The Chicago Haymarket Affair

A Guide to a Labor Rights Milestone

Joseph Anthony Rulli

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781467135740
• eBook ISBN: 9781439658208
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This history and guide presents the significant sites and events of the Haymarket Square riot, a major turning point in the fight for workers' rights. On May 4th, 1886, a bomb exploded during a labor demonstration near Haymarket Square in Chicago. The ensuing gunfire and chaos brought a grisly end to what began as peaceful support for an eight-hour workday. With both officers and civilians dead, newspapers proclaimed an anarchist conspiracy. The investigation led to the trial and execution of rally organizers. The incident also drew irrevocable attention to debates about workers' rights and the role of law enforcement that continues today. In this guide to the key moments and sites of one of Chicago's most confusing and chaotic events, author Joseph Anthony Rulli aims to establish a clearer understanding of its historical significance.

CHAPTER 1

LET’S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT

My third grade teacher, Sister Consortia, of the Order of St. Francis, provided me (unbeknownst to her and not realized by me until four decades later) with an appropriate metaphor for the premise of this book. While, yes, it is a book about the Haymarket Affair and the sites connected to it, it’s going to be, I hope, a very beneficial exercise in “rubber necking.” In our classroom, anyone caught looking around, gawking at something that was none of their business while she was speaking or while one should have been doing desk work would be singled out: “X! Quit your rubber necking!” And she would move on. Well, she will forgive me for engaging in such verboten activity.

The objective study of history necessitates a certain amount of rubber necking—stretching ourselves so that we can get a better look at what was happening at a particular time and place, poking around in areas that might not necessarily seem to be in our purview. The historian needs to be a snoop. He or she needs to get the nose where it doesn’t naturally go. The goal is to have a better record of the human story and to remind ourselves of that story.

There’s the saying from George Santayana, published in 1905, where he claims that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The furtherance of the thought is that those who can remember the past are condemned to watch those ignorant of history repeat it. And so we have the human experience here and now, almost two decades deep into the twenty-first century. We have this knack for seeing ourselves, our times, our experiences as unique to us, and this clouds our ability to creatively think through effective solutions to some of the most gripping problems we face.

It was said in 2001 that the attacks on September 11 changed the world. In a sense it was true: the list of nations touched firsthand by international terrorism got one of its largest members ever. By the explosions, dust and blood at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and around Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the United States was initiated into a club that was becoming less and less exclusive. The worldwide fight against organized chaos would never be the same.

However, at the same time, “9/11” changed mainly the North American perception of terrorism; a large portion of the world had been experiencing such acts for decades throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was only in late 2001 that it was stepped up on a personal level in the United States.

It’s good to remember, though, that even here we had not been free from this type of violence. One need only recall the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the string of shootings at U.S. post offices by postal workers since 1983 (from which the term “going postal” originated), the countless acts of gang violence from the vintage Mafia days to the present blood feuds running from Bogotá to all points North American. All highlight the tragedy of the human experience of violence at the hands of anyone with an agenda and the money, power and will to sacrifice others for it.

Added to this mix in our day are the horrifying experiences of a largely young, African American, male population and the police. Too often for our comfort have news outlets shined a light on the brutality of the urban scene, the conflict between citizens (criminals and non-criminals) and officers (law-abiding and law-breaking) that blurs the line between civic safeguarding and outright military engagement. With a waterfall-like abundance of armaments available to the lawless element, law enforcement seems to have taken on the dystopian view of safety-at-all-costs that has led to an apparent nationwide “shoot to kill” command to reinstate civil order.

Our present circumstance of unrest is not unique to history. While racial prejudice and tensions have existed for far too long, social tensions in general have ample examples for us. In this city alone, through the 1968 protests/riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination and at the Democratic Convention, the 1919 race riots, the numerous “Red Scares” since the late nineteenth century, we can see fuses of all types being laid down, lit and exploding. Roots of these tendencies can be traced back nationwide to the first major case of drawn blood in this country: the protests that led to the British military firing on colonists in Boston in 1770.

