[On May 4th,
1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of
a
nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket
Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important
current scholarly voices on labor.]
On what we’ll
never know about Haymarket, why that matters, and what we can say anyway.
The May 4th
rally and protest devolved into violence and chaos for several reasons, but
one moment towers above the rest: the throwing of a dynamite bomb at police
officers. It was after that bombing that police began firing at protesters,
that protesters began rioting and fighting back, and that the widespread
conflict which resulted in at least eleven deaths (seven police officers and
four protesters) and countless injuries truly commenced. Yet if the bombing’s
influence and effects are crystal clear, its origins are entirely murky: as I’ll
discuss in tomorrow’s post, eight anarchist activists were tried and convicted
for the bombing, but that trial
was a demonstrable farce (so much so that the governor of Illinois
pardoned the anarchists who had not yet been executed only seven years
later) and certainly does not offer historical proof of who threw the Haymarket
bomb. Indeed, as far as I can tell historians
have no idea of who threw that bomb, and it’s difficult to imagine the
emergence at this late date of any new details or evidence that will provide
any further clarity into that crucial historical ambiguity.
Such a central
historical ambiguity is quite frustrating, but it’s even more illuminating.
That is, our eternal uncertainty about the Haymarket bombing offers a number of
valuable lessons for the study of history and its meanings in the present. For
one thing, Haymarket makes quite plain the way that subsequent narratives (such
as those created at a trial) shape our understanding of a historical event, and
forces us to consider whether and how all such narratives distort (or at best
partially portray) more than they reflect the histories themselves. For
another, such ambiguous histories render it nearly impossible to write about
the past without bringing our own perspectives and preferences to bear—I’m sure
I’ve done that here in writing about Haymarket—and in truth that limitation is
(as the recently deceased
historian and theorist Hayden White laid out so convincingly) an element of
any and all
history writing and historical thinking. And for a third, particularly clear
historical ambiguities like Haymarket can help us engage with the presence of
such ambiguities in every significant historical event and moment: what caused the Salem
Witch Trials; why Jefferson’s
draft paragraph on slavery was cut from the Declaration of Independence; what
Abraham
Lincoln’s vision of Reconstruction entailed; and many more.
If there are
many things we can’t know or say with certainty about the Haymarket Affair,
however, there are still some that we can. To my mind, perhaps the most
important thing we can say about the Haymarket protest is that it was intended
to be a peaceful rally in support of the nationwide strike; that the bombing,
whoever performed it and for whatever purpose, was a horrific aberration and
break from the event’s goals. A violent, destructive moment like the bombing
often overtakes any other histories in providing one of those subsequent
narratives and frames for an event, and perhaps that’s inevitable and not worth
contesting. But it seems to me still crucial to differentiate events where the
violence is planned and central (such as the 1898
Wilmington coup and massacre) from those where violence shatters and shifts
the event from its plans and purposes. It’s my understanding that that’s what
happened in Haymarket Square on May 4th, and that’s a historical
narrative worth working to add to our collective memories.
Next Haymarket
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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