Excerpts from Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870-1900, pp 156-65, 170-173, 177-200.

Four Threads in the Cloth of Ideology

I follow four commandments. Thou shalt deny God and love Truth; therefore I am an atheist. Thou shalt oppose tyranny and seek liberty; therefore I am a republican. 'Thou shalt repudiate property and champion equality; therefore I am a communist. Thou shalt hate oppression and foment revolution; therefore I am a revolutionary. Long live the social revolution!

Johann Most, Die Freiheit, 15 July 1882

It is difficult to assess Johann Most's impact on Chicago's anarchists. For Chester Destler, Most's arrival galvanized an otherwise moribund movement in the United States.' 7he Alarm, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, and Die Anarchist reprinted articles from his Die Freiheit, and he visited the city on three agitational tours. If Most did not have the influence Destler claimed, his creed serves now as a convenient catalog of four threads in the cloth of anarchist ideology: atheism, republicanism, communism, and revolution, although I want to consider those elements in a slightly different order. And to anticipate, the argument here is that Chicago's anarchists can be best understood as revolutionary socialists, the self-conscious heirs of the failed bourgeois revolutions of 1848.

The anarchists were political republicans

The year 1848 had been "the springtime of the peoples": an awakening of republicanism and hope. When they failed, Chicago received many of "the refugees of revolution," not just Germans, but also Czechs and Scandinavians. The Illinois Staats-Zeitung denounced those Forty Eighters who "came over herer to America, their heads filled with world messianic dreams," explaining that too many had become "enthusiastic and reckless representatives of socialism."

The International Working People’s Association [note: Founded in 1883, in Pittsburgh, issued a declaration of principles calling for “destruction of the existing class rule by all means” and a”free society based upon cooperative organization of production.” Their enemies had labeled the radicals anarchists, and they took the name as a badge of pride] mingled two republicanisms: an indigenous, Anglo- American one, the other immigrant, almost "alien," and European. This mixture may have sacrificed coherence for cogency. Born in different places, under different conditions, the two were not identical; yet they shared similar notions, heroes, conceptions, and vocabulary. Both Anglo-American and European republicans believed in limited government, with a mixed and balanced structure, and in the sovereignty of the people. Both native and immigrant republicans embraced as first principles the notions that property ought to be widely dispersed, that anti- monopoly vigilance was imperative, and that luxury was not just a sign of wealth but of the corruption of the republic. Both shared what Eric Foner has described as "a passionate attachment to equality (defined not as leveling of all distinctions, but as the absence of inequalities of wealth and influence), a belief that independence - the ability to resist personal or economic coercion - was an essential attribute of the republican citizenry, and a commitment to the labor theory of value, along with its corollary, that labor should receive the full value of its product.

Republicanism pervaded the movement's thought but was most visible in its conception of civil society and of citizenship. In 1878 The Socialist argued: “With us there is no necessity for an appeal to arms involving a bloody revolution. We have a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution, and under them we have the right, now enjoyed for a century, of promolgating (sic] our ideas and of establishing a party in support of them." The socialists presented the Lehr- und Wehr-Verein as a civic organization. In defending the verein, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung quoted from its charter: "The Society's duty is to develop mental and physical qualifications of their members, and thus enable them to exercise their duty as good citizens, that the member should get acquainted with the law, and political economy and practice military and gymnastic drilling." Citizenship carried with it obligations, "the duty" of "good citizens." The verein presented itself as a popular militia, composed of workers and organized as their defense against the "servile militia" of the bourgeoisie. As Conrad Conzett explained, "It is our duty to train ourselves in order to be able to lead the coming uprising of the people in such a way that the victory of the oppressed cannot fail." With its roots in 1848, the verein could still claim the legacy of 1776. In parades, some of its members dressed "in Continental style" and carried placards emblazoned "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death"; its wagons bore the placard "1876."

Both socialists and anarchists believed that workers were citizens; in turn, their notion of citizenship underpinned their conception of the republic. In 1879 and 1880, at election time, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung argued that any worker who failed to vote was unworthy of that privilege. Yet citizenship was never conceived in nationalist or chauvinist terms. Indeed, the children of IWA members were welcomed as "neue Welt-burgem," citizens of the world. In the wake of electoral failure and fraud, many abandoned their faith in the ballot as Der Vorbote contrasted "Reformschwindel und Revolution." A year later Lizzie Swank considered "Election Day":

The American citizen has walked boldly up to the polls, deposited a piece of paper in a box, gone back to 12 hours work, a shanty and a crust of bread, and thus demonstrated to the world his glorious freedom and independence! Perhaps his vote counted, perhaps not, for all he had to vote about, it does not matter. He was offered a choice between two sets of men, of whom he knows nothing, nominated he does not know how, or why, or by whom, and actuated by one and the same principle - to get there.

The anarchists argued that the aristocrats and monopolists had perverted the political process with their greed. They rejected "what may be termed the American theory of government": "the theory that each voter is a sovereign of the Republic; that on election day at the ballot-box the rich and the poor, the wage-class and the capitalistic class are upon a level of equality; [and] that the ballot of the propertyless is as potential for enacting law as is that of the property-holding classes." In 1879, socialists protesting the new Militia Bill passed out leaflets as they marched. One of them was headed, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty! Citizens, stand by the Constitution of your country! The militia bill is the product of a conspiracy to overthrow the republic, that has been cemented by the blood of our forefathers, and to dragoon the working people of Illinois into abject submission." The last banner in the procession repeated the warning "Citizens, Wake Up to the Situation and Save the Republic." Two years later John Blake told the Chicago Labor Union, "We have political freedom, but now we will assert our industrial freedom by a central council of amalgamated trade and labor unions that will place us in a position to offer a united front to the business community." By 1884, John Keegan, a young Irishman active in the IWPA's American Group, argued at the Lakefront "This is not a republic and never will be until the present industrial system should be abolished."

7'he anarchists were economic socialists

One of the speakers at the celebration of Tum-Verein Vorwaerts's fifteenth anniversary complained: "Although we are living under a republican form of government (a government by the people!) much is left to be fought for. Merely existing is not satisfying, we are desirous of higher ideals. We strive for a socialist state based on righteousness, truth and humanity." Because the conflict between virtue and commerce had corrupted the American republic, these Chicagoans broke with Anglo- American republicans and bourgeois political economy. The system of private property had destroyed the republican promise and brought with it wage slavery. "Those who believe they have equal rights," advised 7he Socialist, "should walk, after work, through the fashionable avenues," whose residents had bought the workingman's rights because they owned both his labor and their capital. When Frank Stauber was denied a seat in the City Council, Der Vorbote charged "that the holiest institution of the American people, the right to vote, had been desecrated" and became "a miserable farce and fie." "'Practical politics'," concluded The Alarm, "means the control of the propertied class. Politics and poverty, like oil and water, won't mix."

Svornost's editor argued in 1880 that socialism would counteract the political power of "the capitalists, railroad kings, industrialists, land speculators, and monopolists." Capitalism was worse than slavery, charged Frantisek Zdrubek, for "the slaveowner had to provide for the welfare of his slave. The employer, however, had no regard for his employee and was not concerned about the wages he paid him." The solution, believed Zdrubek, could not come through cooperation with the existing parties, but through "labor cooperatives and direct social change...for socialism promised prosperity to all who wanted to work."

Anarchist oratory and editorials were replete with phrases like "the abolition of slavery" and the "emancipation of the working class." In his first Chicago speech, Paul Grottkau linked the two: "whereas the Americans had evinced a spirit of liberty in ransoming the Negro," Grottkau could barely "entertain a hope that eventually the rights of the white laboring men would also be respected." Five years later, Albert Parsons almost presented the IWPA as a vanguard party, arguing: "The Inter- national is a labor organization composed of people who are devoting their time, their energy, their money and their lives to bring about the abolition of economic slavery and the complete emancipation of the working class from the tyranny of capital." "State Socialism," he argued "is the natural production of the age. It is the end of republican government. It is the complete union of all in one, and one for all alike."

What kind of socialism? In short all kinds.... Others remained ignorant of socialism until they got to America, and Chicago in particular. Thus August Spies wrote in his "Autobiography"

that "when I arrived in this country I knew nothing of Socialism, except what I had seen in the newspapers." Although he arrived in Chicago in 1873, "I think it was in 1875, at the time the 'Workingmen's Party of Illinois' was organized [that] upon the invitation of a friend, I visited the first meeting in which a lecture on Socialism was delivered." For George Engel "Chicago is the first place where I heard something of socialism for the first time in my life." In 1874 a socialist "showed me a newspaper, Der Vorbote.... I found the paper very interesting and saw that it contained great truths. I was delighted. In it was an advertisement of a meeting held by the "International Workingmen's Association ..... I went to the meeting." Oscar Neebe heard his "first communistic speech and that all men are equal" at New York's Commune in 1872, but did not join the communists in Chicago until 1877. Socialism meant the abolition of both private property and the wage system, and its replacement by a system of cooperative production and distribution. If the movement debated the finer points of theory at all, it shared a passionate opposition to the capitalistic system.

