HAYMARKET

...Police, Pinkerton detectives, and militiamen, with rifles at the ready, lined the rooftops along the route...

...Within the next couple of days, 340,000 men and women— Sidney Lens, The Progressive's Senior Editor, died on June 18...

...two skulking cowards who are trying to create trouble...

...Suddenly the crowd noticed that a force of 180 police officers, led by Captain John Bonfield, was advancing on the meeting...

...Sam Fiel-den, an associate of Spies who had formerly been a lay preacher, was concluding a rambling speech...

...About 200 citizens were injured and several were killed—how many is unknown...

...Workingmen, to Arms...

...Lumber-laden ships lay idle at the docks...

...Employers had already granted the shorter workday to 45,000 workers in the city, including 35,000 in the packinghouses...

...Also unknown is the identity of the bomb-thrower...

...they killed six of your brothers at McCormick's this afternoon...

...On the morning of May 1, the Chicago Mail warned in an editorial, "There are two dangerous ruffians at large in this city...

...He finished at 10 p.m., and with his wife and children and several friends, he repaired to a nearby saloon...

...Neebe received a fifteen-year prison sentence...

...Police everywhere reported finding pistols, swords, rifles, ammunition, anarchist literature, dynamite, red flags...

...With his wife Lucy and their two children, Parsons marched in the front rank of the parade to the lakefront...

...While August Spies addressed the meeting, the workshift changed at McCormick's, and some of the lumber shovers drifted toward the harvester plant to help the locked-out workers heckle and attack the scabs...

...From the wagon which served as a platform, Parsons said, "I am not here for the purpose of inciting anybody, but to speak out and tell the facts as they exist...

...Convict these men," cried State's Attorney Julius S. Grinnell, "make examples of them, hang them, and you save our institutions...

...In its heyday, Kerr published the works of Jack London, Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, Mary Marcy, and Oscar Ameringer, among many others...

...On November 11,1887, after all appeals had been exhausted, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons mounted the gallows...

...But Captain," said Fielden, "we are peaceable...

...Elation was in the air...

...Some rail yards had already been shut down by a strike over another issue...

...With a noose around his neck, waiting for the trap to be sprung, Fischer cried out, "Hurrah for anarchy...

...This article is adapted from his opening chapter in "Haymarket Scrapbook," edited by Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, just published by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1740 West Greenleaf Avenue, Chicago, IL 60626...

...Seven were sentenced to be hanged...

...In the confusion that followed, police fired wildly and swung their clubs indiscriminately...

...A Century of Hell-Raising This centennial year of the Haymarket bombing is also the hundredth anniversary of America's— and perhaps the world's—oldest radical/labor publishing house, the Charles H. Kerr Co...

...On Michigan Avenue near the lake, thousands of men, women, and children exchanged pleasantries as they waited for the parade to begin...

...The crowd went home encouraged and enlivened...

...Police attributed the crime to an anarchist...

...The Chicago syndicalists regarded unions as the embryo of an emerging social order—the "workers' commonwealth...

...One juror, seated after the defense had exhausted its peremptory challenges, was related to one of the police victims...

...They killed the poor wretches because they, like you, had the courage to disobey the supreme will of your bosses...

...Governor John P. Altgeld, who pardoned the surviving "conspirators" in 1893, said in his pardon statement that "much of the evidence given at the trial was pure fabrication...

...Let the voice of the people be heard...

...In the city's armories, 1,350 National Guardsmen waited nervously for a call to action...

...Trouble came on the afternoon of May 3. At the McCormick Harvester Works on the South Side, 1,400 workers had been locked out since mid-February and partly replaced by 300 strikebreakers...

...These serpents," thundered the Chicago Tribune, "have been emboldened to strike at society, law, order, and government...

...Two-thirds of the crowd had melted away...

...The State, they believed, was inevitably opposed to social progress...

...Someone had thrown a bomb into the police ranks...

...Instead, he ran for alderman that year...

...The greater crisis lay ahead—the strike for the eight-hour day...

...Make an example of them if trouble does occur...

...But the parade came off without incident, and in the rally that followed, Parsons and Spies were among speakers who uttered eloquent appeals for proletarian unity...

...with whatever your bosses condescend to allow you, or you will get killed...

...They killed them to show you, 'Free American Citizens,' that you must be satisfied...

...Today, Kerr's list includes Haymarket Scrapbook, source of Sidney Lens's article and the accompanying graphics on these pages, as well as such classics as Upton Sinclair's The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America and Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism...

