[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 two
frustrating failures of and one inspiring moment from a farcical show trial.
From the outset,
the arrest and trial of
the Haymarket “bombers” was an overt case of presumed guilt, and not just
(not really at all) for the Haymarket Square bombing. The media used the
bombing to whip up xenophobic fears and violent exclusionary fantasies, as
illustrated by a Chicago
Times editorial that argued, “Let
us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or
in some way exterminate them.” The police followed suit, raiding the offices of
the pro-labor
newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung
without a warrant and arresting its editors, and then doing the same with the
residences of numerous known socialist and anarchist activists. While the eight
men eventually charged with the bombing were indeed swept up during these
widespread raids (including those two newspaper editors, August Spies
and Michael
Schwab), there is ample evidence to suggest that the raids were designed
and executed to intimidate and destroy entire communities, and that picking
scapegoats for the bombing from among those targets was simply a convenient
side effect.
The trial itself
was no more fair or legally sound. The eight defendants were charged not with
the bombing itself, but with the broader and vaguer charge of conspiracy, which
came to mean simply producing anarchist journalism and propaganda that might
have inspired a bomb-thrower: as state’s
attorney Julius Grinnell instructed the jury, “The question for you to
determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did
it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged
it?” That jury was hand-picked from the jury pool by the court’s bailiff, a
break from the normal random selection procedure; it included no immigrants or
laborers. After presenting the jury with a long series of circumstancial and
tangential details and accusations that only vaguely connected any of the
defendants to the Haymarket violence, in his closing argument Grinnell made
plain the trial’s true stakes: acquitting the defendants would mean more
radicals on the city’s streets, “"like a lot of rats and vermin”; and only
the jurors “stand between the living and the dead. You stand between law and
violated law.”
Unsurprisingly,
the jury convicted the defendants, with seven sentenced to death and one (labor organizer Oscar Neebe) to
fifteen years in prison. Four were executed in
November 1887, while three others had their sentences commuted to life in
prison or otherwise were still in limbo when Illinois Governor
John Altgeld pardoned them in 1893, his first year in office (due to his
outrage at the farcical arrests and trial). That pardon (which cost
Altgeld his political career) was one inspiring moment to emerge from this
historic injustice, but to my mind even more inspiring was August
Spies’s concluding statement to the judge and jury. “The contemplated
murder of eight men,” Spies argued, “whose only crime is that they have dared
to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these suffering millions; may wake
them up.” Detailing the prosecutor and judge’s numerous inappropriate and
likely illegal staetments, he added, “I will say that if I had not been an
Anarchist at the beginning of this trial I would be one now.” And in his
concluding paragraphs, he brilliantly reversed the concepts of patriotism and
treason that had been used to condemn the defendants: “I can well understand
why that man Grinnell did not urge upon the grand jury to charge us with
treason. I can well understand it. You cannot try and convict a man for treason
who has upheld the Constitution against those who trample it under their feet.”
A moment of American ideals amidst a history that did indeed trample upon them.
Last Haymarket
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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