There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Before heading home, Harrison stopped at the nearby Desplaines Street police station house where Bonfield had his troops in readiness if it became necessary to confront the group in the Haymarket. The police had wisely elected not to have a uniformed presence in the square, but Bonfield had sent observers there to monitor the event and report back if words became inflammatory or the crowd troublesome. Mayor Harrison informed the inspector and other police officials that the rally was lightly attended, not at all boisterous, and even suggested that some of the reserve officers on duty be allowed to go home.

  Back at the rally, Spies was speaking from the wagon, accusing the McCormick bosses of murder although cautioning against thoughtless retaliation. Parsons, who had arrived back in town only that evening from a speaking engagement in Cincinnati, came to the square with his wife, Lucy, and their two small children, Lulu and Albert Jr. He urged the workers to arm in self-defense, but otherwise devoted his remarks to the prospects for international Socialism. After speaking, Parsons left the Haymarket with his family to join friends at nearby Zepf’s Saloon.

  Last to address the gathering was Samuel Fielden, a former English lay preacher who worked as a teamster. Rugged and bearlike in appearance, with a full bushy beard, Fielden was a favorite speaker at such events, known for his sense of humor and occasional use of quaint Briticisms. Rain had begun to fall and people had started to drift away, leaving Fielden with a crowd of only a few hundred. He proposed to speak briefly. His remarks were not unlike those already made from the wagon, but one of the plainclothes detectives noted that Fielden was counseling his listeners to defy the law. “Keep your eye upon it, throttle it, kill it, stab it, do everything you can to wound it—to impede its progress,” he advised. “Socialists are not going to declare war; but I tell you war has been declared on us, and I ask you to get hold of anything that will help to resist the onslaught of the enemy and the usurper. The skirmish lines are met. People have been shot. Men, women, and children have not been spared by the capitalists and minions of private capital. They had no mercy, so ought you?”

  Something of these remarks was transmitted to Bonfield, who ordered his men out of the station house. As Fielden was closing his remarks and the rally was moments away from adjournment, Captain William Ward walked to the speaker’s wagon at the head of a column of police and told Fielden, “In the name of the people of Illinois, I command this meeting immediately and peaceably to disperse.” Fielden replied, “We are peaceable,” and was stepping down from the wagon when suddenly there was a terrific explosion, the square lit by a blinding white light.57 A bomb had been thrown at the police. One, Mathias Degan, was killed instantly; many others fell wounded, some mortally. Those officers who could quickly unholstered their guns and “swept the sidewalks with a hot and telling fire.” Several workers were struck, a few may have returned fire, and in the smoke and confusion the police also shot into their own ranks.58 It all happened within seconds, and just as swiftly the crowd was in full flight, some helping to carry away bleeding and injured comrades.

  The police retreated en masse to the Desplaines Street station house, where the scene was one of carnage, the floor slick with blood, as dying policemen and the wounded writhed in pain and volunteers tried frantically to administer aid. Seven policemen ultimately died from wounds received in the Haymarket; sixty-seven were badly hurt. Of the workers, four had died and fifty were wounded. Samuel Fielden was led away by companions, a police bullet lodged in his knee.

  THE NATION WAS OUTRAGED over the incident, a deadly assault on uniformed police by anarchists. Commentators reached back to the murder of Lincoln for a comparable act as horrendous.59 The New York Times began its excited coverage, “The villainous teachings of the Anarchists bore bloody fruit in Chicago …” and blamed “the doctrine of Herr Johann Most.”60 Harper’s Weekly saw the terror bombing as the result of passions “plainly gathering for several days … an outburst of anarchy; the deliberate crime of men who openly advocate massacre and the overthrow of intelligent and orderly society.”61

  Chicago Daily News publisher Melville Stone did more than editorialize. He contacted William Pinkerton, son of the detective agency’s founder, and urged him to at once “put shadows” over Spies, Parsons, and Fielden—“the same little coterie [that] had been preaching anarchy for months.”62 In fact, Chicago police, in some cases assisted by Pinkertons, had already reacted, descending on dozens of homes, businesses, and meeting halls frequented by workingmen. “There is hardly an Anarchist in the city … not in a tremor for fear of a domiciliary visit from the police,” it was reported. “Search warrants are no longer considered necessary, and suspicious houses are being ransacked at all hours of the day and night.”63

