May 3, 2018: Haymarket Histories: The Trial

[On May 4^th, 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?

May 2, 2018: Haymarket Histories: Historical Ambiguities

[On May 4^th, 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 4^th 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 4^th, 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?

May 1, 2018: Haymarket Histories: The May Day Strike

[On May 4^th, 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 a motivation, a debate, and an effect of one of the earliest nationwide strikes.

One of the scholarly works I read as an undergraduate that left a lasting impression on me was historian Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (1983). It wasn’t just the depth and detail with which Rosenzweig narrated and analyzed new leisure possibilities and spaces in the late 19^th century, although that certainly impressed me. Instead, it was the overall paradigm shift that Rosenzweig’s book effected in my perspective, as I really considered what the absence of work-hour regulations (and thus the push for an eight-hour workday) meant for 19^th century American workers. The issue isn’t as blatant or horrifying as child labor practices or the absence of safety regulations or the like, but it was a vital cause through which workers and the labor movement could take a bit more control over their own lives. So vital, in fact, that the May 1^st, 1886 nationwide strike of more than 350,000 industrial workers was undertaken specifically to agitate for the creation of an eight-hour workday.

Not every labor leader and organization supported the use of a nationwide strike for that purpose, however. Terence Powderly, leader of the influential national union The Knights of Labor (which had a membership of more than 700,000 in 1886), opposed the strike and forbid Knights of Labor members from taking part in it. Powderly preferred other tactics, from negotiation with management to boycotts, to strikes, a sharp divide from the perspective of the nation’s other most prominent labor union, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (an immediate predecessor to the American Federation of Labor, which was founded later in the year). The debate reflects the widely divergent views and tactics that characterized the labor movement at this still early stage, and reminds us that the May Day strike, significant (indeed, unprecedented) in scale and scope as it was, nonetheless represented only a subset of American workers (again, the Knights of Labor had a membership more than twice the size of the number of workers who struck on May 1^st).

Despite those divergences the May 1^st strike was an important labor milestone, and (despite the Haymarket catastrophe and the negative press and narratives it engendered) had a number of both immediate and long-term positive effects. Some employers did institute an eight-hour workday, while others offered higher wages or other benefits. Yet it was a pair of commemorations that proved the most enduring, if partly ironic, legacies of the strike: in 1889 the Paris Second International designated May 1^st as International Workers’ Day in remembrance of the strike; and when President Grover Cleveland designated the first official federal Labor Day in September 1887, he did so in large part to commemorate organized labor separately from lingering May associations with the Haymarket Affair. Those might seem to be distinct and even opposed effects and commemorations, but both represent the power of organized labor and of events like the May 1^st, 1886 strike to affect and change national narratives and collective memories.

Next Haymarket history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?