by Philip Dray
15 New York Times, Feb. 29, 1860.
16 Molly Stark was the mother of eleven children with John Stark. Molly was highly regarded for her service as a nurse during the war and for opening her house as a hospital for her husband’s troops at the time of a smallpox epidemic; see Boston Herald, Feb. 24, 1860.
17 New York Times, Feb. 29, 1860.
18 Boston Herald, Feb. 28, 1860; see also New York Times, Feb. 29, 1860, and Boston Journal, Feb. 28, 1860.
19 New York Times, March 6, 1860.
20 Ibid.
21 New York Times, March 9, 1860.
22 Dawley, Class and Community, p. 80.
23 Lynn Reporter, March 31, 1860.
24 Bay State, March 29, 1860.
25 Lincoln quoted in Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 40.
26 Dawley, Class and Community, p. 238.
27 Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1972; originally published 1955), p. 25.
28 Fincher’s Trades’ Review, Aug. 29, 1863.
29 Ralph Korngold, Two Friends of Man: The Story of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1950), p. 369. Phillips ran for governor of Massachusetts in 1871 on the Labor-Reform ticket, demanding that government aid laboring men’s cooperatives much as the state had earlier helped corporations and railroads, while also advocating a Progressive taxation policy.
30 Korngold, Two Friends of Man, p. 365.
31 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, pp. 31–32.
32 Quoted in Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 20.
33 New York Tribune, Jan. 6, 1855, cited in Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, p. 20.
34 James C. Sylvis, The Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1872), pp. 78–79.
35 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 23.
36 William Sylvis, “Address to the Iron Molders International Union Convention,” Buffalo, New York, 1864, quoted in Charlotte Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union (New York: International Publishers, 1942), pp. 40–41.
37 Fincher’s Trades’ Review, Oct. 8 and 31, 1863.
38 Sylvis, Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, p. 15.
39 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 26.
40 Jonathan P. Grossman, William Sylvis: Pioneer of American Labor (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), p. 108.
41 Ibid., p. 240.
42 Grant’s proclamation, dated May 19, 1869, appears in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon, vol. 19 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), p. 189; Letter from Sylvis to Grant of May 27, 1869, is in Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, pp. 190–91.
43 E. L. Godkin, “Cooperation,” North American Review, Jan. 1868.
44 Ibid.
45 Fincher’s Trades’ Review, March 25, 1865.
46 New York Times, Aug. 21, 1869, in Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union, p. 107.
47 Godkin, “Cooperation.”
48 Ibid.
49 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 33.
50 Grossman, William Sylvis: Pioneer of American Labor, p. 227.
51 New York Herald, Sept. 22, 1868.
52 New York Times, Sept. 23, 1868.
53 New York World, Sept. 23, 1868, in Israel Kugler, “The Trade Union Career of Susan B. Anthony,” Labor History, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1961).
54 Proceedings of the National Labor Union, Second Annual Session, Philadelphia, 1868, Philadelphia, p. 23, in Kugler, “Trade Union Career of Susan B. Anthony.”
55 Revolution, Oct. 8, 1868, in Kugler, “Trade Union Career of Susan B. Anthony.”
56 New York World, Aug. 17, 1869.
57 Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union, p. 74.
58 Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997; originally published 1954), p. 142.
59 Indeed, race riots sparked by employment issues were almost as old as the country. In 1829 numerous blacks were killed in Cincinnati in a fracas over jobs; whites then attacked the black community itself, prompting two thousand black residents to decamp for Canada. In Philadelphia there were many such riots in the generation before the Civil War; one in 1834 lasted three days, while another outbreak in 1842 was halted only when the militia showed up bearing artillery. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998; originally published 1935), p. 18.
60 Sylvis, Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, p. 233; Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union, p. 76.
61 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pp. 354–55.
62 Ibid., p. 355.
63 Ibid., pp. 357–58.
64 Quoted in ibid., p. 364.
65 Grossman, William Sylvis: Pioneer of American Labor, pp. 262–63.
66 Edward Pinkowski, John Siney: The Miners’ Martyr (Philadelphia: Sunshine Press, 1963), p. 51.
67 “Don’t Go Down in the Mines, Dad,” from “A Discography of American Coal Miners Songs,” Labor History, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1961).
68 Louis Adamic, Dynamite!: A Century of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Books, 1934), p. 12.
69 Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 139.
70 Ibid., p. 146.
71 Pinkowski, John Siney: The Miners’ Martyr, pp. 200–202.
72 Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, pp. 145–47.
73 Ibid., p. 151.
74 Miners Journal, March 12, 1864, in Marvin Schlegel, Ruler of the Reading: The Life of Franklin B. Gowen, 1836–1889 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Archives Publishing, 1947), p. 89.