The invitation to the Pittsburgh Congress that founded the IWPA in 1883 had advertised it as a "Congress of North American Socialists," and left the definition of "socialist" to the reader. Throughout its history the IWPA sought to be an inclusive, rather than exclusive, association....

The anarchists were social-revolutionaries

…The necessity for and inevitability of a social revolution became a third article of faith. In 1884, the Progressive Cigarmakers, Die Metall-Arbeiter Union, and the Central labor Union proclaimed their belief "that the only means whereby the emancipation of mankind can be brought about is the open rebellion of the robbed class in all parts of the country against the existing economic and political institutions." There was, as Henry David noted, an "annoying vagueness" about the anarchists' notion of revolution. For Parsons, it meant "the time when the wage-laborers of this and other countries will assert their rights - natural rights - and maintain them by force of arms. The social revolution means the expropriation of the means of production and the resources of life." And as David noted, "it rarely occurred to the leaders of the movement to clarify the meaning of the term 'social revolution' for the benefit of themselves and their followers."

There was no ambiguity about the weaponry to be used. Articles headed "Dynamite," "Assassination," "Explosives," "Bombs!" "War with AU Means," "Streeffighting," and "How to Meet the Enemy," which appeared in The Alarm, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, and Der Vorbote from 1884 through 1886, are infamous. Many reappeared, first as evid- in the Haymarket Trial, then in contemporary and sensational histories of anarchism, still later in scholarly accounts. Their uncritical repetition has become a hallmark of anarchist scholarship and exaggerated

the "cult of dynamite." According to The Alarm, "one dynamite, properly placed, will destroy a regiment of soldiers." Wage slaves were urged "to start a manufactory of hand grenades"; "Instructions Regarding its Use and Operations, precautions in handling and storage" were available at Die Arbeiter-Zeitung's offices.

The cult centered around Die Anarchist, Engel, Fischer, Lingg, and Gruppe Nordwestseite, who had condemned Die Arbeiter-Zeitung as insufficiently radical. Twenty years after his pardon Oskar Neebe was still "indignant at the 'defense' literature that made the victims bleating lambs. They were emphatically brave soldiers, and Engel was an out-and-out militarist." Johann Most's meticulously researched pamphlet Revolutionare Kliegswissenschaft became their bible. The English translation of its title page accurately describes its contents: The Science of Revolutionary War.- A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine and Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc.

The "Intransigents," as Paul Avrich has labelled them, came to embrace the propaganda of the deed and to use it as a theory of radicalization. The attentats was to be a revolutionary sacrifice; his tat would revenge the working class, frighten the bourgeoisie, result in his own martyrdom, and then serve as propaganda for the movement. 'Me propaganda of the deed was conceived as a sympathetic and symbolic act of violence. By attacking a representative of the oppressors, the intransigents expected to focus the nation's attention on oppression and then trigger a series of attentats that would inevitably culminate in revolution.

Most of this was talk, "bomb-talking," as Floyd Dell perceptively called it. "Why then did these men talk dynamite?" Dell asked as he caught one side of the phenomenon: "It was done partly to attract attention to their real beliefs - it was a way of shocking the public into attention. So desperate a means of securing an audience is only taken by a small faction - it is a sign of weakness." George Schilling thought it more dangerous than desperation and weakness. In a remarkable letter to Lucy Parsons in 1893 he argued

the open espousal of physical force - especially when advocated by foreigners - as a remedy for social maladjustments can only lead to greater despotism. When you terrorize the public mind and threaten the stability of society with violence, you create the conditions which place the Bonfields and Garys’ in the saddle…Fear is not the mother of progress and liberty but oft times of reaction and aggression.

Speaking of the martyrs, and to Parsons' widow, Schilling maintained "They worshipped at the shrine of force; wrote and preached it; until finally they were overpowered by their own Gods and slain in their own temple.

While Chicago's anarchists revelled in bomb talking, the propaganda of the deed remained a recessive characteristic within the anarchist movement. If two of Chicago’s IWPA’s groups published Die Anarchist, twenty-four supported Die Arbeiter-Zeitung. The majority of the movernent never embraced the attentat, nor did they ever denounce those who had. The best explanation for that failure must lie in their recognition that force would be required in the future. Instead the movement pointed to five revolutions, three within their lifetimes, as social revolutions. They were farthest removed from the American Revolution, but they celebrated Tom Paine's birthday annually, and venerated George Washington enough to place his portrait next to Ferdinand Lassalle's at other celebrations. They quoted Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence in the Pittsburgh Manifesto. The French Revolution of 1789 was almost as distant, and the anarchists chose to remember Gracchus Babeuf and "Die Baboeufisten” as heroes ....

Finally, there was more than a streak of revolutionary romanticism in all their discussions of revolution and armed struggle. During a violent strike in 1875, John Simmens prophesied a "proletarian revolution within a few decades." The waiting period seemed brief, the glorious revolution just around the corner, needing but a single spark. The capitalist system was in crisis and on the verge of collapse. Many had convinced themselves of "an already approaching revolution," which cc promises to be much grander than that at the close of the last century"; and Parsons spoke fondly, "We see it coming. We predict it, we hail with joy!" "Tremble, oppressors of the world!" proclaimed the Pittsburgh Manifesto. "Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawns the scarlet and sable lights of the judgement Day." For some revolution meant the millennium.

The anarchists were atheists and freethinkers

Most anarchists expected it would be a godless millennium. E.A. Stevens, the president of the Chicago Liberal League and an active member of both the SLP and the Knights, wrote ot the Detroit Labor Leaf a week after the Riot: “The authorities are making a point against them that they do not believe in God. The police are principally Irish Catholics, and were glad to have a pretext to make the attack."

At a time when the rhetoric of the American labor movement was couched in evangelical Protestantism, and the Knights of labor in Chicago enjoyed close ties to the Rornan Catholic church, the anarchists rejected both the symbols and content of Christianity. This rejection alienated not only the police and clergy, but also many in the labor movement, especially the Knights. We should not be confused that "conservative trade unionists and radical anarchists and socialists ... often appealed to Christianity for its sanction." On the other hand it is clear, as David Montgomery has argued, that "the deepest line of division within the working class ... was that of religion." Yet both insights underestimate the complexity of the situation in Gilded Age Chicago where Protestants and Catholics confronted a third group of atheists and freethinkers found in Scandinavian, Bohemian, German, and even native-born neighborhoods. Not only were these ethnic freethinking groups aware of one another's presence, but they frequently cooperated....

Atheism and free thought intertwined in the nineteenth century, especially in the eyes of the faithful. Not all freethinkers were socialists, but most socialists were freethinkers. Atheism and free thought cut two ways in the Gilded Age. On the one hand, freethinking organizations (like the Skandinavisk Fritaenkere Forening or the Bohemian Svoboda obec Chicagu) were breeding grounds for socialism; in Richard Schneirov's words, they "provided a congenial environment for socialism to thrive and develop." Reverend Adams, a contemporary, put it succinctly: "The result of atheism always must be anarchism." On the other hand, atheism divided the city's labor movement by separating socialists from other immigrants, and from the native-born. Protestants and Catholics, pietists and ritualists, may well have divided at election time, but they shared an intense hatred of the godless.

Adams was not alone in seeing that connection. In 1844, Marx asserted that the "criticism of religion [was] the premise of all criticism." Beyond the organizational nexus, atheism was already political when it immigrated to America. Free thought became political in Europe when it confronted the established church. For Marcus Thrane in Norway and Uv Palda or Iadimir Kacel in Bohemia, antic;ericalism served as a preliminary critique of not just the church but also the state. It was antihierarchical; it was egalitarian because it refused to recognize any Supreme Being, focusing instead on man. Moreover, free thought was materialist; by refusing to yield to another world, it concentrated on this world. Its ethics and morality flowed from that materialist egalitarianism. And while Americans enjoyed a constitutional separation of church and state, and many immigrants clung to their ethnic parishes, these radical immigrants brought a political antagonism to religion and to the state into a society and culture where that antagonism was utterly inappropriate.

Bakunin Never Slept in Chicago

... in this country, above all countries in the world, is Anarchy possible.... In those strong European governments ... they strangle Anarchism or ship it here. Everybody comes to our climate; everybody reaches our shores; our freedom is great - and it should never be abridged - and here with that freedom, with that great enjoyment of liberty to all men, they seek to obtain their end by Anarchy, which in other countries is impossible. As I said, there is one step from republicanism to Anarchy.

