The propitious occasion soon came. It was in Chicago that the blow was struck which succeeded in discrediting the cause of the workers, stayed the progress of their movement, and covered it with a prejudice and an odium lasting for years. There, in that maddening bedlam, called a city, the acknowledged inferno of industrialism, the agitation was tensest. With its brutalities, cruelties, corruptions and industrial carnage, its hideous contrasts of dissolute riches and woe-begone poverty, its arrogant wealth lashing the working population lower and lower into squalor, pauperism and misery, Chicago was overripe for any movement seeking to elevate conditions.
In the first months of 1886, strike followed strike throughout the United States for an eight-hour day. At McCormick's reaper works in Chicago [Footnote: The McCormick fortune was the outgrowth, to a large extent, of a variety of frauds and corruptions. Later on in this work, the facts are given as to how Cyrus H. McCormick, the founder of the fortune, bribed Congress, in 1854, to give him a time extension of his patent rights.] a prolonged strike of many months began in February. Determined not only to refuse shorter hours, but to force his twelve hundred wage workers to desert labor unions, McCormick drove them from his factory, hired armed mercenaries, called Pinkerton detectives, and substituted in the place of the union workers those despised irresponsibles called "scabs"— signifying laborers willing to help defeat the battles of organized labor, and, if the unions won, share in the benefits without incurring any of the responsibilities, risks or struggles. On May 1, 1886, forty thousand men and women in Chicago went on strike for an eight-hour day. Thus far, the aim of inciting violence on the part of the strikers had completely failed everywhere.
The Knights of Labor were conducting their strikes with a coolness, method and sober sense of order, giving no opportunity for the exercise of force. On May 2, a great demonstration of the McCormick workers was held near that company's factories to protest against the employment of armed Pinkertons. The Pinkerton detective bureau was a private establishment, founded during the Civil War; in the ensuing contests between labor and capital it was alleged to have made a profitable business of supplying spies and armed men to capitalists under the pretense of safeguarding property. These armed bands really constituted private armies; recruited often from the most debased and worthless part of the population, as well as from the needy and shifty, they were, it was charged, composed largely of men who would perjure themselves, fabricate evidence, provoke trouble, and slaughter without scruple for pay. Some, as was well established, were ex-convicts, others thugs, and still others were driven to the ignoble employment by necessity. [Footnote: The prevailing view of the working class toward the Pinkerton detectives was thus expressed at the time in a chapter on the mine workers by John McBride, one of the trade union leaders: "They have awakened," he wrote, "the hatred and detestation of the workingmen of the United States; and this hatred is due, not only to the fact that they protect the men who are stealing the bread from the mouths of the families of strikers, but to the fact that as a class they seem rather to invite trouble than to allay it…. They are employed to terrorize the workingmen, and to create in the minds of the public the idea that the miners are a dangerous class of citizens that have to be kept down by armed force. These men had an interest in keeping up and creating troubles which gave employers opportunity to demand protection from the State militia at the expense of the State, and which the State has too readily granted."—"The Labor Movement": 264-265.] During the course of the meeting in the afternoon the factory bell rung, and the "scabs" were seen leaving. Some boys in the audience began throwing stones and there was hooting. Fully aware of the combustible accounts wanted by their offices, the reporters immediately telephoned exaggerated, inflammatory stories of a riot being under way; the police on the spot likewise notified headquarters. [Footnote: In a statement published in the Chicago "Daily News," issue of May 10, 1889, Captain Ebersold, chief of police in 1886, charged that Captain Schaack, who had been the police official most active in proceeding against the labor leaders and causing them to be executed and imprisoned, had deliberately set about concocting "anarchist" conspiracies in order to get the credit for discovering and breaking them up.] Police in large numbers soon arrived; the boys kept throwing stones; and suddenly, without warning, the police drew their revolvers and indiscriminately opened a general fire upon the men, women and children in the crowd, killing four and wounding many. Terror stricken and in horror the crowd fled.