  While the much-published assumption was that the bombing was “a concerted, deliberately planned, and coolly executed murder,”64 it became apparent to investigators within several hours that there was little proof to support such a theory. Police hauled in dozens of men (and a few women), along with cartons of suspicious papers and other items, but wound up letting most of those arrested go free. The seven men they had quickly swooped up and held in custody as ringleaders of the plot—August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, and Oscar Neebe—were all known as committed radicals. Only Fielden and Spies had been at the Haymarket when the bomb was thrown. Albert Parsons, who had left the square with his family before the explosion, had had time to evade the police dragnet. His first thought upon learning of the bombing was that it had been the work of an agent provocateur; he knew, nonetheless, that he would be among those blamed, and he left town on a midnight train to seek refuge with friends in northern Illinois. Rudolph Schnaubelt, an anarchist suspected by the police of having hurled the bomb, had likewise disappeared.

  The other men in custody were deeply implicated by their participation in local anarchist or workingmen’s causes. Louis Lingg was a twenty-two-year-old German immigrant carpenter, in America only one year. “Fearfully, dangerously handsome, the image of manly health and beauty … the lion of the ballroom,”65 Lingg was also known for being somewhat deranged, and was said to bear a grudge against authority because his father had been fired from a job after having sustained a debilitating workplace injury. Lingg had not been in the Haymarket, but he was known to tinker with bomb-making and was, according to one friend, “crazy on the labor question and wanted to kill everybody that did not agree with him.”66 Lingg struggled fiercely with the police sent to arrest him and had to be forcibly subdued.

  George Engel, the owner of a toy store and an earnest Socialist, had been at the meeting held on the evening of May 3 at Greif’s Hall, where the Haymarket rally was planned, although on the night of the bombing he was at home playing cards. Adolph Fischer was a printer at Spies’s paper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and had also been at Greif’s. Unable to find Rudolph Schnaubelt, the police and prosecutors had made Fischer the chief suspect for having thrown or triggered the explosive.67 Oscar Neebe, an organizer with a beer-wagon drivers’ union, was a Socialist whose chief offense seemed to be that he had kept the Arbeiter-Zeitung in operation after Spies and the others had been arrested, while Michael Schwab, an associate editor of the paper, had the bad fortune to have published a rabble-rousing piece about resisting capitalism on the very day of the bombing. Nor could it have helped that the bearded, thin-faced Schwab appeared to investigators and journalists “very untidy … his general appearance that of a fanatic, half-insane,” and that it was known he was “married to a woman in free-love fashion.”68 Schwab had been in Haymarket Square on the fateful night but had left early.

  Sifting through the scant evidence and interviewing witnesses, investigators could not agree on whether the bomb had been thrown at the police from the speakers’ wagon, the sidewalk, or a window overhead. Nonetheless, over several days the outlines of a conspiracy emerged. The radicals, hungry for revenge after the killings at the McCormick factory, had met at Greif’s Hall on Monda
y night and laid plans to murder as many police as possible. The rally at Haymarket would begin with reasonable-sounding speeches but slowly intensify in order to lure the police from their nearby station house. When the hated “Black Jack” Bonfield and his men entered the square, the conspirators would detonate their “deadly Nihilist bomb.”69 Lost in this scenario was the question of whether Bonfield’s decision to march a large body of police into the Haymarket had been necessary, whether the alleged plotters could really have predicted it, and the possibility the bombing might have been the work of someone other than an anarchist; also disregarded was the fact that most of the policemen’s wounds had resulted not from the bomb but from shots fired by fellow officers in the first panicked moments after the explosion.70

