with a Gatling gun, America’s very own version of the mitrailleuses that had mown down the Communards fifteen years earlier.
When May Day arrived, of the 300,000 men who downed tools across the United States, a full fifth of them were in Chicago. Yet the day passed off without major incident. Steeled as they were for a showdown, McCormick, his colleagues and Captain Bonfield surely felt a certain sense of anticlimax, mixed with relief. Yet if their strategy had simply been to crush the demonstrators once the swell of popular support for the workers had subsided, they showed scant patience. It was only two days later, on 3 May, as Spies addressed a crowd gathered outside the McCormick works, that the rattle of rifle fire echoed out, as Bonfield’s men intervened against pickets who were preventing strike-breakers from entering the gates. There was one fatality. Outraged, Spies rushed to the print room of his newspaper and, in the heat of the moment, set about compositing a call for vengeance: ‘If you are men, if you are the sons of grandsires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!’
A light drizzle was slanting down on the night of 4 May 1886, when Mayor Harrison arrived in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to reassure himself that the demonstration he had authorised was passing off in good order. The city was on edge, but having satisfied himself as to the ‘tame’ character of the gathering, Harrison left at around half-past seven, advising the police to stand down. Ignoring the mayor’s instructions, Bonfield merely withdrew with his men to positions of concealment in side streets nearby. Throughout the evening a steady flow of informants and plain-clothes policemen shuttled between the demonstration and Bonfield’s post, relaying updates on the speeches, right until the moment when the last speaker, Samuel Fielden, mounted the wagon that was being used as a podium. ‘Defend yourselves, your lives, your futures,’ he urged those anarchists who remained. ‘Throttle it, kill it, stab it, do everything you can to wound it,’ was his recommended treatment of the law and its protectors, who even as he spoke were lining up, 180 strong in rows four deep, just out of sight.
It was 10.30 when Bonfield ordered his formation to advance. The worsening weather had thinned the crowd gathered near the corner of Desplaines Street, from 3,000 at its peak to a har
d core of a few hundred. ‘We are peaceable,’ protested Fielden, somewhat disingenuously, as the captain ordered the meeting to disperse. The moments that followed would ever afterwards define anarchism in America, and arguably socialism as a whole. A few who glanced upwards saw the glowing fuse of the bomb as it arced through the air above them into the uniformed ranks; most only registered what had happened after the noise of the explosion had passed and the air had cleared of debris, leaving the cries of the dead and dying. One policeman was killed immediately, six more were fatally injured; fifty others wounded.
Accounts carried by the scattering crowds varied greatly, setting off wild rumours that soon ticked along the telegraph wires. Law-abiding citizens of Chicago, hearing reports that hundreds of policemen had died, formed defence groups in the expectation of imminent civil war, while apocryphal stories that the bomb had been followed by salvos of anarchist gunfire into the ranks of the police led them to believe that an insurrection had already broken out.
The police department itself was divided over how to respond. While Police Chief Ebersold tried to reassure the public, convinced that his priority must be to prevent panic, his junior officers set about undermining his strategy by stoking the pervasive sense of fear. Bonfield having played his part, Captain Schaak now took the lead in championing the reactionary cause. Seventy anarchist suspects were rounded up in short measure and brutally interrogated, without access to water or legal representation. Witnesses were bribed, informants retained, reports forged, guns and bombs planted in the anarchist headquarters. Schaak was the sledgehammer of those with a wider anti-socialist and xenophobic agenda, as those around him at the time would later reveal. ‘He saw more anarchists than hell could hold,’ wrote one eye-witness to his excesses; ‘in the end, there was no society, however innocent or even laudable, among the foreign-born population that was not to his mind engaged in devilry.’ Nevertheless, Schaak’s tall tales of secret conspiracies were swallowed without question by most of Chicago’s middle class, who preferred to blame Mayor Harrison’s policies for giving comfort and encouragement to the anarchists, than question who had really thrown the bomb, and on whose orders.
Spies, Neebe, Lingg, Fielden and Schwab were among the eight men charged for the attack, though few of them had been present in the Haymarket, or could be linked to the event. Since they were the city’s leading anarchist speakers and journalists, their removal struck the movement a critical blow. Albert Parsons, having gone into hiding, voluntarily turned himself in, in the hope that his presence in the dock would allay the risk of the trial making scapegoats of the immigrants. The man suspected of throwing the bomb, Schnaubelt, had fled, never to reappear. If Johann Most had visited Chicago for May Day, he had made a quick getaway, but was nevertheless indicted by a grand jury. When eventually arrested, he was humiliated in front of fifty policemen who watched as he was photographed, familiarising themselves with his features for future reference and shouting out threats that ‘If you show your teeth, or open your yap, we’ll shoot you down like a dog.’ Ironically, had Most not kept a certain distance between himself and Parsons, whose policies he still considered too moderate, he would almost certainly have joined those who now stood trial.
The atmosphere in which the eight Chicago anarchists appeared in the dock resembled that of a witch-hunt, and the prosecuting state attorney made no pretence as to the purely political and exemplary nature of the judgement that would be passed. ‘Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury, and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury: convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society.’ The gentlemen, and the judge, duly obliged, sentencing five to the death penalty and three to a life term of hard labour.