The Haymarket bombing in Chicago on May 4, 1886—the first civilian bombing in the United States—smeared the face of the American public with a blood that would not easily wipe off. For some, it was to serve as the battle cry of a new life for the working class in the city, the nation and the world; but it left others in the city, country and across the globe frightened and suspicious of liberty and equality, ever-cautious about the reality of human fraternity—two very different perspectives.

All actions and inactions have consequences, and sometimes these consequences are experienced for years and generations afterward, as in places like Ireland, South Africa and the “Holy Land.” The events of May 4 over 130 years ago have affected how most Americans view Socialism,¹ May Day and, to a certain point, the labor movement and social reform.

The cultural scene wasn’t always suspicious of reform. This book will explore in a cursory fashion the events that occurred and changed the attitudes of the typical American citizen to support the capitalist power structure of the Industrial Age, keeping quite a distance from Socialistic principles, even when these principles upheld basic protections to the worker and consumer against unjust wages, exorbitant industrial profit and rising consumer prices. The causes of this shift came relatively quickly; from the time of the Civil War until the bomb was thrown in 1886, one generation, the security of industry was assured and labor had to wait until the shadows of the Second World War encroached to reap somewhat of the harvest sown over fifty years prior.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was intended by the author as a Socialist manifesto in 1906—much more down to earth than Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. But the novel doesn’t have its high status in the realm of American literature for this reason. Through the story of a struggling Lithuanian family, Sinclair unintentionally exposed the horribly unsanitary conditions of the food production industry at the turn of the century. We as a people couldn’t tolerate a Socialist muckraker, so we sanitized him and heaped accolades on him, grateful for the part he played in the eventual creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Similarly, Eugene Debs is the only Socialist presidential candidate to tally significant votes (6 percent of the total votes cast, almost one million votes, in the 1912 election), but even at the writing of this book, Bernie Sanders (whether he wins or not) wouldn’t be anywhere near the level he presently has reached close to the end of the primaries had he run as a Socialist.

There is something intolerable to the psyche of this country concerning this political philosophy, and its roots predate the Haymarket bombing. Violence, subversion, confiscation of property, suppression of worker incentive and totalitarianism (thanks, Uncle Joe Stalin!) are all brought out as evidence against it. And the same reasoning has led to the American celebration of Labor Day in September rather than on May 1. Distance from anything approaching radicalism has been accepted as a cultural value, and it’s important to explore how it came about and why it’s still this way.

Again, we are who we are as a people because we are who we are as individuals. Individuals are hopeful, proud, loving, fearful, vengeful, petty; we possess a long memory for resentment and are probably too amnesiac for our own good when it comes to root causes of things. As individuals we make up “a people.” We as individuals make up a society, national attitudes and cultural mores—everything we mean when we talk about the clump of human beings in a particular place at a specific time. I hope that this work is like a mirror in addition to a brief history—less a gavel of judgment and more a bench upon which to stand and look out as well as to sit and reflect. Reflection is a fading art, but for a people to survive more than simply in a day-to-day fashion, that people needs to pause and contemplate higher realms—the places that exist above food courts, movie theaters and sports arenas.

Equally true, we need to admit the reality that events are perceived through less than 20/20 vision. All history is told, whether firsthand or not, through flawed human interpretation, tainted by some ignorance and more-than-we’d-like-to-admit personal biases. We remember specific things about specific events, but so does everyone else. Each of our filters are different, and those differences add color to the telling of stories—a great asset for creating a narrative but a little vexing for news reporting and history writing. This point cannot be overly stressed. Because of our limited ability to remember exactly or in total objectivity, it remains so important to understand past events by studying them more carefully.

As individuals who interact with other individuals daily, face to face or in the electronic sphere, we have an obligation to get at facts. The classic rumor mill that has never experienced a work stoppage and the simplistic acceptance of stories posted online that spreads like the stink of a backed up sewer pipe show that we have so far to go before we can reach the level of “doing” good history.

