THE HAYMARKET TRAGEDY
From 1880 on, I became wholly engrossed in the labor movement. In all
the great industrial centers the working class was in rebellion. The
enormous immigration from Europe crowded the slums, forced down wages
and threatened to destroy the standard of living fought for by American
working men. Throughout the country there was business depression and
much unemployment. In the cities there was hunger and rags and despair.
Foreign agitators who had suffered under European despots preached
various schemes of economic salvation to the workers. The workers
asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The
agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.
Particularly the city of Chicago was the scene of strike after strike,
followed by boycotts and riots. The years preceding 1886 had witnessed
strikes of the lake seamen, of dock laborers and street railway
workers. These strikes had been brutally suppressed by policemen’s
clubs and by hired gunmen. The grievance on the part of the workers was
given no heed. John Bonfield, inspector of police, was particularly
cruel in the suppression of meetings where men peacefully assembled
to discuss matters of wages and of hours. Employers were defiant and
open in the expression of their fears and hatreds. The Chicago Tribune,
the organ of the employers, suggested ironically that the farmers of
Illinois treat the tramps that poured out of the great industrial
centers as they did other pests, by putting strychnine in the food.
The workers started an agitation for an eight-hour day. The trades
unions and the Knights of Labor endorsed the movement but because many
of the leaders of the agitation were foreigners, the movement itself
was regarded as “foreign” and as “un-American.” Then the anarchists of
Chicago, a very small group, espoused the cause of the eight-hour day.
From then on the people of Chicago seemed incapable of discussing a
purely economic question without getting excited about anarchism.
The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement. A person
who believed in an eight-hour working day was, they said, an enemy to
his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of government
were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats. Feeling was bitter.
The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people on one
side--hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs with
bare hands. On the other side the employers, knowing neither hunger nor
cold, supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all the power of
the great state itself.
The anarchists took advantage of the widespread discontent to preach
their doctrines. Orators used to address huge crowds on the windy,
barren shore of Lake Michigan. Although I never endorsed the philosophy
of anarchism, I often attended the meetings on the lake shore,
listening to what these teachers of a new order had to say to the
workers.
Meanwhile the employers were meeting. They met in the mansion of George
M. Pullman on Prairie Avenue or in the residence of Wirt Dexter, an
able corporation lawyer. They discussed means of killing the eight-hour
movement which was to be ushered in by a general strike. They discussed
methods of dispersing the meetings of the anarchists.
A bitterly cold winter set in. Long unemployment resulted in terrible
suffering. Bread lines increased. Soup kitchens could not handle the
applicants. Thousands knew actual misery.
On Christmas day, hundreds of poverty stricken people in rags and
tatters, in thin clothes, in wretched shoes paraded on fashionable
Prairie Avenue before the mansions of the rich, before their employers,
carrying the black flag. I thought the parade an insane move on the
part of the anarchists, as it only served to make feeling more bitter.
As a matter of fact, it had no educational value whatever and only
served to increase the employers’ fear, to make the police more savage,
and the public less sympathetic to the real distress of the workers.
The first of May, which was to usher in the eight-hour day uprising,
came. The newspapers had done everything to alarm the people. All over
the city there were strikes and walkouts. Employers quaked in their
boots. They saw revolution. The workers in the McCormick Harvester
Works gathered outside the factory. Those inside who did not join the
strikers were called scabs. Bricks were thrown. Windows were broken.
The scabs were threatened. Someone turned in a riot call.
The police without warning charged down upon the workers, shooting into
their midst, clubbing right and left. Many were trampled under horses’
feet. Numbers were shot dead. Skulls were broken. Young men and young
girls were clubbed to death.
The Pinkerton agency formed armed bands of ex-convicts and hoodlums
and hired them to capitalists at eight dollars a day, to picket the
factories and incite trouble.
On the evening of May 4th, the anarchists held a meeting in the shabby,
dirty district known to later history as Haymarket Square. All about
were railway tracks, dingy saloons and the dirty tenements of the poor.
A half a block away was the Desplaines Street Police Station presided
over by John Bonfield, a man without tact or discretion or sympathy, a
most brutal believer in suppression as the method to settle industrial
unrest.
Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, attended the meeting of the
anarchists and moved in and about the crowds in the square. After
leaving, he went to the Chief of Police and instructed him to send no
mounted police to the meeting, as it was being peacefully conducted and
the presence of mounted police would only add fuel to fires already
burning red in the workers’ hearts. But orders perhaps came from other
quarters, for disregarding the report of the mayor, the chief of police
sent mounted policemen in large numbers to the meeting.
One of the anarchist speakers was addressing the crowd. A bomb was
dropped from a window overlooking the square. A number of the police
were killed in the explosion that followed.
The city went insane and the newspapers did everything to keep it like
a madhouse. The workers’ cry for justice was drowned in the shriek for
revenge. Bombs were “found” every five minutes. Men went armed and gun
stores kept open nights. Hundreds were arrested. Only those who had
agitated for an eight-hour day, however, were brought to trial and a
few months later hanged. But the man, Schnaubelt, who actually threw
the bomb was never brought into the case, nor was his part in the
terrible drama ever officially made clear.
The leaders in the eight hour day movement were hanged Friday, November
the 11th. That day Chicago’s rich had chills and fever. Ropes stretched
in all directions from the jail. Police men were stationed along the
ropes armed with riot rifles. Special patrols watched all approaches
to the jail. The roofs about the grim stone building were black with
police. The newspapers fed the public imagination with stories of
uprisings and jail deliveries.
But there were no uprisings, no jail deliveries, except that of Louis
Lingg, the only real preacher of violence among all the condemned men.
He outwitted the gallows by biting a percussion cap and blowing off his
head.
The Sunday following the executions, the funerals were held. Thousands
of workers marched behind the black hearses, not because they were
anarchists but they felt that these men, whatever their theories, were
martyrs to the workers’ struggle. The procession wound through miles
and miles of streets densely packed with silent people.
In the cemetery of Waldheim, the dead were buried. But with them was
not buried their cause. The struggle for the eight hour day, for more
human conditions and relations between man and man lived on, and still
lives on.
Seven years later, Governor Altgeld, after reading all the evidence in
the case, pardoned the three anarchists who had escaped the gallows
and were serving life sentences in jail. He said the verdict was
unjustifiable, as had William Dean Howells and William Morris at the
time of its execution. Governor Altgeld committed political suicide by
his brave action but he is remembered by all those who love truth and
those who have the courage to confess it.