by James Green
Leaders of the Workingmen’s Party counseled peace that day and expressed concern that roughnecks in the crowds would provoke bloodshed. The party issued a flyer proposing a coordinated national strike for the eight-hour day without a reduction in pay. The circular called for a meeting that evening so a strike committee could be assembled to lead and coordinate the walkout and preserve the peace. By the end of the day, however, Workingmen’s Party activists were laying low after being driven from the streets by the police. 27
ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, Chicagoans awakened to suffocating heat and humidity, made worse by clouds of pollution. In the early-morning haze, strikers and young men from the shantytowns appeared again in the gloomy streets, roaming throughout the city, closing workshops and battling police. When strikers gathered to hold rallies and meetings, they were attacked by patrolmen, who made no distinction between the crowds hurling stones and groups of workers assembling peacefully. That night railroad men and gangs of Irish boys from Bridgeport again converged on the Burlington yards at 16th and Halsted, where they confronted a detail of police from the Hinman Street Station. The boys began stoning the railyards and an incoming passenger train; when they continued, the patrolmen opened fire. A Burlington switchman fell dead on the spot; a score of others were wounded, including two boys who later died.28
The next day, July 26, the city was an armed camp of soldiers, police officers and armed civilians, mainly clerks and managers, who had been made special deputies. Still, the day began with more violence as a large crowd returned to Halsted Street and began cutting telegraph lines and stoning streetcars that carried commuters to work. At the stockyards and the gasworks men forced officials to sign papers promising to raise wages. Meanwhile, other strikers patrolled the idled lumberyards, which had been abandoned by the Czech laborers, and a well-coordinated general strike spread to the North Side, closing all shops and factories as well as the tanneries and rolling mills on Goose Island. Workers who had been suffering from layoffs and wage cuts for nearly four years were suddenly aroused to mass action by the protests of the nation’s railway workers.
The significance of the work stoppage was overshadowed, however, by warfare that resumed along Halsted Street. The flash point of the fighting was the viaduct where Halsted Street crossed 16th Street and the Burlington tracks. There, on the edge of Pilsen, officers confronted a huge crowd that included Bohemian lumber shovers lining the sidewalks. The blue coats attacked and drove people into the viaduct, firing their revolvers into the mass. After the officers emptied their guns, they ran for their lives.
The “battle of the viaduct” escalated when hundreds of striking butchers and meat cutters arrived from Bridgeport in a column flying the emerald and gold nationalist banner of the Fenian Brotherhood. They joined the Bohemians in a brawl with the police that raged all afternoon. Even mounted troops could not stop it. It was TERROR’S REIGN, according to the Chicago Times, and a sure sign of it was the presence of wild women in the crowd, “Bohemian Amazons” brandishing clubs in their “brawny arms.”29
After the battle at the viaduct, the police forces drove men and boys up Halsted Street until they reached Vorwärts Turner Hall at 12th Street. Inside, several hundred members of the Harmonia Society, an assocation of cabinetmakers and their employers, were discussing the eight-hour-day question in German. Some of the members who were smoking cigars outside the hall shouted protests at the policemen, who wheeled toward them and chased them into the meeting hall with guns drawn.
When officers thundered into the meeting room, chaos ensued as police attacked the cabinetmakers with clubs. When the Germans defended themselves with chairs, some patrolmen opened fire. Charles Tessman, a twenty-eight-year-old union cabinetmaker, fell dead when a bullet ripped through his brain. Men clogged the stairs trying to escape the danger, and the police pounded them with clubs until they dropped in a heap at the bottom. Outside, witnesses saw a police sergeant firing his pistol at bystanders, while his men beat cabinetmakers as they fled the hall in terror. Sent out to suppress rioters, the police became rioters themselves. Their attack on the Harmonia Society at Vorwärts Turner Hall aroused all of Chicago’s Germania and provoked some immigrant workers, like the upholsterer August Spies, to join the armed organization of workingmen, the Lehr und Wehr Verein.30
Police attacking cabinetmakers’ meeting at Vorwärts Turner Hall, 1877
That afternoon spirits rose in downtown Chicago as anxious residents saw sunburned regulars of the United States infantry marching down Madison Street with bayonets fixed, fresh from the Dakotas, where they had been fighting the Sioux. That evening, a forbidding moonless night, the shooting stopped and a few brave people ventured out of their homes to shop; some even rode out to the Exposition Hall on the lakefront for an evening concert of Wagnerian music. The program included selections like “Siegfried’s Death” from Götterdämmerung, which matched the concertgoers’ mood at the end of a violent day.
