Haymarket (14 page)

Safely out of their view, I slowed my pace and turned down Dearborn Street, which looked deserted. I sat down on the curb for a few moments to collect my wits, but quickly got up when I saw pockets of men, muskets in hand, leaning against some of the nearby buildings. Then I realized that these were Illinois National Guard troops. A terrible chill ran through me. Today I was threatened with violence; tomorrow, I fear, many will directly experience it. I instantly left the area and hurried home to Lucy. Lizzie, it turned out, had shown her the headlines and she’d been frantic. She’d insisted on going down to the Cook County jail and Lizzie, unable to dissuade her, had gone along too. At the jail they were told that no prisoner named Parsons was there, and baffled, they’d reluctantly returned home.

I wasn’t back more than an hour and already dead asleep—collapsed really—in Lucy’s arms when a knock on the door roused us. It was Abel Hinson, one of the
Tribune
printers. He’d come by to tell me that after I’d been dragged from the building, the men in the composing room had threatened to go out on strike then and there. The proprietor himself, Joseph Medill, had had to appear before the men and calm them down. He swore that he’d known nothing of my mistreatment and had not sanctioned it. But as Hinson said, “The men aren’t the dumb animals Medill thinks they are. They know he’s lying to them and they’re biding their time.”

I fear a bloody dawn awaits us.

Utterly exhausted …

August l

It has turned out worse, far worse, than could have been imagined. At this point, an uneasy calm has settled over the country. But what a nightmarish few days it’s been. I myself witnessed enough brutality to last a lifetime. I don’t put entire blame on the soldiers and police for the hundreds of deaths and injuries; in some places they were strongly provoked by teenage gangs pelting and taunting them. Still, they were too quick to pull their triggers, far too quick. Why do so few of them seem able to understand that they’re firing on
fellow workers?
More than half the police force of Chicago is made up of men of Irish and German descent. Many have shared the hard immigrant life, worked under a factory taskmaster, lived in the tenements, and even now earn a miserable fifty or sixty dollars a month. Yet they dutifully follow orders from the corrupt ward bosses—the “Bathhouse” Coughlins and Mike McDonalds, the “gray wolves,” as we call them, who in turn take orders from the propertied classes. That’s where responsibility for the mayhem finally rests. For a decade, the magnates have haughtily ignored the workers’ peaceable pleas for improved conditions, treating them as mere pests, a passing plague of locusts. When, desperate to be heard, the workers grew more clamorous and the owners could no longer stop up their ears, they turned to their politician cronies and hired thugs to shoot men down with as much pause as you’d give to sweeping away poisoned rats.

My hands tremble as I think back on incidents I myself witnessed. It is too much for me to set down all the details here. Still, the purpose of starting this diary was to create a record of events, so I must steel myself.

The night following my run-in with police chief Hickey and the thugs at the
Tribune
, I attended another outdoor meeting called by the Workingmen’s Party. Throughout the day, there’d been innumerable skirmishes. Roving groups of angry workers closed up factories, stoneworks, and tanneries, and stopped the Burlington Railroad from delivering any grain to the elevators (but not before a fusillade of police bullets had killed three and wounded nine). At the Michigan Central yards, the police charged directly into the crowd, clubs flailing, sparing no one. Even the
Times
reported that the sound of clubs falling on skulls was “sickening; a rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” If the bloodshed sickened the
Times
, one can imagine the extent of the onslaught.

Still, the three thousand workingmen who turned out for the
WP
rally that night were entirely peaceful in demeanor. Van Patten had taken the precaution of going to police headquarters that morning to assure them that the rally would be calm and orderly—for which pains he was given what they called the “Parsons treatment,” including a threat to hang him from a lamppost. At Lucy’s insistence, I stayed
off
the platform and we mingled in the crowd, greeted over and over with delighted shouts and slaps on the back.

