The World That Never Was (48 page)

Faced with such threatening rhetoric, the businessmen of Chicago were inevitably shaken by the rapid radicalisation of their workers. Nearly 100,000 copies of the
Alarm
were printed in ten months between 1884 and 1885, most of which would have been handed from reader to reader, in homes or in such red clubs as the four-storey Florus Hall, to which bundles of the paper were delivered daily. Despite its recent expansion, Chicago’s police force found itself overstretched in keeping the anarchists under surveillance, having to cover not only the indoor meetings but also picnics in the countryside, where dynamite demonstrations provided an added attraction. Of greater concern than the size of the police force, however, was the reliability of its leadership, at least to such leading industrialists as Cyrus McCormick Jnr, the new Princeton-educated manager of the family’s vast Harvesting Machine Company works in the southwest of the city, then planning to cut costs by wage reductions and mass layoffs. A disgraceful even-handedness had recently been noticed in the city’s police officers. The ascendancy of Captain John Bonfield, a failed businessman himself before he had joined the force, offered some reassurance but the ruthlessness that he promised was yet to be tested
in extremis
.

McCormick had quickly made clear his managerial intentions by summoning the industrialists’ most trusted friend the Pinkertons, who had their headquarters in the city. The agency’s hard-boiled mercenaries garrisoned the McCormick Harvesting works, defending its periphery from incursions and guaranteeing the safety of strike-breakers shipped in from other states. With even the moderate Parsons claiming a core of 2,000 active anarchists in Chicago by the spring of 1885, and a hinterland of 10,000 supporters, the risk of escalation was only too obvious. It was heightened in December 1884 when the Pinkertons’ role was extended to include the infiltration of anarchist meetings. Inevitably, the agency had a vested interest in exaggerating the threat it reported for its own commercial benefit, or even in provoking the kind of clashes that its clients dreaded. Alarmism cranked up the political temperature of the city, with both sides hardening their stance. It seemed ever more likely
that the ghosts of civil war and revolution to which Parsons so often alluded would soon take solid form.

On Thanksgiving Day 1884, and again at Christmas a year later, Chicago’s most affluent families were brought face to face with those on whose grinding efforts their comfortable existence rested. Down the millionaire’s row of Prairie Avenue, past mansions decked out for the holidays, the anarchists paraded bearing the black banner of mourning and starvation, chanting and abusing the unearned privilege of those inside. They were the same benighted individuals who, when attending the annual Commune celebrations, had been described by the
Chicago Tribune
as being what might be found should one ‘skim the purlieus…drain the bohemian socialist slums’. During a winter of mass unemployment, the same paper now urged farmers with land in the immediate environs of the city to poison their crops lest scavengers, left unfed by soup kitchens swamped by demand, steal crops from their fields. Whatever civil society had previously existed in Chicago no longer deserved to be dignified with the name.

For seven years, since his first election as Chicago’s mayor in 1879, Carter Harrison had tried to treat his constituents, rich and poor, with an even hand, respecting the cosmopolitan make-up of the city, and even appointing socialists to his administration. In April 1885, when pressed by Cyrus McCormick to provide still more police to enforce the strike-breaking, he had chosen instead to support the labour movement’s call for an arbitrated settlement. Captain Bonfield had first tested the mayor’s authority three months later, when he led his men into action against a transportation strike: requisitioning a streetcar to drive through the crowds of protesters, policemen had swung their batons with abandon as they passed the strikers, cracking heads and breaking morale. But whilst the industrial action came to a swift end, the attitude of the city’s anarchists stiffened in reaction, and the wafer-thin majority with which Carter Harrison was re-elected saw his authority wane. The first signs of a developing power vacuum in the city appeared. Union representatives began talking of their members ‘buying $12 guns and playing soldiers’, and the old socialist militias were said to be stepping up their training. With news that the industrialists were giving over their warehouses as drill grounds for their own clerks, the longstanding fears of bloody confrontation appeared to be coming to a head.

Through the long, hard winter of 1885, the air of militancy intensified, with the anarchist newspapers publishing ever more bellicose statements in favour of dynamite, ‘the proletariat’s artillery’, and even a letter purporting to have been sent by an army officer from Alcatraz Island, offering illustrated guidance on street-fighting tactics. The
Tribune
, in turn, demanded ‘A Regular Army Garrison for Chicago’, but had to be satisfied with the 300-strong police guard posted under Bonfield to enforce a lockout at the McCormick works, with orders that seemed conceived to provoke clashes with the strikers. Within weeks the ensuing violence led to the gunning down of four strikers. In April 1886, seven more were killed by police bullets in nearby East St Louis, and Chicago’s
Arbeiter-Zeitung
was reporting that the forces of law and order were readying themselves for a fight on May Day: ‘The capitalists are thirsting for the blood of workingmen.’

The battle would be precipitated, it was thought, by concerted demands for a watershed in labour relations. For many years, workers had campaigned for a mandatory eight-hour day, to counter the relentless demands of their employers. Recognising the importance of a single cause around which protest could coalesce, Albert Parsons had been collaborating with the Knights of Labor and other organisations for the past three years to press the case. Set against the reality of hundred-hour weeks in some industries, however, the campaign’s true purpose had always seemed more symbolic than achievable: to assert the respect and humane consideration that the working class deserved. Then at the beginning of 1886, a new intransigence entered the campaign, and the sense of possibility was further encouraged by Mayor Harrison’s decision in April to grant the new working terms, wholesale, to Chicago’s public employees. Finally, Parsons was able to convince Chicago’s hard-line anarchists of the benefit of joining the bandwagon, if only to be in a better position to direct it.

