The American: A Middle Western Legend

by Howard Fast

  “Well, these are the crimes I have committed. They found a revolver in my house and a red flag there. I organized trade unions. I was for reduction of the hours of labor, and the education of the laboring man, and the reestablishment of the workingman’s newspaper. There is no evidence to show that I was connected with the bomb-throwing, or that I was near it, or anything of that kind. So I am only sorry, your honor—that is, if you can stop it or help it—I will ask you to do it—that is, to hang me, too; for I think it is more honorable to die suddenly than to be killed by inches. I have a family and children; and if they know their father is dead, they will bury him. They can go to the grave and kneel down by the side of it; but they can’t go to the penitentiary and see their father, who was convicted of a crime that he hasn’t anything to do with. That is all I have got to say. Your honor, I am sorry I am not to be hung with the rest of the men.”

  There were times when, reading something like this, in the early hours of the morning, Altgeld would simply stop, cease to act and react, and find himself and his thoughts suspended in a limbo—out of which he would painfully crawl—tired, beaten. Sometimes, Emma would come in and find him that way, and say to him, “Come to bed, Pete, it’s, so late.” “This business, my God, Emma, Schilling came and pleaded with me, and I didn’t listen.” “But now you’ll make it right, Pete,” thinking, anything, so the dead would lie dead. “I can’t bring them back,” he would say. “I can’t make Parsons alive.” “You didn’t hang Parsons.” “I hanged him. We all did.” “Well, that’s because you’re tired. You’re talking that way because, you’re tired.” “Emma, I’m going to fight them, I’m going to fight them to hell and be damned.” “Don’t swear, please, Pete—come to bed.” “But it was rotten, from top to bottom, right from the beginning when that son of a bitch, Melville Stone, the stinking editor of a lousy daily wrote the verdict of the coronor’s jury and boasted than, before the trial ever began, that it was fixed and they would die. And then a dirty little bailiff, Ryce, you remember him, he took bets they would die because he had instructions and money to fix the jury—” “Stop talking that way, Pete.” “But I’ve seen dirty things—it’s not Sunday School, being a politician—but I’ve never seen anything like this.” “You’ll make yourself sick over it.” “I am. Emma, this is going to break like a bat out of hell.” “What are you afraid of?” “You’re not afraid?” She said, “What have I been afraid of, with you in it? I don’t understand these things, but I haven’t tried to stop you. You do what’s right, that’s all.” “How do I know what’s right?” “You know.” “Well, they want me to pardon these men because they’re afraid, all of them, Stone is afraid, and Ryce and Gary, because they’re none of them sure their religion is a lie and there isn’t a hell for them to roast in, but just to pardon these poor bastards and say that they’re guilty and write a clean slate for the men who murdered Parsons and Spies, by God, I won’t do that. I won’t do it. I swear to God I’ll do what I please!” “You will, Pete.” “I’m all right, don’t look at me like that, only I’m mad.”

  His anger became meticulous. He read every word, every line. He saw that the jury was framed, but he had to prove it for himself, and he itemized the proof. He made for himself a brief that would stand up in a court of the gods. He came to the conclusion that Judge Gary, who had tried the case, was the most deliberate judicial murderer in all civilized history, but that too he had to prove, and he worked down to the essence of fact, so far as it was given to any man to know the facts. That, in relation to all this, a qualitative change was occurring within him, he knew, nor did he resist any longer that change taking place. Here were the facts and here was the case, and now he was sitting as judge, by the sovereign right and decision of the people of Illinois. The forged testimony, the perjury, the inventions of a hundred hired spies, the statements of thugs and degenerates, the confused blubberings of the human wrecks who came out of the police torture cells—all of this happening in his own beloved city, in his own Chicago, and he hadn’t known.