Then, as soon as Van Patten opened up the proceedings and began his speech, a squad of police cavalry charged the assembled crowd from behind. In their rush to flee, people crashed into the flimsy platform, reducing it to splinters, scattering the torches, and injuring Van Patten. At that very moment a procession of one thousand workingmen, arriving late, entered the meeting grounds with a blaring fife-and-drum corps at their head. The police “mistook” them for an army, fired a warning volley, and then collided with the crowd in a series of skirmishes. Miraculously, only a few were killed.

The next day, Mayor Heath called for federal assistance and President Hayes authorized the use of the Illinois National Guard. Their ranks were swelled from elsewhere. Some business leaders and railroad heads organized armed companies from the lists of their employees. They served, I like to think, against their will, but I’ve learned not to trust too much in the “logic” of worker solidarity.

Hundreds of Civil War veterans eagerly lined up for blocks to get deputized as “special” police officers. That, I confess, did confound me. Having experienced the miserable carnage of war, why were they so eager to reenlist in it? Did they blot out memories of suffering in order to taste again the intensity of feeling and purpose now absent from their lives? I suppose when you’ve marched with Grant from Donelson to Vicksburg, being a clerk or a bricklayer twelve hours a day is like trading in cognac for tea.

The climax came at the Halsted Street viaduct, where an angry mob of some five thousand clashed in open combat with the police. I was in a different part of the city during the melee, but Spies found himself trapped in the middle of it. He reported seeing man after man fall in his tracks with a bullet in the head or chest, or mercilessly clubbed into unconsciousness. One striker, blood and brains oozing out of the back of
his neck, was so caught in the frenzy of the moment, according to Spies, that he staggered forward for several blocks before falling over dead. He also saw a teenage boy standing upright and immovable, blazing away at the police with a pistol in each hand—until he suddenly crumbled to the pavement, shot through the head. When Frank Norbock, a leader in the Bohemian section of the Workingmen’s Party, was likewise felled with a bullet in the neck (or as the
Times
described it the next day, “with a bullet through the base of his uncultivated brain”), the crowd started to scatter. And no wonder, with eighteen dead and thirty-two wounded—not counting those dragged anonymously away by friends.

Still the police weren’t satisfied. They headed straight for Turner Hall on Twelfth Street where some 250 members of the cabinetmakers’ society, the Harmonia Association of Joiners, were engaged in an orderly discussion of how to achieve an eight-hour working day. Without warning, the police roared into the meeting, guns drawn, and brutally brought down their clubs on any head within striking distance. It was all over in a matter of minutes: one cabinetmaker shot dead, a score of others seriously injured. A few tried to escape by jumping out of the third-story windows. The press today praises the police for their “quick action.” The
Tribune
urges that every boiler be equipped with a hose attachment that could be used to direct a stream of scalding water at the “Communistic rabble.”

Despite the bloodthirsty press, the sheer horror of the Turner Hall incident produced a shift in public mood. As if the breath had been knocked out of them, people took a gasping step backward. In the three days since, there’s been a rapid de-escalation on all sides. Scattered incidents are still being reported, but terror has loosened its grip on the city.

Indeed, on the country. St. Louis remained at fever pitch a few days longer than most places. The Workingmen’s Party there is one thousand members strong. I felt proud to read that when a negro man took to the platform at one of the St. Louis rallies, saying he wished to speak for all his people who worked on the levees and steamboats, the crowd listened attentively. According to the
Vorbote
—no other paper even mentioned the event—the colored man told the rally, “We work in the summer for twenty dollars a month and in the winter can’t find the men we worked for.” Then he asked the crowd, “Will you stand with us regardless of color?” It roared back, “We will!”

Those are thrilling words, but I don’t need Lucy to tell me that what’s
said in the passion of the moment is soonest forgotten. Still, I’m hopeful (“You always are!” my dear wife says). In late July, negro longshoremen in Galveston struck for—and won—equal pay with white workers on the docks. And just two days ago, in that same city, it was the negro tracklayers who persuaded their white counterparts to demand a raise in pay to two dollars a day. And they got it!