The depth of the anger and alarm felt by the likes of Cyrus McCormick at the prospect of such solidarity across the working population should not be underestimated: the 71 per cent increase in profits since he had taken over could not be sustained in such circumstances. ‘To arm is not hard. Buy these,’ Herr Most told a meeting in New York’s Germania Gardens, holding aloft a rifle, ‘steal revolvers, make bombs, and when you have enough, rise and seize what is yours. Take the city by force and the capitalists by the throat.’ The news that Most was due to be in Chicago on 1 May must have sent a shiver through the ranks of the city’s businessmen, who hastily pledged $2,000 to arm the police with a Gatling
gun, America’s very own version of the
mitrailleuses
that had mown down the Communards fifteen years earlier.

When May Day arrived, of the 300,000 men who downed tools across the United States, a full fifth of them were in Chicago. Yet the day passed off without major incident. Steeled as they were for a showdown, McCormick, his colleagues and Captain Bonfield surely felt a certain sense of anticlimax, mixed with relief. Yet if their strategy had simply been to crush the demonstrators once the swell of popular support for the workers had subsided, they showed scant patience. It was only two days later, on 3 May, as Spies addressed a crowd gathered outside the McCormick works, that the rattle of rifle fire echoed out, as Bonfield’s men intervened against pickets who were preventing strike-breakers from entering the gates. There was one fatality. Outraged, Spies rushed to the print room of his newspaper and, in the heat of the moment, set about compositing a call for vengeance: ‘If you are men, if you are the sons of grandsires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!’

A light drizzle was slanting down on the night of 4 May 1886, when Mayor Harrison arrived in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to reassure himself that the demonstration he had authorised was passing off in good order. The city was on edge, but having satisfied himself as to the ‘tame’ character of the gathering, Harrison left at around half-past seven, advising the police to stand down. Ignoring the mayor’s instructions, Bonfield merely withdrew with his men to positions of concealment in side streets nearby. Throughout the evening a steady flow of informants and plain-clothes policemen shuttled between the demonstration and Bonfield’s post, relaying updates on the speeches, right until the moment when the last speaker, Samuel Fielden, mounted the wagon that was being used as a podium. ‘Defend yourselves, your lives, your futures,’ he urged those anarchists who remained. ‘Throttle it, kill it, stab it, do everything you can to wound it,’ was his recommended treatment of the law and its protectors, who even as he spoke were lining up, 180 strong in rows four deep, just out of sight.

It was 10.30 when Bonfield ordered his formation to advance. The worsening weather had thinned the crowd gathered near the corner of Desplaines Street, from 3,000 at its peak to a hard core of a few hundred. ‘We are peaceable,’ protested Fielden, somewhat disingenuously, as the captain ordered the meeting to disperse. The moments that followed would ever afterwards define anarchism in America, and arguably
socialism as a whole. A few who glanced upwards saw the glowing fuse of the bomb as it arced through the air above them into the uniformed ranks; most only registered what had happened after the noise of the explosion had passed and the air had cleared of debris, leaving the cries of the dead and dying. One policeman was killed immediately, six more were fatally injured; fifty others wounded.

Accounts carried by the scattering crowds varied greatly, setting off wild rumours that soon ticked along the telegraph wires. Law-abiding citizens of Chicago, hearing reports that hundreds of policemen had died, formed defence groups in the expectation of imminent civil war, while apocryphal stories that the bomb had been followed by salvos of anarchist gunfire into the ranks of the police led them to believe that an insurrection had already broken out.

The police department itself was divided over how to respond. While Police Chief Ebersold tried to reassure the public, convinced that his priority must be to prevent panic, his junior officers set about undermining his strategy by stoking the pervasive sense of fear. Bonfield having played his part, Captain Schaak now took the lead in championing the reactionary cause. Seventy anarchist suspects were rounded up in short measure and brutally interrogated, without access to water or legal representation. Witnesses were bribed, informants retained, reports forged, guns and bombs planted in the anarchist headquarters. Schaak was the sledgehammer of those with a wider anti-socialist and xenophobic agenda, as those around him at the time would later reveal. ‘He saw more anarchists than hell could hold,’ wrote one eye-witness to his excesses; ‘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 devilry.’ Nevertheless, Schaak’s tall tales of secret conspiracies were swallowed without question by most of Chicago’s middle class, who preferred to blame Mayor Harrison’s policies for giving comfort and encouragement to the anarchists, than question who had really thrown the bomb, and on whose orders.

Spies, Neebe, Lingg, Fielden and Schwab were among the eight men charged for the attack, though few of them had been present in the Haymarket, or could be linked to the event. Since they were the city’s leading anarchist speakers and journalists, their removal struck the movement a critical blow. Albert Parsons, having gone into hiding, voluntarily turned himself in, in the hope that his presence in the dock would allay the risk of the trial making scapegoats of the immigrants. The man suspected of throwing the bomb, Schnaubelt, had fled, never to reappear.
If Johann Most had visited Chicago for May Day, he had made a quick getaway, but was nevertheless indicted by a grand jury. When eventually arrested, he was humiliated in front of fifty policemen who watched as he was photographed, familiarising themselves with his features for future reference and shouting out threats that ‘If you show your teeth, or open your yap, we’ll shoot you down like a dog.’ Ironically, had Most not kept a certain distance between himself and Parsons, whose policies he still considered too moderate, he would almost certainly have joined those who now stood trial.

The atmosphere in which the eight Chicago anarchists appeared in the dock resembled that of a witch-hunt, and the prosecuting state attorney made no pretence as to the purely political and exemplary nature of the judgement that would be passed. ‘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.’ The gentlemen, and the judge, duly obliged, sentencing five to the death penalty and three to a life term of hard labour.