Haymarket Memorial, DesPlaines Street, Chicago
May
4, 2015, marks the 129th anniversary of the Chicago's Haymarket "riot," a
police-provoked disturbance at a workers rally for which four innocent
men were hung. Two of these four did nothing more than express unpopular
political views in public. The other two had no demonstrated connection
to provoking the riot leading to the deaths of 7 police officers and at
least 3 civilians (probably more). Two of the Haymarket martyrs, Albert
Parsons and August Spies, were particularly admirable leaders of the
Chicago labor/anarchist movement in the 1870s and 1880s. That movement had as its
first priority an 8-hour workday (over 30 years before national
implementation of the limited work day with overtime requiring
heightened compensation), and as its long range vision a society in
which members of "self-governing communities and workplaces would
determine their own rights and responsibilities democratically, without
the domination of a powerful national state with its judges and laws,
its police forces and armies." (J. Green, DEATH IN THE MAYMARKET p.
129.)
The event known as the Haymarket riot occurred at a May 4
workers rally, called by local anarchist union leaders in the midst of a
series of industry-wide strikes for the 8-hour day and better wages.
The featured speaker was Albert Parsons, a confederate officer as a
teenager who became a defender of former slaves in Reconstruction Texas. He was driven north to Chicago by the retrenching racist elite who
could tolerate neither his pro-black political stances nor his marriage
to the mixed race Lucy Parsons. In Chicago, Parsons was confronted by
the evils of capital's extremist domination and suppression of working
people and quickly became a leader of the idealistic movement to
organize workers to demand better hours, wages, and, ultimately, a more
humanely organized society. For this, Albert Parsons was made a martyr
to American evil and became a model of American righteousness.
The
day before the Haymarket rally, company thugs had provoked violence
among striking workers at the giant McCormick Reaper Works and police
then gunned down several strikers. The May 4 rally was called in part to
refute bogus police allegations that the workers, and particularly
German-language anarchist newspaper publisher August Spies, had provoked
the violence. Spies spoke at the Haymarket rally and urged calm in the
face of police confrontation. The crowd that night grew as large as
3000. The mayor of Chicago watched the rally for a while from the back
of his horse, and then went to a nearby police station where police
Inspector Bonfield had amassed a force of officers to counter any
violence at the rally. Mayor Harrison told Bonfield that the rally was
breaking up and that there was no need to worry about any violence. By
this time, as it had started to rain, several of the speakers and
organizers, including Parsons (with his wife and two young children),
had walked to a tavern a block to the north where they were having a
beer and talking about the day's events. Shortly after the mayor rode
off toward home, a police agent erroneously told Bonfield that the last
speaker, Samuel Fielden, was urging violent action. The trigger happy
Inspector ordered the massed force into formation and down the street to
the Haymarket, where they came to face the remaining few hundred
workers. A police captain called for the rally to disperse peacefully.
The speaker Fielden said they were being peaceful. The captain repeated
his order to disperse. Fielden said "All right, we will go," and moved
to climb down from the speaker's wagon. At that point, someone (probably
a lone anarchist worker, but possibly a police agent provocateur) threw
a small bomb into the mass of police officers, many of whom immediately
began shooting the handguns they had recently begun carrying.
Eventually, seven police officers died, one or two from the bomb blast,
the rest from bullets fired by other police. (No non-police witnesses
saw any of the workers with guns.) The establishment and the
"respectable" middle class was of course outraged and terrified; the
Haymarket became a symbol of the tenuous control the Establishment
classes had over the workers who were suddenly susceptible to utopian
visions of a radically different society. This, the establishment could
not stand; someone had to pay the price to erase the power of the symbol
and the potential power of the democratic majority of worker-citizens.
Despite
the acknowledged lack of evidence any of the four martyrs threw the
bomb or were involved in any planning for violence or had any advance
knowledge of the bomb, they were convicted of conspiracy. The case
against Spies and Parsons was basically that they had publicly said the
time was coming when striking workers would use force to protect
themselves against the increasingly violent attacks by police forces and
company hired thugs. Spies and others had romanticized dynamite as a
great social leveler, potentially enabling workers to contend with the
violence of the bosses and their public and private armies. But there
was no substantial evidence Spies ever possessed dynamite or encouraged
others to use it. He and Parsons engaged in idealistic, prophetic
rhetoric about what would happen if the bosses continued to violently
suppress workers organizing and striking to gain better working
conditions and wages. For talking about dynamite as a way to resist
police suppression, Parsons and Spies were sentenced to die by hanging.