...The Chicago police arrested twenty-five printers at the Arbeiter Zeitung, wrecked presses, seized subscription lists, invaded radical organizations' offices and meeting halls, and beat and tortured suspects held under arrest...

...It was headed, Revenge...

...the other is named Spies...

...Of those indicted, only Fielden and Spies had even been on the scene when the bomb went off, but under the free-wheeling doctrine of "conspiracy," other anarcho-syndicalist leaders could be tried for inciting the act...

...A few hundred yards away, near Black Road, 6,000 lumber shovers, on strike for the eight-hour day, met to select a committee that would bargain with employers...

...Lingg had cheated the hangman by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth...

...This is the happiest moment of my life...

...It was the date that had been set by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions for a nationwide general strike in support of the Federation's call for an eight-hour workday...

...One officer was killed on the spot, seven died later, and sixty were wounded (though subsequent studies showed that most police casualties were inflicted not by the bomb but by bullets that may have been fired by other officers...

...But they also believed the Revolutionary Socialists had to address workers' immediate needs, and that conviction put them in the forefront of the movement for an eight-hour day...

...Parsons said, "Will I be allowed to speak, O men of America...

...Within a few minutes, 200 police officers were on the scene...

...The jury panel had been chosen by a special bailiff instead of being selected at random...

...Now construction sites and metal foundries fell silent...

...Let me speak, Sheriff Matson...

...The leaflet ended with a call to arms to "destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you...

...Others conceded their prejudice against the accused but were nonetheless permitted to serve...

...One of them is named Parsons...

...The trial in Judge Joseph E. Gary's courtroom was a travesty...

...Bonfield, known to working people as "Clubber," gruffly commanded the assemblage to disperse "immediately and peaceably...

...See the Editor's Memo on Page 4 of this issue...

...But it didn't matter much who actually threw the bomb...

...Schwab and Fielden had asked for executive clemency and had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment...

...Parsons, just back from a trip to Cincinnati, took Lucy and their two children, expecting no trouble...

...Parsons had been threatened before: In 1877, when he came to prominence as a strike leader, Chicago's police chief had warned him to leave town or risk being hanged from a lamp post...

...In the days that followed, newspapers in Chicago and around the country launched an all-out attack on unionism...

...Spies and others still at the meeting, hearing gunshots and commotion, rushed to the site of conflict and were met with clubs and a hail of bullets...

...Blazing with anger, Spies headed for the print shop of the Arbeiter Zeitung, a German-language daily he edited, and composed a fiery leaflet in English and German...

...As expected, the jury found all eight guilty...

...Waiting with the multitude was Albert Parsons, at thirty-eight a national figure in the labor and radical movements...

...of Chicago...

...Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards," State's Attorney Grinnell instructed the minions of the law...

...tomorrow's society would be run by a loose federation of producers' groups...

...O—" Inside his hood, Spies made a short statement that would reverberate for decades: "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today...

...Union officers were arrested around the country...

...It was signed, "Your Brothers...

...Mark them for today...

...the men indicted for the crime were charged not with murder but with conspiracy...

...On the previous Sunday, Parsons and his close friend, August Spies, had addressed a crowd of25,000 at a massive rally in preparation for this parade and the strike...

...They killed them because they dared ask for the shortening of the hours of toil...

...When the dust cleared, four workmen lay dead, and more were wounded...

...almost a quarter of them in Chicago-would lay down their tools...

...Another leaflet, issued the next morning, called for a mass protest that evening at Haymarket Square on Randolph Street...

...The general impression was that the men indicted for conspiracy had actually thrown the bomb...

...The text read: "Your masters sent out their bloodhounds—the police...

...At that moment, there was a deafening explosion...

...Sid Lens was one of the sponsors of a support group called Friends of the Kerr Co...

...In 1881, Parsons and Spies were members of a radical faction that seceded from the Socialist Labor Party to found the Revolutionary Socialist Party...

...Within a day or two, 65,000 to 80,000 workers were walking picket lines while employers huddled to map retaliatory actions...

...Some 3,000 people showed up the evening of May 4 at Haymarket...

...It was late, a raw wind was blowing, and rain was beginning to fall...

...Parsons claimed it was the work of an agent provocateur...

...They were tried for their inflammatory speeches and writings and for adhering to a philosophy that called for liberation through violence...

...For more information, write to Kerr at 1740 West Greenleaf Avenue, Chicago IL 60626...

...Parsons, expecting the worst, went into hiding and only surfaced six weeks later, when he calmly walked into a Chicago courtroom to stand trial with his indicted co-conspirators, Spies, Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, George Engel, and Oscar Neebe...