  Now he knew. He told himself, if this was his last case, he would judge it as a judge should. And then he wouldn’t take what came quietly—he’d fight. There were long hours when he thought of democracy, what it meant, what it might be. There was a theory that no one had ever tried, except perhaps Tom Jefferson, long, long ago, and sometimes it seemed to him that another could try it, take democracy and make a fight of it—

  He sometimes thought that if he could come out of this with his head on his shoulders, he could make a fight of it.

  XI

  It can’t be said entirely how a man changes, why he changes, what ferments in him, what juices run together and come to a slow boil; for there are a hundred thousand factors unaccountable, not to be listed in any set of books. The child is the father of the man, and the child has his father too, and even the beating rain and the shining sun go to temper a man; sometimes change ferments slowly, sometimes quickly; sometimes change boils in rage; and sometimes there is an iron rod in a man that resists change, or a soggy clay core that soaks it up and never shows a difference.

  The change in Altgeld, seeping through him now, inside and outside, doing quiet things inside, etching lines on his face outside—this change was not a thing entirely, not altogether, not accountable and not to be graphed. He was sailing, suddenly, a sea he had never really charted; nor was he too familiar with the charts of others. He was looking at persons newly and freshly; for example, his wife, the wonderful, calm Emma, had become a rock, closer to him than ever before, but, on the other hand, Schilling was understandable and pitiful; Whitlock was a boy such as he might have had, yet the emptiness of his childlessness was not the way it had been. A processional was filing in, and out of his memory form took shape, the wanderers on the many roads of the land, the men who had swung pick and shovel, the hard-handed, brown-faced farmers of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, Missouri, scraping at the soil in epic hopelessness, for they had had nothing commensurate with their labors, nor would they, the evil-faced criminals who had stood before his bench, whipped and broken and turned into devils, the thousands of stolid workers, so bitterly silent, walking behind the coffins of Spies and Parsons and the others, the bereaved and the tear-stained, the homeless and hopeless and cold and hungry, and the shadow upon them of the towers that were reared over the land, such towers as his own great Unity Building—they filed in, processional-like, and they filled a space.

  Yet the change was slow, stumbling, uncertain; where he sought for markers on the many roads, there were none, and those whom he tried to remember for sustenance, the Lincolns, the Jacksons, the Jeffersons and Paines—they had no certainty of direction to give him. He put out his hands and he felt his way, and most of the time his hands met so little that his reaction was more of fear than of hope.

  XII

  When he did a thing, he simply felt that he must do it, Downstate, at Decatur, a black man was dragged from a jail and lynched. A year ago, two years ago, three years ago this would have been a natural and accepted part of the landscape. In this landscape you built your house and earned your bread, a million dollars of it. If men hungered, starved, sinned, or were lynched, the world was so, and you accepted it. Now he accepted nothing: Burning with rage, he talked to newspapermen.

  “This,” he said, “is not civilization, not decency, but barbarism. You and I were down there participating in that lynching—so was every good citizen of this state. Don’t think any different. And the shame is ours.”

  Still he was not satisfied. He sat down and wrote a proclamation to the people of Illinois:

  “Being authoritatively advised that at two o’clock this morning a mob broke down the doors of the jail at Decatur, overpowered the officers of the law, took from his cell a Negro confined there, dragged him out and killed him by hanging him to a post nearby, I hereby denounce this cowardly and diabolical act as not only murder under our laws, but as a disgrace to our civilization and a blot upon the fair name of our Stat
e.…”

  It set him to thinking of civilization, of all that the very word implied. Joe Martin had a code of ethics based on gambling, on graft and the buying and selling of votes, yet it was civilized compared to the code of Phil Armour or Cyrus McCormick; yet what was Altgeld’s own code in this state where a man was dragged from a jail and murdered by a mob?

  He was emerging from the nightmare word-welter of Hay-market. The dead would sleep in peace, even if there was no peace for him. He said to Emma:

  “My darling, we’re going to see something no one in America ever saw before.”

