Death in the Haymarket
Page 36
By this time, Lucy Parsons had abandoned support for propaganda by deed, and had joined with the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs and others who were trying to create a new labor movement, based largely on the “Chicago idea” of revolutionary unionism that her husband had espoused. And so it was fitting that Lucy appeared as an honored guest at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World held at Chicago’s Brandt’s Hall in June 1905. Prominent among the 200 workers who attended the convention were the western hard-rock miners who followed their leader William D. Haywood to Chicago, carrying with them stories of the bloody battles they had fought in the Rocky Mountain metal-mining camps. Haywood, who had memorized the words of Spies and Parsons, convened the meeting of what he called the “Continental Congress of the working class.” The aim of the assembly, Haywood declared, was to create a revolutionary labor movement, premised on the reality of class struggle around the world. The IWW would become a vehicle for organizing the vast army of immigrant machine tenders and common laborers into “one big union” that would one day engage in the ultimate general strike. Once the “wage slaves” felt their own transcendent power, it would be natural for them to want to seize control of their industries and run them cooperatively. 4
Lucy Parsons’s presence at the first IWW convention reminded the delegates of the Haymarket tragedy, which had ended the first great drive for revolutionary unionism in Chicago.5 She told the assembled workingmen, and a few workingwomen, of how she came to Chicago twenty-seven years before as a young girl full of hope and animation, and how her life had been changed by her husband’s ordeal. After the convention adjourned that day, Bill Haywood recalled, the delegates responded to a plea from Lucy and visited Waldheim Cemetery to lay wreaths on the graves of the Chicago martyrs.6
In the next dozen years, as the Chicago idea of one big union espoused by the Industrial Workers of the World began to catch on, Lucy found more and more workers eager to hear of her husband’s words and deeds. This was an age of industrial violence, when employers mounted relentless union-busting drives, aided by local police and vigilantes, by private gunmen and state militiamen and by hostile judges who denied workers freedom of speech and freedom of association. Scores of unarmed workers were slain on picket lines during mass strikes that often seemed like rebellions. As a result, many of the new immigrants who had been pouring into the United States by the millions since 1890 were intimidated; some of them, however, were radicalized by these experiences and attracted by the IWW’s embrace of all races, creeds and nationalities—“the wretched of the earth.” Prominent among these alienated immigrant laborers were the peasants and laborers who came to “L’America” from the poor provinces of the Italian Mezzogiorno.
Common laborers and factory operatives from southern Italy played an outsized role in the mass strikes that exploded all over the United States between 1909 and 1919, notably in the “Uprising of the 20,000” women clothing workers of New York City; in the legendary strike for “Bread and Roses” at Lawrence, Massachusetts; and in the Colorado coalfield wars, which culminated in the infamous massacre of two women and eleven children at Ludlow. Deeply involved in all these battles, Italian workers gravitated to the IWW and to a special foreign-language federation of the Socialist Party; they also helped revive the anarchist movement in the United States by forming scores of groups in industrial cities and towns. All of these organizations celebrated May Day and enjoyed picnics, where immigrants danced, sang songs, listened to long speeches, watched performances of plays like Primo Maggio, written by the poet Pietro Gori, which began and ended with the singing of Verdi’s operatic chorus “Va, pensiero,” and heard readings of poems like Gori’s “Undici Novembre”—a tribute to those who died on Black Friday.7 The main speaker on May 1 usually followed a common script that began with a reference to the first May Day and the grand struggle for freedom that cost the lives of the heroic Haymarket martyrs, innocent victims of so-called justice in America.8
