[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 existing
ways to better remember Haymarket, and one I’d love to see.
One way to
remember the Haymarket Square protest and rally, bombing and violence, and
trial more fully and accurately would be, quite simply but crucially, to engage
with all the primary texts and contexts to which I’ve hyperlinked throughout
the week’s series. While there are and will remain the unanswered questions and
ambiguities about which I wrote on Wednesday, the fact of the matter is that
there are many many texts and resources through which we can learn a great deal
about the lead-up to May 4th, the events of that day, and all its
aftermaths and legacies. One of the blessings and curses of my principal public
scholarly goal—adding to our collective memories—is that there is a literally
endless supply of histories and stories, figures and texts, that can and should
be better remembered, and I know it can be difficult for any one American (much
less all of us) to engage with them at length or in depth. But we don’t have to
do it all day every day to make it part of our collective communal experience,
and even an occasional dip into the primary sources and resources would help us
think about Haymarket and its contexts and meanings.
Public memorials
offer another set of resources for collective memory, although with Haymarket,
as is so often the case, there are competing memorials that demand nuanced response
and engagement. Sculptor Johannes
Gelert created a memorial to the fallen policemen in 1889, and it stood in
Haymarket Square for nearly a century before being moved to Chicago Police
Headquarters in 1972. Sculptor Albert Weinert created the Haymarket
Martyrs’ Monument in 1893 to honor the anarchists convicted and
executed for the bombing; it stands in Forest Home Cemetery (originally the
German Waldheim Cemetery) where the men are buried. To some degree bridging the
gap between these two competing memorials is the most recent work, artist Mary
Brogger’s 2004 sculpture of a fifteen-foot wagon meant to commemorate the impromptu
stage from which the Haymarket rally speakers delivered their remarks. The
September 2004 ceremony
that unveiled Brogger’s monument featured both labor activists and the
president of Chicago’s police union, suggesting the possibility at least of a
shared communal history that does not pit the subjects of Gelert’s and Weinert’s
memorials against each other quite so overtly or necessarily.
Popular culture has
its own role to play in our collective memories, and on that level I have to
admit being disappointed with (from what I’ve seen) the lack of Haymarket stories
in our cultural works. For example, the life of convicted anarchist August Spies, whose
concluding statement to the judge and jury I quoted in yesterday’s post, would
make for a wonderful TV miniseries. Born in 1855 in a ruined mountain castle in
Germany to a forestry official and his wife, Spies immigrated to the US in 1872
as a teenager (after his father’s death), worked as an upholdsterer while
gradually becoming more and more deeply involved with radical labor and
socialist activism and journalism, and spoke at the May 4th
Haymarket Square rally. While in prison awaiting execution Spies met and married
the young journalist and labor activist Nina
van Zandt. Moments before his November 11th, 1887 hanging, he
cried out, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the
voices you are throttling today,” some of the most compelling last words in
American history. His is only one of many Haymarket stories, of course, but
telling it would open up those other stories and histories as well. Just
another potential screenplay I’ll add to the imaginary pile, I suppose!
Special tribute
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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