Tnere were at least three other threads in the cloth of this movement's ideology. One was a precocious feminism evident in Lizzie Swank's articles on "Factory Girls" and the prominence of women in the American Groups. The IWPA remained uninterested in women's suffrage, indeed the anarchists "offered no path to combat their oppression - except the social revolution, which would somehow solve all problems." An ambiguous position on racism formed a second. While Chicago's anarchists applauded Riel's Rebellion in Canada and supported the American Indian, their positions on anti-Chinese activity and towards American blacks remained ambiguous - "at best fuzzy about the very existence of racism" in Paul Le Blanc's judgment. A third thread denounced chauvinism, as Tne Alarm maintained that "Real internationalists despise and loathe the name and spirit of Nationalism. " And yet four major threads can be easily discerned within the fabric of anarchist ideology: republicanism, socialism, revolution, and atheism.

If the two Russians Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin epitomized nineteenth-century anarchism, then Chicago's IWPA was not anarchist. Indeed the only Chicagoan in any way affiliated with the IWPA who had met Bakunin was Dr. Ernst Schmidt. They met, only briefly, in St. Louis in March 1861, the month before the start of the Civil War. Beyond the continuities of membership and organization lay an ideological evolution, one best understood as a transcendence of nineteenth-century republicanism. This was not an evolution from socialism to anarchism but from republicanism, through electoral socialism' to revolutionary socialism. However unscrupulous he may have been, State's Attorney Julius Grinnell understood that there was but "one step from republicanism to Anarchy."

Republican images pervaded socialist and anarchist rhetoric. The republic depended upon the independence of the citizenry and its active involvement in society. Capitalist development, as some of Chicago's radicals saw it, had destroyed independence and liberty and the concentration of wealth had corrupted the republic. Greed had perverted the political process and concentrated power in the hands of the few. "He who must sell his labor power or starve will sell his vote when the same alternative is presented. Our political institutions are but the reflex of the economic, and our political reformers should learn that the workers are not poor because they vote wrong, on the contrary, they vote wrong because they are poor." Despite rampant vote fraud, these anarchists did not completely reject the electoral process until 1882.

They had already broken with republican political economy when they identified private property as the cause of corruption, economic depression, and social revolution. "Private property in the resources of life - the means of existence - is sanctified by the Church, made legal by the Constitution, enforced by the law, backed up and maintained by the army, navy, and police of the bourgeoisie." That identification was an irreconcilable breach with the republican notion that liberty and property were entwined. Anarchists argued that the concentration of private property had corrupted the republic, and that a free society must be based on the cooperative organization of production.

And they broke with republican notions of the state and social evolu- tion by embracing revolution. As socialists they had viewed the state as socially neutral and politics as mere electioneering. For anarchists, the state was not neutral and politics extended far beyond elections into the workshop and factory. Social revolution, on the model of the Paris Commune, promised to reestablish the republic. The Pittsburgh Manifesto thundered that "the political institutions of our time are the agencies of the propertied class" and that "their mission is the upholding of the privileges of their masters." The ultraradicals, those Paul Avrich has labelled the "Intransigents," rejected the legitimacy of any form of government. The majority within the movement seemed unconvinced by such arguments. Both envisioned the "destruction of the existing class rule, . . . [and] the establishment of a free society. " Convinced that the ruling class would "never resign their privilege voluntarily... there remains but one recourse - FORCE! Our forefathers have not only told us ... that force is justifiable ... but they themselves have set the immemorial example."

Irreligion served as a fourth thread in their ideology. English-speaking marchers carried banners emblazoned with "No God, No Master," Germans carried "Neider mit Thron, Altar und Geldsack," the Czechs "Zadny buh Zadny pan." Few attended any church, even fewer

believed; most subscribed to Bakunin's denunciation of God and State. Free thought and atheism contributed to anarchist conceptions of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and to the assault of both property and authority. Their lack of faith might have been tolerable, except that the Knights of Labor were deeply pious, the city's working class was still engaged by Protestant revivals, and the anarchists delighted in both blasphemy and sacrilege.

Finally, the movement's ideology, like its culture, reflected the dynamic interaction of ideologues and membership, and must be understood as part of a larger cultural system. The active membership hired its editors and between 1874 and 1886 fired at least ten of them. If the Martyrs moved ideologically from socialism to anarchism, the active membership seems to have moved from republicanism, through parliamentary socialism, to revolutionary socialism. And the movement expressed that ideology culturally. While our understanding of their ideology has relied on editorials and manifestoes, each of these four threads was woven figuratively into the banners carried by the rank and file. Socialist singing societies, theater groups, dances, picnics, parades, and festivals tried to promote a sense of solidarity and mission within the active membership, which then offered its abilities and ser- vices to the sympathetic following within the city's working class.

Eight Hours, Riot, and Repression

The size, growth, composition, organization, culture, and ideology of the anarchist movement form the background for understanding the Hay- market Affair. 'fhat movement was both large and growing at the time of the riot and had organized around a vital, militant socialist press; an active, democratic club life; and an ominous federation of "progressive" unions. Movement culture expressed an ideology that transcended artisan republicanism by becoming collectivist, solidaristic, and communitarian as it embraced revolutionary socialism. In sum, the anarchist movement threatened to assume the leadership of the city's working class.

This [section] focuses on the riot's immediate foreground, the organ- ization and agitation of the Great Upheaval of 1885-86, in which the fWA and the Central Ubor Union played the central role. We need to look first at the unprecedented mass movement to establish the eight- hour working day. 'Men, we can briefly review the riot in Haymarket Square the night of 4 May 1886. Finally, we need to understand the trial and the executions of the Martyrs as part of a much wider program of repression, one which began before and continued beyond the legal proceedings, beyond the executions, and well into the 1890s.

This is familiar ground, and it is not my intention to reconstruct either riot or trial at any length; that project has already been done by competent historians. The point instead must be to understand that the Haymarket Affair offered an opportunity to try eight prominent anarchists as criminal conspirators, and to bring the full weight of civil authority against the most radical organization within the city's working class. Finally, we need to assess the impact of repression on the movement as a whole.

The Eight Hour Movement

The year of 1886 was a year of great activity in the labor movement. The Knights of Labor had had a previous convention and resolved to engage in an effort to establish the eight-hour day. In May, 1886, and some months before, they had entered into an agitation to accomplish their purpose. There was no knowledge of that movement in our group at all; information about it was distributed through the American and German press, but since we could read neither German nor English .... we knew nothing of that movement; but it was in the atmosphere and it seemed to have crossed the border of our settlement, because in the months of February and March there was quite a lot of dissatisfaction among our people about the prices paid for work.

That description comes from Abraham Bisno, a twenty-year-old Russian-bom Jewish sewing-machine operator, who had arrived in Chicago in 1882 and joined the Eight Hour Movement four years later. The earliest meetings of the Jewish garment workers were "very cleverly" arranged by someone unknown to them. "There was a great tumult[,] everybody was talking and nobody knew quite what this thing was about." A Knight appeared at a second meeting and signed the workers up. According to Bisno, "All I then knew of the principles of the Knights of Labor was that the [ir] motto ... was, 'One for All, and All for One.' I think they did require us to pay in a dollar per man ... and [then] we were all initiated with great ceremony."

Bisno was mistaken. The Knights were not the driving force behind the eight-hour day, nor was the Trades Assembly, nor the Central labor Union. Two years earlier, in 1884, at a convention in Chicago, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Assemblies had ordained I May 1886 for the inauguration of the eight-hour day. Both ordination and inauguration died for lack of interest. In the fall of 1885, however, the movement was reborn by the unskilled and unorganized. Their "dissatisfaction," in Bisno's words, deepened and organization spontaneously appeared. Indeed, the organized and skilled found themselves drawn into a movement they had not started and long disdained.

Although it had hosted the federation's convention, Chicago's Trades Assembly neither endorsed the eight-hour demand nor established an eight-hour committee until October 1885. Two months later, and six months before May Day, only eleven of the Assembly's twenty-five member unions had endorsed the movement for shorter hours. The assembly was more concerned with fighting the introduction of new machinery, and with fighting the dilution of craft skills by female, child, unskilled, and prison labor. However beleaguered, Chicago's skilled and organized workers could not get enthusiastic over shortened hours. Because they treated the relations between labor and capital "from a conservative point of view," and because they recognized the reality of intercity competition, the assembly held that eight hours was unwinnable.

While the anarchists and socialists scurried from meeting to meeting, 7'he Alarm complained in January that "the Trade and labor Assembly has done but little or nothing."

Thus far the only large mass-meetings in behalf of the "Eight Hour Movement, " have been held by those who have been accused of being opposed to the movement” The revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, Intemationalists, or whatever you may call the "ignorant foreigners" who follow the red flag and proclaim that wage-slavery is the curse of this age.

Two weeks later Albert Parsons explained: "The Trades Assembly has so much to do in other directions that they don't get time to bother with such little things as the Eight Hour Movement." The Knights of Labor were similarly unenthusiastic. In March, the Order's Grand Master Workman released his "secret circular" which disavowed the eight-hour strikes, refused to charter new assemblies for forty days, and counseled against both strikes and boycotts.