The Chicago anarchists were recalled in especially grand fashion on May Day in 1913, during a huge strike of 25,000 Italian silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, an anarchist stronghold. On that May 1, a monster demonstration wound its way through the city, led by women dressed entirely in red outfits with white IWW insignias. On this day, wrote a radical reporter, “the proletariat of Paterson raised the banner for which 26 years ago five of our comrades in Chicago were assassinated by the Republican Bourgeoisie.” 9
By this time, the memory of the Haymarket martyrs had taken on a new life of its own. References to the Chicago anarchists appeared across the United States in May Day marches, IWW mass strikes and anarchist picnics. The names of Parsons, Spies and the others also reappeared at various manifestations that took place in other nations, especially in Spain, France and Italy, as well as in Argentina, Cuba and Mexico, where revolutionary union federations led by anarchists became mass movements during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Many of the militants in these new anarchosyndicalist unions regarded the Chicago martyrs as pioneers and celebrated their memory in May Day job actions and demonstrations. In Mexico, for example, May Day was celebrated for the first time in 1913 with anarchist-inspired strikes for the eight-hour day, protests against the nation’s military rulers and memorials to the heroes who gave their lives for the cause in 1887. From then on, Primero de Mayo became a national holiday in Mexico, known as the “Day of the Martyrs of Chicago.”10
During these stirring times, the nearly forgotten widow of Albert Parsons regained her status as the leading player in a company of traveling anarchists dedicated to preserving the memory of Black Friday and the men who died that day. All the while, Lucy Parsons continued to struggle with local authorities over her right to speak freely. At one point Chicago police even denied her a permit to speak in Washington Square across from the Newberry Library, a site reserved for free speech at the request of the institution’s founder—one of the few such places that existed in Chicago after Haymarket. 11 Lucy’s numerous free-speech fights paralleled the IWW’s massive civil disobedience campaigns on behalf of free expression for workers. At a time when the First Amendment was regarded as unenforceable, these radicals, known as Wobblies, challenged the courts in sharp ways and drew the attention of many complacent citizens to local authorities who regularly denied, and indeed mocked, the right to free speech for dissenters.12
Lucy Parsons and her radical comrades kept speaking and agitating until the United States entered World War I. Then, in 1917 and 1918, a patriotic fervor swept the land, and the government suppressed all types of protests, including strikes and May Day marches.13 Eugene Debs and socialist opponents of the war were tried for sedition and imprisoned. The IWW was devastated by vigilante assaults and federal prosecutions. A third red scare followed the war, and in 1920, the Department of Justice conducted raids that led to the arrest of 10,000 people, whose civil liberties were abused by federal agents. That same year, Congress enacted a law that allowed the government to punish and deport aliens simply for possessing radical literature, for “advising, advocating or teaching” radical doctrines and for belonging to radical organizations. 14 By this time nearly every repressive measure called for during the post-Haymarket red scare had become federal law.
Under these circumstances, the nation’s leading historians reopened the Haymarket case and retried the defendants. Of the prosecution and execution of the Chicago anarchists, one legal scholar remarked: “It may be that after all is said and done the end justified the means; it may be that our Government which today seems to be extremely lax in allowing Bolshevism and I.W.W. doctrines to be preached . . . might well study the result of the Chicago trial.” The result was studied by historian James Ford Rhodes, who concluded in his influential History of the United States that “the punishment meted out to the anarchists was legally just.” Another noted historian of the time wrote that “all seven anarchist wretches who assumed an impudent front during the trial” deserved to be
hanged—even those whom Governor Altgeld had pardoned. 15