By studying history in general and a particular moment in the past, one becomes better able to understand circumstances here and now. If we can take an event such as the Haymarket Affair and study it as objectively as possible, we may be able to understand our situation today better. Where did the main players of the trial follow the law or follow their passion or fear? And how do we, today, behave in similar ways? If one of the hot button issues today is police brutality, then we could study the past, particularly in Chicago, and bring history to bear on our present needs. For example, it does no one any good to say that this city’s problems of institutionalized racism and police violence go back a half century; the record is clear that suspicion of and violence against foreigners and outsiders of all stripes and skin tones have been among some of the few consistencies in this city almost since its founding. And in fairness, it must be admitted that it’s of little help to finger point, to blame with no constructive alternative plan. Protest for its own sake doesn’t raise anyone to a better situation, but rallying for a cause, with alternative propositions presented—even presented loudly—is much more faithful to the greater cause of liberty and human progress.

Tensions among a people have always been and will be with us as long as two or more people hang around each other for any length of time. Solutions come with greater understanding. This work shows that the instances of civil strife, which predate the War Between the States, rose in Chicago and very rarely were met with anything but ignorance, fear and their best-known offspring, hatred and violence. No amount of hiding from, discoloring or distorting what actually happened in the past can make our present problems any better. It would be the same for a doctor examining a patient and seeing the family history of breast cancer: the physician’s denial of the preponderance of the disease in a particular family won’t cause the cancer to not appear or automatically go into remission or do anything but what it will do. The study of history has to be as honest and courageous as a doctor and patient in such a situation.

In our present day, we have access to as complete an archive of the documented material of the Haymarket bombing, jury selection, trial proceedings, initial judgment, appeals and final judgment as we most likely will ever be able to find. The digitized trial transcripts allow students and historians anywhere in the world easy access to invaluable primary source material. And, since 2011, more light has been spread out over the whole story in a more even manner. The first historian to utilize these digital files in their totality, Timothy Messer-Kruse, has enabled those who follow (me included) a clear path to this more evenly dispersed light of historical truth.

In what has been traditionally seen as an illegal trial with a biased judge, an out-for-blood prosecuting attorney against a black banner–waving, crusade-fighting defense team isn’t so clear cut anymore. According to the transcripts and Messer-Kruse’s research into late nineteenth-century Illinois law, the investigation and trial were carried out in scrupulous detail.

However, it does need to be stated emphatically over and over again that state and federal law concerning strikes, rallies, public speech, the property-less class, police tactics, searches and seizures, arrests, conspiracy charges and all the other points on which the Haymarket Affair touches were consistently found to favor individuals and corporations of wealth and political power and the general defenders of structure and order in society’s life.²

To put it briefly, the state, through Prosecutor Julius Grinnell and Judge Joseph Gary, reacted in the only way possible to ensure the status quo—that things (life, work, power) remained the same. In fairness, though, the defense team of William Black, Moses Solomon, Sigmund Zeisler and William Foster was inexperienced in a trial for a capital crime. Some of their mistakes were catastrophic for the eight accused. The attorneys could have requested separate trials for their clients, and most likely, Parsons and Spies would have been spared the scaffold.

The defense was supportive of the bailiff, Henry L. Ryce, chosen to go out and find potential jurors to question.³ A reading of the Chicago Daily Tribune on the day after jury selection had been completed shows the list of the twelve empanelled. Most of the men were low-level company employees, salesmen or self-employed. Not one would be seen then or now as wealthy—but also, to keep the balance, none of them was at all sympathetic to the cause of Socialism or Anarchism either.⁴

So this leaves us with quite the task and not a little more responsibility to get at facts that aren’t as easily attainable as simply keying in a word for an online search. Accessible as the information is, it still requires sifting through and applying our rational capacity in order to interpret events, sometimes judge historical personages and oftentimes reevaluate preconceived notions of past events. We cannot be satisfied with a smug Facebook-style posting of bumper sticker wisdom that supports one position and ridicules those who think differently, waddling in bigotry with intolerance sticking to us like sludge from a swamp. This is the kind of behavior that over the past several years has led to our inability to debate real issues (or really to debate at all), and we have ended up with presidential candidates talking at, yelling at, sniping at one another in the gutter style of The Jerry Springer Show rather than reaching the heights of the Olympian-like philosophy of Plato’s Republic.

