by James Green
None of the relatives or friends of the four anarchists were allowed to witness the execution that day, so they had bid them goodbye the evening before. Because Lucy Parsons had been denied access to the jail, she set out the morning of the hanging day determined to see Albert one last time. After rising early, she put on a handmade dress of dark cloth and wound a long black veil of crepe around her face and over her hat; and then she hurried downtown with Albert, Jr., and Lulu. At the Amnesty Association office, she met Lizzie Holmes, who accompanied her to the fortified courthouse. Never afraid to confront the police, the women approached the line and asked to be admitted to the jail, but at every point the women and children were told to move on. Boiling with anger and frustration, Lucy screamed, “Oh, you murderous villains! You forbid me to see my husband, whom you are about to kill and not let him take a last look at his children, whom you are about to make orphans.” In a rage she told the officers she had no bombs with her but that she could get them and use them if she wanted to. At this she was arrested along with Lizzie and the two children; they were put in a patrol wagon and driven off to Captain Schaack’s Chicago Avenue Station, where a matron strip-searched the women and children, looking for weapons and bombs.46
AT THE COURTHOUSE and all around it, huge crowds filled the streets. At 10:55 a.m., 250 newspapermen, the 12 jurymen and other selected witnesses filed quickly through a dark passage under the gallows and into a corridor behind the courthouse. The bailiff begged the reporters not to make a rush out of the corridor when the drop fell, but to wait decently and in order. There they sat for the next hour and waited. As noon approached, their conversations turned to whispers. The witnesses fell silent when, according to one observer, “the tramp, tramp of men’s foot-steps was heard resounding from the central corridor, and the crowd in front of the gallows knew the condemned men had begun the march of death.” Then all eyes turned toward the screen at the edge of the gallows platform that hid the four anarchists. 47
“The Execution”
At this point the news reporters, all seasoned witnesses of public hangings, made notes that would become nearly rhapsodic descriptions of the scene that unfolded after the first man appeared from behind the screen. “With a steady, unfaltering step a white robed figure stepped out . . . and stood upon the drop. It was August Spies. It was evident that his hands were firmly bound behind him beneath his snowy shroud.” He walked across the platform to the left side, where he stood under the dangling noose that reached down to his breast. His face, said a Daily News reporter, was very pale, his looks solemn, his expression melancholy, yet “at the same time dignified.” He glanced quickly at the noose and then gazed out on the hundreds of faces turned up to him. Fischer and Engel followed him and took their places on the line. Last came Parsons, who straightened himself before the fourth noose and, “as he did so, turned his big gray eyes upon the crowd below with such a look of awful reproach and sadness as it would not fail to strike the innermost chord of the hardest-heart there,” wrote one observer. “It was a look never to be forgotten.” 48
The bailiff then fastened leather straps around the ankles of the four men, who all stood straight and remained quiet. Guards first placed a noose around Spies’s neck, and when the rope caught on his right ear, he deftly shook his head so that it fell down around his neck. When the bailiff approached Adolph Fischer, “he threw back his head and bared his long muscular neck by the movement.” Then he laughingly whispered some words in Spies’s ear while Engel “smiled down at the crowd” and said something to his guard, “evidently some word of peace” that seemed to affect the officer. Parsons, however, looked angrily down at the witnesses.
The anarchists seemed to be choreographing their own final scene on the stage of life. They certainly planned to make the most of the ritual moment when they could speak their last words from the gallows platform. But the bailiff, perhaps unnerved by their behavior, broke with tradition and immediately started putting shrouds over their heads as if to block their words. In a few moments all four men stood upon the scaffold clad from head to toe in pure white robes. The executioner took up his ax and was poised to cut the cords that would trip all four trapdoors and send the men to their doom. As the hangman paused, awaiting the order, a “mournful solemn voice sounded” from the platform. It was Spies speaking from behind his muslin shroud. His words would become his epitaph. “The time will come,” he said, “when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” Emboldened by this declaration, George Engel shouted in German, “Hurrah for anarchy!” and Adolph Fischer proclaimed, “This is the happiest day of my life.”
