Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  There was no dispute about what happened after the police started shooting. One reporter described the scene as “wild carnage,” and the Tribune’s observer went much further. “Goaded by madness,” he wrote, “the police were in the condition of mind that permitted no resistance, and in a measure they were as dangerous as any mob of Communists, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between the peaceful citizen and Nihilist assassin.”38 What remained unreported was the likelihood that, as an anonymous police official later indicated, a very large number of the police were wounded by their own revolvers. In the riotous seconds after the concussion, “it was every man for himself” as many patrolmen, trapped in tight formation, “emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.”39

  When the firing ceased on Desplaines Street, the stunned group huddled at the back of Zepf’s Hall waited quietly in the dark for several minutes before they risked venturing out into the night. Lizzie Holmes, Albert and Lucy Parsons and their children headed north over the Desplaines Street viaduct, where they met Thomas Brown of the American Group, who told Parsons that he was a marked man. Since everyone knew him and knew his influence, it would be better if Albert fled the city. An urgent discussion ensued on the viaduct. At first, Parsons refused to flee the scene and leave his family members and friends to face the consequences without him. No one recorded Lucy’s words to her husband that night, but her close friend Lizzie said she was able to convince Albert to run for his life. He had no money to buy a train ticket, so Brown gave him $5. And then, there on the viaduct, they decided to separate. Brown would go one way, Lucy, Lizzie and the children another, while Albert headed for the Northwestern Railroad Depot and a train that would take him to Geneva, Illinois, where William Holmes would be waiting to receive him. Before he turned to leave, Parsons looked at his wife and said in a sad voice, “Kiss me, Lucy. We do not know when we will meet again.”40

  At about the same time, Chicago Police Superintendent Frederick Ebersold was retiring for the night in his South Side home. He was terribly fatigued by his long hours at headquarters dispatching patrols throughout the strike-torn city and mobilizing divisions for the Haymarket protest. He had left his office at about 10 p.m. after hearing from Inspector Bonfield that no trouble had occurred at the Haymarket and that the policemen held in reserve at various stations could be dismissed. When the telephone rang at his home, Ebersold knew it meant serious trouble had occurred. He threw on his clothes and rushed his horse carriage uptown to the Desplaines Street Station. When he arrived, he told a reporter, “the building was illuminated from top to bottom, officers were carrying wounded men on litters, surgeons and police were working or praying.” Ebersold, a combat veteran of the Union army and a survivor of the ghastly slaughter at Shiloh, had seen the gory aftermath of several Civil War battles. The scene of scores of wounded officers stretched on the Desplaines Street Station floor vividly recalled those pictures of battlefield carnage.41

  Police officers told the superintendent that an unknown number of anarchists had been shot and killed, but the next day only one civilian death was reported in the Tribune. Carl Kiester, a laborer who lived near Albert and Lucy Parsons on West Indiana Street, had died after being shot just below the heart. Kiester was later described by the coroner as a “Bohemian Socialist.” Nineteen other “Citizens or Anarchists” were listed as wounded, according to the paper. Six of them, reportedly in dangerous condition, gave names that suggested the national diversity of the Haymarket rally crowd: William Murphy, John Lepland, Joseph Koutchke, Robert Schultz, Peter Ley and Mathias Lewis, a shoemaker shot through the back. A few days later, police identified a comatose patient in Cook County Hospital as a man named Krueger, who lay with a bullet in his brain and with no hope whatever for a recovery. This was “Big Krueger,” a militant in the IWPA. At least thirty more people at the rally and in the neighborhood were wounded by police gunfire, including Henry Spies, who took a bullet for his brother, and Sam Fielden, who was shot in the leg as he ran up Randolph Street toward downtown.42

  In the next days, the deaths of three civilians were recorded by the coroner, though more may have died in the hail of police gunfire without having their deaths and burials recorded by the city. In any case, these deaths seemed of no account to the press. What mattered to the public was that in the same span of time six more patrolmen followed Mathias Degan to the grave—seven brave men in all, men who marched with their fellow officers into the Haymarket that night faithfully performing their duties with no inkling of the fate that awaited them.43

