Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 149, 154; The Accused and the Accusers: The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court on October 7th, 8th and 9th (Chicago: Socialistic Publishing Co., 1886), p. 10.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 157–59, 161–63.

  Ibid., pp. 159–60.

  Quote ibid., p. 173.

  Quote ibid., p. 174. Also see Alan Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Story of Albert R. Parsons (New York: International Publishers, 1937) p. 111.

  Lucy Parsons, ed., Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court (1910; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 82.

  Ibid., p. 102.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, p. 176; L. Parsons, Famous Speeches, pp. 176–77.

  L. Parsons, Famous Speeches, pp. 98, 111.

  Ibid., p. 109.

  Calmer, Labor Agitator, p. 112.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, p. 177.

  John Moses and Joseph Kirkland, eds., The History of Chicago (Chicago: Munsell & Co., 1895), pp. 199–200.

  Chicago Tribune, October 13, 1886.

  Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 221–22; Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1886.

  Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 237; Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 223, 225.

  Chicago Tribune, October 18, 20, 1886; also see Ware, Labor Movement in the U.S. (see chap. 6, n. 40), pp. 152–54; and Avrich, Tragedy, p. 310.

  Quote in Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 223.

  Richard Schneirov, “The Friendship of Bert Stewart and Henry Demarest Lloyd,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, pp. 158–59.

  Quoted in Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 223.

  Chicago Tribune, November 23–25, 1886.

  Orvin Larson, American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), pp. 219–20.

  Ibid., p. 220.

  Robert S. Eckley, “Leonard Swett: Lincoln’s Legacy to the Chicago Bar,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 92 (1999), pp. 30–36.

  Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 315–16; Chicago Tribune, November 6, 1887; and Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, The Working-Class Movement in America (London: Sonnenschein, 1886), p. 161.

  Charles Edward Russell, These Shifting Scenes (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), pp. 94–95.

  Ibid., p. 96.

  Franklin Rosemont, “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wild-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 206; drawing of the Parsons family and quote from Art Young, ibid., pp. 100, 201.

  Art Young, On My Way: Being the Book of Art Young in Text and Pictures (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), p. 201; Russell, These Shifting Scenes, pp. 98–99; and see Franklin Rosemont, “The Most Dangerous Anarchist,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 51.

  Russell, These Shifting Scenes, p. 100.

  See Avrich, Tragedy, p. 324.

  Chicago Tribune, January 14, 18, 19, 20, 1887; Van Zandt quoted in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 325.

  Chicago Tribune, March 11, 13, 1887.

  Aveling and Marx, Working-Class Movement, p. 167; L. Parsons, The Life, pp. 235–41.

  Chicago Tribune, March 18, 1886.

  Francis X. Busch, “The Haymarket Riot and the Anarchist Trial,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 48 (1935), p. 261; Swett and Oglesby quoted in Harry Barnard, “ Eagle Forgotten”: The Life of John Peter Altgeld (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), pp. 110, 198.

  Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1886, and March 21, 1887.

  Quote in Chicago Tribune, March 25, April 2, 5, 1887; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 228.

  Chicago Tribune, April 6, 7, 1887.

  Chicago Tribune, April 6, 7, 1887.

  Chapter Fifteen / The Law Is Vindicated

  Chicago Tribune, May 6, 7, 8, 1887.

  Chicago Tribune, March 8, May 5, June 10, 1887. On the Merritt law, see David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 313–14.

  McConnell, “The Chicago Bomb Case” (see chap. 7, n. 60), pp. 733–34; McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, p. 182.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 185–86.

  Central Labor Union resolution quoted in David, Haymarket Affair, p. 347.

  Ingersoll quoted in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 336, and in Larson, American Infidel, p. 220.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 198–200; Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1886.

  Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 304–5.

  Digby-Junger, The Journalist as Reformer (see chap. 5, n. 17), pp. 80–81.

  Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 303–4; Thomas, Alternative America (see chap. 5, n. 17), pp. 208, 232.

  Quote in David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 345–46; Chicago Tribune, September 24, October 11, 21, 1887.

  Quote in E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1976), p. 409; Beryl Ruehl, “From Haymarket Square to Trafalgar Square,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, pp. 217, 220.

  Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land (see chap. 9, n. 2), pp. 15, 33, 36–37; Marianne Debouzy, introduction to In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. vii.

  Marjorie Murphy, “And They Sang the ‘Marseillaise’: A Look at the French Left Press as It Responded to Haymarket”; Hubert Perrier et al., “The ‘Social Revolution’ in America? European Reactions to the ‘Great Upheaval’ and to the Haymarket Affair”; and Raymond C. Sun, “Misguided Martyrdom: German Social Democratic Response to the Haymarket Incident,” in a special Haymarket centennial number of International Labor and Working Class History 29 (Spring 1986), pp. 42–44, 53–60; George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 6–9, 125–27, 155–56. Quote in Chicago Tribune, October 11, 1887.