  Official interrogations of the detained men added little new information, for with their practiced contempt for the law, the radicals easily resisted efforts to coerce their cooperation. Fischer, told by a police lieutenant that August Spies had confessed to the conspiracy and had named Fischer as the bomb thrower, replied coolly, “If Spies has really told you that, then he has lied. Either you lie or Spies does. That Spies has told an untruth I do not believe. Therefore you are the liar.” When Cook County prosecutor Julius S. Grinnell took a turn with Fischer, counseling him that “a brave man does not lie,” Fischer snapped back, “Is that so? Then you must be the greatest coward in the world, for you are a lawyer, which signifies a liar by profession.” Fischer also refused Grinnell’s offer of leniency in return for his cooperation, angering the prosecutor. “Then we’ll hang you!” Grinnell shouted. “Very well,” replied Fischer, “then hang me, but don’t degrade me with any more of your rascally propositions.”71

  Discussions between Grinnell and city attorney Fred Winston as to the difficulty of proceeding without proof of the bomber’s identity came to include publisher Melville Stone. “They were in trouble,” Stone recalled. “No one knew who had actually thrown the bomb, and they both felt that this was important in the conduct of the case. I at once took the ground that the identity of the bomb thrower was of no consequence, and that, inasmuch as Spies and Parsons and Fielden had advocated over and over again the use of violence against the police and had urged the manufacture and throwing of bombs, their culpability was clear.” The prosecutors warmed at once to Stone’s idea. It would not be necessary to link the men held in custody with the bomb; their words had created the atmosphere in which the assault had taken place. They were as guilty as if they had thrown it.72

  Unfortunately for the accused, the trial was set to proceed within weeks, meaning it would take place in a Chicago still furious about the wanton murder of its policemen. The seven defendants (neither Parsons nor Schnaubelt had been found, despite a nationwide manhunt) hired two attorneys—William Perkins Black, a Civil War hero and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and criminal defense lawyer William A. Foster. (Black, it was said, was displaying more courage in representing the most despised men in America than he had in meeting the Confederate advance at the Battle of Pea Ridge.) The sitting judge was Joseph Eaton Gary, a twenty-year veteran of the Cook County Superior Court bench not known for his sympathy to the interests of workers or radicals. Black, citing the judge’s own known prejudices and the mob atmosphere surrounding the impending trial, asked that Gary recuse himself from the bench; he also sought a change of venue and separate trials for the defendants. All these requests were denied.

  On June 21, 1886, the trial opened with a dramatic flourish when through the doors of the courtroom walked Albert Parsons. After going underground in northern Illinois, he had moved on and spent several weeks laying low at the home of a sympathizer in Waukesha, Wisconsin. When the considerable buzz in the chamber had been quieted, Parsons informed Judge Gary in a clear tone, “I have come to stand trial, your honor, with my innocent comrades.”73

  Attorney Black had been instrumental in convincing Lucy Parsons that Albert should return and face the charges; he was convinced the prosecution would not be able to make the case that men who gave speeches and published newspaper editorials, however inflammatory, were responsible for a bombing with which they had no physical connection, and that Parsons’s hiding out only implied his guilt. Through Lucy, Black also had gotten the sense that Albert was too honorable a man to be content to long remain a fugitive, and too committed an anarchist to pass up the opportunity to use the trial and the accusations against him to make public his beliefs.

  Parsons didn’t fully share Black’s optimism about winning acquittal, and likely recognized that, even if miraculously set free, he and Spies and the others would be hunted down by vengeful police, relatives of the dead officers, or vigilante groups, some of whom had already issued warnings to that effect. Still, for a combination of reasons, some known only to himself, Parsons made a fateful decision, one consistent with how he had always lived his life, and surrendered to the judgment of the law.

  THE HAYMARKET TRIAL has been viewed for well over a century as a remarkable travesty of justice. With the city and the nation’s fulsome contempt for the accused at his back, Judge Gary gave himself broad latitude to bring the case to the resolution demanded. The compromises to expediency began with the jury selection. As it was virtually impossible to find potential jurors in Chicago not already convinced of the defendants’ guilt, or even willing to say they might keep an open mind about crimes allegedly committed by anarchists, the judge sought only a dubious guarantee that they would be objective in a murder trial, and then determinedly closed off the defense’s peremptory challenges. This was significant, since the trial would ultimately turn not on evidence of murder but on whether the defendants held anarchist beliefs. The result was a jury of twelve white men, not a single one of whom was a laborer or an immigrant, a few of whom even said they were friends of policemen present at Haymarket Square. Once so grossly biased a jury had been seated, Judge Gary’s denial of Black’s plea for a change of venue seemed ever more obtuse and unjust.