  Chapter Twelve

  The Strangest Frenzy

  MAY 5, 1886–MAY 27, 1886

  AFTER HE LEFT the back room of Zepf’s Hall, August Spies hurried up Milwaukee Avenue to his home in Wicker Park. When he returned that evening, his mother and sister told him that his brother Henry was alive and had received treatment for his wound. Spies’s relief could hardly have displaced the anxiety he must have felt; in the previous thirty-two hours he had witnessed the shootings at McCormick’s, found himself blamed for the bloodshed the next morning and then, the next night, had survived a bomb explosion, an assassination attempt and a hail of police gunfire in the Haymarket.

  Spies left no account of how he slept that night or how he felt on the morning after the tragedy, but his actions were normal. He took the horsecar down Milwaukee Avenue and went to work at the Arbeiter-Zeitung as usual. There he joined Schwab in the urgent task of putting out the day’s special edition on the sensational Haymarket events. Lizzie Holmes and Lucy Parsons also arrived at the newspaper building that morning after spending the night with Albert, Jr., and Lulu in a comrade’s flat; they planned to compose a special edition of the Alarm, to denounce the police who had broken up a peaceful meeting and gunned down innocent workers. None of them had yet read the morning dailies with their accounts of police casualties and the “hellish deeds” in the Haymarket.

  NOW IT IS BLOOD! proclaimed a typical headline. A BOMB THROWN INTO RANKS INAUGURATES THE WORK OF DEATH. Headlines screamed murder and zeroed in on the “Bloody Monsters” who committed it. City editors all adopted Inspector Bonfield’s theory that the bombing was the work of an anarchist conspiracy rather than an act of an individual. Wilbur Storey’s Democratic Chicago Times cried out for an immediate and remorseless repression. “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.” 1

  The owners of the Knights of Labor newspaper condemned the anarchists as harshly as the business press did. Like their leader, Terence Powderly, who immediately denounced the outrage on behalf of “honest labor,” these men lashed out at the “band of cowardly murderers, cut-throats and robbers, known as anarchists, who sneak through the country like midnight assassins, stirring up the passions of ignorant foreigners, unfurling the red flag of anarchy and causing riot and bloodshed.” Even though Albert Parsons was a founding member of the Knights, the two owners of the order’s Chicago newspaper declared that he and his comrades “should be summarily dealt with,” because they were “entitled to no more consideration than wild beasts.”2

  One report from the Board of Trade captured the mood of the city’s businessmen: a broker said that if some in the financial quarter moved to hang the anarchists from lampposts, 500 men on the trading floor “would lend willing hands in the work.” Even a highly regarded Chicago attorney said he believed that the nature of the crime was itself “a waiver of trial and a plea of guilty.”3

  Public antipathy toward the anarchists was naturally heightened by sympathy for the stricken police officers. When two more patrolmen, John Barrett and George Mueller, died on May 6, the Tribune headline tolled like a bell: TWO MORE DEAD HEROES.4 Once despised by city elites and characterized as shakedown artists and bagmen, as the lackeys of saloonkeepers and “bummer” politicians from the Irish wards, the police were suddenly regarded as brave warriors who marched in “gallant platoons” to the Haymarket, never expecting resistance
or the explosion of a bomb that devastated their ranks.5

  However, the dead policemen were not buried with military honors. In fact, Mathias Degan, a widower and the first to die, was given a modest funeral at his humble residence on South Canal Street and was buried with only a few friends and police department representatives in attendance. John Barrett, age twenty-five, who had learned the trade of an iron molder before joining the force, was also put to rest in a funeral service conducted in a small room of his third-floor flat. The only police officers who attended the service were six patrolmen from the Desplaines Street Station who would serve as Barrett’s pallbearers. The third deceased patrolman, twenty-eight-year-old George Mueller, who came to Chicago to work as a teamster, was not buried in the city but in his hometown of Oswego, New York. Mueller, said the Tribune, was one of the men “most horribly torn by the destructive bomb” thrown by the anarchists; he expired after suffering “such torture from his injuries that death came as a release to him.”6