Then Parsons spoke from behind his mask, sounding sadder than the others: “May I be allowed to speak?” he beseeched the sheriff. “Oh, men of America! May I be allowed the privilege of speech even at the last moment? Harken to the voice of the people,” he was saying when the executioner cut the cord and the trapdoors snapped open with a crash, leaving four men dangling at the ends of ropes.49
The Tribune’s man on the scene spared nothing in his account of what he saw when the floorboards shot open and the bodies fell 4 feet down. “The light form of Parsons’ body seemed to bound upward” much more than those of the heavier men and, after a few minutes, his shrouded figure “settled into almost perfect quiet,” as did that of Engel. Then, “all eyes were directed to that of Spies, which was writhing horribly” as his shoulders twisted, his chest heaved and his legs “drew up to his chest and straightened out again and again” as he strangled to death. This scene continued for several minutes as physicians kept checking the pulse of each man. Seven and a half minutes after the bodies fell, the last man alive, Adolph Fischer, was declared dead.
None of the four men died from a broken neck, the form of death that was supposed to result from a state hanging. Instead, the convicts all strangled to death during what seemed to those present like a terribly long period of agony.50 “The spectators of the hanging, many of whom were visibly affected by the scene, remained seated even after life had been declared extinct in each dangling figure,” the Daily News remarked. “As the white forms hung in startling relief against the dark background of the wall behind the scaffold the sight was more ghastly than at any previous stage of the grim proceedings.” The spectators remained seated for some time, and the sheriff twice had to tell them to leave. Among the witnesses, the Tribune reported, the general mood seemed to be “one of pity and regret rather than exultation.” 51
While the coroners placed each body in a pine coffin, Lucy and her children remained behind bars in the Chicago Avenue Station, what she called “Captain Schaack’s Bastille.” Two hours after the execution, Lucy Parsons was told that her husband was dead and she could leave and take her children home.52
BY THIS TIME, runners had carried word of the deaths to the Western Union telegraph office and to newspaper row. The news was posted on billboards that had been placed all over the city. At the luxurious Palmer House Hotel the city’s wealthiest citizens gathered after lunch to read this notice: “Trap fell. Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engle [sic] expiate their crime and the law is vindicated.” One reporter described a palpable feeling of relief among downtown people, because the execution had occurred without a single hand being raised in violent protest.53
That afternoon the attorney Moses Salomon arrived at the jail with three union representatives to claim the bodies and carry the remains of the men to the undertakers. Barred from witnessing the execution, comrades and friends gathered to escort the five coffins back to the North Side. A large throng of mourners followed the remains of Engel and Lingg to an undertaker’s parlor, where a crowd of 1,000 formed waiting to view the bodies. At the home of August Spies’s mother a crowd of women and children lined the walk in front, many of them in tears, while at the Parsonses’ flat nearby, Lucy was being attended to by other women after she fainted. One observer said that “the fearless wife of Parsons had been absolutely prostrated by the violence of her emot
ions” and that, when she regained consciousness, “she raved and moaned in a most pitiable manner.” One of her comrades, Frank Stauber, told the journalist he had seen grief-stricken people before, “but never in my life have I seen such grief. I am actually afraid the woman is dying.”54
Friends and relatives, advocates and supporters of the defendants had been preparing themselves for the deaths of the condemned men, but on the afternoon of November 11 they still found themselves uncontrollably distraught over the news. Even those in faraway cities were deeply affected.