Until Haymarket, the anarchists remained ambivalent towards the Knights. When Powderly appeared to concede to Jay Gould on the Southwest strikes in March 1886, Der Vorbote labelled him a "monarchical, outdated labor leader" who "might have been of use a thousand years ago." "The Knight of the rueful countenance" became "Pope Powderly," the head of "the established Catholic Church of modem times," - "an arrogant, ambitious ignoramus." The Knights became "muddleheads and men of simple belief who do not understand their position in society and don't know anything about economic laws." In April, Der Vorbote cautioned a new union against "the haphazard step" of joining the Knights, recommending instead an "independent" course.

While the German newspapers attacked, the American Groups and their paper cooperated with the Knights. In March, the Alarm reported that an attempt "to create ill-feeling between the Socialists and the Knights" had "proved a dismal failure." During a meeting of the American Group "a laborer in the audience rose and inquired if he could join the Knights of Labor as he had come to the meeting for that purpose." The chairman, according to the Alarm, "informed him that the Knights of labor was a secret organization and that the International was not, and he would have to go to some Knight ... Assembly in order to join it." Instead of denouncing the Noble Order, the chairman merely directed the man down the street. Der Vorbote hoped the Eight Hour Movement would "lead the Knights in the right direction toward radicalism." Despite their vicious criticism of the local and national leadership, Spies and Schwab argued "their demonstration of power is a very favorable development." Although Spies had approached Bisno and the Jewish tailors, the anarchists were not disturbed when they joined the Knights. Oskar Neebe remained adamant that "hundreds of our speakers [spoke] to workingmen to organize themselves, no matter in what form as unions or Knights [arguing] that in organization lay their strength." As the anarchists organized, they "did not assail" the Knights, "on the contrary, [they) applauded them."

Neither the IWPA nor the CLU was initially enthusiastic about shorter hours. "We do not antagonize the eight hour movement," the Alarm explained, "viewing it from the standpoint that it is a social struggle - we simply predict it is a lost battle." Asked why the I'WTA did not support the Eight Hour Movement, The Alarm answered, "Because we will not compromise." Other anarchists were less adamant. At a CLU meeting in the Bohemian Turner Hall in December Josef Pecka judged the movement a good one "as it afforded an opportunity to spread revolutionary ideas." Confronting the groundswell of a mass movement, the anarchists moved to join it that fall.

On the eve of the Great Upheaval, Chicago's labor movement contained three different organizations, with different memberships and organizations. That fragmentation was typified by the 1,381 production workers in McCormick's reaper works. 'The Knights claimed 750 members among them, the Metall-Arbeiter Union (which belonged to the CLU) 250, and the Molder's Union (which belonged to the Trades Assembly) 10; the remaining 300 were nonunion men. 'The Trades Assembly remained a conservative body composed of skilled and organized Anglo-Americans. The Knights were organizing both skilled and unskilled, male and female, under an Irish-American leadership. The CLU had been organized by skilled European immigrants, but

in the heat of the movement for shorter hours, would push hardest for the organization of the unskilled and previously unorganized.

As the winter of 1885-86 set in, the CLU found itself caught up in the Great Upheaval, and the IWTA followed. Before the end of the year the two organizations scheduled weekly, then almost daily meetings. From the Deering reaper works on the far North side, to a hall outside of Pullman on the far South side, its speakers addressed workingmen and women in German, English, Czech, Norwegian, Danish, and Polish. Their agitation penetrated at least one community, the Polish, which had been ignored by previous organizing campaigns. As late as January 1886, the Times reported, "The Poles and Bohemians are absolutely without any organization; except so far as their inborn sympathy with socialistic ideas has impelled them to join army military companies." Led by the CLU, "the Polish and Bohemians have finally begun to organize."

The pace became even more frenetic in the last months before May 1. Established unions within the CLU, like the International Carpenters and joiners, composed of Germans and Bohemians, continued to grow. In April, Die M6bel-Arbeiter Union claimed 1,600 members in its four branches. Existing unterstutzsungvereine, like those among the German and Bohemian bakers, led by Mathias Schmeidinger, and among the German butchers, led by Tlomas Florus, became unions and joined the CLU. Under the eight-hour banner, other wholly new unions organized. In March, the brewers, with 400 members, joined the CLU. In April, the IWPA and the CLU called a mass meeting to create an Unskilled Laborers Eight-Hour League and about thirty men signed up at the first meeting. The Butcher Clerks' Union took the lead among the grocery clerks, organizing 250 members almost immediately. And on the night of May 4, Samuel Fielden, Lucy and Albert Parsons were late to the protest meeting in Haymarket Square because the American Group had been working, like the Working Women's Union seven years earlier, to bring organization to the city's sewing girls.

Die Lumberyard Arbeiter Union was one of the newest unions. The Irish dockworkers in the lumber district had organized in the 1870s, but the Bohemian yardworkers, who had struck in 1876 and were prominent in the 1877 Upheaval, had never enjoyed any permanent organization. It came only with the Eight Hour Movement, and, like the Jewish tailors, only in the last weeks before May 1. The Tribune reported that "the majority of the men who are employed in the lumberyards [are] representatives of the rabid branch of the Anarchists and Socialists." Of ten officers elected by the new union, five were members of the IWPA, including the vice-president, the Bohemian-language secretary, and all three delegates to the CLU. The union's growth was meteoric: "About 60 new members joined the union, which now contains about 3,000 in branch and 2,500 in the Bohemian. Night before last 400 joined." The Tribune ominously noted: "The Lumber-Workers ['] union is not a branch of the Knights of Labor[,] but of the notorious Central Labor Union."

The unionization campaign that accompanied the Eight Hour Movement was frenzied. Under the heading "Stadt Chicago," Der Vorbote's last page was filled with the announcements and reports of union meetings. The 21 April 1886 issue, for example, reported meetings of Die Mettal-Arbeiter Union; a mass meeting just outside Pullman where the Metall-Arbeiter Union gained fifty new members and Die Metal-Arbeiter Union No. 3 initiated seventy-five; the linseed Oil Arbeiters; die Maurer [masons]; tanners, butchers (with forty-five new members); carpenters (fifty-four new members in two locals); saddlers ("fifty neue Mitglieder"); and Die Metall-Arbeiter Union, which gained ninety-six new members for a total "uber 900." According to the Tribune, the Passementerie Workers' Union added "25 new members, mostly girls," the shop tailors were organizing and about seventy joined, and the wagonmakers union had decided to affiliate with the CLU.

Each of the city's three labor organizations grew in the Great Upheaval. The Trades Assembly reported some twenty-five member unions in October 1885; five months later there were fifty. The CLU had eight founding unions in February 1884; two years later it had twenty-four, including the eleven largest unions in the city. One month before the riot, Der Vorbote estimated the Assembly at 20,000 members; a week before the bomb it claimed 28,000 for the CLU. Despite long-standing fears of "mushroom growth" and Powderly's secret circular, the membership of the Noble and Holy Order continued to grow. Indeed if District Assembly 24 obeyed the circular, DA 57 did not. At the end of March 1886, the Tribune counted about twenty-six local assemblies and 5,000 Knights attached to DA 57, and "about the same membership" in DA 24, for a total of 10,000. In June 1886, the Illinois Bureau of labor Statistics reported about 18,000 Knights in Cook County; in July the Knights's General Assembly Proceedings reported a total of 22,592 affiliated with the city's three DAs.

The contrasts could not have been plainer than in the juxtaposition of Chicago's two Eight Hour demonstrations in April 1886. The first was scheduled by the Knights and the Trades Assembly and held in the Cavalry Armory on a Saturday night. Of thirty people who can be identified in the platform party, 60 percent had Irish surnames; another 26 percent came from Britain; no more than 14 percent were immigrants from continental Europe. 'Me Knights claimed sixteen representatives, the Assembly eleven. All of the evening’s speakers, including the Protestant ministers and the head of Chicago’s Clan-na-Gael, spoke in English. Their speeches were fervent but cautious, almost conciliator. According to the Tribune,

Workingmen were called upon to organize and to join the Knights of Labor; to abstain from whiskey-drinking and prepare themselves for the 1^st of May…[when] the clink of the hammer and the turn of the wheel would stop and the fires be drawn resolutely….They were to ask for eight hours of work and eight hours’ pay…and the justice of their demand would assure its realization.

TWO weeks later the CLU and the IWPA arranged a second eight-hour demonstration that the Tribune dismissed as "Mainly Communistic.” It drew from 10,000 to 15,000 marchers, rnale and female, who gathered in Market Square and then wound through the Loop led by seven bands. A great crowd accompanied the marchers, who divided towards two speaker stands, one for English and Germans, the other for English and Czechs. This second demonstration was multilingual, as were the speakers. The ministers were absent, for the procession and rally had been scheduled on Easter Sunday. The red flag far outnumbered the Stars and Stripes; where the Knights and unionists sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee," the anarchists and their followers sang the "Marseillaise. " While those in the Armory petitioned for an eight-hour day, those in the streets demanded shorter hours with no reduction.

