by James Green
THE AMERICAN GROUP was an exceptional piece in the mosaic of Chicago’s anarchist club life. Other groups consisted largely of Germans and Bohemian immigrants who were not for the most part recent arrivals or political refugees. The largest single element in the anarchist movement were workers from Germany who had become naturalized citizens after living in Chicago for five to ten years; in other words, they were foreigners who became radicalized after they arrived in America.33
Some of the Internationals made good as small proprietors, particularly the saloonkeepers—men like Charles Zepf, Moritz Neff and Thomas Grief, who advertised their taverns as meeting places for the city’s socialists. These “red saloons” would become targets of police surveillance in 1886, when movement activity reached a fever pitch— places like Bohemian Hall in Pilsen, where the Czech workers’ militia met; Neff’s Hall on the North Side, where the Lehr und Wehr Verein gathered; and Thalia Hall on Milwaukee Avenue, where the largest North Side group of the IWPA congregated. 34 These socialist beer halls were some of the 5,000 drinking establishments that existed all over the city in the mid-1880s. The Chicago saloon exuded an atmosphere of freedom, serving as “the workingman’s school,” a discussion center, a free space where the immigrant laborer learned the real rules in the game of city life.35
A group of worker militiamen of the Lehr und Wehr Verein with the socialist saloonkeeper Moritz Neff lying down
With the exception of the saloonkeepers and a few teachers, musicians and journalists, the Chicago anarchist movement was composed of immigrant wage earners like the lean young printer Adolph Fischer. Fischer had settled into the North Side with his wife and three children after arriving in Chicago during the spring of 1883. Already a well-assimilated immigrant, he had worked ten years as an apprentice in the print shop of his brother, who published a German paper in Little Rock, Arkansas. When he left Bremen, his birthplace, at the age of fifteen, the blond youngster had already enjoyed eight and half years of school, much more education than most immigrant workers received. As a boy, he had absorbed the doctrines of socialism from his father, so Fischer, like Spies and Schwab, arrived in Chicago a self-taught intellectual, exceedingly well read in philosophy, history, literature and political economy. Soon, the twenty-five-year-old newcomer joined their company, after hiring on as a compositor at the Arbeiter-Zeitung.36
A tall man with the body of a long-distance runner, Fischer appeared light in complexion and wore a wispy blond beard and mustache on his thin face. He sat silently at socialist meetings with a faraway look in his blue eyes, but the quiet young man was always ready to perform any task. “He kept himself and his little family nearly destitute because he gave the greater part of his wages to the cause,” Lizzie Holmes recalled. “He did not think life worth living as things existed, and cared only for the time when all should have justice and equal opportunity.” He was “in every fiber of his being, the man of action.”37
Fischer joined the Lehr und Wehr Verein soon after he arrived in Chicago, in order to prepare for the armed struggle he believed to be inevitable. “Would a peaceable solution to the social question be possible, the anarchists would be the first ones to rejoice over it,” he wrote later. But the fact was that, in almost every strike, militia, police, even federal troops, were dispatched to protect the interests of capital. So, it seemed unlikely to Fischer that big employers would give up their power and their property without going to war.38
Late in 1885, Fischer linked up with a group of ultramilitants who shared the same apocalyptical views. George Engel was their leader. Born in Kassel, Germany, Engel was the son of a mason who had died, leaving his wife a widow with four young children.39 George suffered a hard and bitter youth. No one would take him in and give him training in his chosen trade, shoemaking, a situation that would have provided him with food and clothing. Without money, Engel wandered through northern Germany, working in various cities at different jobs until he married and settled in Rehna, where he started a toy business in 1868. Unable to make much of a living, he