_The New Time, February, 1898_
The century now closing is luminous with great achievements. In every
department of human endeavor marvelous progress has been made. By the
magic of the machine which sprang from the inventive genius of man,
wealth has been created in fabulous abundance. But, alas, this wealth,
instead of blessing the race, has been the means of enslaving it. The
few have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to
the extremity of living by permission.
A few have had the courage to protest. To silence these so that the
dead-level of slavery could be maintained has been the demand and
command of capital-blown power. Press and pulpit responded with
alacrity. All the forces of society were directed against these pioneers
of industrial liberty, these brave defenders of oppressed humanity—and
against them the crime of the century has been committed.
Albert R. Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis
Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe paid the cruel
penalty in prison cell and on the gallows.
They were the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom, and one
of the supreme duties of our civilization, if indeed we may boast of
having been redeemed from savagery, is to rescue their names from
calumny and do justice to their memory.
The crime with which these men were charged was never proven against
them. The trial which resulted in their conviction was not only a
disgrace to all judicial procedure but a foul, black, indelible and
damning stigma upon the nation.
It was a trial organized and conducted to convict—a conspiracy to murder
innocent men, and hence had not one redeeming feature.
It was a plot, satanic in all its conception, to wreak vengeance upon
defenseless men, who, not being found guilty of the crime charged in the
indictment, were found guilty of exercising the inalienable right of
free speech in the interest of the toiling and groaning masses, and thus
they became the first martyrs to a cause which, fertilized by their
blood, has grown in strength and sweep and influence from the day they
yielded up their lives and liberty in its defense.
As the years go by and the history of that infamous trial is read and
considered by men of thought, who are capable of wrenching themselves
from the grasp of prejudice and giving reason its rightful supremacy,
the stronger the conviction becomes that the present generation of
workingmen should erect an enduring memorial to the men who had the
courage to denounce and oppose wage-slavery and seek for methods of
emancipation.
The vision of the judicially murdered men was prescient. They saw the
dark and hideous shadow of coming events. They spoke words of warning,
not too soon, not too emphatic, not too trumpet-toned—for even in 1886,
when the Haymarket meetings were held, the capitalistic grasp was upon
the throats of workingmen and its fetters were upon their limbs.
There was even then idleness, poverty, squalor, the rattling of skeleton
bones, the sunken eye, the pallor, the living death of famine, the
crushing and the grinding of the relentless mills of the plutocracy,
which more rapidly than the mills of the gods grind their victims to
dust.
The men who went to their death upon the verdict of a jury, I have said,
were judicially murdered—not only because the jury was packed for the
express purpose of finding them guilty, not only because the crime for
which they suffered was never proven against them, not only because the
judge before whom they were arraigned was unjust and bloodthirsty, but
because they had declared in the exercise of free speech that men who
subjected their fellowmen to conditions often worse than death were
unfit to live.
In all lands and in all ages where the victims of injustice have bowed
their bodies to the earth, bearing grievous burdens laid upon them by
cruel taskmasters, and have lifted their eyes starward in the hope of
finding some orb whose light inspired hope, ten million times the
anathema has been uttered and will be uttered until a day shall dawn
upon the world when the emancipation of those who toil is achieved by
the brave, self-sacrificing few who, like the Chicago martyrs, have the
courage of crusaders and the spirit of iconoclasts and dare champion the
cause of the oppressed and demand in the name of an avenging God and of
an outraged Humanity that infernalism shall be eliminated from our
civilization.
And as the struggle for justice proceeds and the battlefields are
covered with the slain, as Mother Earth drinks their blood, the stones
are given tongues with which to denounce man’s inhumanity to man—aye, to
women and children, whose moanings from hovel and sweatshop, garret and
cellar, arraign our civilization, our religion and our judiciary—whose
wailings and lamentations, hushing to silence every sound the Creator
designed to make the world a paradise of harmonies, transform it into an
inferno where the demons of greed plot and scheme to consign their
victims to lower depths of degradation and despair.
The men who were judicially murdered in Chicago in 1887, in the name of
the great State of Illinois, were the avant couriers of a better day.