In Britain, as throughout Europe, the Haymarket debacle galvanised both extremes of the political spectrum. While those on the left rallied to the accused during the trial and afterwards, collecting petitions and addressing public meetings, the Tory press inveighed against the defendants, in a displaced expression of the loathing it felt for the immigrant and native socialists closer to home. For William Morris, the event exposed at a stroke the hypocrisy surrounding the vaunted ideal of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy, on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Will you think the example of America too trite?’ he asked an audience of moderate Fabians, challenging their willingness to operate within existing political structures. ‘Anyhow consider it! A country with universal suffrage, no king, no House of Lords, no privilege as you fondly think; only a little standing army, chiefly used for the murder of red-skins; a democracy after your model; and with all that, a society corrupt to the core, and at this moment engaged in suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Tsar of all the Russias uses.’
After visiting the condemned men in prison, Marx’s daughter Eleanor returned to England on the eve of their execution to report the belief, common among the working men of Chicago, that the true guilt for the bomb-throwing lay with a police agent. Subsequent investigations never settled the matter, though the corruption in the Chicago police and judiciary at the time was eventually laid bare and officially acknowledged. Foreign powers also had a hand in manipulating the aftermath of the Haymarket Affair, however, and the possibility of their prior involvement in provoking the bombing cannot be discounted; certainly, the most vociferous calls for vengeance came from a certain Heinrich Danmeyere, a deep-cover agent of the Imperial German Police.
It may well have been Danmeyere too who, in the guise of an American-based inventor known as ‘Meyer’, played a supporting role in a police plot of 1887 to entrap Most’s accomplice Johann Neve. The bait offered was a new terror weapon he had supposedly devised, called the ‘scorpion’: a poisoned needle resembling that which Jules Allix had proposed during the Siege of Paris as an effective means for Frenchwomen to kill Prussians. The key figure in the plan was a certain Theodore Reuss: one of the more flamboyant émigrés in London, where – on behalf of the Imperial Police – he had been making mischief among the socialists for the past couple of years, repeatedly evading exposure.
Even before the London Anarchist Congress, when the French spy Serreaux had required such careful handling and Malatesta had almost fought a duel with his lover’s brother Giuseppe Zanardelli over attempts to discredit the movement, there had been considerable unease about police infiltration of the émigré communities in Britain. When Theodore Reuss joined the Socialist League in 1885, the sincerity of his conversion should immediately have been in doubt: a Wagnerian tenor who claimed to have taken a lead role in the world premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth and to have re-founded the mystical Order of the Illuminati in Munich, his shared interest in medievalism with William Morris was insufficient by way of explanation. As it was, however, neither his decision to enrol under the pseudonym of Charles Theodore, nor the generosity with which he funded the league’s propagandist activities at a level far beyond his ostensible means, appear to have caused any initial suspicion.
Within a few months, however, with Reuss installed as ‘Lessons Secretary’ for the League, coaching recent arrivals in the English language and cultivating the most extreme of them, his more cautious colleagues intuited a troublesome presence, and when he convened a conference to propose that an international centre should coordinate the league’s activities, veteran delegates surely recalled Serreaux’s ruse in 1881. Perhaps when Eleanor Marx lamented the vulgarity of the songs Reuss chose for a recital, or a German colleague contradicted the verdict of the music critics by declaring Reuss to have ‘a harsh voice’, they were giving vent to a deeper-seated but unspoken unease. While the German émigrés could deal with traitors ruthlessly – a spy who had revealed details of the operation to smuggle Freiheit to the Continent had been ‘accidentally’ shot during a picnic on Hampstead Heath – for the moment a lack of evidence against Reuss saved him fro
m a similar fate.
Those who doubted Reuss’ integrity would soon regret their scruples. Insinuating himself into the trust of Joseph Peukert, who had established the Autonomie group as a means of distancing himself from Most’s influence, Reuss cultivated the tensions between Peukert and his rivals, in particular Neve’s Belgian assistant Victor Dave. Before long each was accusing the other of being a police spy. On a secret visit to the Continent by Dave, the ease with which Reuss was able to address letters to him raised further suspicions that he was in league with the police. These appeared to be confirmed when Dave tested Reuss by providing him alone with information about an imaginary visit to Berlin by Neve, to which police in the city responded. Peukert merely accused Dave of attempting to frame Reuss, and the mutual recrimination continued.
It was now that the agent provocateur Meyer offered Peukert the ‘scorpion’ as a means by which he could regain Neve’s esteem, and when Neve agreed to meet in Belgium, Reuss eagerly tagged along. ‘Now I’ve got him,’ crowed Kruger, the director of the Berlin police, certain that ‘this time he would not escape my grasp.’ But the elusive Neve failed to appear, and the police agents to whom Reuss had signalled his movements returned empty-handed. Then, two days before Reuss was due back in London to perform in a concert, Neve offered to meet him alone.
The rendezvous was arranged for Luttich station. The minutes dragged by in the waiting room, the appointed time came and went, and just as Reuss was about to leave, the door creaked open and Neve entered. He had no real interest in secret weapons; only in reprimanding Reuss for his malicious slanders of Dave. ‘You are a man without character,’ Neve sneered, before making a cautious exit. Leaning on the bar, watching in the mirror, the only other man present was Kruger’s agent, who had got a good enough view of Neve’s reflection to be able to circulate a description.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 34