  XIII

  A week after the lynching, he sat down to write. He began late one evening, a pile of white paper clean and virgin on his desk, a single sheet upon which he had written:

  “Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebé and Schwab, by John P. Altgeld—”

  He wrote without much hesitation. He knew what he wanted to say, and the words flowed from his pen:

  “On the night of May 4, 1886, a public meeting was held on Haymarket Square in Chicago; there were from 800 to 1000 people present, nearly all being laboring men. There had been trouble, growing out of the effort to introduce the eight-hour day, resulting in some collisions with the police, in one of which several laboring people were killed, and this meeting was called as a protest against alleged police brutality.

  “The meeting was orderly and was attended by the mayor, who remained until the crowd began to disperse and then went away. As soon as Capt. John Bonfield, of the police department, learned that, the mayor had gone, he took a detachment of police and hurried to the meeting for the purpose of dispersing the few who remained, and as the police approached the place of meeting a bomb was thrown by some unknown person, which exploded and wounded many and killed several policemen, among the latter being one Mathias Degan. A number of people were arrested and after a time August Spies, Albert R. Parsons, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Oscar Neebe were indicted for the murder of Mathias Degan. The prosecution could not discover who had thrown the bomb and could not bring the really guilty men to justice, and, as some of the men indicted were not at the Haymarket meeting and had nothing to do with it, the prosecution was forced to proceed on the theory that the men indicted were guilty of murder because it was claimed they had at various times in the past uttered and printed incendiary and seditious language, practically advising the killing of policemen, of Pinkerton men and others acting in that capacity, and that they were therefore responsible for the murder of Mathias Degan. The public was greatly excited and after a prolonged trial all of the defendants were found guilty; Oscar Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment and all of the other defendants were sentenced to be hanged. The case was carried to the supreme court and was there affirmed in the fall of 1887. Soon thereafter Lingg committed suicide. The sentence of Fielden and Schwab was commuted to imprisonment for life, and Parsons, Fischer, Engel and Spies were hanged, and the petitioners now ask to have Neebe, Fielden and Schwab set at liberty.

  “The several thousand merchants, bankers, judges, lawyers and other prominent citizens of Chicago who have by petition, by letter and in other ways urged executive clemency, mostly base their appeal on the ground that, assuming the prisoners to be guilty, they have been punished enough, but a number of them who have examined the case more carefully, and are more familiar with the record and with the facts disclosed by the papers on file, base their appeal on entirely different grounds. They assert:

  “First—That the jury which tried the case was a packed jury selected to convict.

  “Second—That according to the law as laid down by the supreme court, both prior to and again since the trial of this case, the jurors, according to their own answers, were not competent jurors and the trial was therefore not a legal trial.

  “Third—That the defendants were not proven to be guilty of the crime charged in the indictment.

  “Fourth—That as to the defendant Neebé, the state’s attorney had declared at the close of the evidence that there was no case against him, and yet he has been kept in prison all these years.

  “Fifth—That the trial judge was either so prejudiced against the defendants, or else so determined to win the applause of a certain class in the community that he could not and did not grant a fair trial.

  “Upon the question of having been punished enough I will simply say that if the. defendants had a fair trial, and nothing has developed since to show that they are not guilty of the crime charged in the indictment, then there ought to be no executive interference, for no punishment under our laws could then have been too severe. Government must defend itself; life and property must be protected and law and order must be maintained; murder must be punished, and if the defendants are guilty of murder, either committed with their own hands or by someone else acting on their advice, then, if they have had a fair trial, there should be in this case no executive interference. The soil of America is not adopted for the growth of anarchy. While our institutions are not free from injustice, they are still the best that have yet been devised, and therefore must be maintained.”

  So he began this paper, feeling not too different from a man who writes his own death warrant, yet feeling also an excitement and wonder at his own actions; for, as his friend Judge Tree pointed out, he was taking a course not too different from Parsons’, a course which almost all men avoid because inherent in it are seeds of destruction. But with the course laid down, for all that it was, poorly charted, he could not turn aside; excitement won out over fear; and for the first time in all his life he felt some of that curious peace which can only come from a solution, partial or otherwise, of the terrible contradictions which begin to destroy a thoughtful man, almost from the moment he applies his thoughts to justice or injustice.