decided to leave for America in 1873. After several desperate years in Philadelphia, where he suffered from illness and his family endured constant hunger, Engel made his way to Chicago, where he found work in a wagon factory and met a German wheelwright who showed him a copy of Der Vorbote, the socialist weekly. The newspaper held “great truths” about the capitalist order, Engel wrote, truths that explained his own life of misfortune.40 When he met the workers who supported the newspaper, he was astonished to see that men could work so eagerly without pay for the cause of humanity. Even during the depression, Engel worked steadily and saved enough money to open a little toy store on Milwaukee Avenue with his wife and daughter. Freed of hand-work in the factory, Engel found much more time to read and to participate in socialist activity.41
Engel seemed like an old man among young followers like Adolph Fischer. At age forty, the anarchist toy maker was a stolid figure with a flat face and a mild, genial way; he looked more like an ingratiating waiter in a Wursthaus than a dedicated insurrectionist. George Engel had, however, moved a long way to the left since the time he canvassed the North Side wards for Albert Parsons and other socialist candidates. Indeed, in 1885, Engel had fallen out with his International comrades, Spies and Schwab, whose efforts to create a mass movement of organized workers now seemed like hopeless gestures; and by the time the new year dawned, Engel had decided it was time to prepare workers for “a violent revolution” that would begin when the capitalists declared war on working people.42
THE CALL FOR revolutionary action was gaining new converts in Chicago in early 1886, especially among hundreds of German anarchists who had read Johann Most’s extremist views in his provocative newspaper Freiheit and in his notorious pamphlet Revolutionary War Science: A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, etc. etc. Most offered up various recipes in this cookbook of destruction, but he emphasized the special value of explosives because they would be the “proletariat’s artillery” in a revolutionary war—and the surest means of gaining a victory. Success would be assured if revolutionaries stocked adequate quantities of dynamite bombs that could easily be concealed in their clothing. Most even imagined that these explosive devices would allow insurgents to defeat a fully equipped army.43
The Chicago anarchists fell in love with the idea of dynamite as the great equalizer in class warfare. “One man with a dynamite bomb is equal to one regiment,” wrote one of the Alarm’s correspondents in a typically exaggerated claim. On several occasions in public speeches and newspaper articles, Parsons and Spies advocated its use in revolutionary warfare; they seemed enamored of its scientific mystique, but they also valued dynamite because its potential power promised to instill a sense of courageous manhood in workers intimidated by the police and the militia. No one outdid Lucy Parsons in her fantastic claims for the importance of explosives: “The voice of dynamite is the voice of force, the only voice which tyranny has ever been able to understand,” she proclaimed.44
In January 1886, talk of bombs took a more dramatic turn when August Spies showed a newspaper reporter a piece of tube he said could be used as a casing for a dynamite bomb. “Take it to your boss,” he said with his usual bravado, “and tell him we have 9,000 more like it—only loaded.” He repeated this demonstration to other reporters later, to show that the anarchists were deadly serious. Many years later, after these reckless gestures helped tie a noose around Spies’s neck, the writer Floyd Dell suggested that the anarchists and the newshounds served each other’s purposes. Dell, who had been a Chicago reporter, knew how much his fellow “bohemians” of the press loved a “lurid story,” and he knew how much the anarchists wanted to create the impression that they were dangerous men. He doubted that Spies actually made any bombs; what he needed most, Dell suggested, was the “symbolism of dynamite.”45
If anarchists like Spies and Albert and Lucy Parsons indulged in “bomb talking
