Another Book About the Haymarket Affair? Yes.
My answer to those questions is embodied in the book, Death in the Haymarket, which appears in stores on March 7. Readers can now be judges of whether the tale was worth retelling.
I approached the project reluctantly knowing how much had been written about the bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886 that led to the deaths of seven policemen and at least seven civilians and to an avalanche of other sensational events—the nation’s first red scare, the demise of the Knights of Labor, the show trial of alleged anarchist conspirators, the international clemency campaign for the condemned revolutionaries, and the highly-publicized hanging of Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer on November 11, 1887, events that left an enduring memory of martyrdom embedded in labor lore around the world.
The Haymarket affair is mentioned in thousands of books and articles and is the subject of attention in hundreds of other historical studies, plays and poems. I was particularly impressed with the richly detailed account written by the noted historian of anarchism, Paul Avrich, who died on February 17 this year.
Avrich’s The Haymarket Tragedy (1984) was so comprehensive and well written that I put it out of reach on a high bookshelf until I had written my own first draft. I didn’t want Avrich’s prose resounding in my mind as I was composing my own narrative. In any case, I also wanted to structure my story in a very different way.
Avrich, who had written three important books about the Russian anarchists, placed the Haymarket actors within the context of world anarchist history. He devoted his book to profiling all of the anarchists involved and to demonstrating the innocence of those accused of the crime.
I was also interested in explaining who the anarchists were and what they believed, and I too wanted to write about “the trial of the century,” as well as the gruesome execution that followed, because these episodes created powerful hatreds and suspicions that divided a nation. But I was less concerned with retrying the case by revisiting the crime scene and courtroom than I was with creating new contexts for the Haymarket story.
The first context was the Great Upheaval in working class America that centered on Chicago during the 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day. I wanted to tie Haymarket to the birth of the nation’s first labor movement with all the dreams and hopes, passions and tensions it aroused. My editor and I believed that the reading public--historically-minded people who purchase and try to read huge historical biographies of presidents, generals and tycoons--had simply never encountered this story, or this kind of story, in reading popular non-fiction. I had long believed that labor history, though a somewhat marginalized field within the profession, was the repository of some of the most dramatic, even epic, stories in U.S. history.
The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, J. Anthony Lukas, was on to this--as were the journalists who have recently produced popular accounts of the Homestead lockout, the Triangle Fire and the Bread and Roses strike. Lukas’s ambitious book, Big Trouble , centered on the 1907 trial of three labor militants accused, and later acquitted, of blowing the former governor of Idaho to bits with dynamite. After reading and reviewing Big Trouble , I thought it would be exciting to tackle another large subject in labor history with a similar literary approach but with a more disciplined grasp of context and a more extensive use of relevant scholarship.
But I didn’t think I’d have the chance until the Haymarket book idea came along. Once underway, I began to nurse the immodest hope that my volume might be a kind of breakthrough book for labor history, which has remained terra incognita for general readers of non-fiction.
If the book does reach a public audience it will probably be because of the inherent drama and tragedy of the Haymarket story, and because of the larger than life characters it involved: Albert and Lucy Parsons, the ever-intriguing inter-racial couple with political views far ahead of their time; the bombastic German anarchist August Spies whose speeches are still quoted; the hard- driving industrialists Cyrus McCormick and George Pullman; the newspaper czar of Chicago, Joseph Medill; and the merchant prince, Marshall Field, who used his enormous influence to make sure that the anarchists “choked.” What a cast of characters! What writer wouldn’t want to put them on a big stage! And what a stage! Chicago, America’s Gilded Age boom town, and the nation’s foremost immigrant city.
Choosing to write about the “city of the century” during the Gilded Age offered more than literary opportunity, however: the city’s rough-and-tumble history also provided the second context in which I placed the Haymarket saga, which was, above all, “a story of Chicago.”
To make this clear I chose to begin my book not with the origins of anarchism in the mid nineteenth century, but with an account of one somber event etched in American memory: the return of Abraham Lincoln’s body to Chicago on May Day, 1865. I chose this as a starting point because I remembered reading Carl Sandburg’s moving account of the city unified in mourning and standing “on common ground, for once.” The work of the first chapters is to describe the break down of that civic solidarity over the next 21 years of increasingly bloody strife that led to the Haymarket tragedy.
Two other motives compelled me to retell this old story for a new time. One was academic and the other political.
I first became interested in the Haymarket affair because of the enduring transnational memory it produced, a memory that was passed down to workers all over the world.
Although knowledge of the Haymarket affair was nearly erased from American memory in the Cold War years, it survived in other nations around the world. Indeed, for years no other event in U.S history exerted such a hold on the imaginations of working people in other lands, especially in the Latin world, where the “martyrs of Chicago” were annually recalled in the iconography of May Day.
Finally, and most disturbingly, there was the present context for writing about the Haymarket bombing: the context of an ongoing “war on terror” aimed at alien subversives. I had been warned about the hostile reception my book might receive by critics who would see the Chicago anarchists as nothing but the first foreign terrorists to appear on our shores.
Despite this risk, a retelling of the Haymarket story appeared as an opportunity to examine in a historical context in which political violence erupted and terrified the American public. The hysterical response to this Chicago bombing in 1886 cast a net of suspicion over all new immigrants, especially workers and labor activists. And so, I believe, the history of the Haymarket tragedy should also be read as a warning to citizens who allow the civil liberties of immigrants to be violated in the name of fighting terrorism.