Three decades after the hangings in Chicago, the memory of the Haymarket anarchists as heroic martyrs seemed to have survived mainly in the labor lore carried by itinerant Wobblies who constantly blew into the Windy City, where they roamed the “canyon stretching across the great west side from the Lake through the Loop on toward the setting sun.” These never-ceasing streams of humanity created what one observer called “the largest number of homeless and hungry men that have ever been brought together anywhere in our land.”16 Some of these hoboes turned up regularly in the free-speech park at Washington Square, now called “Bughouse Square,” where Lucy Parsons would speak about the old days and the men who gave their lives for the one-big-union idea.17
During the 1920s, Parsons joined the efforts of the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense group and took up the case of Tom Mooney, then serving a life sentence for allegedly bombing a San Francisco military-preparedness parade. She also joined the worldwide campaign to save the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian anarchists sentenced to death in Massachusetts after a sensational murder trial. The ordeal of Sacco and his comrade Vanzetti aroused the same objections from well-known writers and intellectuals that Henry Demarest Lloyd and William Dean Howells had made on behalf of Parsons, Spies and their comrades. Like the Chicago anarchists, the Italians were tried by a biased judge and a packed jury on charges of “general conspiracy” to commit murder, and they too were executed for their beliefs as much as for their actions; thus they became victims, one commentator wrote, of “a pattern of hate and fear toward radicals set in 1887.”18
The fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were electrocuted on August 23, 1927, served as a reminder of what had happened to the Chicago anarchists four decades earlier; and so, when the Great Depression hit in 1929, stories of Haymarket had already resurfaced and floated out of the confines of Chicago’s “hobohemia.” 19 In the hard times that followed, the legions of unemployed people demanding bread or work, the scores of radicals risking their lives to organize immigrant factory workers and the numerous cases of policemen gunning down protesters and picketers re-created scenes that had been acted out in Chicago during the Great Upheaval decades earlier. As a result, Lucy Parsons had many occasions on which to call up the memories of the workers killed in 1886 and 1887. Indeed, after many years of passing unnoticed, November 11 was celebrated once again as the Haymarket martyrs’ memorial day in 1937, when Lucy Parsons addressed a mass meeting at the Amalgamated Hall on Ashland Avenue in Chicago. According to one observer, she stepped out on the platform, bent with age, almost totally blind, but still hurled curses at the powers that be and still called for the overthrow of capitalism. 20
This fiftieth-anniversary ceremony occurred just five months after ten steelworkers were shot in the back and killed as they ran from Chicago police at the South Chicago plant of Republic Steel, where they had established a picket line. Known as the Memorial Day Massacre, the event aroused liberal Chicago in passionate protest against the police. History seemed to be repeating itself in 1937, as the city’s police department re-created the bloody events of 1886 and the Tribune blamed the massacre on a riot caused by communists. Under these circumstances, the memory of the Haymarket tragedy fifty years earlier became useful to the militant organizers of the new industrial unions in Chicago. On May Day, 1938, local unionists trying to organize the old McCormick company (by now International Harvester) held a march from the South Side to Haymarket Square led by a float that featured a hooded man, identified as August Spies, who stood with a rope around his neck in a tableau meant to symbolize the ongoing suppression of workers’ civil liberties by the Chicago police.21
The Haymarket affair was recalled during the bloody 1930s because it highlighted the agonizing dilemma violence presented for the American labor movement. Mainstream trade unionists like Sam Gompers had looked back in anger at the Chicago anarchists because their blatant advocacy of force played into the hands of labor’s enemies, but other union activists, like Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood, admired Parsons and Spies for facing up to the brutal realities of American industrial life.22 Even trade unionists opposed to the tactics and beliefs of the Chicago anarchists understood that workers’ struggles had often been met with shocking repression, and that when violence bred violence, when powerless laboring people struck back in anger, they often paid with their lives. This is why, unsettling though it has been, the Haymarket case could never be forgotten within the labor movement.
