Death in the Haymarket Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Maps

  Prologue

  Chapter One - For Once in Common Front

  Chapter Two - A Paradise for Workers and Speculators

  Chapter Three - We May Not Always Be So Secure

  Chapter Four - A Liberty-Thirsty People

  Chapter Five - The Inevitable Uprising

  Chapter Six - The Flame That Makes the Kettle Boil

  Chapter Seven - A Brutal and Inventive Vitality

  Chapter Eight - The International

  Chapter Nine - The Great Upheaval

  Chapter Ten - A Storm of Strikes

  Chapter Eleven - A Night of Terror

  Chapter Twelve - The Strangest Frenzy

  Chapter Thirteen - Every Man on the Jury Was an American

  Chapter Fourteen - You Are Being Weighed in the Balance

  Chapter Fifteen - The Law Is Vindicated

  Chapter Sixteen - The Judgment of History

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  To Janet and Nick

  Acclaim for James Green’s

  Death in the Haymarket

  “No potboiler on the bestseller list can compete with Death in the Haymarket for narrative grip. Rich in character, profound in resonance, shot-through with violence, set in the immigrant neighborhoods, meeting halls, and saloons of the capitol of the American nineteenth century, here is a Chicago of life. Green renews that horror and shame for our time.”

  —Jack Beatty, Senior Editor, The Atlantic Monthly

  “Filled with the suspense of a good novel, Death in the Haymarket vividly illuminates the shifting industrial terrain of late-nineteenth-century America. This is a work of art as well as history.”

  —Alice Kessler-Harris, Bancroft Prize–winning author of In Pursuit of Equity

  “Green eloquently . . . produces what will surely be the definitive word on the Haymarket affair for this generation.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “James Green tells a powerful story of Chicago, America and the industrial world of the nineteenth century. His talents as a historian and a writer bring to life social and political struggles that helped make modern American society.”

  —Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Nation under Our Feet

  “A stunning portrait of America in the Gilded Age . . . and a bona fide page-turner to boot.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “A compelling, even moving, version of the events surrounding Haymarket. He renders the execution—or ‘civic murder,’ as writer William Dean Howells bitterly called it—of Albert Parsons, journalist August Spies, toy maker George Engel and printer Adolph Fischer in vivid detail.”

  — Houston Chronicle

  “Green’s re-creation of this terrible moment exposes the deep divisions that marred America at the dawn of the industrial age. As the nation again struggles with wrenching economic change, we need to hear the story that Death in the Haymarket so passionately tells.”

  —Kevin Boyle, National Book Award–winning author of Arc of Justice

  “Fast-paced. . . . Vivid.”

  —The New Yorker

  “There have been poems about Haymarket . . . and novels . . . and chapters in books on the labor violence that is strangely omitted from our high school history textbooks—but nothing until now as meticulous as Green’s account, nor as saddening.”

  —Harper’s Magazine

  “The Haymarket affair was a pivotal event in United States history. Green explains its significance with a scholar’s sure grasp of context and a storyteller’s skill at weaving a dramatic narrative.”

  —Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

  “The bombing and the infamous trial that followed are all vividly depicted in this crisply written, highly readable account. This is exceptional historical reporting and skillfully written with both color and clarity.”

  —Tucson Citizen

  “A good, fast-paced read driven by fascinating characters. . . . Green’s exploration of revolutionaries and their world—their newspapers, social clubs, festivals and fraternal organizations—humanizes men and women who, in their lifetimes, were constantly dehumanized by an astonishingly biased press. This book enriches our understanding of a road not taken.”