  Emma saw it; he was more gentle with her; things so small as passing a dish at dinner became an extension of what went on within him. If they had not started with love, she had no doubts as to what she felt for him now. She went away from his room one evening choked up with emotion, her eyes wet, yet at the same time with a buoyancy she had never known before. She didn’t try to understand his actions; he was doing a brave thing, and though her own reaction surprised her, she was somehow not sad that things would not ever be the way they were. She had hitched her star to something when she married the awkward bumpkin of a country schoolteacher, but what was impossible to him when here he was, Governor of the state, and doing something which every sober friend of hers had assured her would ruin him? But she had stopped listening to her sober friends, and when coming from his room, she met the Governor’s secretary and was asked, “Is he working on the pardon now, Mrs. Altgeld?” she said, “Yes.” “It will be a blow, I’m afraid.” “It will be all right,” she said.

  After a time, Pete Altgeld felt it would be all right too. There was enough potency in the cold facts he put down on paper. He proved that the jury was fixed. Piling up thousands of words of sworn evidence, he summarized it thus in his pardon message:

  “It is shown that he [Ryce, the special bailiff] boasted while selecting jurors that he was managing this case; that these fellows would hang certain as death; that he was calling such men as the defendants would have to challenge-peremptorily and waste their challenges on, and that when their challenges were exhausted they would have to take such men as the prosecution wanted.”

  He inserted affidavits; he reproduced verbatim testimony of examination of the jurors who finally sat on the case, as for example that of H. T. Sanford:

  “Q. Have you an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendants of the murder of Mathias J. Degan?

  “A. I have.

  “Q. From all that you have heard and that you have read, have you an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendants of throwing the bomb?

  “A. Yes, sir; I have.

  “Q. Have you a prejudice against socialists and communists?

  “A. Yes, sir;
a decided prejudice.

  “Q. Do you believe that prejudice would influence your verdict in this case?

  “A. Well, as I know so little about it, it is a pretty hard question to answer. I have an opinion in my own mind that the defendants encouraged the throwing of that bomb.”

  Case after case of this sort, Altgeld quoted, concluding finally:

  “No matter what the defendants were charged with, they were entitled to a fair trial, and no greater danger could possibly threaten our institutions than to have the courts of justice run wild or give way to popular clamor, and when the trial judge in this case ruled that a relative of one of the men who was killed was a competent juror, and this after the man had candidly stated that he was deeply prejudiced and that his relationship caused him to feel more strongly than he otherwise might, and when in scores of instances he ruled that men who candidly declared that they believed the defendants to be guilty; that this was a deep conviction and would influence their verdict, and that it would require strong evidence to convince them that the defendants were innocent, when in all these instances the trial judge ruled that these men were competent jurors, simply because they had, under his adroit manipulation, been led to say that they believed they could try the case fairly on the evidence, then the proceedings lost all semblance of a fair trial.”

  Then he went on to give his opinion of the judge. He felt no mercy, no charity toward Gary; he had sat on a bench himself—he knew well enough the extent of any judge’s power. Recently, in a magazine article, Judge Gary had reviewed the Haymarket case, and now Altgeld quoted from Gary’s article:

  “‘The conviction,’ Gary wrote, ‘has not gone on the ground that they did have actually any personal participation in the particular act which caused the death of Degan, but the conviction proceeds upon the ground that they had generally, by speech and print, advised large classes of the people, not particular individuals, but large classes, to commit murder, and had left the commission, the time and place and when, to the individual will and whim, or caprice, or whatever it may be, of each individual man who listened to their advice, and that in consequence of that advice, and influenced by that advice, somebody not known did throw the bomb that caused Degan’s death. Now, if this is not a correct principle of the law, then the defendants of course are entitled to a new trial. The case is without precedent; there is no example in the law books of a case of this sort.’”