This is a repost of a diary I wrote two years agoon the 120th anniversary of the Haymarket bomb that forever altered the American labor movement.
I want to thank dsteffen for adding the following excerpt from Studs Terkel to the comments of a previous Haymarkey diary. It is the real reason that the Haymarket needs to be remembered today.
"I'm known around the block as a writer and broadcaster," Terkel tells me, "but also as that old guy who talks to himself. I never learnt to drive. Why should I have? The bus was there. So one day I'm on the corner alone, waiting for the 146. I'm talking to myself, finding the audience very appreciative. Then other people arrive; I talk to them too. This one couple ignore me completely. He's wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She's a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, 'Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ' honour the unions.' The guy gives me the kind of look Noël Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. 'We despise unions.' I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, 'How many hours do you work a day?' He tells me eight. 'How come you don't work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?' He can't answer that. 'Because four men got hanged for you.' I explain that I'm referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, 'How many days a week do you work?' He says five."
Terkel laughs, and takes a sip of water. "I say: 'Five – oh, really? How come you don't work six and a half ?' He isn't sure. 'Because of the Memorial Day Massacre. These battles were fought, all for you.' I tell him about that massacre of workers, in Chicago, in 1937. He's never heard of these things before. She drops her Vanity Fair. I pick it up, being gallant. I am giving it to them now: the past. Because, like James Baldwin said, without the past, there is no present. The bus arrives. They leap in. I never see them again. But I'll bet... they live in an upscale condominium that faces the bus stop. I'll bet she looks down every morning, from the 20th floor, and he says: 'Is that old nut still down there?' And can you blame them?"
http://www.independent.co.uk/...
It is part of a series that includes:
May Day, 1886 and how four citizens came to hang
May 3rd, 1886 - WORKINGMEN, TO ARMS!!
May 5th, 1886 - Rounding up the Haymarket martyrs
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Haymarket.
Always Remember.
May 4, 1886.
120 years ago tonight - one of the most significant events in American history.
It is the event that inspired the international labor holiday we call May Day.
It is the event that forever altered the labor movement.
It is the event that revealed the brutality of the class divide in America.
120 years ago tonight a bomb exploded in a crowd of Chicago police officers who were trying to silence the speakers at a labor rally.
It's often referred to as the "Haymarket Riot", yet no riot occurred. For years, the city of Chicago treated it as such. Rather than face the truth, the leaders of the city cherry-picked the facts and stuck to their story that the brave and heroic Police Department put down an anarchist rebellion.
That is as far from the truth as one can imagine.
Arguably, the Haymarket Bombing was not the result of any organized movement. Instead it was the result of a series of mistakes and miscommunications.
It begins with the announcement of the meeting itself.
Great
MASS-MEETING
TO-NIGHT, at 7:30 o'clock
at the
HAYMARKET, Randolph St, bet. Desplaines and Halsted
Good speakers will be present to denounce the latest atrocious act of the police, the shooting of our fellow-workmen yesterday afternoon
This is the circular that was widely distributed throughout the city. No specific speakers are mentioned, because none were confirmed. In fact, many of the labor movement's best speakers (including Albert Parsons) were almost no-shows. It also promises nothing but a denouncement of the previous day's violence. There is nothing here that should have alerted the police force, the Mayor, or the business community to a "riot" of any size.
But there was also this circular - all of which were supposed to have been destroyed after one small print run.
Attention Workingmen - Mass Meeting
To-night at 7:30 o'clock at the Haymarket, Randolph Street betwn Des Plaines and Halsted.
Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force
It was August Spies, the German-born editor of city's largest German-language newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, who testified in his own defense that he ordered this circular destroyed. He stated that a threat of violence would result in a smaller crowd and that it would give the police an excuse to crush them.
Unfortunately, Spies was wrong.
Not all of these circulars were destroyed.
In fact, at least one ended up in the hands of the police department. It was because of the threat of armed workingmen appearing in "full force" just one block from a police station that put the police on edge.
Much of May 4th, 1886 was a normal day for Chicago's workers and labor leaders. Albert and Lucy Parsons met again with representatives of the sewing girls - many as young as twelve - who were trying to organize in order to better protect themselves from their abusive bosses. Albert and Lucy were scheduled to speak later that evening at another labor meeting. Others like stone hauler and labor organizer Samuel Fielden chose not to attend the Haymarket rally because if Parsons wasn't going it mustn't be that important. It was only a personal appeal from August Spies that got Parsons and Fielden to change their plans and attend.
It was not a normal day for Police Captain John Bonfield and his men - 200 of whom had assembled one block away at the Desplaines Avenue station. Bonfield and his men waited until 7:30 for the start of the meeting. Prepared to retaliate against the working men who would soon "appear in full force."
Nature tried to conspire against them all. Dark clouds and rain thinned the crowds. 7:30 came and went. By 8:30 the crowds were even more sparse. Parsons and Fielden would finally arrive. But Parsons spoke only briefly before retiring to a nearby saloon to get his wife and children out of the rain. Spies succeeded in exciting the crowd of just a few hundred - far less than the tens of thousands he had hoped for.
By all measures, the Haymarket meeting was a bust. It was so uneventful that Mayor Carter Harrison, who had arrived on horseback to make sure that no violence occurred, left convinced that the event was "tame."
By now Bonfield knew he must act or give up a chance to crush the increasingly irritating labor movement. He gathered his men - 200 strong - and marched them towards the speaker's cart (just adjacent to the Haymarket Square).
He ordered the crowd to disperse.
Samuel Fielden, who was addressing the still-thinning crowd, insisted to Bonfield that -
"We are peaceable!"
But Bonfield only grew more determined to shut down the rally.
And then it happened.
A bomb.
At the trial that followed in July of 1886, numerous witnesses would say it came from the mouth of Crane's alley. None would agree on the description of who threw it. The night, remember, was dark and rainy. Witnesses for the prosecution would say with certainty that they saw the bombthrower (identified by many as Rudolf Schnaubelt who was arrested and inexplicably released). These same witnesses would also freely admit that they accepted payment from the police for their testimony.
The bomb - a small cast iron "shell bomb" about the size of a softball - hurled over the heads of the police and hit one Mathias J. Degan, killing him instantly. In the fog of war, police fired indiscriminately wounding countless workers who would be dragged off by families and friends rather than face arrest. Seven policemen would receive fatal gunshot wounds - not from the workers, but from the pistols of their fellow officers.
By the end of the night, the floors of the police station were puddle with the blood of the dead and injured.
Fearing retaliation come morning, Albert Parsons would flee to Wisconsin to the home of a trusted subscriber of Parson's newspaper The Alarm. Lucy and their children would pray for Albert's safety. August Spies, meanwhile, would prepare the printing press for tomorrow's edition of the Arbeiter-Zeitung.
And the business leaders of the city would go to bed realizing that, while it was not Anarchist blood that was shed at the Haymarket, things had still gone their way.
Now, they had the chance to hang Parsons and Spies.