There was a strident difference between the two organizing slogans, the Knights and unionists calling for eight-hours' work at eight-hours' pay, the anarchists and CLU demanding eight-hours' work for ten- hours' pay. The first was presented respectfully, almost deferentially; the second was brazenly, defiantly, demanded. The first conceded to the reigning notions of political economy; the second utterly rejected them. If the anarchists had initially disdained the Eight Hour Movement, historians, not contemporaries, faulted and discounted them. As they organized during 1885-86, Chicago's workers enjoyed the luxury of choosing from among the established trade unions, the reformist Knights, and the revolutionary CLU, all of which offered organizers. That many chose to follow the anarchists and the CLU does not mean they chose anarchy or revolution. By May 1, 47,500 workers had already won shorter hours, many at a higher wage; on May Day an additional 62,500 struck, including the building trades, cigar-makers, freight handlers, lumber shovers, furniture and garment workers. According to the state Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16,000 of the 19,000 workers surveyed had demanded eight-hours' work at ten-hours' pay.

On May Day, the Tribune published an interview with an otherwise unidentified anarchist who compared the organizing campaigns of the two major competitors:

The German and Bohemian workmen are thoroughly organized and armed and will fight to achieve their end. The brewers, matters, butchers, and bakers have already achieved their eight hour day. The Knights of Labor are principally American and Irish; they don't train with the Germans and Bohemians. And we can't get them to do aggressive work in the movement[:] they hang back and take what they can get, while the Ger- mans and Bohemians go out and get what they want.

Beyond their organizational and agitational skilIs, the anarchists and the Central Labor Union brought a sense of militancy to Chicago's Eight Hour Movement, giving it a confrontational edge.

The Haymarket riot, trial, and executions

That edge reinforced the shadow of 1877. Nine years before Haymarket, Federal troops who had campaigned with General Custer fought Bohemian and Irish workers in "The Battle of the Halsted Street Viaduct." That afternoon police had charged into the Westside Turner Hall and, in the course of breaking up a negotiating session of furniture workers and their bosses, killed one worker and wounded others. After being fired from the Times, Parsons went to speak in Market Square that night and remembered in his autobiography "over 100 policemen charged upon this peaceable mass-meeting, firing their pistols and clubbing left and right." For three days that July men, women, and children had taken the streets, closed the city's factories and workshops, and fought not only police but state militia and two Army regiments. About thirty working- men had been killed, another 200 wounded. The police were undermanned, practically unarmed, and so ill equipped that Marshall Field, a leading merchant, lent the department his delivery wagons for transportation. Led by the Board of Trade, the city's business elite had formed a Veteran's Corps and a Citizen's Patrol. The police proved so ineffective that the militia and cavalry had to be summoned.

The socialists had long been identified as troublemakers. During the 1877 strike, the mayor and a group of businessmen threatened Parsons in the police chief's office, advising him to leave the city. In March 1879, the militia had been garrisoned next to the Commune festival in the Exposition Building; a month later the state legislature outlawed the Lehr- und Wehr-Verein and revitalized the state militia. As recently as July 1884, nineteen-year-old Wilhelm Spies, the youngest of August Spies's brothers, had been fatally gut-shot by an Irish cop while defending a drunken friend from arrest. If plainclothes detectives had shadowed socialists since 1877, the first Pinkerton agent did not infiltrate the anarchist movement until December 1884. He was not alone: John Dusey recognized and "scolded" four Pinkertons at a lakefront meeting in July 1885.

There were more recent incidents of what had become routine police violence. The most brutal came in the first week of July 1885 during a citywide streetcar strike. I-ed by an as yet unknown lieutenant, John Bonfield, twenty-five officers mounted a train's first car and towed a second for prisoners and a third for their reinforcements along the Madison Street line. Anyone who blocked or passed the train was clubbed, anyone Who shouted "scab" or “rat" was similarly treated, and Bonfield earned the nickname "Blackjack”, The track was slowly cleared and more than 150 arrested, including sixty-five strikers and two groups Of jeering bystanders. Such brutality was unprovoked and widely denounced by all sections of the community; Yet it was also effective and the strike collapsed. The Trades Assembly called for Bonfield's job, but Mayor Harrison deferred. Most importantly the strike marked a new, and unauthorized, aggression by the police.

As May I approached, the forces of order prepared with the Police Department as the first line of defense. Between 1880 and 1883 it had grown from 473 to 637 men; by 1886 it had been expanded to just over 1,000. While they were not officially armed, a few relied on their night- sticks. The department recruited the native-born, British, and Irish, and did not hire its first Bohemian, for example, until 1882. The department was not fully trusted by the city's manufacturers. In 1882 it had failed to intercede during a streetcar strike; in 1884 the firm of Cribben and Sexton had been forced to hire Pinkertons when the department failed to control strikers. The most recent scandal had revealed that an officer had refused to order his men to break up a strike by boxmakers in the winter of 1885-86. Behind the force stood a larger group of police extras" and "specials," reinforced in turn by an expanding militia. If the Lehr- und Wehr-Verein was training in the basements of their meeting halls, another rumor had Marshall Field's clerks armed and drilling in his company's warehouses. The Citizen's Association supported the expansion of both the police and the militia; the Commercial Union League., and Chicago clubs preferred a nearby garrison of Federal troops but continued to patronize the National Guard's officers and armories.

The Haymarket riot can best be understood then in a context of suspicion, hostility, and fear, for the Eight Hour Movement reawakened the terror of 1877. For a decade and a half, Chicago’s communists had annually celebrated, even invoked, the specter of the Paris Commune. In

January 1885, during another of the city's recurrent red scares, the state militia put "a voluntary guard" on the First Regiment's Armory to protect it from a possible attack by the Lehr- und Wehr-Verein. When the attack never materialized, the Inter Ocean interviewed several mernbers of the LV.IV and of the Jaeger Verein; two weeks after those rumors first appeared, the Daily News headlined "No Cause for Alarm."

Those fears multiplied in the Great Upheaval. The First Infantry Regiment "satisfactorily performed" its street-riot drill on Thanksgiving Day 1885. The next month "an infernal machine" was found on a judge's doorstep, obviously placed there by "an insane freak of some socialistic crank." In January 1886, stories, emanating from New York, reappeared "regarding a socialistic outbreak in Chicago." 'The Tribune responded with an editorial calling for "A Regular Army Garrison in Chicago" which could quell "the dangers of riot and insurrection." In March, Charles Bodendeick, a member of the American Group, frightened another judge "by calling at his house late at night and demanding $25;" bound by a $1,500 bond, "the defendant exclaimed: 'I am a socialist, and am proud of being one."

The forces of order expected the worst as they planned for the inauguration of the eight-hour day. Two days before the CLU's procession and Lakefront demonstration, the First Cavalry Regiment performed another exhibition drill and dress parade for the Commercial Club. Three days later the First Infantry Regiment held its annual inspection and the same club, led by Philip Armour, subscribed more than $2,000 "to furnish the regiment with a good machine gun, to be used by them in case of trouble." The anarchists did nothing to calm the city. From February 1885 through March 1886, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung reportedly advertised free rifle instruction to workers at Smrz's Hall on Clybourn Avenue; the IWPA's English and German organs had issued directions for making and using dynamite; The Alarm published diagrams on street fighting and how to attack a Gatling gun. Military rhetoric permeated every discussion of the labor movement and class relations. On May Day, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung called:

Bravely forward! The conflict has begun. An army of wage-laborers are idle. Capitalism conceals its tiger claws behind the ramparts of order. Workmen, let your watchword be: No compromise! Cowards to the rear! Men to the front! The die is cast. The first of May, whose historic significance will be understood and appreciated only in later years, has come.

May I came and nothing untoward happened. Expecting, even predicting "trouble" and "violence," the bourgeois press waited. When an anarchist let slip that "Herr Most was expected that afternoon, the Tribune sent its reporter to Police and military headquarters. Police Chief Frederick Ebersold had no intimation that there is to amount of trouble" and dismissed "all this talk of police reserves, police preparations and special orders” as “nonsense”. On the other hand, "the arms and ammunition of the regiment were in readiness for immediate use" at D Battery's armory. At the First Infantry Regiment's new armory and headquarters, "extra men were in chargers but there were "no extraordinary precautions." If the police remained resolute, and the Militia stood ready, the Tribune reassured its readers that a Gatling gun had been bought and would arrive that very night. Chief Ebersold, Inspector Bonfield, and the precinct captains quietly met "in consultation" the second day, but all the Press could report was that "the police will be disposed about the city... and others will be held to act at a moment's notice. The entire force will be on active duty." The Knights, the Trades Assembly, and the CLU met, separately of course, and went over strike reports. That night the Assembly held a "slimly attended" Eight-Hour Ball at Battery D's armory.