  —The New York Sun

  Maps

  Chicago in the early 1880s, showing prominent railroads, industries and other important sites 103

  Locations of major strikes in Chicago during the Great Upheaval from April 25 to May 4, 1886 175

  Chicago’s Haymarket Square area on the night of May 4, 1886 187

  Prologue

  AS THE SUN ROSE over Lake Michigan on May 5 in 1886, Chicagoans beheld one of the brightest mornings in memory. In the early light of day, merchants, managers and brokers boarded horse-drawn streetcars on the South Side and headed north on Michigan Avenue toward the business district. Along the way they encountered a few high-hatted rich men, like the great manufacturer George Mortimer Pullman, being driven uptown in fancy carriages from their mansions on Prairie Avenue. Marring the commuters’ eastward view of Lake Michigan’s azure blue reaches, black freight trains rolled along the shoreline laden with baled cotton from the Mississippi River delta, cut lumber from the piney woods of Texas and soft coal from the mines of southern Illinois—all crucial ingredients in the city’s explosive industrial growth during the 1880s. Indeed, the businessmen who went to work in Chicago’s financial district that spring day in 1886 were in the midst of a golden decade of profit, when the net value of goods produced by the city’s leading industries multiplied twenty-seven times, ten times faster than the average yearly wage.1

  But that first Wednesday in May when commuters gazed west over the widest industrial landscape in the world, they saw something unusual: a clear sky above the prairie horizon. Gone was the cloud of thick smoke that always hung over the city. The only signals of industrial activity came from the tall chimneys of the huge McCormick Reaper Works two miles away, where strikebreakers, guarded by Chicago police, kept the factory in operation. Scores of other plants and shops remained shut down on this fifth day of a mammoth general strike for the eight-hour day that had begun on May 1.

  As the black-coated businessmen entered the downtown area, they could see knots of pickets around the soot-blackened warehouses that stretched along State Street all the way up to the Dearborn Station. Striking freight handlers had stanched the flow of interstate commerce through Chicago’s immense grid of iron rails. In solidarity, switchmen had refused to switch trains in one central railyard, crippling the mighty Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the city’s largest freight handler. 2 Trains still chugged into the city that day, but when the locomotives reached the depots, they sat idle, stuck on the tracks with unloaded cargoes.

  Looking back into the rising sun, the businessmen would have seen hundreds of boats riding at anchor in the outer harbor. The captains of side-wheel steamers had banked their boilers, and sailors on lake schooners had struck their sails under orders from the alarmed vessel owners. A vast quantity of wheat and cut lumber awaited shipment, and there were lucrative tons of iron ore and anthracite coal to be unloaded, but the spring shipping season had been ruined by the storm of strikes that had swept over the city. Vessel owners feared for the safety of their ships if they ventured down the South Branch of the Chicago River to unload in the industrial zone because angry strikers, many of them Bohemian lumber shovers, had taken over the lumberyards and could, at any
moment, put a torch to their wooden boats and the acres of dry lumber nearby.3

  The strike wave even reached outside the city, to the enormous railroad car shops in the model town George Pullman had built to escape the turmoil of Chicago. Seemingly unconcerned with labor unrest in the city and in the town he owned, Pullman arrived for work as usual at his palatial company headquarters on Michigan Avenue. Stepping out of a carriage driven by a well-dressed black man who wore his own high hat, the world-renowned industrialist and city builder entered his office building looking as he did every morning, walking purposefully and wearing his usual outfit—a Prince Albert coat, striped trousers and patent-leather shoes.4

  Yet, beneath his businesslike demeanor, George Pullman suffered from feelings of uncertainty. “My anxiety is very great,” he wrote to his wife, “although it is said that I appear very cool and unconcerned about it.” The stunning breadth of the eight-hour strike shocked him. He had constructed his company town nine miles from industrial Chicago, where poverty and despair had poisoned relations between manufacturers and their hands and caused frequent strikes, lockouts and riots. In Pullman’s model community, carefully selected workmen earned high wages, rented comfortable new houses and lived a healthy life in a clean place. Now the toxic fumes of class antagonism were wafting through the streets of his planned community. “Some change must occur very soon now,” he told his wife, “but I cannot yet predict what it will be.” 5

  Like George Pullman, other businessmen headed for work on May 5 just as they always did and with their usual frantic energy. When they arrived downtown, these men usually stopped to buy the morning edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, the self-proclaimed businessman’s paper. But on this Wednesday, men grabbed the paper eagerly because they had heard rumors about a riot on the West Side the night before in which many policemen were hurt, and no one knew with any certainty what had happened. When they read the morning headline, they were stunned because it carried news of an event far worse than any of them imagined.