On Friday, July 27, an eerie calm enveloped the city. The great uprising had been put down. In working-class neighborhoods like Pilsen and Bridgeport, people gathered on street corners, in saloons and in meeting halls to ponder what had happened, while some made plans to bury their loved ones. Within a few days the body count had been tallied: 30 men and boys had died, most of them from the Irish and Bohemian wards around Halsted Street.31 The police and the 5,000 specials they deputized suffered no casualties.
As the immigrants mourned their dead and the police girded for future confrontations, businessmen measured the costs of the uprising in dollars and cents: at least $6 million lost in shipping and manufacturing alone, not to mention the cost of property damage and extra pay for the special deputies. But these expenses paled at what would now be spent to make the city secure. Chicago’s richest man, Marshall Field, would donate thousands to purchase arms and would insist the money be invested in constructing fortresslike armories. The Citizens’ Association provided the police department with four 12-pound cannons with caissons, one ten-barrel Gatling gun, 296 Springfield breech-loading rifles and 60,000 rounds of ammunition. Police Superintendent Michael Hickey, designated a colonel by the mayor, infused the police force with a martial spirit, ordering patrolmen to drill regularly for street fighting and to receive instruction in handling their pistols and their new arsenal of heavy weapons.32
What could not be counted or measured, but only felt, was the hate and mistrust that now gripped Chicagoans of different social classes. The uprising of 1877 and its suppression left toxic fumes of animosity that would poison social relations in the city for years to come.33 No one expressed these hard feelings more strongly than the editor of the Tribune, who drew some tough lessons from the episode for the police. On the first day of the strike patrolmen fired blank cartridges to no effect. On the second day they shot above the heads of the strikers and a few of the rioters were hurt, but on the third day of the riots the police began firing directly at the protesters, which “had a most admirable effect on the mobs.” Had the police been ordered to fire low on the first day, the Tribune concluded, “fewer would have been hurt than were, and the city would have been saved the disgrace of three days’ rule by the commune.” 34
WHILE THE MILLIONAIRE MERCHANT Marshall Field concluded that only a militarized city would be safe from another uprising, and while the editors of the Tribune decided the police now needed a shoot-to-kill strategy to suppress rioting, labor activists drew their own lesson from the conflict; it was not, however, the one conservatives feared, the one reached by the European anarchists who believed that state repression left workers with only one choice: to commit acts of violence that would spark an armed revolution. In the United States, socialists and labor reformers began a search for American solutions to the dilemma they faced, solutions that would allow hardworking citizens to peacefully capture the republic from the money lords who ruled it and make it a democracy by and for the people.35 These radicals were encouraged not only by the militancy of the strikers but
by the behavior of hundreds of city dwellers who joined the workers in a series of community uprisings that expressed long-standing grievances against the railroads and their destructive invasion of urban space.36
All those who spoke for laboring people agreed on the challenge before them. The actions of Tom Scott and the other railroad chiefs confirmed the widespread popular belief that these men had risen above the law and descended below any accepted standard of Christian morality. They could discharge employees without cause, withhold their pay without notice and cut their wages without compunction. Scott and the railroad barons forced their workers to make a choice: submit to industrial serfdom and sacrifice their manhood or take concerted action and become outlaws. This, wrote one labor reformer, was no way to treat hardworking citizens of the world’s only democracy. 37