The best way out of the muck is to first reach up and climb from the pit, then towel off and begin the further ascent to something better, more dignified, more respectful, more hopeful. The historical record and our own rational, human capacity to think are our ladders and clean linen. We can wash ourselves in the bath of a truth that’s already accessible to us. We have merely to think, to use that one single capacity that among all the rest differentiates us from our fellow creatures on this planet. To answer probing questions is a great gift that becomes only possible with our reason.

What are the similarities and differences today as compared to the labor scene in post–Civil War industrialized Chicago? And what can these teach us about contemporary challenges—from state-sponsored terrorism, to “active shooters” in schools and workplaces, to urban unrest, to labor issues today? How can we best assess past events and have them help us to honestly converse with one another about solutions today?

This work seeks to explore these questions through an outline of the Haymarket Affair and an exploration of related sites in the city in the hopes of shedding light on our contemporary situation for the benefit of all. Sister Consortia, who experienced the unfolding of nearly a full century during her lifetime, would approve of this rubber necking, this snooping around and getting into other people’s business for the furtherance of knowledge and the good of humanity. She and her fellow sisters spent and spend their lives teaching the young by word and work, and like the human race in general, students sometimes think they have the solutions—and maybe some of them do. But if they hold keys to solving the social ills of our time, it’s not because such solutions will have been dropped in their laps. It’s because they will have worked with the rest of us, past and present, in finding ways to live with one another in harmony.

CHAPTER 2

AYN RAND COULD KICK KARL MARX’S ASS

OBJECTIVITY AND HISTORY

Wait…who?

Ayn Rand, author most famous for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps and to-hell-with-everyone-else arch-capitalist of the twentieth century. Karl Marx, father of Communism and the clarion herald for worker liberation…uh… was so not like her.

A person’s perspective also accounts for the majority of how he or she interprets the world and how history is written—how things “really” happened. Seldom, if ever, is any one account of a historical event the definitive answer that satisfies everyone. For what it’s worth, I’d say Ayn Rand wins said brawl with Karl Marx because she’d kick him in the groin… pardon my gender bias.

From Caesar’s Gallic Wars, to the various accounts of Jesus Christ, to Shakespeare’s portrayals of kings, to Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, to our own day of political campaign advertising, human beings can only write from a limited perspective, in the midst of our struggles with memory and amnesia, in spite of our own angles and agendas and with regard to who conquered and who was conquered. All of it congeals into the stew of history.

Another simple example helps, I hope, to illustrate the issue. I can buy something “Made in America” and feel like I’m strengthening the American economy. I can also buy something “Made in Timbuktu” and pat myself on the back for helping a struggling worker in a developing country. It’s all in spin, as the politicos show us ad nauseum.

My perceptions, my intentions say a lot about the values I hold, the message I want to communicate and the legacy I want to leave. Both purchases mentioned above, I hold, are valid. Both uphold fellow human beings and reveal our attitudes. And both attitudes hold certain responsibilities to find out how just the wor...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Photographs
• List of Tables, Diagram and Map
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Haymarket Scoop in a Nutshell
• 1. LET’S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT
• 2. AYN RAND COULD KICK KARL MARX’S ASS: OBJECTIVITY AND HISTORY
• 3. THE WORKING CLASS SMELLS…SO DO ROSES
• 4. IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS: THE SITES RELATED TO THE HAYMARKET AFFAIR
• Epilogue: Two Ears, One Mouth
• Additional Sites
• Cemetery Residents
• Chronology
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography of Sources Cited
• Annotated Bibliography of Resources for Further Study
• About the Author