From Boston, William Dean Howells wrote of his “helpless feeling of grief and rage” over the “civic murder” committed in Chicago. “[T]his Republic has killed five men for their opinions,” he told his father. Howells believed the executions dishonored the nation and the memory of Abraham Lincoln, whose campaign biography Howells had written in 1860. After years of optimistic contentment with the progress of American civilization and belief in “its ability to come out all right in the end,” the writer now felt the nation’s story was “coming out all wrong in the end.” The death of the anarchists in Chicago shattered his faith in the triumph of Lincoln’s ideal republic, a republic with malice toward none and charity for all.55
In New York City many Jewish working people in the tenement houses and clothing shops of the Lower East Side were palpably disturbed by the news that four innocent men, three of them immigrants, had died on the gallows in a land to which these foreigners had come seeking freedom and justice. “Heartbroken, we walked for days like mourners,” the Jewish socialist Abraham Cahan recalled. The distress of these immigrant workers deepened, he reported, when they realized how many Americans applauded the verdict and its execution. 56
In Chicago the defenders were too devastated to speak in public or to put their feelings on paper. Joseph Buchanan later described seeking a quiet refuge from the immense throng that crowded the downtown streets, and waiting in a hotel lobby where a clerk read minute-by-minute accounts from a ticker tape of the death walk, the hoods and nooses being adjusted, the last words uttered. Buchanan watched the long hand on a clock as it moved to the fateful hour of noon; when it struck twelve, he broke down sobbing over an event that would haunt him for the rest of his life. After passing “a night of horrors” as he agonized over the impending executions, Sam Gompers spent the afternoon of November 11 meandering through Chicago’s streets, utterly depressed by the hangings and his failed efforts to win clemency for those now deceased. Captain William Black’s rage over the executions was mixed with a gnawing sense of guilt over Parsons’s fate. If he had not called the fugitive to return from Wisconsin and stand trial with the others, he might still be alive. Henry Demarest Lloyd, who was as disturbed as anyone on the defense team, wrote a poem dedicated to Spies and Parsons. That night, as tears flowed, his wife, Jessie, and his children joined Lloyd in singing his elegiac words to the tune of “Annie Laurie.”57
No one was closer to Parsons than George Schilling, who spoke with him in Market Square the night the great uprising began in 1877, campaigned with him as a socialist candidate and joined him in founding the “old 400” assembly of the Knights. Schilling quarreled with Parsons over the anarchists’ militant demands and violent words, but he loved and admired the charismatic Texan, and no one cared more about saving him and his comrades than Schilling did; no one, outside the families of the condemned men, bore a greater emotional strain during the long ordeal. As a result, Schilling was deeply shaken and thoroughly embittered by the hangings. Two years passed before he could gain some perspective on the event the anarchists would call Black Friday. “This 11th of November, 1887, has passed into history, and marks the chief tragedy of the closing years of the 19th century,” he wrote. “The trial of Parsons, Spies, et al is over and the verdict of the jury executed, but the trial of judgment is still going on.” 58
Chapter Sixteen
The Judgment of History
NOVEMBER 12, 1887–NOVEMBER 11, 1899
SOON AFTER THE EXECUTION order arrived in Chicago, comrades of the condemned men began preparing for a funeral march and burial to take place on Sunday, November 13. Family members and friends planned simple wakes on Saturday for the deceased anarchists at three locations along Milwaukee Avenue; they were unprepared for the public response that came on that morning. At eight o’clock hundreds of people lined up along the street in front of the flat Lucy Parsons had rented on Milwaukee Avenue. All day people filed through the little living room to gaze on Albert Parsons’s colorless face with the faint smile the undertaker had put on his lips. At times Lucy burst out of her room, weeping uncontrollably and clinging to Lizzie Holmes for support. By the time William Holmes finally closed the Parsonses’ door at 11:30 p.m., 10,000 people had filed through the parlor to pay their last respects. 1
A similar scene unfolded upstairs in the toy shop on Milwaukee Avenue where George Engel’s body lay in a parlor next to Louis Lingg’s corpse, with its poorly repaired face. During the day and evening 6,000 people viewed the remains. Even larger crowds pressed into Aurora Turner Hall, where August Spies lay in state surrounded by an edgy-looking honor guard of German trade unionists and militiamen.
The next morning, a clear, cold Sunday, elaborate funeral plans were put in motion, but within the strict limits set by Mayor John A. Roche, who prohibited speeches, songs and banners or “any demonstration of a public character.” The bands accompanying the funeral march could play only dirges.
The procession began at the home of August Spies’s mother. His coffin was loaded onto a carriage, which then proceeded down Milwaukee Avenue, stopping at the homes of the other anarchists, where other carriages were loaded with their remains. Then the cortege, carrying five red-draped coffins, rolled away to the sound of several brass bands playing somber tunes; the carriages were followed by a long line of 6,000 people who moved slowly down Milwaukee Avenue to the measured beat of muffled drums.