  Busch, “Haymarket Riot,” p. 266. Butler made this argument about applying the Fourteenth Amendment to state cases before a Supreme Court that had “rendered that amendment innocuous as far as the Negro was concerned,” wrote W. E. B. DuBois, and made it instead into the “chief refuge” for corporations trying to avoid state regulation. See DuBois, Black Reconstruction (see chap. 4, n. 10), p. 691.

  Quote in McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 207, 211.

  David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 322–24; quoted in Busch, “Haymarket Riot,” p. 267.

  Chicago Tribune, November 3, 1887. Quotes in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 355.

  L. Parsons, The Life, p. 230; Stone, Fifty Years (see chap. 13, n. 21), pp. 175–76.

  Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1887; L. Parsons, The Life, pp. 183–86.

  Chicago Tribune, November 5, 6, 7, 1887. On Trumbull, see McConnell, “The Chicago Bomb Case,” p. 735; Ralph J. Roske, His Own Counsel: The Life and Times of Lyman Trumbull (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1979), pp. 100–105, 113–16, 121–28; and Plummer, Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter, p. 49.

  Quoted in David, Haymarket Affair, p. 240.

  Quotes from Garlin Sender, Three American Radicals: John Swinton, Charles P. Steinmetz and William Dean Howells (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 107, 110.

  Quote from Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), p. 291; Sender, Three American Radicals, pp. 127–38.

  David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 336–38.

  Quote ibid., p. 334. See Thomas, Alternative America, pp. 225–26, 230–31.

  Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1887; Avrich, Tragedy, p. 353.

  On Gage, see Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 205. On the businessmen’s meeting, see David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 362–63; on Medill’s view, see Plummer, Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter, p. 197.

  Chicago Tribune, November 6, 8, 1887.

  Chicago T
ribune, November 11, 1887; Plummer, Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter, p. 194.

  Chicago Tribune, November 7, 8, 1887; Matson quote in Finis Farr, Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), p. 150.

  Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1887.

  David, Haymarket Affair, p. 367; Herman Raster to Richard J. Oglesby, November 7, 1887, Chicago, in Oglesby Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL; Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1887.

  On Cora Richmond, see Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 371–72; quote about Oglesby in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 205. On literature of reminiscence, see Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln and American Memory (New York: Oxford, 1994), pp. 158–63.

  Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1887; Gompers, Seventy Years (see Prologue, n.

  , p. 238.

  Quote in David, Haymarket Affair, p. 375.

  Joseph R. Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator (1903; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 336–39.

  Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1887; David, Haymarket Affair, pp. 364–66, 397; Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 367–71, 377.

  Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 367–71, 377.

  Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1887. Parsons’s letter to his children is in L. Parsons, The Life, Appendix.

  For the lyrics to “Annie Laurie,” see http:// www.ingeb.org/songs/annielau.htm.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 227–29.

  Ibid., pp. 230–31.

  Quotes from Farr, Chicago: A Personal History, p. 150; and Russell, These Shifting Scenes, pp. 103–4.

  Russell, These Shifting Scenes, pp. 103–4.

  Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1887; and see Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 35–36.

  Chicago Daily News, November 11, 1887, quoted in McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 232–33.

  Ibid.

  Chicago Daily News, quoted in McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, pp. 234–37.

  In 1886 a special committee of the English courts conducted a seminal study of execution by hanging and determined the ideal form of death by this means: sudden death caused by a broken neck instead of slow strangulation or decapitation, which sometimes resulted when a heavy body was dropped too far below the gallows platform. After various experiments in physics, it was determined that a man weighing 140 to 170 pounds, the weight range of the four men executed in Chicago, should fall at least 71⁄2 feet below the platform in order for the neck to snap and death to occur most rapidly. These measurements would become the goal to which all subsequent Anglo-American judicial hangings aspired, but in November of 1887 such physics of death were not employed by the Cook County sheriff and the executioner: the four anarchists were given enough rope to fall only 4 feet below the gallows floor, and so they dangled at the ends of nooses for seemingly interminable minutes before finally choking to death. Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, From the Noose to the Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 87–88, 112–13. Also see Charles Duff, A Handbook of Hanging: Being a Short Introduction to the Fine Art of Execution . . . (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1929), pp. 62–63.

  Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1887.

  Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1887.

  Buchanan, Story of a Labor Agitator, pp. 414–15; Avrich, Tragedy, p. 394; and Russell, These Shifting Scenes, p. 105.

  Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1887.

  Howells’s letter quoted in Sender, Three American Radicals, pp. 122, 124, 129; and see Lynn, William Dean Howells, pp. 89, 109, 278, 290–92.

  Abraham Cahan, The Education of Abraham Cahan, translated by Leon Stein, Abraham P. Conan and Lynn Davison (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), p. 328; Morris U. Schappes, “Haymarket and the Jews,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, pp. 119–120.