  Patrolman Mathias J. Degan

  Unaware of the hurricane developing outside the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, the anarchists seemed unprepared for what happened next. As Spies and Schwab composed copy for their afternoon newspaper, a police detail arrived to arrest them. August Spies’s youngest brother, Christian, a furniture worker who happened to be in the building, was also taken to jail. The police detective who led the raid later admitted that he searched the editors and their premises without a warrant.7

  When Spies and Schwab arrived at the Central Police Station, they were confronted by Police Superintendent Frederick Ebersold, who was at his wit’s end. He had placed 350 men at McCormick’s disposal to keep the peace on the Black Road, but the result was a riot that left civilians dead. He had commanded Bonfield to assemble a large squad at Desplaines Street to keep order there, and now three policemen were dead and others lay dying at Cook County Hospital. He leapt at Schwab and at Spies, who recalled the scene this way: “ ‘You dirty Dutch sons of bitches, you dirty hounds, you rascals, we will choke you, we will kill you,’ ” Ebersold screamed, “forgetting in his rage that he was himself a German.” Then the officers “jumped upon us, tore us from one end to the other, went through our pockets,” Spies wrote. They took his money and everything he had, but he remained silent, fearing far worse abuse.8

  After their German comrades were taken away from the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Holmes nervously resumed work on the Alarm. In a short time, another detail of police burst up the stairs to their office and confronted the two women. When one of them grabbed Lizzie, she resisted. When Lucy protested, an officer pushed Lucy and called her “a black bitch.” The police then marched the two anarchist women to the city jail for questioning. After the interrogation the officers released Lucy, hoping they could follow her to Albert, now the target of an intense dragnet. When she did not lead them to her husband, she was arrested and questioned two more times. The second time she was apprehended, the police arrested her in front of her children, who were staying in a friend’s flat near Grief’s Hall. They ransacked the place while Lucy kept up a running stream of protest. It was the beginning of a forty-year ordeal of episodic jailings for Mrs. Albert Parsons, whose activities would become an obsession with the Chicago Police Department.9

  As soon as Albert Parsons and William Holmes learned of these arrests, they knew the Holmes house in Geneva would soon be searched. So Parsons disguised himself by shaving off his long mustache and washing out the shoe black that he normally used to dye his gray hair. He took off the waistcoat, shirt collar and necktie he always wore and dressed like a tramping worker before leaving on foot for the little city of Elgin, where he would catch a train to Waukesha, Wisconsin, and there take refuge in the home of a socialist comrade. Parsons decided to travel unarmed, hoping to avoid a shoot-out if lawmen tracked him down.10

  When the police arrested Lucy and Lizzie, they also hauled off the entire staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. All twenty-two workers, including the compositor Adolph Fischer and several young printer’s devils, were marched two by two to the police station past people on the streets who shouted angry words at them. Some cried out that the printers should be hanged immediately. The pressmen were charged with murder and held incommunicado for the night. Meanwhile, the police returned to systematically search the Arbeiter-Zeitung office, where they found 100 copies of the call for the Haymarket meeting, and in the room adjoining Spies’s office they seized some material they believed was to be made into bombs.11

  Oscar Neebe, assistant manager of the anarchist newspaper, went home that night distressed by the arrests that closed down the radical presses on a day when thousands of readers awaited news about the Haymarket affair. In the morning he was confronted by Captain Michael Schaack, who arrived at his house with a police detail. The officers found one Springfield rifle, one Colt .38-caliber pistol with five chambers fired out, one sword, a belt with a Lehr und Wehr Verein buckle and leaflets announcing the protest meeting at the Haymarket. On this basis, Schaack would go before a grand jury to ask that Neebe be indicted for conspiracy to commit murder. 12