The Trades Assembly held another "Protracted" meeting on Monday, May 3. A resolution from the floor recommended "the formation of an Executive Board, composed of representatives of all trades," which would have meant not just recognition of the CLU, but outright cooperation at least for the Eight Hour Movement. R. C. Owens, from the carpenters' union and LA 1307, seconded the resolution, arguing that such cooperation was both timely and essential to success. The vulnerable Andrew Cameron, former editor of the Workingman's Advocate and one of the oldest of Chicago's labor reformers, took the floor to denounce any notion of cooperation:

I am one of those who do not think it a crime to be an American, or worse than murder to speak the English language. I am opposed ot any movement toward joining with those who carry the red flag of socialism from Euroep to the democratic-republic anism of America. The Trade Assembly will be certainly smirched if it takes on such a responsibility.

Additional denunciations followed, echoing Cameron’s lead, and the resolution was allowed to drop.

That same afternoon, the lumber shovers invited August Spies to address a strike meeting. Attended by more than 5,000 from the union, the meeting was held a block from McCormick’s plant, and attracted about 500 of the strikers there. At shift’s end, the strikebreakers started to file out, and Spies’ audience left to jeer the scabs. A police detail arrived unexpectedly, fired on the stirkers, and then charged; at least 2 strikers were killed, five or six wounded, an dothers injured. Spies rushed back to his office, dashed off the “Revenge Circular,” and handed it to the composing room foreman.

Only 200 or 300 of the 20,000 handbills carried the word "Revenge" as they announced a mass meeting that evening to protest the latest police outrage. And however durable, the label "the Haymarket Riot" is wrong on two counts. Based on the CLU's turnout a week before, the meeting's planners expected a crowd of 25,000 and originally chose Market Square. When someone objected that it was "a mousetrap" with few exits, the site was changed to the Haymarket Square. When the crowd never materialized, the event did not take place in Haymarket Square, but in an alley off the square. Second, it was the police, not the crowd, who rioted. The meeting was called for 8:30 p.m. but none of the speakers was present and runners were sent to find them. Mayor Harrison stopped by to measure the crowd, judged it "tame," concluded that "nothing had occurred yet, or looked likely to occur to require interference," and suggested that the reserves at the Desplaines Street Police Station be sent home.

Spies spoke first, then deferred when Parsons, his wife, children, and Fielden finally arrived. Parsons spoke for almost an hour, then introduced Fielden who spoke for about ten minutes. Threatened by rain, the meeting was about to break up when the police arrived. "In the name of the people of the state of Illinois," Captain Ward intoned, "I command this meeting immediately and peaceably to disperse." When Ward repeated the order Fielden replied, "We are peaceable." A moment later the bomb exploded. Chaos ensued; then the police reformed, opened fire, reloaded, and fired again. There may have been some return fire from the fleeing crowd, then all was quiet.

Who was in the square that night? We can identify only eighty-two in a crowd estimated between 600 and 3,000. This is not, however, a random sample and there is little reason to believe it representative. About a third of the sample were marked by the riot: sixteen were shot that night, four more got clubbed, four arrested, four died. We know the ages of only seventeen, with a mean of thirty-five years old; we know that twelve in the crowd had been city residents for an average of eleven years. One victim was visiting from Indianapolis, but the majority had addresses within eight blocks of the square. All three of the speeches that night were in English, but 60 percent of the crowd had German surnames; about IO percent English; another IO percent native-born; the remaining 20 percent were split among Bohemians, Poles, Swedes, and French. Drawn from the surrounding neighborhood, the crowd was composed of "workingmen of all beliefs and views," just as Spies described them; and shoemakers comprised the single largest occupational group.

We have much more accurate information on the police commanded by Lieutenants Ward and Bonfield. They were "all select men, the flower of the Central Detail", "a company of giants," according to the department's official historian, and each carried two loaded revolvers. Mathias Degan died instantly; officers Mueller, Barrett, Flavin, Sheehan, Redden, and Hansen died later; up to seventy others were injured, most by police bullets, most shot in the back. The detachment had a mean age of 33.5 years. Four of the officers had been with the department for only fourteen days; two had served seventeen years; overall they had a mean of five years of service. A microcosm of the department, Captain Ward's squad was an Irish-American unit: fully 40 percent had been born in Ireland, 24 percent were native-born, 22 percent in Britain, and the only Pole, Charles Dombrowski, "disgraced his uniform by fleeing."

The bomb thrower's identity remains a mystery. The grand jury indicted Rudolph Schnaubelt, who figured as the bomber throughout the trial, but the evidence remains inconclusive. 'Mere are two schools for speculation. One holds that the bomber was an agent provocateur. Parsons maintained that the bomb was thrown "to break up the eight- hour movement, thrust the active men into prison, and scare and terrify the workingmen into submission." Eight months later the Arbeiter- Zeitung still had "every reason" to believe that the bomb was thrown by a police agent. If Henry David failed to identify the bomb thrower after weighing the evidence against eight suspects, Paul Avrich has argued more recently that it was thrown by someone inside the movement. In 1984, Avrich's best guess identified George Schwab (no rela- tion to Michael), "a German shoemaker and ultramilitant." In 1986, he proposed a new candidate, George Meng, "a German anarchist, a 'self- determined militant in the Chicago groups, a known figure in the movement. " Without some startling new evidence the mystery will apparently endure.

Repression

On Wednesday, 5 May 1866, the day after the riot, the police regrouped and struck back. Armed, but without a warrant, they charged into L)ie Arbeiter-Zeitung's offices and arrested everyone they found: August Spies, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, and the entire staff of reporters, compositors, even the printer's devil. The police returned, arresting a few more, confiscating manuscripts, type, galley proofs, the library's books, the paper's records and such. That afternoon Blackjack Bonfield led the detachments that closed both Zepf's and Greif's halls on Lake Street. The next day, May 6, the police raided and closed Lampcka and Budoucnost’s offices, where they again confiscated manuscripts, back issues, records, and a dozen banners. They also netted three anarchists (Jakub Mikolanda and Vaclav and Hynek Djmek) and a list of the paper’s subscribers. The Djmek brothers were promised money and jobs to turn state’s evidence; both refused and were eventually released. Within two weeks the police had raided each of the IWPA’s known and suspected meeting places, more than fifty in all.

Throughout their investigatiosn the police followed State’s Attorney Julius Grinell’s advice to “Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards!” More than 2000 men and women were arrested in their homes, at work, and in the streets. The police arrested Henry Spies because of his last name, and William Boege when he bragged about the riot in a saloon. Martel Obermann was pinched carrying a half-empty revolver and George Dietz, a cabinetmaker, had a breechloader, cartridges, bullet molds, bullet lead, and several hundred copies of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Captain Schaack proudly published his version the interrogations of about 70 prisoners, revealing in the process that many were denied counsel, food, water and medical treatment.

The program of repression was never selective. The day after the riot, Inspector Bonfield met with a group of freight handlers and “advised them to avoid assembling in crowds upon the streets, and especially not to march in procession. He gave them a lot of good advice about avoiding even the appearance of evil, and withdrew.” Some never heard the advice. The same morning 600 Jewish tailors marched from their ghetto towards the garment district; “patrol wagons came in on us from all sides…hundreds, probably thousands of policemen were unloaded in very short order…every policeman had a billy and they began to chase us and beat us unmercifully.” Yet as Abraham Bisno remembered, “none of us were arrested, none of us had time to do anything that would warrant an arrest.”

After May 4^th, picketing became absolutely impossible. The police arrested all pickets, even two or three. The attitude on the part of the police was practically the same as though the city was under martial law. Labor unions were raided, broken up, their property confiscated, the police used their clubs freely. Arrests were made without any cause, and the life of a working man was not quite safe when out on strike.

Some, of course, fled immediately. Lampcka’s editor and publisher, Anton Hradecney, left Chicago Tuesday or Wednesday night but returned to give himself up on the Tenth, John Henry ran to St. Louis;’ Balthaser Arau ran to friends in Omaha, Nebraska only to be arrested (without a warrant) and returned to Chicago. After being twice arrested, Rudolph Schnaubelt shaved off his beard, and chose flight, telling Sigmund Zeisler: "I believe it would be better for me to get out of Chicago for a time." He never returned. Albert Parsons, the most famous fugitive, fled first to William and Lizzie Holmes's house in Geneva, Ill., and then hid out in Waukesha, Wis. Others went underground within the city. William Seliger ran to a comrades' home in lakeview but was later turned in by his own wife. The Seligers' boarder, Louis Lingg, hid out with two friends on the South side only to be tracked down when he sent for his tools. As late as August, the Tribune reported that Hendrich Sever, Solene Henri, and Justus Mont, all "parties to the Haymarket tragedy," had been traced to Ottawa (Illinois or Canada?) and that extradition was being arranged.

On May 5 the coroner's jury ruled that Officer Degan's death had been murder and charged all those then in custody with its responsibil- ity. A grand jury was empaneled on May 17, conducted its investigation without a trace of secrecy, and dutifully presented an indictment on June 5 which concluded by thanking "the police force [whose] heroic bravery [had] saved this city from a scene of bloodshed and devastation equal to or perhaps greater than that witnessed by the Commune of Paris." The indictment named thirty-one men: the eight Martyrs, Schnaubelt, and twenty-two others who never stood trial. All but Schnaubelt and Parsons were already in custody.