Along the parade route the streets and sidewalks were thronged with thousands of men, women and children; others looked out of windows or stood on barrels. Some of them wore red and black ribbons as an expression of sympathy. The funeral procession grew even larger as it left the immigrant North Side and headed downtown to the railroad depot, where mourners would board a long funeral train bound for Waldheim Cemetery, a nondenominational graveyard in the German town of Forest Park. Along the way even thicker crowds, estimated at 200,000 overall, packed the sidewalks to observe the cortege.2
After the procession turned off Milwaukee Avenue and headed down Desplaines Street, it passed within a block of the deadly spot where so many had fallen on May 4 of the previous year; it then proceeded east on Lake Street past Zepf’s Hall and Grief’s Hall, where portraits of the dead anarchists draped in mourning hung on the walls. At this point one of the bands broke the mayor’s rule and burst into the melody of “Annie Laurie” in Parsons’s honor. Another band struck up “La Marseillaise” as it passed Grief’s Hall. More than two decades later, the reporter Charles Edward Russell vividly recalled the somber scenes of that Sunday funeral procession. The black hearses, the marching thousands and the miles and miles of streets packed with silent mourners—all left him with the impression that death had finally conferred amnesty on the anarchists. 3
Chicagoans had never witnessed such a massive public funeral. The crowds exceeded even those that had gathered to march behind Lincoln’s coffin on May 1, 1865. Then, however, Chicago’s citizens had walked together in common front, unified in their grief. Now, on November 13, 1887, one class of people grieved while another gave thanks for the moral judgment rendered on the gallows, as Chicagoans divided into separate spheres of sentiment determined largely by where they lived and worked and by how well they spoke English.
The sun was low by the time the procession wended its way into Waldheim Cemetery. After the five caskets had been lowered into the ground, Captain William Black offered a traditional eulogy—one that would be fondly remembered by the dead men�
�s sympathizers and bitterly denounced by their prosecutors. “They were called Anarchists,” said Black. “They were painted and presented to the world as men loving violence, riot and bloodshed for their own sake. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were men who loved peace, men of gentle instincts, men of gracious tenderness of heart, loved by those who knew them, trusted by those who came to know the loyalty and purity of their lives.” They had lived for a revolution that would create a new society based on cooperation instead of coercion. Black said he did not know if such a society was possible in America, but he did know that through the ages poets, philosophers and Christian believers had lived for the day when righteousness would reign on the earth, and when sin and selfishness would come to an end.4
AS THE NEWS of the executions spread around the world in the weekend newspapers, those who had followed the trial reacted with extreme emotions, even though they had suspected for weeks that the anarchists would die. The defendants had gained widespread admiration in the eyes of European workers and radical intellectuals by maintaining their innocence and refusing to renounce their beliefs, even to save their lives. Their highly publicized hangings seemed to many Europeans to be nothing more than a ferocious attempt by the state to silence the strongest voices of dissent in America.5
In cities all over the United States and in other nations, workers expressed their rage at what seemed to them a historic atrocity. At a gathering of laborers in Havana, speakers condemned the executioners, and organizers collected $955 to aid the anarchists’ family members. In Barcelona, artisans and sailors met in their little centros and lit candles around the images of los mártiri.6 In Boston a large crowd gathered in New Era Hall to hear a mournful address by the secretary of the Knights of Labor, the esteemed George McNeill, who had helped found the first eight-hour movement in 1863. The white-haired philosopher of labor reform told his depressed followers that the hanging of the anarchists in Chicago was the act of desperate, unthinking men and that it would not remedy the evil of social inequity or wash out the stain of anarchy from the nation’s political fabric. In Newark, New Jersey, Reverend Hugh O. Pentecost, one of the few clergymen to speak out against the execution, told his congregation that it was “one of the most unjust and cruel acts ever perpetrated by organized government—immoral and illegal.”7 And in Rochester, New York, a young Russian clothing worker named Emma Goldman nearly became deranged when she heard news of “the terrible thing everyone feared, yet hoped would not happen.” She had learned about the Knights of Labor, the eight-hour day and the Haymarket anarchists from other Russian Jews during her first year in America, 1886. After sewing garments in a factory for ten hours a day, she devoured every word on anarchism she could find and closely followed news of the Haymarket defendants during and after the trial. 8