Workingmen and their leaders had feared monopolists like Tom Scott for decades, but in 1877 they encountered a new threat: the massive use of the militia and the U.S. Army to suppress civil protest. For the first time, citizen strikers and their allies confronted a hostile array of forces deployed by their own cherished government. As if to exacerbate workers’ fears and to reassure frightened property owners, the popular Harper’s Weekly featured a frightful illustration of militiamen pouring rifle fire into a group of Chicago workers armed with sticks and stones. The scene, depicting the battle at the Halsted Street viaduct, was a vivid but misleading one; the police, not the militia, had fired all the fatal bullets in that assault. Nonetheless, National Guard units had killed scores of strikers and other citizens in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and these shootings were more than enough evidence to confirm the popular view that the railroad kings could influence governors, intimidate mayors, exploit the militia and in effect subvert the republican system of government. After the smoke had cleared in 1877, George McNeill, a leading labor intellectual, expressed a new fear, a fear that the “spirit of hate that now centers upon the great monopolies will soon extend to the government that acts as their protector.”38
The Battle of the Viaduct at Halsted and 16th streets, 1877, in which National Guard troops are inaccurately depicted as firing on a crowd
And yet the insurgency of 1877 offered a surprisingly affirmative message to labor leaders. Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers recalled that the strikes alerted discouraged union men to the enormous latent power of the wage-earning class. Made desperate by their accumulated miseries, the railway workers rebelled, but, lacking strong organizations, they were doomed to defeat. Still, their rebellion in the “name of American manhood” and in defense of their rights as citizens inspired labor activists like Gompers, who wrote later that the trainmen sounded “a tocsin” with “a ringing message of hope for us all.”39
No one heard the alarm bell in July more clearly than Albert Parsons. Indeed, on the second day after the strike began in Chicago, he experienced a sequence of unforgettable events that shook him to the core.40 That Tuesday morning after the printer said goodbye to his wife, Lucy, in their North Side flat, he took the Clark Street horsecar downtown, feeling excited about the great enthusiasm his speech had generated the night before. His mood changed quickly when he entered the Times building and learned that he had been removed from the rolls of working compositors. He had been fired because of his rousing speech he later recalled in his autobiography. Feeling dejected, Parsons walked a few blocks to the offices of his party’s German newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung, hoping to find some consolation from his fellow union printers. As he was telling his story, two men entered the building and informed Parsons that Mayor Heath wanted to see him at City Hall. He readily joined them, thinking that perhaps city leaders might want to consult him about finding some way to calm the workers before another hideous riot exploded.
As they walked away, Parsons realized that his escorts were policemen in plain clothes, and soon he learned they were taking him not to the mayor’s office, but into the bowels of an old wooden building called the Rookery, which had served as a temporary police headquarters since the fire. Assuming he was being arrested, Parsons was amazed when he was ushered into a large room filled with well-dressed businessmen he recognized as Board of Trade members. He was put in a chair and lectured by Police Superintendent Michael Hickey on the great trouble he had brought upon the city of Chicago. Hickey wanted to know: Did Parsons think he could come up from Texas and incite working people to insurrection without arousing suspicion?
Parsons tried to respond, but his voice sounded pathetically thin. He had a cold and was hoarse from speaking outdoors the night before. He was also weak from lack of sleep and shaken by his firing that morning. Yet he summoned his strength and explained that he had not called for an insurrection at the rally, but had addressed the causes of the uprising and outlined the program of the Workingmen’s Party. Then, more boldly, he proclaimed that a strike would not have erupted “if working men had voted for their own party and elected good men to make good laws.” This remark infuriated some businessmen in the room, who burst into jeers and shouts. A few screamed, “Hang him, lynch him!”
Parsons’s ordeal lasted for two hours. When it ended, Hickey told him to leave the city because his life was in danger, that he could be assassinated at any moment on the street. The superintendent then opened a spring latch door, shoved Parsons into a dark hallway and whispered in his ear, “Take warning.”