75 In 1866 Pinkerton wrote and published The History and Evidence of the Passage of Abraham Lincoln from Harrisburg, Pa., to Washington, DC on the 22nd and 23rd of February 1861, the first of fifteen gripping detective yarns published under his name.
76 For background on Allan Pinkerton see Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 17–52.
77 Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham Publishing, 1906), p. 16.
78 Miners Journal, Jan. 13, 1866, in Schlegel, Ruler of the Reading, p. 91.
79 Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton Publishing, 1877), pp. 14–15.
80 Alan Hynd, “With the Pinkertons, Through the Labyrinth of Death,” True Detective Mysteries Magazine, Nov. 1940.
81 Shenandoah Herald, Sept. 28, 1875, in Schlegel, Ruler of the Reading, pp. 111–12.
82 Schlegel, Ruler of the Reading, p. 124.
83 Morn, Eye That Never Sleeps, p. 95.
84 Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1959), p. 39.
85 Quoted in Schlegel, Ruler of the Reading, pp. 130–31.
86 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 55.
87 Ibid., p. 56.
88 New York Times, June 21, 1877.
89 Today much local pride in Schuylkill County surrounds what could be considered an antidote to the Mollie legacy, the Pottsville Maroons, an independent professional football team that won a disputed NFL championship in 1925. The Maroons booked an unauthorized exhibition game in Philadelphia against an all-star team of former Notre Dame players. The game was ordered canceled by NFL president Joe Carr, and when the Pottsville team played it anyway their franchise was suspended, sacrificing the title.
90 Quoted in David T. Burbank, Reign of Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), pp. 4–5.
91 New Yo
rk Times, Jan. 14, 1874.
92 Ibid., July 30, 1877.
93 Quoted in David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 2.
94 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 44.
95 New York Times, March 29, 1874.
96 Governor J. F. Hartranft to W. J. Falkenburg, March 29, 1874, in New York Times, March 30, 1874.
97 See Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture & Society in Industrializing America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 301–17.
98 Quoted in David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877, p. 5.
99 New York Times, Dec. 31, 1876, and Jan. 1, 1877.
100 Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1877).
101 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, pp. 36–41.
102 Irish World, June 30, 1877, in Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 67.
103 Wheeling Register, July 18, 1877, in Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 85.
104 The compromise that “solved” the disputed election of 1876 involved the Republican promise to place a Southerner in the cabinet (David Key of Tennessee), the withdrawal of the United States Army from the Reconstruction South, and “internal improvements of a national character,” in effect a much-lobbied-for congressional subsidy for Tom Scott’s planned transcontinental Texas & Pacific Railroad.
105 President Lincoln faced the issue during the war when printers went on strike and General William Rosecrans dispatched troopers to confront them. The printers sent word to Lincoln, reminding him of his praise for the Lynn shoemakers—“Thank God, we have a system where there can be a strike.” Lincoln then ordered Rosecrans to desist, saying, “Servants of the federal government should not interfere with the legitimate demands of labor.” Due to the exigencies of war, however, soldiers were deployed as replacement workers or guarded scabs when strikes impacted the war effort, and in some instances, strike leaders had been detained. See Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union, p. 44.
106 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 91. Hayes may have also been moved to assist because Tom Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, had been instrumental in clearing the way for Hayes’s assumption of the presidency. Hayes had thus far not followed through with the promised effort to aid Scott’s Texas and Pacific Railroad.
107 Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1984; originally published 1972), p. 7.
108 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, pp. 118–19.
109 Ibid., p. 120.
110 Ibid., pp. 135–36, in Brecher, Strike! p. 11. President Andrew Jackson in 1834 sent soldiers to deal with a turnout at a construction site of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
111 Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1877.
112 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 125.
113 New York Times, July 22, 1877.
114 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 62.
115 Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July 1877, pp. 907–10.
116 James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 76; Alan Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Biography of Albert R. Parsons (New York: International Publishers, 1937), p. 29.
117 Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1877.
118 Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal Versus Changing Realities (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958), p. 39; Lucy Parsons, The Life of Albert Parsons (Chicago: Lucy Parsons Publisher, 1903), p. xxvi.
119 Burbank, Reign of Rabble, p. 11.
120 Ibid., p. 5.
121 Ibid., p. 53; Brecher, Strike! p. 19.
122 Chicago Times, July 25, 1877, in Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 243.
123 Burbank, Reign of Rabble, p. 12.
124 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, pp. 225–26.
125 Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1877.
126 Dave Rodeiger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986), p. 81.
127 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 314.
128 Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1877.
129 Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, p. 314.
130 Ibid.
131 Ibid., p. 315.
CHAPTER THREE: WE MEAN TO HAVE EIGHT HOURS
1 Harry J. Carman, ed., The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), p. 35.
2 Some vocations, such as lawyer, doctor, banker, stockbroker, or anyone involved in selling or manufacturing liquor, were excluded from membership in the Knights.