  A HELLISH DEED

  A Dynamite Bomb Thrown into a Crowd of Policemen. It Explodes and Covers the Street with Dead and Mutilated Officers— A Storm of Bullets Follows—The Police Return Fire and Wound a Number of Rioters—Harrowing Scenes at the Desplaines Street Station—A Night of Terror.

  The editors used all seven columns of the front page to describe the shocking events of May 4 in elaborate detail. A bomb thrown into the midst of six police divisions took an awful toll: at least fifty patrolmen had been wounded; several were near death, and one of them, Mathias Degan, had already expired in the arms of a fellow officer. The list of injured men was long, and the descriptions of their wounds were sickening. 6

  The news story explained that the bombing occurred at the end of a meeting called by the city’s socialists on Tuesday evening, May 4, in order to denounce the police for killing some strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works in a skirmish that took place the previous afternoon. Roughly 1,500 people had gathered for a rally that began that Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. on Desplaines Street, quite close to Randolph Street, where it widened to become the Haymarket, a busy place where farmers sold their produce by day. August Spies, the city’s leading German socialist, had called the meeting to order and then had introduced the renowned labor agitator Albert R. Parsons, who spoke for nearly an hour.

  By the time the last speaker mounted a hay wagon to close the meeting, only 600 people remained, according to the news report. Samuel Fielden, a burly stone hauler, had begun his speech by noting premonitions of danger obvious to all. He told the crowd to prepare for the worst, claiming that since the police had shown no mercy to the unarmed workers they gunned down at McCormick’s, then the police deserved no mercy in return. “Defend yourselves, your lives, your futures,” Fielden shouted to a crowd the Tribune described as composed of Germans (who were the most enthusiastic), along with Poles, Bohemians and a few Americans.

  At this point, “[a] stiff breeze came up from the north and, anticipating rain, more of the crowd left, the worst element, however, remaining,” according to the Tribune’s lead reporter. Fielden was winding up his address when witnesses saw a dark line of men forming south of Randolph in front of the Desplaines Street Police Station. A few minutes later the line started to move, and men on the outskirts of the rally whispered, “Police.” The large contingent of 176 officers moved rapidly down the street, marching double-time, like soldiers. The silver stars and buttons on the policemen’s blue coats glittered in the light cast off from the nearby Lyceum Theater, the only building in this dark grid of streets that glowed with electric lights. The police column was so broad that it filled the width of Desplaines Street, forcing onlookers to move onto the wooden sidewalks.

  When the first division of police stopped just before the wagon, the officer in charge said to Fielden in a loud voice, “In the name of the law, I command you to disperse.” Then, said the Tribune, came the “response.” With no warning “something like a miniature rocket suddenly rose out of the crowd on the east sidewalk.” It gave off a red glare as it arced about 20 feet in the air before falling in the middle of the street among the police. The bomb lay on the ground for a few seconds and then “exploded with terrific force, shaking buildings on the street and creating havoc among the police.” The blast stunned the officers and, before they could come to their senses, the newspaper reported, another shocking scene unfolded as “the anarchists and rioters poured a shower of bullets into the police.”

  The patrolmen immediately let loose with their pistols and kept up an incessant shooting for nearly two minutes as the dark sky above the street glowed with the flashes of gunfire. The civilians gathered on Desplaines Street ran for their lives. Some went west on Randolph and others east toward the Chicago River. Either way, those in flight ducked as bullets whizzed past them, and many of them dropped on the streets before they could escape. “The groans of those hit could be heard above the rattle of revolvers,” wrote one reporter. Some of those who fled took refuge in the halls or entrances of houses and in saloons. When the shooting stopped, they cautiously ventured forth, only to face more gunfire from the police.

