James Green.
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Excerpts:
The Haymarket case refuses to die because it involves so many troubling questions about the causes of violent conflict and the limits of free speech, about the justice of conspiracy trials and the fairness of the death penalty and about the treatment of immigrants, particularly foreign-born radicals, by the police, the newspapers and the courts. And perhaps most troubling of all, the Haymarket case challenged, like no other episode in the nineteenth century, the image of the United States as a classless society with liberty and justice for all.*On May 2 the largest Chicago employers refused to obey the new law and ordered their employees back to work for the customary ten or eleven hours. In response, worker protests and strikes closed railroad car shops, shipping depots, lumberyards and wood-planing mills. In the Irish section of Bridgeport, workers shut down all the packinghouses and rolling mills.*While the city enjoyed a lavish centennial celebration on July 4, Medill anguished over the future of the nation, “great in all the powers of a vast empire,” but “weak and poor in social morality as compared with one hundred years ago.”4*The ensuing confrontation on July 22 between the soldiers and huge crowds resulted in a bloodbath when encircled militiamen fired on the protesters. Twenty people died, including a woman and a child. The immigrant neighborhoods erupted in fury. By the time the Battle of Pittsburgh ended, enraged crowds had killed several militiamen, driven the National Guard from the city, destroyed millions of dollars of railroad property, derailed trains, dismantled roundhouses and burned Union Depot to the ground.*IN THE EARLY 1880S, few American social commentators, other than the socialists, believed class consciousness could emerge in the United States, because of its open frontier, its endless opportunities for entrepreneurs and its vaunted democracy. Class hatred existed in Europe, but in America it existed only in the minds of deluded socialists.*Beginning in March of 1886, a strange enthusiasm took hold of wage-earning people in industrial centers across the nation as the dream of an eight-hour day suddenly seemed within their grasp. The agitation for shorter hours appeared to be everywhere by April, drawing thousands of unorganized workers into the swelling ranks of the Knights of Labor. Soon a strike fever gripped the nation’s workforce; it peaked on May 1, when 350,000 laborers from coast to coast joined in a coordinated general strike for the eight-hour day.*THE MANY ACCOUNTS OF what happened that night in Chicago are in rough agreement up until the moment that Captain Ward gave the order to disperse; then the testimonies offered by witnesses diverge wildly.*The night of terror in the Haymarket challenged commentators to find words that could capture the horror of the event and the evil of the men who caused it. The urge to describe, label and signify went far beyond the white-hot editorials in Chicago papers. Every editor in the country had his say. Western newspapermen said frontier justice should be applied to the lawless city*When the jury had rendered its verdict and its death sentences on August 20, few trade unionists commented in the press. Still, the news that came from Judge Gary’s courtroom alarmed many workers, who now feared losing their rights to protest and speak out in anger. A dangerous precedent had been set that day: if some kind of lethal violence occurred after the trade unionists freely assembled and expressed themselves, then their leaders could be indicted and tried as accessories to murder.*“They were called Anarchists,” said Black. “They were painted and presented to the world as men loving violence, riot and bloodshed for their own sake. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were men who loved peace, men of gentle instincts, men of gracious tenderness of heart, loved by those who knew them, trusted by those who came to know the loyalty and purity of their lives.” They had lived for a revolution that would create a new society based on cooperation instead of coercion. Black said he did not know if such a society was possible in America, but he did know that through the ages poets, philosophers and Christian believers had lived for the day when righteousness would reign on the earth,*It is impossible to say exactly what might have been different if the police hadn’t killed those strikers at McCormick’s, if the chief inspector hadn’t decided to break up the Haymarket meeting, if someone hadn’t thrown the bomb, but it is clear that, in some sense, we are today living with the legacy of those long-ago events.
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