3 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 135.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 142.
6 Ibid., p. 144.
7 Gompers. “What Does Labor Want?” AFL pamphlet (1893), reprinted in Pamphlets in American History series, Microfilming Corp. of America, Sanford, N.C., 1979.
8 Dave Rodeiger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986), p. 13.
9 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 146.
10 Lucy Parsons, The Life of Albert Parsons (Chicago: Lucy Parsons Publisher, 1903), p. 24.
11 Ibid., p. 15.
12 Ibid., p. 16.
13 Ibid., pp. 17–19.
14 Alarm, Dec. 21, 1887.
15 Ibid., Dec. 13, 1884.
16 Alan Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Biography of Albert R. Parsons (New York: International Publishers, 1937), pp. 57–59.
17 Louis Adamic, Dynamite!: A Century of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Books, 1934), pp. 45–46.
18 Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Biography of Albert R. Parsons, pp. 60–61.
19 Alarm, Feb. 6, 1886.
20 Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), pp. 5–7.
21 Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 164.
22 Alarm, Jan. 13, 1885.
23 Richard Drinnon, ed., Emma Goldman: Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Books, 1969; originally published 1917), p. 50.
24 Miriam Brody, “Introduction,” in Living My Life, by Emma Goldman (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; originally published 1931), p. xiv.
25 Ibid., p. xv.
26 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson (New York: Viking Press, 1928), p. 308.
27 Miriam Brody, “Introduction,” p. xvii.
28 Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886.
29 Alarm, Dec. 31, 1887.
30 Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Biography of Albert R. Parsons, p. 70.
31 Parsons linked the paper’s name to the philosopher Edmund Burke, who had written, “I love clamor when there is an abuse. The alarm disturbs the slumber of the inmates, but it awakens them to the dangers that threaten.” See Alarm, Nov. 19, 1887.
32 Alarm, Oct. 11, 1884.
33 Ibid., Dec. 13, 1884.
34 Ibid., May 20, 1885.
35 Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal Versus Changing Realities (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958), p. 41.
36 Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, p. 173.
37 Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1972; originally published 1955), p. 69.
38 Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, p. 176.
39 Chicago Tribune, Nov. 23, 1875.
40 Rodeiger and Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 78.
41 Alarm, April 18, 1885.
42 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 66.
43 Claudius O. Johnson, Carter H. Harrison I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), p. 120.
44 Harrison would serve five terms as Chicago’s mayor. He was shot to death in his home on October 23, 1893, during the Chicago World’s Fair, after admitting a frustrated
office seeker named Prendergast, “a man of the Guiteau stamp … impelled to his deed by vague semi-political promptings.” His son, Carter Harrison IV, later served multiple terms as mayor. See William Abbot, ed., Carter H. Harrison, A Memoir (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1895).
45 Alarm, July 11, 1885.
46 George Schilling, in Parsons, Life of Albert Parsons, p. xxxii.
47 Rodeiger and Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 138.
48 Alarm, Sept. 5, 1885.
49 New York Times, Sept. 4–6, 1882; New York Tribune, Sept. 5, 1882. Previously, Washington’s Birthday (Feb. 22) and July Fourth had served as occasions for displays of labor solidarity; March 18 had come to be honored as the anniversary of the Paris Commune, and in Illinois May 1, a day of ritualistic observance pagan in origin, was also occasionally used as a day of protest. In 1889, three years after the May 1 strike for the eight-hour day, May Day was declared a Socialist labor holiday by the Second International. By that same year the popularity of Labor Day, the first Monday of September, had also spread widely, as it was supported by both the Knights of Labor and the emerging labor federation that would become the AFL. Celebrated by 1890 in four hundred U.S. cities, Labor Day was established as a legal holiday by Congress in 1894.
50 Alarm, Feb. 20, 1886.
51 Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Biography of Albert R. Parsons, pp. 46–47.
52 Ibid., pp. 46–47; Parsons, Life of Albert Parsons, p. 25.
53 Alarm, April 24, 1886.
54 Chicago Mail, May 1, 1886, in Alarm, Dec. 31, 1887.
55 Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 94.
56 Rodeiger and Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook, p. 14.
57 Captain William Ward report to Frederick Ebersold, General Supervisor of Police, May 30, 1886; Chicago Police Department Reports, Haymarket Affair Digital Collection (http.//www.chicagohs.org/hadc/manuscripts/m03/MO3.htm).
58 Inspector John Bonfield report to Frederick Ebersold, General Supervisor of Police, May 30, 1886; Chicago Police Department Reports, Haymarket Affair Digital Collection (http.//www.chicagohs.org/hadc/manuscripts/m03/MO3.htm).