  After this second assault ended, reporters saw men crawling on their hands and knees. Others tottered “along the street like drunken men, holding their hands to their heads and calling for help to take them home.” Many victims had their wounds dressed in drugstores and on wooden sidewalks, while others boarded streetcars going in every direction and containing wounded people fleeing from the Haymarket.

  At this point the journalists on the scene ran across the river to “newspaper alley” seven blocks away so they could file the biggest story of their lives. The news of the sensational events at the Haymarket flew across telegraph lines to newsrooms all over the nation and across the Atlantic to Europe as well. Every paper in London reported the event, and several even published long and graphic special sections with reports rendered in minute detail. Overnight, the Haymarket event became the biggest news story since Lincoln’s assassination twenty-one years earlier. “No disturbance of the peace that has occurred in the United States since the war of rebellion,” said the New York Times, “has excited public sentiment throughout the Union as it is excited by the Anarchists’ murder of policemen in Chicago on Tuesday night.”7

  At 11:30 p.m. police wagons rumbled into the Haymarket district from other precincts carrying reinforcements who cleared the streets around the station and “mercilessly clubbed all who demurred at the order to go.” After patrolmen drove all pedestrians from the area, the West Side fell silent, and “Desplaines Street looked black and deserted, save where the gas-lamps showed blood on the sidewalks and the curbstones.”

  The Tribune’s account then described the scene at the Desplaines Street Station: a “harrowing spectacle of wounded and dying men on the floor oozing blood that flowed literally in streams” until almost “every foot of the space was red and slippery.” Officers stoically bandaged up their own wounds but repor
tedly never moaned, according to one reporter who wrote that he had never seen such heroism.

  The station’s basement was filled with wounded civilians who were scattered around on the floor, some with serious wounds. One of them moaned and screamed, “but the remainder were as quiet as the death which was settling down upon quite a few of their number.” Thomas Hara of Eagle Street near the Haymarket, one of those shot in the back as he fled the melee, “claimed to be an unoffending citizen” but was probably a rioter, according to the Tribune reporter. Policemen interviewed at the station expressed no sympathy for the men in the basement who were suspected rioters, including socialists and anarchists who had been “preaching dynamite for years.”

  Reporters finally buttonholed Chief Inspector John Bonfield, who had ordered the police advance on the protest rally. “The Communists were bent on mischief” for some time, he explained, and therefore the police, anticipating “the hellish intent of the Haymarket meeting,” had massed a force of 176 officers at the Desplaines Street Station the previous night. When the meeting started, the inspector sent officers in civilian clothes out into the crowd with orders to report back to him if the speeches became dangerous. “When finally the speakers urged riot and slaughter” to seek revenge for the deaths of the strikers killed at McCormick’s, the inspector said he issued his fateful order to march on the meeting.

  NONE OF THE businessmen who read this terrifying story in the Tribune on May 5 had any reason to doubt the reporters’ accounts. The news appeared in their paper, the city’s paper of record, which was edited by Joseph Medill, perhaps the most respected journalist in the nation. An early champion of Lincoln and of war against the southern secessionists, Medill had served a term as a reform mayor of Chicago, and by 1886 he was a powerful force in the Republican Party and an influential voice in the business community. 8

  For all these reasons, the Tribune’s account of the events of May 4 provided a governing narrative for the city’s propertied classes and for the state’s attorney who would prosecute the alleged perpetrators. The news reported on May 5 carried an aura of authority and objectivity, but it also contained some curious inconsistencies and contradictions that would come into sharper focus when the smoke cleared from the streets, leaving more than a few people wondering what really happened in the Haymarket that terrible night.