  Captain Schaack, a close ally of Inspector Bonfield, knew the anarchists well. He commanded a police station on Chicago Avenue, where he kept up a steady surveillance on the radicals who lived and congregated in his district; he had promised to keep the Gold Coast a “safe haven” for the rich families who lived uncomfortably close to the immigrant masses down below Division Street. Described as “posturing, defiant, self-assured,” a man full of “bluster and bravado,” Schaack eagerly organized an anarchist-roundup that would soon make him the best-known police detective in America.13

  The next day, May 6, Samuel Fielden awoke and found his leg wound superficial. His wife put a new bandage on it, and he felt strong enough to walk around the block. After doing this he came home and waited for the police. When they arrived, the officers ransacked Fielden’s house without presenting a search warrant, but they discovered nothing incriminating. At the station, Fielden recalled, he was confronted by Superintendent Ebersold, who demanded to see his wound. When the prisoner pulled up his pants leg and Ebersold saw the wound from the bullet, he said, “Damn your soul, it ought to have gone here,” as he pointed his finger at Fielden’s forehead. 14

  Fielden was arraigned with Spies and Schwab, and then all three prisoners gave interviews to the press in which they explained their actions at the square the night before. The men “cast furtive glances downward,” according to one reporter, because they “had undoubtedly heard the threats of lynching.” Schwab, who was described as looking fifty years old and “thin almost to the point of emaciation,” said he left the Haymarket before the rally and knew nothing of the bombing. “His eyes were covered with heavy, puffy lids,” and he shielded them behind a pair of steel-framed spectacles. “His hair is black and tumbled, and his weedy, black beard falls down upon his breast and covers his upper lip. His hands are big and bony, and his thin body and legs are lost in his clothes.

  Newspaper artists’ drawings of Samuel Fielden (left) and Michael Schwab from police photos

  His hands and legs writhe and intertwine, and his general appearance is that of a fanatic, half-insane.”15

  Fielden, who also protested his innocence, was depicted as being dressed in well-worn clothing of the poorest quality, wearing a “blue hickory shirt that gave him the appearance of a country man.” He was heavyset and muscular, with swarthy features well covered with a thick growth of black hair and a beard. All these features seemed “repulsive” to one reporter, and Fielden’s “low brow and catlike eyes” did not improve his appearance. When eight-hour leader George Schilling spoke up for Fielden, calling him “an old pupil” who had now gotten himself into very “deep water,” the Tribune took this to mean that Schilling, “heretofore looked upon as a labor reformer acting for the benefit of working men,” had actually been “a teacher in the school of anarchy.” The conclusion was a harsh one: “The time has come . . . no
t only for suppressing the Spieses, Parsonses, and the Fieldens, but the Schillings also.”16

  In his interview August Spies called the bombing an impulsive and outrageous act, not a prearranged one. He said he knew nothing of the explosives the police said they took from his office; he thought they had been “placed there by the police in order to make a case” against him. He admitted that he kept two metal casings in his desk to show reporters but said they were “perfectly harmless.”17

  These expressions of innocence meant nothing to the coroner’s jury when it convened that day. The inquest into Officer Degan’s demise concluded not only that his death had been “caused by a piece of bomb, thrown by an unknown person,” but that the perpetrator was “aided, abetted, and encouraged” by Spies, Schwab, Parsons and Fielden. An editorial in the Tribune that same day set the terms of prosecution in even more ominous specificity. It retold the story of Tuesday night’s violence as a “murderous Communist conspiracy” and then explained that Illinois’ criminal code regarding accessories to murder was broad enough to allow indictments against any offenders whose “seditious utterances” were followed by the commission of a crime. If it could be shown that anarchist leaders “advised and encouraged” the crime perpetrated on Desplaines Street, then, under state law, they would be subject to death on the gallows. 18

  While the searches, arrests and interrogations continued, the police kept busy raiding other places where militant workers and anarchists congregated. They closed Grief’s and Zepf’s halls on Lake Street because they were “headquarters of the foreign-speaking population which flaunts and marches under the red flag.” The streets in the Haymarket district were usually crammed with farmers, workers and shoppers, but on May 6 all were deserted. The red flags that had flown from hundreds of buildings on the West Side during the previous week of tumult had all but disappeared.