The eminent American historian Richard Hofstadter once observed that, even with a minimum of radical activity and ideologically motivated class conflict, the United States has somehow experienced a maximum of industrial violence: at least 160 instances in which state and federal troops intervened in strikes, and at least 700 labor disputes in which deaths were recorded. He thought the reason for this lay more in the ethos of American capitalists than in that of the workers, because it was clear to him that most American violence had been initiated with a “conservative bias” by the “high dogs and the middle dogs” against radicals, workers and labor organizers, immigrants, blacks and other racial minorities who had, for their part, rarely taken forceful action against state authority. Writing in 1970, Hofstadter expressed dismay at the actions of young radicals like the Weathermen, who provoked violent confrontations to elicit repressive responses from authorities; he nonetheless concluded that there were far worse things in American history than the strikes and spontaneous riots that had erupted so often in the past. “After all,” he noted, “the greatest and most calculating of killers is the national state, and this is true not only in international wars, but in domestic conflicts.” 23
During the years after the shocking 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago, the new industrial unions grew and used their political influence to curb the police and private armed forces that had been used against strikers and protesters over and over again for sixty years. The aged Lucy Parsons, whose life had been shaped by these violent episodes, was treated like a living saint by many trade unionists in Chicago, especially when Congress mandated the eight-hour day in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, marking the end of the long struggle Albert and Lucy Parsons had helped to initiate. Lucy was a particularly important person to the radicals fighting to bring a union back to the old McCormick Reaper Works, where all the trouble began so many years ago. In 1941, at age eighty-eight, she braved the winter winds and spoke to workers on the Black Road, where a union affiliated with the new Congress of Industrial Organizations was conducting a campaign for votes at the old McCormick works. When the weather warmed up that spring, Lucy reappeared at a May Day parade, riding through the South Side as an honored guest sitting on top of a float sponsored by the Farm Equipment Workers Union. It would be her last May Day.24
Nine months later, on March 7, 1942, the stove in Lucy Parsons’s little house caused a fire. Handicapped by her blindness, Lucy could not escape. She died of smoke inhalation. Her books, papers and letters from Albert and a host of others survived the fire, but were confiscated by police officers and never seen again. Lucy Parsons’s ashes were placed at Waldheim, close to the remains of her beloved husband and her daughter, Lulu. Her quiet funeral was attended by many of the young radicals who carried on the union fight that had begun during the Great Upheaval of her youth.25
Lucy’s final May Day in 1941 was also the last one celebrated in Chicago for many years. After the United States entered World War II, Communist Party leaders let May 1 pass without notice. They even disbanded their party organization and joined mainstream union leaders in taking a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war. The Chicago idea of militant unions taking mass action against capital and the state—the idea Parsons and Spies espoused until their last breaths—had simply vanished from the American labor scene.
After World War II the living memory of the Haymarket anarchists died, and their story survived only in literature—
in the Chicago poems by Kenneth Rexroth; in a best-selling novel, The American: A Middle Western Legend, about the life of John Peter Altgeld written by the most popular leftist writer of the time, Howard Fast; and in Nelson Algren’s prose poem to his hometown, Chicago: City on the Make.26 Long ago, the famous novelist wrote, Chicago had been the town of “the great Lincolnian liberals,” figures like John Peter Altgeld, “the ones who stuck out their stubborn necks in the ceaseless battle between the rights of Owners and the rights of Man.” Algren loved this Chicago that was once the “most radical of all American cities: Gene Debs’ town, Bill Haywood’s town, the One Big Union town.” But he also hated the place because it was the most brutal of all American cities, a “town of the hard and bitter strikes and the trigger happy cops,” a town where “undried blood on the pavement” recalled the Haymarket tragedy. And so Chicago remained a city with “many bone-deep grudges to settle”—none greater, Algren thought, than the “big dark grudge cast by the four standing in white muslin robes, hands cuffed behind, at the gallows’ head. For the hope of the eight hour day.”27
AFTER ALGREN’S HARD-EDGED essay on Chicago appeared and then disappeared, the Haymarket story nearly vanished from literature during the Cold War years, when all manifestations of radicalism became deeply suspect. The May Day celebrations that had resumed briefly after World War II were banned. In 1955, May 1 was proclaimed Law Day in many states, and then designated as Loyalty Day throughout the country by presidential decree. The Congress of Industrial Organizations merged with the conservative American Federation of Labor that same year after nearly all radicals had been purged from union offices. The epic events in Chicago that gave birth to the first labor movement and the first May Day, as well as to the Haymarket tragedy, now became merely another chapter in “labor’s untold story.” Thus, it seemed that the memory of Haymarket would be effectively erased from the labor movement’s history, even in Chicago.28