Their trial became the most prominent manifestation of repression. We need not dwell on it at any length, yet some points deserve our attention. It was a long trial, lasting two months from jury selection to verdict; the transcript ran to 8,000 typed pages. Fully 981 talesmen were examined for the jury, and as the bailiff guaranteed, the defense exhausted its peremptory challenges. In the end, the prosecution man- aged to pack the jury with men who freely admitted their prejudice. 'The presiding judge, Joseph Gary, was grossly biased and consistently ruled against the defense. 'The defense team was inexperienced: Moses Salomon and Sigmund Zeisler were irnmigrant labor lawyers, only recently admitted to the bar; they were joined by Captain William Black, a corporation lawyer.

Led by State's Attorney Julius Grinnell, the prosecution charged the defendants as accessories to Officer Degan's murder, having incited "a person or persons unknown" to commit the act. In exchange for immunity, Gottfried Waller and Bernard Schrade testified that Engel and Fischer planned the bombing in Zepf's Hall. William Seliger testified about Lingg's bomb making, and Engel's peculiar furnace was introduced along with the chemical analysis of the bomb fragments. Two reporters, Harry Gilmer and M. M. Thompson, swore they saw Schnaubelt throw the bomb. Additional testimony placed Fielden, Spies, and Parsons in the square that night. The evidence against Neebe remained especially thin: he owned stock in the Arbeiter-Zeitung and had been arrested in its offices, he read the "Revenge Circular," was a member of the IWA, and owned a pistol, sword, breech-loading rifle, and red flag. Perhaps the most damaging testimony was read to the jury from Diie Arbeiter-Zeitung and The Alarm in order to illustrate their revolutionary content, inflammatory rhetoric, and criminal intent. The core of the prosecution's case lay in conspiracy, not murder.

Led by Captain Black, the defense probably erred by basing its case on the evidence and the charges. The eyewitnesses contradicted themselves and each other. Neither Gilmer nor Thompson was particularly reliable; Seliger, Waller, and Schrade admitted they had received money, jobs, and immunity for their testimony. The state had offered no proof that any of the defendants had thrown the bomb, indeed the state failed to connect its general conspiracy theory with the meeting in Zepf's Hall. The defense hammered at testimony and evidence, discounting the conspiracy, convictability, and manifest guilt of the defendants. In his closing remarks Grinnell explained the obvious: "law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society."

On August 20 the jury announced that all of the defendants were guilty as charged. With the exception of Neebe, who received fifteen years, all were sentenced to death. Captain Black appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court for a writ of error and the executions were postponed. A year passed before the final appeal to the United States Supreme Court failed and the date of execution set. On 10 November 1887, Governor Oglesby commuted Fielden and Schwab's sentences to life imprisonment. At nine o'clock the next morning the law was avenged: Lingg committed suicide; an hour and a half later Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies were hanged.

The red scare continued unabated outside the courtroom. Captain Schaack supplied the commercial press with a steady diet of raids, arrests, and interviews. Secret "anarchist arsenals" were still being discovered, in basements, and under sidewalks, throughout July and August. More than a week after the trial had ended, the police were reportedly prepared to move on the Bohemian anarchists who haunted the Sixth Ward. A second round of grand-jury indictments was repeatedly threatened but never produced. Suppressing anarchy became a big business. By May 18, responsible citizens had contributed $67,445 to a fund for the families of officers killed or injured in the square. Schaack used a different, larger fund to hire Pinkerton detectives, and Melville Stone, editor of the Daily News, paid for still others. One contemporary questioned Schaack's zeal:

He saw more anarchists than vast bell could hold. Bombs, dynamite, daggers, and pistols seemed ever before him; in the end, there was no society, however innocent or even laudable, among the foreign-born population that was not to his mind engaged in deviltry. 'The labor unions, he knew were composed solely of anarchists, the Turner societies met to plan treason, stratagems, and spoils; the literary guilds contrived murder; the Sunday schools taught destruction. Every man that spoke broken English and went out o'nights was a fearsome creature whose secret purpose was to blow up the Board of Trade or loot Marshall Field's store.

Police Chief Ebersold, who proved unwilling to restrain him at the time, tried much later to disown his subordinate.

Captain Schaack wanted to keep things stirring. He wanted bombs to be found here, there, all around, everywhere. I thought people would ... sleep better if they were not afraid their homes would be blown to pieces any minute. But this man, Schaack,... wanted none of that policy .... After we got the anarchist societies broken up, Schaack wanted to send out men to organize new societies right away .... He wanted to keep the thing boiling, [to] keep himself prominent before the public.

The police had help investigating anarchy. According to George McLean, "the most sensational evidence" to come out of the trial "was that of Detective Andrew C. Johnson, of the Pinkerton Agency,.who was detailed in December, 1884 by his agency, which had been employed by the First National Bank to furnish details of the secret meetings which it was known were being held by revolutionary plotters at various places throughout the city." Masquerading as a cabinetmaker, Johnson had infiltrated the American Group in February 1885 and joined its armed group. Although William Holmes later insisted that the "spies" were "generally known," both Parsons and Charles Bodendeick had vouched for Johnson. Johnson's testimony was sensational, if not wholly manufactured, but Holmes mentioned "spies," for Johnson was not alone. As soon as he got the case Captain Schaack

at once employed a number of outside men, choosing especially those who were familiar with the Anarchists and their haunts. The funds for this purpose were supplied to me by public-spirited citizens who wished the law vindicated and order preserved in Chicago. I received reports from the men thus employed from the beginning of the case up to November 20, 1887. There are 253 of the reports in all, and a most interesting history of Chicago Anarchy do they make in themselves.

For eighteen months after the riot, Schaack "had at least one man present" whenever the dreaded anarchists met: "Before midnight I would know all that had transpired at meetings of any importance." Once Schaack ordered his officers to listen through a hole cut in the floorboards; another time they hid under the floor of the stage in Thalia Hall. Some of this could be amusing: two spies, both in Schaack's employ, denounced each other to the Captain. Yet undercover work also proved dangerous: one agent barely avoided disclosure by denouncing a legitimate member; Schaack also reported that another of his detectives was "betrayed by beauty" and mysteriously drowned by a female anarchist.

Cheered on by an adoring press, the police continued both surveillance and repression long after the trial and executions. In September 1886, State's Attorney Grinnell announced he was ready to prosecute the Bohemian anarchists who had been arrested in May and still sat in jail. Although all were convicted, their trials were reported as the beginning of a detailed investigation of anarchism in the heathen Czech community. The day before the executions a judge restored the indictments of nineteen anarchists and issued the appropriate warrants "as a precautionary measure." None, however, was ever used.

The city's reaction to the entire affair split along complex lines. The English-language press universally denounced the riot, the conspirators, the defense, the appeals, and the foreign-bom in general. The Staats- Zeitung labeled the anarchists as "the worst enemies of the Germans" but noted the "deplorable fact that most of them bear German names [and) that many talk no other language but German." Led by Svornost's editor, "reputable Bohemians" disclaimed any connection with or sympathy for the dreaded anarchists. The Times quoted a similar resolution issued by a meeting of "reputable Polish residents: "Our nationality is moved by motives only of good citizenship ... [we] have always denounced[,] in no measured terms[,] communism, socialism, and anarchism."

Yet others, less respectable perhaps, rallied to support the accused, the convicted, and the condemned. A committee, drawn from the CLU, but headed by Dr. Ernst Schmidt, collected funds for the defense and appeals. Most contributions were under a dollar, yet the committee raised more than $40,000. After the trial, and when the appeals failed, the defense committee became an Amnesty Association and expanded its base. The movement tried to provide for the Martyrs' families. When Oskar Neebe's wife died in March 1887, the movement arranged both wake and funeral. A month before, Der Vorbote had published the initial call and the constitution of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, which would care for the martyrs' widows and orphans. The association arranged frequent benefits to raise money. One, in January 1889, was described by the Staats-Zeitung. fully 7,000 people came to a concert sponsored by twenty clubs, "mostly singing and athletic." It was "a cheerful gathering and ... all enjoyed the skillful performances" of 200 singers and fifty-odd gymnasts. Beyond honoring the Martyrs, such family support had long been a feature within the movement.

The forces of order chose to see any defense activity as proof of anarchism. Noting that both Christian and August Spies "had been members for years," the Aurora Tum-Verein contributed $100 to the defense fund in July; their continued support later rebounded. Two years later the Sozialer Tum-Verein had to deny, in the pages of the rabid Saats-Zeitung, that it had glorified anarchy or insulted the American flag. The national Turn-Verein, which had removed the word "sozialistische" from its name in 1856, broke its affiliation with the Chicago Turngemeinde in June 1887 over its repeated requests to support the Martyrs. The red flag remained an issue. During the November II memorial meeting in Vorwaerts TumHall in 1891 "Lt. Gibbons, followed by a squad of policemen in civil clothing" mounted the speakers' platform to demand that the American flag be raised among the red ones. Then in May 1892, Julius Vahiteich was expelled from the Turngemeinde "for anarchistic speeches" in its halls.