  The trial got under way on July 15 with the county’s Julius Grinnell laying out the prosecution’s case, abetted by extensive readings from anarchist and Socialist tracts and the testimony of compensated informants. He placed August Spies at the head of a network of bomb-throwing anarchists. According to Grinnell, Spies had orchestrated the violence at the McCormick plant on May 3 as a way to provoke outrage and violence among the city’s workmen, and had then immediately issued the “Revenge!” flyer calling for violent resistance and the next night’s rally in the Haymarket. At the gathering at Greif’s Hall on the night of May 3 the conspirators had agreed to hurl bombs at the police if they made a show of force. Samuel Fielden’s speech at the Haymarket, Grinnell explained, was intended to agitate the police and bring a response; the bomb had been thrown from the vicinity of the speakers’ wagon after the police had been drawn there. The conspirators’ ultimate hope, he asserted, was that the spilling of police blood would in turn trigger a citywide uprising of workingmen and other citizens. While the state had not been able to identify the bomber, Grinnell told the jury that “it is not necessary in this kind of case … that the individual who commits the particular offense—for instance, the man who threw the bomb … be in court at all. He need not even be indicted. The question for you to determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, encouraged it.”74

  Interestingly, a case heard in New York City the year before might have been instructive. In early 1885 Justus Schwab (the man arrested in 1874 for racing across Tompkins Square waving a red flag) had been charged with inciting to riot after an incident at an anarchist lecture in which a police captain had been crowned over the head with a chair. Dozens of police reinforcements had then rushed into the hall shouting, “Drive the loafers out!” and bludgeoning men and women audience members as they tried to flee. Schwab was an ideal target for the prosecution—a known troublemaker who ran a saloon on the Lower East Side that
was a gathering place for radicals. But there was no evidence indicating Schwab had “incited” the fighting in the hall. The district attorney harped instead on the allegation that he was a Socialist, until Schwab himself demanded, “Is Socialism on trial here, or is Justus H. Schwab on trial?” In the end the charges were dismissed after the jury declined to convict a man solely on his beliefs.75 Few if any people associated with the Haymarket trial, however, anticipated so enlightened a verdict.

  The Chicago trial carried on through the warm, humid days of summer 1886. Despite the intense heat and closeness of the courtroom, there was a daily demand for seats. The fortunate who gained entry packed their lunches, intent on sitting through every moment of the drama. The result, in the sultry atmosphere, was a courtroom “fragrant” with the smells of meat sandwiches, boiled potatoes, oranges, and bananas, and noisy at times with the crinkling of food wrappers. So desirable were good viewing places that Judge Gary opened his own riser each day to special guests, often society women of his acquaintance, who sat in chairs at his rear; the judge frequently passed personal notes to his visitors, or shared the contents of a candy dish.76

  As the trial progressed, the defense succeeded at presenting witnesses who contradicted the conspiracy Grinnell had described. The meeting at Greif’s Hall could hardly be characterized as a gathering to plot a bombing since it was open to the public, and Albert Parsons had not even been there, for he was in Ohio that evening making a speech. He had only learned of the Haymarket gathering upon arriving back in Chicago on May 4, and when he dropped by the rally, where he was glad to make a few remarks, he had with him his wife and children, curious behavior for someone aware a bomb was about to be exploded and a riot instigated. Louis Lingg had been neither at Greif’s Hall nor at the Haymarket rally, and even though it appeared he had manufactured bombs, there was no evidence linking him to the bomb in the Haymarket. It was tempting to connect the vanished Rudolph Schnaubelt to the crime, since his flight suggested guilt, but the defense was able to show that his involvement was little more than speculation, as was the prosecution’s attempt to place the bomb in the hands of either Adolph Fischer or another man, Reinhold “Big” Krueger, who could not answer for himself because he had been killed in the Haymarket.