  See Avrich, Tragedy, p. 407; and on Black’s being haunted by Parsons’s return, see ibid., p. 259. On Gompers, see Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers, A Biography (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1963), p. 57.

  Schilling, “Labor Movement in Chicago,” pp. xxvi–xxvii.

  Chapter Sixteen / The Judgment of History

  The following description of the funeral is drawn from the Chicago Times, November 14, 1887. Also see Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 137–39; and Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 395–96.

  Avrich, Tragedy, pp. 395–96.

  Russell, These Shifting Scenes, p. 105.

  Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 121.

  Avrich, Tragedy, p. 456.

  See ibid., p. 409; and Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, pp. 156–60.

  David, Haymarket Affair, p. 395; McNeil, ed., The Labor Movement, pp. 467–68.

  Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1931), Vol. 1, p. 10.

  Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 12–15; Goldman, Living My Life, Vol. 1, pp. 9–10, 23–42, 508; and also quote from a letter in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 434.

  Bisno, Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer (see chap. 9, n. 22), p. 90.

  Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones (see Prologue, n. 10), pp. 13–14; also see Elliot J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), pp. 263–65, 273–77.

  William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 31.

  Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1954), p. 184.

  Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), pp. 134–37.

  Zechariah Chafee, Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 507–8.

  Thomas, Alternative America, p. 214.

  Edgar Lee Masters, The Tale of Chicago (New York: Putnam, 1933), p. 219.

  May, Protestant Churches (see chap. 6, n. 38), pp. 100–102; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order (see Prologue, n. 13), pp. 125–28, 131, 135, 242.

  Quote from Flinn, Chicago Police, p. 222.

  McLean, Rise and Fall of Anarchy, p. 20.

  Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, p. 148.

  William J. Adelman, “The Haymarket Monument at Waldheim,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 167.

  Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 136–37.

  William J. Adelman, “The Road to Fort Sheridan,” in Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 130; Miller, City of the Century (see Prologue, n. 4), p. 476; Roy Turnbaugh, “Ethnicity, Civic Pride and Commitment: The Evolution of the Chicago Militia,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 72 (1979), pp. 111–22.

  David, Haymarket Affair, p. 404; and Montgomery, Citizen Worker (see chap. 7, n. 19), pp. 102–4.

  Barnard, “Eagle Forgotten” (see chap. 14, n. 41), p. 184; and see Rosemont, “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wild-Eyed Fiend,” p. 205.

  Roediger and Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 29.

  For an insightful study of this popular literature, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  Smith, Urban Disorder (see Prologue, n. 14), pp. 137, 142–43.

  Rudolph Vecoli, “ ‘Free Country’: The American Republic Viewed by the Italian Left, 1880–1920,” in Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty, p. 25.

  Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, pp. 162–63, 175–76.

  Alarm, December 8, 1888; Thompson, William Morris, pp. 506–7.

  Quotes in Thompson, William Morris, pp. 487, 507.

  Ibid., p. 487; also see pp. 489, 493–94.

  Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, pp. 6–9, 125–27, 156; quote on p. 159. Kropotkin quoted in Avrich, Tragedy, p. 412. Also see Lars-Goran Tedebrand, “America in the Swedish Pres
s, 1880s to 1920s,” in Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Stature of Liberty, p. 55.

  Gompers, Seventy Years, pp. 238–39.

  Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, p. 163; Andrea Panaccione, ed., Sappi che Oggi e la tua Festa . . . per la Storia del l Maggio [May Day Celebration] (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1988); Eric Hobsbawm, “May Day,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (see chap. 10, n. 10), p. 285.

  Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1890.

  Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 177–78, and My Friend, Julia Lathrop (New York: Macmillan, 1935), quoted in “Haymarket, 1886!” Chicago History 15 (Summer 1986), p. 63.

  See Richard Schneirov, “Voting as a Class: Haymarket and the Rise of the Democrat-Labor Alliance in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago,” Labor History 45 (Spring–Summer 2004), pp. 6–20, and Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, pp. 284–86, 307; Leon Fink, “The New Labor History and the Power of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony and the Case of the Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988), p. 132; David Brody, “Shaping a Labor Movement,” in Brody, In Labor’s Cause (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 87–88. On the socialist challenge to Gompers led by Chicago machinist Tommy Morgan, see P. Foner, Labor Movement, Vol. 1, pp. 279–310. Quote from Chicago activist George Detwiler in Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, p. 318.

  Quote in Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 30, 49, 57.

  Schilling to Lucy Parsons, December 1, 1893, in George Schilling Papers, quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 191.

  Barnard, “Eagle Forgotten,” pp. 1–18, 23–39, 43, 133, 159–62; and Pierce, Chicago, Vol. 3, p. 452.

  See Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Vintage, 2004); quote from Lloyd on p. 374.