Organized repression continued long after the executions. In July 1888, the police trotted out still another conspiracy when three Czech anarchists, John Hronek, Frank Chleboun, and Frank Capek, were arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate State's Attorney Grin- nell. Hronek was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison on Chleboun's bargained testimony. Two months after their trial, Charles Bodendeick was arrested and held incommunicado for twelve days, charged with "manufacturing dangerous explosives and conspiracy to destroy city hall." He never went to trial, but Captain Bonfield reportedly told him "to immediately leave the country as he was liable to arrest in every city and town in the United States."

A year after the executions some of the more naive anarchists reorganized as the Arbeiterbund and foolishly published their constitution in Der Vorbote. The police quickly raided their earliest meetings and Mayor Roche argued that the city's ordinances gave him the authority to sup- press any meeting that he considered revolutionary or otherwise illegal. Arguing free speech and assembly, the anarchists took the case to court, managing to get it before a judge who had originally been elected by the SLP (in 1879) and more recently reelected by the United labor Party (in 1886). He ruled in their favor, arguing: "Anarchists have the same rights as other citizens to assemble peaceably for the discussion of their views; ... in no other city of the United States except Chicago have the police officials attempted to prevent the right of free speech on such unwarranted pretences and assumptions of power, and ... it is time to call a halt." Although the Tribune published the Bund's constitution and listed the names of its "secret agitation committee," Die Arbeiter-Zeitung still rejoiced in the decision with a story headlined "Chicago Vanquished! "

In September 1888, Die Fackel charged Schaack with nepotism, moonlighting, and possession of a $75,000 fortune. Considering the source, nothing came of the story. Then, sixteen months later, during a messy divorce case, the wife of one of Schaack's detectives charged that her husband and his boss had robbed prisoners, received stolen goods, and committed extortion. When Die Arbeiter-Zeitung published the story, its editor found himself arrested and charged with criminal libel, despite the fact that he had only commented on an article that originally appeared in the Times.

The police continued to harass the annual commemorations of November I I and to raid anarchist haunts. As the marchers came back from the cemetery in 1888, they were accosted and ordered to remove their red lapel ribbons. That year the bakers' union chose to hold a secret memorial, but the Staats-Zeitung still reported it. The harassment and surveillance did not stop when Schaack and Bonfield were suspended and later dismissed from the force in 1889. A prominent site for both the SLP and IWPA, Thomas Greif's Hall at 54 W. Lake Street remained a meeting place for anarchists, socialists, and unions past the turn of the century. 'Me police raided it several times in the weeks after the riot and irregularly thereafter. The last two raids apparently came in April and November 189 1, the latter occasioned by the semiannual business meet- ing of the Arbeiter-Zeitung Publishing Company's stockholders.

In January 1892, the Herald charged that the most recent raid on Greif's Hall "was simply a scheme to show men who had been putting up money to keep down anarchist movements that the followers of Parsons and Spies were not yet dead." An anonymous group of businessmen had reportedly raised an annual fund of more than $115,000, instructing the police: "Use this money as you may find best, the object being to crush out anarchy." In October 189 1, they closed their books; $487,000 had been spent since May 1886, and although $57,670 remained on hand, nothing had been spent in the past year. The Herald charged that the last raid had been staged to reopen the fund. The surviving elements of the anarchist movement still had police shadows as late as September 1895. When 3,000 of them assembled at Hahn's Garden there were fifty plainclothes policemen on the grounds and another fifty in uniform held in reserve a block away. "All these numerous peace guardians gave the harmless picnic more the appearance of a serious affair of state," yet according to Die Abendpost, a bourgeois Ger- man paper, the "picnic was absolutely peaceful." In addition to surveillance by Pinkertons, the department's own detec- tives, and Schaack's "privates," Chicago's anarchists were watched by Imperial German police agents. "According to the press in Berlin at the beginning of 1890 a man named Heinrich Danmeyer or Dammeyer, who had been regarded as a wide-eyed socialist or anarchist, was revealed to be a police agent in Chicago. He was considered to be one of the most 'raging' of the anarchists, ... the most outstanding of the leaders of the [Arbeiterbund], . . of the Freethinkers' Association and ... of the Karl Marx Assembly. Danmeyer had been in the pay of the police since at least 1886 and had called for the assassination of [the] police, state['s] attorney and judge connected with the Haymarket Trial."

Surveillance of German emigre radicals began in 1878 after an assassination attempt on Kaiser Wilhelm 1. An adjunct to Bismarck's anti- socialist laws, it aimed at preventing emigres and their literature from returning to the Reich. And an editorial in the Inter Ocean ten days after the riot reported a communication from Baron Schaeffer, an Austrian minister, to the American secretary of state asking his help in stopping the return of exiled Czech radicals. German surveillance continued until World War 1. In Chicago, two agents submitted their reports to the consular staff, and two more agents were hired through the Pinkerton Agency. In 1902, those agents prepared a list of Chicago's "anarchists" for the Reichschancellor. Of the 145 names listed, forty appear to have been active in the IWPA before the Haymarket riot. The majority of the people only became "dangerous" after the riot, but 27 percent of the total were long-time activists.

Although we can chronicle the program of repression organized by the civil authorities, we know little of the private sector's program. Immediately after the riot, the Times had screamed that "public justice" demanded "that no citizen shall employ or keep in his service any person who is a member of such ... [an] ... association of conspirators and assassins." just as quickly, the Chicago Furniture Manufacturers' Asso- ciation pledged not to employ "any communist, anarchist, nihilist, or socialist, or any other person denying the right of private property." Die Mobel-Arbeiter Joumal reported that those resolutions made it "impossible for members of the union to find employment." Surely there were other resolutions, and with the names, addresses, and descriptions of alleged, accused, and suspected anarchists widely circulating, the program must have been effective.

The city's business community supported the forces of order and the program of repression. They raised one fumd for the families of the police officers who died or were injured in the square. Even before the trial verdict a citizen suggested that another fund reward the jurors. Still another, raised and directed by the Citizens' Association, not only paid for Pinkerton detectives but also supplemented police salaries. In 1889, the Commercial Club bought land thirty miles north of Chicago and donated it to the federal government for a garrison because Marshall Field felt safer with the troops at Fort Sheridan "instead of a thousand miles away, like Fort Laramie or Fort Riley." If the whole program remained uncoordinated, with detectives, "privates," Pinkertons, and German agents crossing each other and reporting to different superiors, it was nonetheless effective.

Repression affected all three levels within the anarchist movement. The trial decimated the leadership by convicting the combined editorial staffs of The Alarm, the Socialist Publishing Society's three papers, and Der Anarchist. Although he escaped the first indictment, a second trial subsequently convicted Jacob Nukolanda, from Budoucnost; and Anton Hradecny closed down Lampcka. The raids, arrests, and harassment similarly affected the active membership. Expelled from the Knights of Labor, many were also fired from their jobs and found it difficult to get employment. Reputations and friendships gained before the riot haunted many for years. And repression hit at the movement's sympathetic following. The raids on Greif's Hall and Budouenost's office confiscated two different subscription lists and the police assured the commercial press that every name would receive special attention.

The anarchist revolutionaries reacted to such harassment in a most peculiar and ironic way. Arguing freedom of speech and assembly, some turned to the law and the courts for protection. The core of the Haymarket defense committee did not rest with the convictions, the appeals, the executions, or the pardons. On the contrary, they kept busy well into the 1890s. In the last half of 1888, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung regularly reported the activities of "'Me Chicago Workers' Legal Aid Society," which had been formed to defend Hronek, Chleboun, and Capek. Tle profits of an evening entertainment in October were "to be used for the defense of those Bohemian workers who were spotted by Bonfield, the bloody Haymarket slayer, as his latest sacrifices." The society became more than an ad hoc organization, for its services enjoyed a frequent, if not constant, demand. In 1896, the Chicago Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance announced the founding of the Alliance Bureau of Law. Staffed by T. J. Morgan and Paul Ehmann, among others, the bureau was "designed to furnish a convenient and reliable institution to which working people may safely apply for free advice and assistance in all legal and business matters.

The breadth and duration of repression affected the movement in two different ways. According to Henry David, “In the decade after 1887, Chicago witnessed a more active, widespread, and intelligent discussion of revolutionary doctrines and labor theories than ever before.” On the other hand, repression fundamentally subverted the movement’s energies and organization away from revolution and the working class and towards its own survival. The activities o fthe defense committee, Amnesty Association, Arbeiter Rechtsschutz-Verein, Personal Rights League and the alliance Bureau of Law were altogether different than the activities of the IWPA. Although the new organization still depended on festivals, picnics and dances to raise funds and solidify their members, mere survival replaced agitation.