” to frighten the authorities and to encourage their followers, there were, among their comrades, other men, men of few words, frustrated militants who were prepared to make and use bombs in the showdown they expected to come.46 One of these men was a young carpenter named Louis Lingg. Born in Baden, Germany, to a father who toiled in a lumberyard and a mother who kept a laundry, he suffered a miserable childhood. His father almost died following his employer’s instructions to retrieve a heavy oak log from the surface of a frozen river. The ice broke and the lumber shover nearly drowned in the frigid water. Before Lingg’s father could regain his health, he was discharged by his employer. By the time he reached the age of thirteen, Lingg had seen his father’s health deteriorate while his former employer’s wealth accumulated. These experiences, he recalled, left him with what he called “a bitter hatred of society” and all its injustices.47
As a teenager, Lingg entered an apprenticeship with a master carpenter, but before long he left Germany for the freer atmosphere of Switzerland. On this sojourn as a tramping artisan, the young carpenter became a freethinker and joined a workers’ club, where he received food and companionship and benefited from what he called a kind of “practical communism.” Lingg was supposed to return home to serve in the army, but he refused and became a wanted man. Now alienated from his fatherland, Lingg found a place in Zurich’s community of exiled revolutionaries; and there he met the outcast leader of the German anarchists, August Reinsdorf, at the time Reinsdorf was planning to assassinate the king of Prussia. Lingg, still in his teens, was captivated by Reinsdorf and became his disciple.48
In 1885, at the age of twenty-one, Louis Lingg left his fugitive life behind and made straight for Chicago, where, he knew, there was a large community of German anarchists. The new arrival found work and immediately joined the new International Carpenters and Joiners’ Union organized by revolutionaries. Despite his youth, Lingg quickly won the admiration of other German carpenters, who elected him as a delegate to the Central Labor Union. Soon afterward, he was hired as a full-time organizer for the burgeoning new union movement. Though he spoke little English, Lingg’s ardor and stunning physical presence attracted attention among anarchists. William Holmes remembered Lingg as the handsomest man he had ever met. His well-shaped face, “crowned with a wealth of curly chestnut hair,” his “fine blue eyes” and peach white complexion, his athletic body and his physical vigor all made Lingg seem like a Greek god to Holmes. When Spies and Schwab met this newcomer, they too were impressed by his charisma and physical courage, though they found Lingg’s ideas so peculiar and puzzling that “they never knew how to take him.”49
Although he worked as a union organizer of German and Bohemian carpenters, Louis Lingg harbored no illusions about the ultimate success of trade unionism or about the odds faced by unarmed strikers when confronted by the employers’ armed forces. Talk of reviving the eight-hour movement did not impress him, but bomb talk did.
BY THE END OF 1885 the Chicago anarchists had frightened the city’s philistines and politicians. The revolutionaries’ public speeches and demonstrations seemed threatening enough, but when word leaked out of their private discussions, anxieties rose even higher.
The Internationals were aware that spies were infiltrating their meetings, and so they made halfhearted efforts to identify strangers. Nonetheless, Pinkerton agents hired by businessmen and plainclothes police detectives attended meetings of the International without being noticed. The private spies brought back lurid stories of bloody threats and plots to dynamite buildings like the Board of Trade. Many of these reports were wildly exaggerated, and some were fabricated to please the men who paid the detectives, but when these stories appeared in the press, they fed a growing fever of anxiety among middle- and upper-class Chicagoans that a vast anarchist conspiracy was in the works.50
At this point, the Chicago anarchists’ threats remained rhetorical. No mansions had been bombed, no police stations had been attacked, no member of the workers’ militia had fired a shot in anger. But Chicagoans had reason to fear that dynamite bombs would explode in their city, as they had in London that year—not ignited by German anarchists but by Irish-American nationalists.