They were called anarchists, but at their trial it was not proven that
they had committed any crime or violated any law. They had protested
against unjust laws and their brutal administration. They stood between
oppressor and oppressed, and they dared, in a free (?) country, to
exercise the divine right of free speech; and the records of their
trial, as if written with an “iron pen and lead in the rock forever,”
proclaim the truth of the declaration.
I would rescue their names from slander. The slanderers of the dead are
the oppressors of the living. I would, if I could, restore them to their
rightful positions as evangelists, the proclaimers of good news to their
fellowmen—crusaders, to rescue the sacred shrines of justice from the
profanations of the capitalistic defilers who have made them more
repulsive than Augean stables. Aye, I would take them, if I could, from
peaceful slumber in their martyr graves—I would place joint to joint in
their dislocated necks—I would make the halter the symbol of
redemption—I would restore the flesh to their skeleton bones—their eyes
should again flash defiance to the enemies of humanity, and their
tongues, again, more eloquent than all the heroes of oratory, should
speak the truth to a gainsaying world. Alas, this cannot be done—but
something can be done. The stigma fixed upon their names by an
outrageous trial can be forever obliterated and their fame be made to
shine with resplendent glory on the pages of history.
Until the time shall come, as come it will, when the parks of Chicago
shall be adorned with their statues, and with holy acclaim, men, women
and children, pointing to these monuments as testimonials of gratitude,
shall honor the men who dared to be true to humanity and paid the
penalty of their heroism with their lives, the preliminary work of
setting forth their virtues devolves upon those who are capable of
gratitude to men who suffered death that they might live.
They were the men who, like Al-Hassen, the minstrel of the king, went
forth to find themes of mirth and joy with which to gladden the ears of
his master, but returned disappointed, and, instead of themes to awaken
the gladness and joyous echoes, found scenes which dried all the
fountains of joy. Touching his golden harp, Al-Hassen sang to the king
as Parsons, Spies, Engel, Fielden, Fischer, Lingg, Schwab and Neebe
proclaimed to the people:
“O king, at thy
Command I went into the world of men;
I sought full earnestly the thing which I
Might weave into the gay and lightsome song.
I found it, king; ’twas there. Had I the art
To look but on the fair outside, I nothing
Else had found. That art not mine, I saw what
Lay beneath. And seeing thus I could not sing;
For there, in dens more vile than wolf or jackal
Ever sought, were herded, stifling, foul, the
Writhing, crawling masses of mankind. Man!
Ground down beneath oppression’s iron heel,
Till God in him was crushed and driven back,
And only that which with the brute he shares
Finds room to upward grow.”
Such pictures of horror our martyrs saw in Chicago, as others have seen
them in all the great centers of population in the country. But, like
the noble minstrel, they proceeded to recite their discoveries and with
him moaned:
“And in this world
I saw how womanhood’s fair flower had
Never space its petals to unfold. How
Childhood’s tender bud was crushed and trampled
Down in mire and filth too evil, foul, for beasts
To be partakers in. For gold I saw
The virgin sold, and motherhood was made
A mock and scorn.
I saw the fruit of labor
Torn away from him who toiled, to further
Swell the bursting coffers of the rich, while
Babes and mothers pined and died of want.
I saw dishonor and injustice thrive. I saw
The wicked, ignorant, greedy, and unclean,
By means of bribes and baseness, raised to seats
Of power, from whence with lashes pitiless
And keen, they scourged the hungry, naked throng
Whom first they robbed and then enslaved.”
Such were the scenes that the Chicago martyrs had witnessed and which
may still be seen, and for reciting them and protesting against them
they were judicially murdered.
It was not strange that the hearts of the martyrs “grew into one with
the great moaning, throbbing heart” of the oppressed; not strange that
the nerves of the martyrs grew “tense and quivering with the throes of
mortal pain”; not strange that they should pity and plead and protest.
The strange part of it is that in our high-noon of civilization a
damnable judicial conspiracy should have been concocted to murder them
under the forms of law.
That such is the truth of history, no honest man will attempt to deny;
hence the demand, growing more pronounced every day, to snatch the names
of these martyred evangelists of labor emancipation from dishonor and
add them to the roll of the most illustrious dead of the nation.