On the other hand, in San Francisco white workers are demanding that all Chinamen be discharged from the railroads and are randomly attacking Chinese people on the street, setting fire to their washhouses and ransacking their homes for valuables. Even the Knights of Labor call the Chinese “vice-ridden racial inferiors”—even “human vermin.” It’s disgusting to me, but these attitudes are so widespread that if I were to await a pro-Chinese platform, I’d have no labor organization to affiliate with. Only the most radical groups, the Marxists or anarchists, show a broader tolerance. But they’re too ideological for my taste. The Marxists especially seem too sure about what the past means and what the future requires. To me, so much seems unknowable, and unpredictable. Perhaps the fault is mine. I started late on my education, certainly as compared with Spies. These days I read widely but it’s mostly hit-and-miss. Lucy insists I’m better off for it.

But I’m wandering far from my topic.

The rest is quickly summarized. We must face facts: the Great Strike has collapsed. Among those who scrambled to join the Trainmen’s Union, it turns out, were a number of private detectives and informers; management soon had its hands on our membership lists. Now many workers are worse off than before. That is surely true of me. I have no job and no prospects of one in a city where I’m denounced as a “leader of the mob.” The railroads have fired and blacklisted anyone who played a prominent role in the strike. The Trainmen’s Union has collapsed, and Ammon has started getting chummy with a few railroad officials—I never did trust the man, even while admiring his courage. The Workingmen’s Party, its membership dwindling and under threat of repression, is lying low.

On the positive side, the propertied classes have been severely shaken even while their hatred of the “lower orders” seems undimmed. Just last week, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher told his New York congregation that the strikers represented a “tyrannical opposition to all law and order.” Can you believe it?!—the
workers
are now the tyrants! Beecher
went on to say that “it is true that a dollar a day is not enough to support a man and five children, if the man insists on smoking and drinking beer. Is not a dollar a day enough to buy bread? Water costs nothing. Man cannot live by bread alone, it is true; but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.” This from a seducer of women, a sybarite living in the lap of luxury.

At least labor has seen what can be accomplished when its numbers and organizations are strong. And resentment among the workers is more fierce than before, though for the moment forced underground. It will soon enough find new expression. Of that, I am certain.

“It’s such a risk. And I’d rather not be taking it,” Lucy said, her voice piqued and strained. “But how else are we supposed to survive?”

She and Lizzie were standing in the vacant ground-floor space of their tenement building. The room was a bleak, empty rectangle, seven by eight feet, the flooring rough-hewn boards, the space devoid of all ornamentation and amenities—no molding on the walls, no basin for washing, no ice chest for food or stove for heat. Which was precisely why it had stood unrented all these years, though priced at only four dollars a month.

The room’s one attraction was a large window that faced onto the street. It was the window that had first given Lucy the idea. Passersby would be able to see directly inside, and could be drawn in, hopefully, by the merchandise on display.

“Lucy, you’ll freeze in the winter, and during the summer, with the sun beating down on that window, this place will be an inferno.”

“I’m not going to live here, I’m going to work here. I’ll keep the door open for ventilation.”

“You’ll be living here more than half of every day,” Lizzie said fretfully.

“Do you think I like the idea? Give me an alternative, just one, anything. With Albert blacklisted and bringing in no money except the occasional pittance for an article in the
Vorbote
, how do you expect us to live?”

“It’s just … just that a dress shop in this neighborhood is such an unlikely—”

“—after all, Albert can’t develop new skills overnight, much as he might like to become a cooper or a blacksmith!”

Lizzie simply threw up her hands rather than attempt a reply.

“No,” Lucy went on, “Albert is a writer and a speaker, and that’s how he should spend his time, not as a day laborer or a barker for some dime museum.”

“I completely agree,” Lizzie said, as if humoring a five-year-old. “Albert’s doing important work that only Albert can do.”

“You agree? Then why are we arguing?”

“I wasn’t. I was only trying to raise a few practical considerations. Almost every woman in this neighborhood knows how to sew, and makes her own family’s clothes. Who will your customers be? How many women can find the extra pennies to buy a skirt, let alone pay you to lay in pleats or fix a hem? Or are you expecting commissions from Mrs. Risberg’s crowd for tennis outfits and riding habits?” Lizzie mordantly added.