Trial and Error

...Ideology rather than action became the central issue in the case against eight anarchists arrested in connection with the Haymarket Square explosion...

...None was ever accused of the actual deed, and no evidence was offered to show that they had entered into a conspiracy with whoever had done it, or knew his identity...

...This theory is based purely on oral statements passed from mouth to ear among the anarchists and therefore cannot be proved, yet it does indeed seem that an outsider was responsible...

...No violence ensued, and the meeting was already dispersing as the last orator, Samuel Fielden, wound up his remarks...

...The Haymarket affair left a permanent mark on American attitudes...

...Avrich suggests that he was not a Chicago man at all but a certain George Schwab, a German shoemaker who came from New York specifically to perform the act and soon departed...

...The number of civilian casualties, although at no point clearly established, was certainly high...

...In the end seven policemen were fatally injured, mostly by the bullets of their colleagues, and 60 were wounded...

...As Paul Avrich shows in The Haymarket Tragedy, his admirable retelling of the incident, one still can only conjecture about the culprit...

...If a local activist had committed the crime, some evidence would almost certainly have surfaced in the recollection of survivors...

...The trial took place in a hysterical atmosphere whipped up by a press that demanded revenge...

...It led to changes in immigration legislation that transformed the United States from a country open to every kind of political refugee into the non-Communist nation with perhaps the most imposing barriers to even visitors for reasons of ideology rather than action...

...Hence, also, the discriminatory laws—beginning with a 1903 act to keep out anarchist immigrants and culminating with the McCarran Act—that greatly broadened the scope of ideological exclusions.from the United States and applied them retroactively: Anyone who was ever an anarchist or a Communist, or was suspected of having been one by an immigration or consular official, could be kept out...

...Outside that circle, however, they and their cause continued to be widely hated and feared...

...Partial and late justice had at last been done...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "Anarchism," "The Writer and Politics" The May 4,1886, Haymarket bombing in Chicago was a watershed event in American history, setting off the first "Red Scare...

...history...

...Radical views, broadly tolerated in the early days of a republic founded on popular and armed resistance to authority, became suspect to an enduringly large section of the population, not only the rich and the powerful...

...Then Inspector Bonfield, who had become notorious for his attacks on strikers, appeared at the head of a large contingent of police and ordered the rally to end...

...In any event, the eight anarchists tried for murder were unquestionably innocent...

...They were tried for their words, written and spoken...

...Fielden complied and was actually stepping down from the speakers' wagon when a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the lawmen...

...a packed jury condemned seven of the accused to death and the last to 15years' imprisonment...

...At the May 4 event, held near Haymarket Square, the anarchists again called on the proletariat to meet force with force, but they spoke in a somewhat ritualized way...

...One committed suicide with a bomb (disguised as a cigar) that a visitor brought into prison...

...At least one of them was hit fatally by a fragment...

...Eventually, in 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld showed great moral courage at cost to his political career by publicly condemning the court's unfairness and releasing the three survivors...

...Having written impressively on the Russian anarchists, the author has now given their American counterparts the benefit of the same careful scholarship, fairness and clarity of style...

...The bomb-thrower was never arrested or identified...

...His fellow-officers immediately drew their revolvers and fired at random, hitting one another as well as their fleeing targets...

...His new work is an excellent and long-needed addition to the history of the American Left, with its intertwined native and foreign roots...

...Despite support frommany liberals , attempts to save the prisoners following the trial ran into opposition from an aroused majority that condemned them not for perpetrating but simply for advocating revolutionary violence...

...Samuel Fielden was an English immigrant ; the remaining six were Germans...

...A prejudiced judge accepted the prosecution's approach, which was new in law...

...Much has appeared about the Haymarket riot and its aftermath in radical literature, but the only previous substantial study was Henry David's History of the Haymarket Affair, published in 1936...

...This celebrated incident took place at the end of a campaign for an eight-hour day enthusiastically backed by the strong local anarchist movement, consisting both of native-born radicals and of German and Bohemian immigrants...

...The mere fact that they had told the workers to resist violence with violence was enough to prove that they had inspired the bombing even if they had not plotted it, the prosecution argued...

...Hence arose the succession of Red Scares that subsequently marred U.S...

...Parsons, Adolf Fischer, August Spies, and Carl Engel—the four executed men —became instant martyrs of labor...

...A strike had broken out at the McCormick Reaper Works, and on May 3 fighting between pickets and police moved some of the anarchists to urge the workers to defend themselves with arms...

...Four were actually hanged, partly through their own intransigence—they refused to appeal to the Governor for clemency, as the laws of Illinois demanded...

...Much new material has since come to light and is included by Avrich in The Haymarket Tragedy...

...One of them, Albert Parsons, came from an old American family...

...The two who did appeal for clemency had their death sentences commuted...