Partially in response to an international uproar of the unfairness of
the convictions and sentences, the governor indicated he was willing to
commute their death sentences to life in prison. But the rules of
commutation required the prisoners acknowledge some guilt and plead for
mercy and neither Parsons nor Spies was willing to do that. On November
11, 1887, Parsons and Spies were executed, killed, hung from the neck by
officials of the State of Illinois.
As a tribute to the memory
of the martyrdom of the Chicago anarchists, I post the following passage
from the book where I learned all this stuff, DEATH IN THE HAYMARKET
(Pantheon 2006) by labor historian James Green. The point of posting this passage is not to
'nostalgize' about some past idyll that of course never existed, but to
evoke the conceptual freedom from a time when workers could envision
taking society in a different direction than the one being orchestrated
by the big money capitalist overclass. This was the real reason the
anarchists had to be killed off: they insisted there was a
non-capitalist and better way to organize society, a better way to live
life cooperatively, a way that would not enable or allow the kind of
super stratified wealth and power a capitalist society requires.
Green
writes that in the mid 19th century, white American and European
craftsmen "expressed 'a defiant sense of egalitarianism' toward other
men who acted as their superiors. Their code was based on a sense of
self-worth gained through long apprenticeship and mature workmanship in
an honorable trade. They believed their work was noble, even holy, and
that they should be regarded romantically as 'knights of labor.' Thus,
manly workers refused to be put upon by their bosses or to accept any
affront to their dignity. They also opposed efforts to pit themselves
against one another. An honorable, respectable working man did not steal
from his fellows or seek to undermine their customs and standards by
rushing to please the boss or simply to make more money. . . . The
habits that craftsmen cultivated were first expressed in the early
benevolent societies based on the principle of mutual aid and then in
the first craft unions their members called 'brotherhoods.' These
'rituals of mutuality' fused readily with the practices of democratic
citizenship that evolved during the nineteenth century among white
mechanics and workingmen who came to see themselves as the backbone of
the republic.
"Being a skilled tradesman, a competent craftsman
and an intelligent citizen required, above all, enlightenment through
self-edification. Many craftsmen took pride in the breadth and depth of
their reading, and appreciated what they learned from each other on the
job. Cigar rollers sometimes asked a literate among them to read a book
or newspaper aloud to them while they worked. . . .
"Manufacturers exerted little control over the cigar makers, who worked
by the piece, and some producers complained that many of their men would
come into the shop in the morning, roll a few stogies and then go to a
beer saloon and play cards for a few hours, willfully cutting they day's
production and voluntarily limiting their own earnings. These irregular
work habits appeared in other trades as well, for instance, among
German brewers, who clung to their Old World privilege of drinking free
beer while they worked in the breweries. Coopers would appear at work on
Saturday morning, like all wage earners did in those years, and then,
in some places, they would pool their pay and buy a 'Goose Egg,' a half
barrel of beer. 'Little groups of jolly fellows would often sit around
upturned barrels playing poker . . .,' wrote a historian of cooperage,
'until they received their pay and the 'Goose Egg' was dry.' After a
night out on Saturday and an afternoon of drinking on Sunday, the
coopers were not in the best condition to settle down to a regular day's
work. They would spend a 'blue Monday' sharpening tools, bringing in
supplies and discussing the news of the day.
"Into this world,
with its honored traditions, its irregular work habits and its rituals
of mutuality came the machine. It rattled on relentlessly 'never tiring,
never resting,' . . . dragging the worker along with it. And behind the
machine stood a man, an owner or a foreman, who regarded the
craftsmen's stubborn old habits and craft union rules as nothing more
than ancient customs, relics of medieval times in a modern world
governed by the need for industrial efficiency and the unforgiving laws
of political economy."
(DEATH IN THE HAYMARKET pp. 107-109.)
***
"I
am doomed by you to suffer an ignominious death because I am an
outspoken enemy of coercion, of privilege, or force, of authority. 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. You are being weighed in the
balance. The people are conscious of your power – your stolen power. I,
as a working man, stand here and to your face, in your stronghold of
oppression, denounce your crimes against humanity. It is for this I die,
but my death will not have been in vain."
– Albert Parsons at his
sentencing hearing, October 9, 1886.
We can pay appropriate
tribute to Parsons, Spies, and the other worker-visionaries of the
nineteenth century by keeping alive an American moral imagination – a
vision and eventually practice of a more humane, cooperative society
driven not by the plutocratic imperatives of wealth and social stratification, but
by the quest for good, meaningful lives for all.