There was a group of radical spirits in Chicago, popularly branded as anarchists, but in reality men of advanced ideas who, while differing from one another in economic views, agreed in denouncing the existing system as the prolific cause of bitter wrongs and rooted injustices. Sincere, self-sacrificing, intellectual, outspoken, absolutely devoted to their convictions, burning with compassion and noble ideals for suffering humanity, they had stepped forward and had greatly assisted in arousing the militant spirit in the working class in Chicago. At all of the meetings they had spoken with an ardor and ability that put them in the front ranks of the proletarian leaders; and in two newspapers published by them, the "Alarm," in English, and the "Arbeiter Zeitung," in German, they unceasingly advocated the interests of the working class. These men were Albert R. Parsons, a printer, editor of the "Alarm;" August Spies, an upholsterer by trade, and editor of the "Arbeiter Zeitung;" Adolph Fischer, a printer; Louis Lingg, a carpenter; Samuel Fielden, the son of a British factory owner; George Engel, a painter; Oscar Neebe, a well- to-do business man, and Michael Schwab, a bookbinder. All of them were more or less deep students of economics and sociology; they had become convinced that the fundamental cause of the prevalent inequalities of opportunity and of the widespread misery was the capitalist system itself. Hence they opposed it uncompromisingly. [Footnote: The utterances of these leaders revealed the reasons why they were so greatly feared by the capitalist class. Fischer, for instance, said: "I perceive that the diligent, never-resting human working bees, who create all wealth and fill the magazines with provisions, fuel and clothing, enjoy only a minor part of this product, while the drones, the idlers, keep the warehouses locked up, and revel in luxury and voluptuousness." Engel said: "The history of all times teaches us that the oppressing always maintain their tyrannies by force and violence. Some day the war will break out; therefore all workingmen should unite and prepare for the last war, the outcome of which will be the end forever of all war, and bring peace and happiness to mankind.">[
The newspapers, voicing the interests and demands of the intrenched classes, denounced these radicals with a sinister emphasis as destructionists. But it was not ignorance which led them to do this; it was intended as a deliberate poisoning and inflaming of public opinion. Themselves bribing, corrupting, intimidating, violating laws and slaying for profit everywhere, the propertied classes ever assumed, as has so often been pointed out, the pose of being the staunch conservers of law and order. To fasten upon the advanced leaders of the labor movement the stigma of being sowers of disorder, and then judicially get rid of them, and crush the spirit and movement of the aroused proletariat—this was the plan determined upon. Labor leaders who confined their programme to the industrial arena were not feared so much; but Parsons, Spies and their comrades were not only pointing out to the masses truths extremely unpalatable to the capitalists, but were urging, although in a crude way, a definite political movement to overthrow capitalism. With the finest perception, fully alert to their danger, the propertied classes were intent upon exterminating this portentous movement by striking down its leaders and terrifying their followers.
THE HAYMARKET TRAGEDY.
Fired with indignation at the slaughter at the McCormick meeting, Spies and others of his group issued a call for a meeting on the night of May 4, at the Haymarket, to protest against the police assaults. Spies opened the meeting, and was followed by Fielden. Observers agreed that the meeting was proceeding in perfect quiet, so quietly that the Mayor of Chicago, who was present to suppress it if necessary, went home—when suddenly one hundred and eighty policemen, with arms in readiness, appeared and peremptorily ordered the meeting to disperse. It seems that without pausing for a reply they immediately charged, and began clubbing and mauling the few hundred persons present. At this juncture a small bomb, thrown by someone, exploded in the ranks of the police, felling sixty and killing one. The police instantly began firing into the crowd.
No one has ever been able to find out definitely who threw the bomb. Suspicions were not lacking that it was done by a mercenary of corporate wealth. At Pittsburg, in 1877, as we have seen, the Pennsylvania railroad hirelings deliberately destroyed property and incited riot in order to charge the strikers with crime. In the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania, subsidized detectives had provoked trouble during the strikes, and by means of bogus evidence and packed juries had hung some labor leaders and imprisoned others.
The hurling of the bomb, whether done by a secret emissary, or by a sympathizer with labor, proved the lever which the propertied classes had been feverishly awaiting. Spies, Fielding and their comrades were at once cast into jail; the newspapers invented wild yarns of conspiracies and midnight plots, and raucously demanded the hanging of the leaders. The trifling formality of waiting until their guilt had been proved was not considered. The most significant event, however, was the secret meeting of about three hundred leading American capitalists to plan the suppression of "anarchy." Very horrified they professed themselves to be at violent outrages and destruction of property and life. Their views were given wide circulation and commendation; they were the finest types of commercial success and prestige. They were the owners of railroads that slaughtered thousands of human beings every year, because of the demands of profit; of factories which sucked the very life out of their toilers, and which filled the hospitals, slums, brothels and graveyards with an ever-increasing assemblage; every man in that conclave, as a beneficiary of the existing system, had drained his fortune from the sweat, sorrow, miseries and death agonies of a multitude of workers. [Footnote: This seems a very sweeping and extraordinary prejudicial statement. It should be remembered, however, that these capitalists, both individually and collectively, had contested the passage of every proposed law, the aim of which was to improve conditions for the workers on the railroads and in mines and factories. Time after time they succeeded in defeating or ignoring this legislation. Although the number of workers killed or injured in accidents every year was enormous, and although the number slain by diseases contracted in workshops or dwellings was even greater, the capitalists insisted that the law had no right to interfere with the conduct of their "private business.">[ These were the men who came forth to form the "Citizens' Association," and within a few hours subscribed $100,000 as a fighting fund.