Lost in a dark labyrinth of the Rookery’s empty corridors, Parsons walked aimlessly, not knowing where to go or what to do. He felt “absolutely alone, without a friend in the world.” This, Parsons wrote later, was his first experience with “the powers that be” in Chicago, one that made him conscious that they were powerful enough to give or take a person’s life.
Parsons wandered the nearly deserted streets that night and sensed “a hushed and expectant feeling” pervading the city. He picked up an evening newspaper reporting that the strikers had become more violent, that the Commune was about to rise and that he, Albert Parsons, was the one who caused it all. Frightened now, he decided once again to look for support from his union brothers. He called upon the printers at the Chicago Tribune to see if he could get a night’s work and, as he later wrote, to be near men of his own craft, whom he instinctively felt would sympathize with him. He entered the composing room and began talking with union typographers on the night shift about the great strike, but was soon seized from behind by two men who pushed him out of the room and down the stairs, ignoring the angry shouts from his fellow compositors. As the men dragged him down the stairs, Parsons protested at being treated like a dog, but he soon fell silent when one of them put a pistol to his head and threatened to blow his brains out.
In less than twenty-four hours Albert Parsons had been fired, removed from his trade, blacklisted, threatened with lynching, had a gun held to his head and been warned to leave the city. But he was not absolutely alone in the world; he had many friends in Chicago. Furthermore, he knew how to live with the burden of being a marked man. For five dangerous years he had defied the Ku Klux Klan and risked his life to defend the rights of black freedmen in Texas. He had held his ground then, and he would do so again. The Board of Trade was not going to drive Albert Parsons out of Chicago. Within a month after his ordeal, he would be back on the streets, campaigning for the Workingmen’s Party.
Chapter Six
The Flame That Makes the Kettle Boil
SEPTEMBER 1877–OCTOBER 1883
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1877, Albert Parsons, running hard for county office as a socialist, harangued crowds in saloons and railyards, in Turner halls where German immigrants still seethed over the deadly police attacks of July and on street corners in riot-torn Pilsen. Everywhere he went he spoke of the great uprising of July and its bloody suppression.1
When Parsons topped the Workingmen’s Party ticket, polling a total of 8,000 votes, his former employer at the Times simply dismissed his tally as “a riot vote” garnered by one of those “long-haired idiots and knaves” who denied the inexorable laws of
political economy. 2 The socialists, however, were elated; they had gained favorable public attention and tapped into widespread popular indignation over the behavior of the railroad barons. Up to this point in his young but eventful political life, Albert Parsons had been a reformer, a socialist who believed that as long as workers lived in a republic, they had hope of gaining power through the democratic process. Over the next six years, however, a series of discouraging events would dash that hope and send him down a revolutionary road.
In December of 1877 the Chicago socialists sent a delegation to their party’s national convention, where they agreed to merge their party with a new organization, the Socialistic Labor Party. The following spring the party ran a full slate of candidates in all the city’s wards, calling for the circulation of paper currency (greenbacks) and for the enactment of an eight-hour day; the socialists also demanded the abolition of vagrancy laws used to punish the unemployed, conspiracy laws used to persecute unionists and convict-lease arrangements used to exploit forced labor and undermine free laborers.3
Albert Parsons, now residing in the 15th Ward, made another impressive showing in a race for a City Council seat, polling 744 votes, just 116 votes fewer than the winner. He believed, however, that he had actually won the election and that Republican election officials had counted him out.4 Being cheated out of public office reminded Parsons of the blatant election fraud carried out by Democratic officials in Texas against his old Republican allies. It seemed to matter little which party was in power: the people’s will was denied either way. Having served his time as a militia colonel defending freedmen’s voting rights in Texas, Parsons was now prepared to take up arms to protect workingmen’s voting rights in Chicago. Indeed, some of the German workers who had voted for him in Ward 15 had already done so.