Early in 1885 a cadre of the secret Clan-Na-Gael had bombed Westminster Hall, London Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London, wounding scores of people. The popular Irish republican paper Irish World, along with three other Chicago Irish papers, supported the bombing attacks. Indeed, the editors of the influential World “took great delight in every blast, declaring that dynamite was the only means of retaliation the Irish had against a tyrannical power.” Europeans, however, were appalled by this new use of dynamite as an instrument of terror; they were painfully familiar with the actions of nihilists and other revolutionaries who assassinated imperial rulers and police officials. But the actions of the bomb-throwing anarchist seemed at least intelligible to the London Times. By comparison, the evil work of the “Irish-American ‘dynamite fiend’ ” seemed incomprehensible because he chose to assault crowds of innocent civilians and ordinary travelers in order “to inspire terror.”51
Despite all the talk of bomb throwing by revolutionaries in Chicago, no one had suffered from any anarchist attacks. Nonetheless, by the end of 1885, the city’s businessmen had not only come to fear the Internationals in their midst, they had grown “to hate them and wish for their destruction.” The anarchists’ rhetorical threats were not the only reason for this antipathy. The city’s most powerful men were less afraid of bomb talk than they were of the large working-class following the anarchist-led Central Labor Union had attracted in various immigrant districts. The Internationals embodied the worst fears native-born Americans harbored of aliens who refused to profess their loyalty to God, country and private property. The daily press, Republican and Democratic, magnified this hostility with dehumanizing descriptions of the immigrant revolutionaries, who were called “long-haired idiots and knaves.” Their women, the papers said, acted like harlots and amazons, marching brazenly down the streets and cheering speeches by a “determined negress” who said she wanted to “devastate the avenues of the rich.” The communists were bilious immigrants, libertines with no self-control, people who were drunk with beer and intoxicated by the fumes of revolutionary talk. They were heathens and homicidal maniacs, incendiaries and bloodthirsty worshipers of La Commune. They were not humans, but wolves from the darkest dens in Europe, beasts worthy of extinction.52
The anarchists played their own part in this degrading war of words, branding Board of Trade men as gamblers and thieves, and industrialists as bloodsucking “leeches.” They castigated policemen as obedient “bloodhounds,” militiamen as heartless mercenaries and the Pinkertons as common criminals paid to gun down innocent civilians. The Internationals also nursed their own conspiracy theory: that the city’s wealthy men were plotting to turn all the armed forces at their disposal against workers in some imminent attack. Certain of this, the anarchists beseeched workers to arm for their own self-defense and prepare to meet force with force. In response, more immigrant workingmen joined the Lehr und Wehr Verein and began drilling in secret, and more began talking about making bombs, if not actually manufacturing the infernal devices. No wonder a Chicago police reporter recalled the last months of 1885 as a time when “everything pointed to a dreadful culmination.” 53
Chapter Nine
The Great Upheaval
JANUARY 1886–APRIL 1886
THE DEEP WINTER of 1886 passed quietly as Chicagoans hunkered down and endured cold blasts of wind off the plains and the snowstorms they carried; it was no time for street warfare. That time would come after the harsh weather broke in March. Then, prosperous city residents feared, anarchist activity would resume at a much higher level of intensity. They were not disappointed.
As expected, the Internationals took to the streets again, and anxieties rose with the temperature. But then something happened that no one expected, neither the anarchists nor the capitalists
, not the editors of the Arbeiter-Zeitung or of the Chicago Tribune. Historians would call it the Great Upheaval, but in 1886 no one knew how to describe the working-class unrest that welled up throughout industrial America.
Beginning in March of 1886, a strange enthusiasm took hold of wage-earning people in industrial centers across the nation as the dream of an eight-hour day suddenly seemed within their grasp. The agitation for shorter hours appeared to be everywhere by April, drawing thousands of unorganized workers into the swelling ranks of the Knights of Labor. Soon a strike fever gripped the nation’s workforce; it peaked on May 1, when 350,000 laborers from coast to coast joined in a coordinated general strike for the eight-hour day.
The strike wave broke for a while and then returned in the fall with another surge of walkouts. By year’s end 610,000 workers had struck, compared to 258,000 the year before. In 1885, 645 job actions affected 2,467 establishments; in 1886, however, more than 1,400 strikes hit 11,562 businesses. 1 Nothing like this had ever happened in America, or in Europe. These huge protests stunned observers like Friedrich Engels, who wrote from London, “History is on the move over there at last.” The Americans, he remarked, were “a people full of energy like no other,” a people who astonished European socialists with “the vastness of their movement.”2